TemplarOrdersFreemasonry

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THE TEMPLAR ORDERS IN FREEMASONRY
An Historical Consideration of their Origin and Development
By ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE
HAVING regard to the fact that Emblematic Freemasonry, as it is
known and practised at this day, arose from an Operative Guild and
within the bosom of a development from certain London Lodges which
prior to the year 1717 had their titles in the past of the Guild
and recognised its Old Charges, it would seem outside the
reasonable likelihood of things that less than forty years after
the foundation of Grand Lodge Knightly Orders should begin to be
heard of developing under the aegis of the Craft, their titles in
some cases being borrowed from the old institutions of Christian
Chivalry. It is this, however, which occurred, and the inventions
were so successful that they multiplied on every side, from 1754
to the threshold of the French Revolution, new denominations being
devised when the old titles were exhausted. There arose in this
manner a great tree of Ritual, and it happens, moreover, that we
are in a position to affirm the kind of root from which it sprang.
Twenty years after the date of the London Grand Lodge, and when
that of Scotland may not have been twelve months old, the
memorable Scottish Freemason, Andrew Michael Ramsay, delivered an
historical address in a French Lodge, in the course of which he
explained that the Masonic Brotherhood arose in Palestine during
the period of the Crusades, under the protection of Christian
Knights, with the object of restoring Christian Churches which had
been destroyed by Saracens in the Holy Land. For some reason which
does not emerge, the foster-mother of Masonry, according to the
mind of the hypothesis, was the Chivalry of St. John. Ramsay
appears to have left the Masonic arena, and he died in the early
part of 1743, but his discourse produced a profound impression on
French Freemasonry. He offered no evidence, but France undertook
to produce it after its own manner and conformably to the spirit
of the time by the creation of Rites and Degrees of Masonic
Knighthood, no trace of which is to be found prior of Ramsay.
Their prototypes of course were extant, the Knights of Malta,
Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, Knights of St. Lazarus, in the gift
of the Papal See, and the Order of Christ in Portugal, in the gift
of the Portuguese Crown. There is no need to say that these
Religious and Military Orders have nothing in common with the
Operative Masonry of the past, and when their titles were borrowed
for the institution of Masonic Chivalries, it is curious how
little the latter owed to the ceremonial of their precursors, in
their manners of making and installing Knights, except in so far
as the general prototype of all is found in the Roman Pontifical.
There are, of course, reflections and analogies: (I) in the old
knightly corporations the candidate was required to produce proofs
of noble birth, and the Strict Observance demanded these at the
beginning, but owing to obvious difficulties is said to have ended
by furnishing patents at need; (2) in the Military Order of
Hospitallers of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalern, he undertook, as
in others, to protect the Church of God, with which may be
compared modern Masonic injunctions in the Temple and Holy
Sepulchre to maintain and defend the Holy Christian Faith; (3)
again at his Knighting he was "made, created and constituted now
and for ever," which is identical, word for word, with the formula
of another Masonic Chivalry, and will not be unknown to many.
