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The Knights Templar and Their Connection to Illuminati Mythology

Few medieval institutions have generated a richer body of legend than the Knights Templar, the crusading order founded in the early twelfth century and destroyed in the early fourteenth by a king who owed them money. The Templars have been the subject of legends about hidden treasure, secret rituals, the Holy Grail, and a vast underground network of survivor-cells that supposedly persisted for centuries after the order’s official suppression. The order’s supposed survival has, been woven into the modern conspiracy literature about the Freemasons, the Priory of Sion, and, eventually, the Bavarian Illuminati. Understanding the place of the Templars in the modern Illuminati myth requires understanding both the actual history of the order and the long tradition of post-suppression legend that has grown up around it.

The Rise of the Templars

The Order of the Temple, commonly known as the Knights Templar, was founded in 1119 by a small group of French knights who had taken monastic vows and who committed themselves to the protection of pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. The order received formal recognition from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1120 and was confirmed by Pope Honorius II in 1129. Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Templars became one of the most powerful military and financial institutions in medieval Europe, with holdings throughout France, England, the Iberian Peninsula, and the crusader states of the Levant.

The order’s actual history is well-documented, and the standard scholarly accounts make clear that the Templars were, in their heyday, a sophisticated international organisation with a strong reputation for military discipline, financial innovation, and political independence. None of the features of the order’s actual history requires a hidden connection to later organisations to be explained, but the order’s prominence in the medieval imagination has made it a natural target for legend.

The Fall Under Philip IV

The Templars’ downfall was a sudden and brutal affair that has generated legend ever since. On Friday, 13 October 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the simultaneous arrest of every Templar in his kingdom. The order’s leaders, including its Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were taken into custody, charged with a long list of heresies and immoralities, and subjected to interrogation, much of it under torture. The English trials, in particular, reached somewhat different conclusions than the French ones, and the English Templars were generally treated less harshly than their French counterparts.

The charges against the Templars included denial of Christ, spitting on the cross, idol worship, homosexual practices, and secret initiation rituals in which members were allegedly required to perform obscene acts. Many of these charges were extracted under torture and have no historical support. The order’s actual sin, in the eyes of most modern historians, was the political threat it posed to Philip IV, a king deeply in debt to the order and anxious to seize its holdings. The Pope, Clement V, eventually suppressed the order in 1312, and Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake in 1314.

The burning of Jacques de Molay in 1314 was a defining event in the modern Templar myth. According to a tradition that began to circulate soon after the execution, de Molay, while being burned at the stake, summoned both Philip IV and Pope Clement V to meet him before the judgment seat of God. Both Philip and Clement died within the year, and the prophecy was treated as fulfilled. The episode has been a staple of Templar legend ever since, and it has been incorporated into the modern conspiracy literature as evidence of the order’s supernatural powers.

Legends of the Surviving Templars

A persistent element of the post-suppression legend is the claim that some Templars survived the suppression and continued the order’s work in secret. The most elaborate version of this legend holds that a small group of Templars, possibly led by the order’s last preceptor in Scotland, escaped to Scotland and to the Iberian Peninsula, where they took refuge among sympathetic communities and founded a series of underground networks. The most-cited version of this theory is that of the Priory of Sion, a French society alleged to have been founded in 1099 and to have preserved the alleged “bloodline” of Jesus Christ through a series of supposed Grand Masters.

There is no documentary evidence that any such underground network ever existed. The historical record of the suppression is reasonably complete, and the great majority of Templars either died, went into hiding as individuals, or were reconciled to the church. The order’s properties were seized by the relevant authorities, and the order’s archives were, in many cases, preserved by the same authorities. The legend of the surviving Templars is, in this sense, a literary invention that has been attached to the order by later writers.

The Templars in 19th-Century Mythology

The Templar legend went through a major revival in the 19th century, when a series of French and English writers began to construct elaborate stories about the order’s survival and its supposed connection to later organisations. The most influential of these writers was Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, a French doctor who in 1804 founded the Order of the Temple, a revived version of the medieval order, and who claimed to have inherited the office of Grand Master from a continuous line of post-suppression leaders. Fabré-Palaprat’s claims have no historical support, but his revived order continued to exist and to attract members.