But the appeal of the new foundations was set in an6ther
direction, and was either to show that they derived from Masonry
or were Masonry itself at the highest, in the proper understanding
thereof. When the story of a secret perpetuation of the old
Knights Templar- outside the Order of Christ- arose in France or
Germany, but as I tend to conclude in France, it was and remains
the most notable case in point of this appeal and claim. It rose
up within Masonry, and it came about that the Templar element
overshadowed the dreams and pretensions of other Masonic
Chivalries, or, more correctly, outshone them all. I am dealing
here with matters of fact and not proposing to account for the
facts themselves within the limits of a single study. The
Chevalier Ramsay never spoke of the Templars: his affirmation was
that the hypothetical building confraternity of Palestine united
ultimately with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; that it
became established in various countries of Europe as the Crusaders
drifted back; and that its chief centre in the thirteenth century
was Kilwinning in Scotland. But the French or otherwise German
Masonic mind went to work upon this thesis, and in presenting the
Craft with the credentials of Knightly connections it substituted
the Order of the Temple for the chivalry chosen by Ramsay. The
Battle of Lepanto and the Siege of Vienna had invested the annals
of the St. John Knighthood with a great light of valour; but this
was as little and next to nothing in comparison with the
talismanic attraction which for some reason attached to the
Templar name and was obviously thrice magnified when the
proposition arose that the great chivalry had continued to exist
in secret from the days of Philippe le Bel even to the second half
of the eighteenth century. There were other considerations,
however, which loomed largely, and especially in regard to the
sudden proscription which befell the Order in 1307. Of the trial
which followed there were records available to all, in successive
editions of the French work of Dupuy, first published in 1685; in
the German
Historical Tractatus
of Petrus Puteamus published at
Frankfort in 1665; in Gurther's Latin
Historia Tempiarsorum
of
1691; and in yet other publications prior to 1750. There is not a
little evidence of one impression which was produced by these
memorials, the notion, namely, of an unexplored realm of mystery
extending behind the charges. It was the day of Voltaire, and it
happened that a shallow infidelity was characterised by the kind
of licence which fosters intellectual extravagance, by a leaning
in directions which are generally termed superstitious- though
superstition itself was pilloried- and in particular by attraction
towards occult arts and supposed hidden knowledge. Advanced
persons were ceasing to believe in the priest but were disposed to
believe in the sorcerer, and the Templars had been accused of
magic, of worshipping a strange idol, the last suggestion- for
some obscure reason- being not altogether indifferent to many who
had slipped the anchor of their faith in God. Beyond these
frivolities and the foolish minds that cherished them, there were
other persons who were neither in the school of a rather cheap
infidelity nor in that of common superstition, but who looked
seriously for light to the East and for its imagined traditional
wisdom handed down from past ages. They may have been dreamers
also, but they were less or more zealous students after their own
manner; within their proper measures, and the Templar Chivalry
drew them because they deemed it not unlikely that its
condemnation by the paramount orthodoxy connoted a suspicion that
the old Knighthood had learned in Palestine more than the West
could teach. Out of such elements were begotten some at least of
the Templar Rites and they grew from more to more, till this
particular aspect culminated in the Templar dramas of Werner, in
which an Order concealed through the ages and perpetuated through
saintly custodians reveals to a chosen few among Knights Templar
some part of its secret doctrine-the identity of Christ and Horus,
of Mary the Mother of God, and Isis the Queen of Heaven. The root
of these dreams on doctrine and myth transfigured through the
ages- with a heart of reality behind it- will be found, as it
seems to me, in occult derivations from Templar Ritual which
belong to
circa
1782 and are still in vigilant custody on the
continent of Europe. I mention this lest it should be thought that
the intimations of a German poet, though he was an active member
of the Strict Observance, were mere inventions of an imaginative
mind.
There is no historical evidence for the existence of any
Templar perpetuation story prior to the Oration of Ramsay, just as
there is no question that all documents produced by the French
non-Masonic Order of the Temple, founded in the early years of the
nineteenth century, are inventions of that period and are
fraudulent like the rest of its claim, its list of Grand Masters
included. There is further- as we have observed- no evidence of
any Rite or Degree of Masonic Chivalry prior to 1737, to which
date is referred the discourse of Ramsay. That this was the
original impetus which led to their production may be regarded as
beyond dispute, and it was the case especially with Masonic
Templar revivals. Their thesis was his thesis varied. For example,
according to the Rite of the Strict Observance the proscribed
Order was carried by its Marshal, Pierre d'Aumont, who escaped
with a few other Knights to the Isles of Scotland, disguised as
Operative Masons. They remained there and under the same veil the
Templars continued to exist in secret from generation to
generation under the shadow of the mythical Mount Heredom of
Kilwinning. To whatever date the old dreams ascribe it, when
Emblematic Freemasonry emerged it was-
ex hypothesi
-a product of
the union between Knights Templar and ancient Scottish Masonry.
Such is the story told.