The more important 19th-century development was the publication, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, of a series of documents known as the Dossiers Secrets that purported to show that the Templars had been the guardians of a secret bloodline descended from Jesus Christ. The Dossiers Secrets were eventually shown to be the work of Pierre Plantard, a French con man with a long history of fraudulent activity, and the Priory of Sion they purported to describe has no historical existence prior to the 1960s. The exposure of the forgery is documented in several published works, including Marie-France Etchegoin and René Weiss’s Le trésor de Rennes-le-Château (1969) and a series of French police investigations.

The most important modern claim about the Templars is that they are the ancestors of the modern Masonic tradition. According to this claim, which has been a staple of Masonic and anti-Masonic literature for more than two centuries, a small group of Templars escaped the suppression and took refuge in Scotland, where they founded the first Masonic Lodges. The Scottish Rite and other high-degree Masonic systems, in this reading, preserve elements of Templar ritual that have been passed down through the centuries.

The claim has no historical support. The earliest documented Masonic Lodges in Scotland and England date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and they have no demonstrable connection to the medieval Templars. The high-degree systems that emerged in the 18th century, including the Scottish Rite and the Strict Observance, were the work of French and German innovators who explicitly modelled their systems on the Knights Templar but who had no actual connection to the medieval order.

The modern claim of a Templar–Illuminati connection rests on three pillars. The first is the claim, discussed above, that the Templars survived in secret and eventually produced the Masonic tradition, which in turn produced the Bavarian Illuminati. The second is the claim that the early Illuminati, like many other European fraternal organisations of the late 18th century, used Templar imagery in their rituals. The third is the claim that the Bavarian Illuminati were working toward a similar political goal to that attributed to the medieval Templars: the establishment of a transnational Christian (or, in the conspiracy version, anti-Christian) order that would supersede national governments.

None of these claims has any historical support. The early Illuminati did use some Templar imagery, but they used many other things as well, and their actual project was a radical reform of the Bavarian state, not the establishment of a transnational religious order. The historical Templars, have no documented connection to any organisation founded after 1314, and the standard scholarly accounts treat the order as having been effectively destroyed by the suppression.

The Holy Grail and the Bloodline Theory

The most elaborate modern Templar legend is the Holy Grail-bloodline theory, which holds that the medieval Templars were the guardians of a secret bloodline descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. According to this theory, the historical Jesus was not divine but was a mortal man who married Mary Magdalene and had children, whose descendants were eventually smuggled to southern France, where the Templars took them under their protection. The detailed examination of the Priory of Sion and the Holy Grail myth walks through the development of this theory.

The Holy Grail-bloodline theory has no historical support. The earliest accounts of the Templars make no reference to a secret bloodline, and the documents on which the modern theory rests have all been shown to be forgeries. The theory has, however, been enormously influential in the modern conspiracy literature, and it has been incorporated into a long list of works of fiction and film, most famously Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The theory’s persistence is a testament to the appeal of secret-knowledge narratives, and it is one of the main reasons the Templars have remained a presence in the modern imagination.

Modern Cultural Depictions

The modern Templar myth has been enormously productive in popular culture. The most influential single work is Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a 1982 book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln that did much to popularise the bloodline theory. The book was followed by Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), a satirical novel that takes aim at the conspiracy framework, and by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), which became an international bestseller. The Templars have also appeared in a long list of films, video games, and television series, including National Treasure, Assassin’s Creed, and the recent Warrior Nun series.

These cultural depictions have, fed back into the conspiracy literature, providing new visual and narrative materials that the conspiracy framework has been able to absorb. The most careful academic studies of the modern Templar myth treat it as a case study in the construction of contemporary myth, in which fragments of historical fact are recombined with literary invention and pseudo-scholarly documentation to produce a narrative that has little to do with the actual medieval order.