The Strict Observance was founded by Baron von Hund in Germany
between about 1751 and 1754 or 1755, and is usually regarded as
the first Masonic Chivalry which put forward the story of Templar
perpetuation. I have accepted this view on my own part, but
subject to his claim at its value- if any- that he had been made a
Knight of the Temple in France, some twelve years previously. The
question arises, therefore, as to the fact or possibility of
antecedent Degrees of the kind in that country, and we are
confronted at once by many stories afloat concerning the Chapter
of Clermont, the foundation of which at Paris is referred to
several dates. It was in existence, according to Yarker, at some
undetermined period before 1742, for at that date its Masonic
Rite, consisting of three Degrees superposed on those of the
Craft, was taken to Hamburg. A certain Von Marshall, whose name
belongs to the history of the Strict Observance, had been admitted
in the previous year, Von Hund himself following in 1743- not at
Hamburg, but at Paris- for all of which no authority is cited and
imagination may seem to have been at work. But some of the
statements, including those of other English writers, are
referable to a source in Thory's
Acta Latamorum
. When Woodford
speaks of Von Hund's admission into Templar Masonry at Clermont as
not a matter of hypothesis, but of certain knowledge, he is
dependent on the French historian, according to whom the German
Baron was made a Mason at Paris in 1742. The Chapter of Clermont
was founded in that city so late as 1754, and some time
subsequently Von Hund retunied thither, with the result that he
derived Templar teaching from Clermont, on which he built up the
Observance system. But, whatever the point is worth, this story is
not only at issue with that of Von Hund himself, but with the
current chronology of the Observance. To involve matters further,
the Chapter is reported otherwise to have derived its Templar
element from something unspecified at Lyons which is referred to
1738. The utmost variety of statement will be found, moreover, as
to the content of the Clermont Rite, the Templar character of
which has been also challenged. It is proposed otherwise that the
Chapter was founded on a scale of considerable magnitude, that it
was installed in a vast building, and that it attracted the higher
classes of French Freemasons, which notwithstanding it ceased to
exist in 1758, being absorbed by the Council of Emperors
established in that year for the promulgation of a different Grade
system.
I am in a position to reflect some light for the relief of
these complications by reference to Dutch archives which have come
to my knowledge. The date of the Chapter's foundation remains
uncertain, but it was in activity between 1756 and 1763, so that
it was not taken over- as Gould suggests- by those Masonic
Emperors to whom we are indebted for the first form of the
Scottish Rite, Ancient and Accepted. It is not impossible that its
foundation is referable to the first of these dates, when it
superposed on the three Craft Grades as follows: (I) Grade of
Scottish Master of St. Andrew of the Thistle, being the Fourth
Grade of Masonry, "in which allegory dissolves"; (2) Grade of
Sublime Knight of God and of his Temple, being the Fifth and Last
Grade of Free Masonry. At a later period, however, it became the
Seventh Grade of the Rite, owing to the introduction of an Elect
Degree which took the number 5 under the title of Knight of the
Eagle, followed by an Illustrious Degree, occupying the sixth
place and denominated Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. The Grade
final in both enumerations- otherwise Knight of God- presented a
peculiar, as it was also an early version of the perpetuation
story, from which it follows that the Clermont Rite was Templar.
I have so far failed to trace any copy of the Ritual in this
country with the exception of that which has been placed recently
in my hands, an example of the discoveries that await research in
continental archives. The Templar element- which may be called
the historical part- is combined with a part of symbolism, for
though allegory is said to be abandoned in the Fourth Degree, its
spiritual sister is always present in Ritual. The aspect which it
assumes in the present case is otherwise known in Masonry, the
Chapter representing the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, with its
twelve gates, as a tabernacle of God with men. The Candidate is
represented therefore as seeking the light of glory and a perfect
recompense, while that which he is promised is an end of toils and
trials. He is obligated as at the gates of the City and is
promised the Grand Secret of those who abide therein. The City is-
spiritually speaking- in the world to come, and the reward of
chivalry is there; but there is a reward also on earth within the
bonds of the Order, because this is said to be divine and
possessed of the treasures of wisdom. The kind of wisdom and the
nature of the Great Secret is revealed in the Perpetuation Story,
and so far as I am aware offers the only instance of such a claim
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