The Templars (25 page)

The efficacy of these freemasons’ mutual assistance associations depended on their exclusivity, that they should be clubs open to freemasons only, and the point was made by developing a system of signs and rituals supposedly passed down from ancient times and by means of which adherents gained access to the private meetings. One such ritual concerned Hiram Abiff, to whom the masons gave a history that went far beyond his brief mention in the Bible. Hiram Abiff, they said, knew
the secret of the Temple. Three villains kidnapped Hiram and threatened to kill him if he did not reveal the secret ‘Master’s word’–a term used by the masons in their trade to differentiate the pay and assignments of workers, but also, as the ritual now implied, bearing deeper and mystical significance. But Hiram refused to reveal the secret, and his assailants murdered him.

When Solomon heard about this, he wondered what was Hiram’s secret, and he sent three masons to look for his body, also telling them that if they could not find the secret, then the first thing they saw when they found Hiram’s body should itself become the secret of the Temple. The masons found Hiram Abiff’s coffin, and when they opened it the first thing they saw was his hand–and from this the masons made the handshake and other signs of recognition the new secret. On the basis of this story, the masons developed the ritual by which a Freemason advances through degrees, the first being apprentice mason, the second being entered apprentice, and so to the third degree when he becomes a master mason. Advancing to the third degree requires that the initiate must agree to undergo the sufferings of Hiram Abiff should he ever reveal the Freemasons’ secrets, and that if he ever broke his oath it would be right for his fellow Freemasons to cut out his heart, his liver and his entrails, in the same way as a traitor was disembowelled as part of the process of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

But already these associations of artisan freemasons were undergoing a transition that would alter their fundamental nature. To enhance the standing of their associations, freemasons invited influential people to serve as patrons. This gave the freemasons a social appeal which together with their study of the Bible began to attract an inquiring elite comprising gentlemen and scholars, professionals and merchants, so that by about 1700 these ‘admitted’ or ‘speculative masons’ outnumbered ‘operative masons’, as the artisans were called. In fact the modern institution that we recognise as Freemasonry was born when a group of four London lodges made up of both operative and admitted masons merged in 1717 to create a Grand Lodge. They placed at their head not a practising mason but a gentleman, and never again would a true stonemason ever serve as a Grand Master.

Enlightenment and Mystery

The meaning of the Hiram story is unclear as perhaps it was meant to be, for its true purpose may have been to link the Freemasons with antiquity. For all that educated people of the Enlightenment looked towards the future, they also looked back towards the past for they believed that antiquity had possessed much learning and wisdom that had since been lost, and that it was their duty to recover what they could from biblical and classical times. For example, Sir Isaac Newton made such recovery a major part of his work and attempted for years to decipher the wisdom hidden in biblical prophecy and alchemy. His
Principia Mathematica
, published in 1687, which described gravitation and the laws of motion, was central to the scientific revolution and the acceptance that rational investigation can reveal the inner workings of nature–and yet Newton was convinced that it was merely a rediscovery of ancient knowledge.

Though Newton, who died in 1727, was never himself a mason, Freemasonry did attract eminent intellectuals, including several members of the Royal Society, in effect the British academy of sciences, men who stood for rationalism and deism, but who also found it entirely appropriate that the Freemasons should identify themselves with the Temple of Solomon, built by Solomon and Hiram Abiff, those mysterious exemplars of ancient wisdom.

Freemasons and Templars

News of the formation of London’s Grand Lodge and the activities of British Freemasons soon spread across Europe. By the 1730s masonic lodges had been founded in the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere, often by representatives of the London Grand Lodge who travelled abroad for the purpose, but sometimes by local residents who were inspired by the Grand Lodge but were not under its direction. But if Freemasonry proved popular in Europe, it was also alien and troubling for some. It did not grow out of the old artisan organisations of France, Germany and elsewhere on the continent, which had long since ceased to exist. Instead it was imported from Britain, home of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 that had definitively curtailed the powers of the king and divided authority between the monarchy, Parliament and the judiciary, and that had instituted a degree of religious toleration. Britain was widely admired by the people of Europe as a progressive and tolerant nation, but its institutions and inventions, not least Freemasonry, were deeply distrusted by Europe’s autocratic rulers and the Catholic Church.

Though the Freemasons in Britain were an innocuous and largely middle-class fraternal organisation, whose lodges fulfiled a similar social function as the London coffee house, they acquired a cult of secrecy and linked this to a mysterious knowledge associated with Solomon’s Temple. Earlier, Agrippa had linked the Templars to witchcraft and occult powers. It remained for these elements to be drawn together into one powerful occultic myth, and this is what happened when the Freemasons were directly linked to the Templars–which happened not in Britain but in continental Europe.

The first step was taken in 1736 or 1737 by a Scotsman called Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite exile living in France who, as chancellor of the French Grand Lodge, introduced a fictitious Crusader background to the Freemasons and notions of aristocratic class. British Freemasonry was democratic in nature; its members included artisans and aristocrats, professional men, learned men and middle-class traders, all content to rub shoulders with one another. But neither rubbing shoulders nor belonging to an institution that had grown from workingmen’s beginnings appealed to the upper strata of French society. The gentry and nobility of France wanted recognition of social distinctions, and they wanted it reinforced by style, nostalgia and romance. Ramsay gave it to them by the bucketful, suggesting that the stonemasons had also been knightly warriors in the Holy Land, and soon he had turned the French Freemasons into an ancient chivalrous international secret society. ‘Our ancestors, the Crusaders, who had come from all parts of Christendom to the Holy Land, wanted to group persons from every nation in a single spiritual confraternity’, Ramsay announced in his Oration to Saint John’s Lodge in Paris, variously dated 27 December 1736 or 21 March 1737.

In Ramsay’s version of the past, the Crusaders had attempted to restore the Temple of Solomon in a hostile environment and had devised a system of secret signs and rituals to protect themselves against their Muslim enemy, who otherwise would infiltrate their positions and cut their throats. Ramsay also said that at the collapse of Outremer the Crusaders returned to their homelands in Europe and established Freemason lodges there. But their lodges and their rites were neglected over time and it was only among Scotsmen that the Freemasons preserved their former splendour:

At the time Ramsay said nothing about the Templars, perhaps because he might have offended the still powerful French monarchy and Church. In 1749, however, six years after his death, Ramsay’s monumental work
The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion
was published in Glasgow, and in it Ramsay said, ‘every Mason is a Knight Templar’, a remark that was not forgotten.

The Crusader link was further developed in Germany in about 1760, when a Frenchman who pretended to be a Scottish nobleman and called himself George Frederick Johnson claimed to have direct access to Templar secrets. This too served local tastes, as Germany was an old-fashioned society dominated by notions of rank which resisted the egalitarian and rationalist ideas inherent in British Freemasonry. A spurious connection with Templars provided the German Freemasons with Gothic atmosphere and a strong flavour of the occult.

According to Johnson’s concoction of history, the Templar Grand Masters had spent their time in the East learning the secrets and acquiring the treasure of the Jewish Essenes, later famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the people with whom John the Baptist probably had some association. This learning and this treasure was handed down from one Grand Master to another, and so came into the possession of James of Molay–who according to the story also bears the name of Hiram. On the night before his execution, James of Molay was said to have ordered a group of Templars who were somehow still at large to enter into the crypt of the Paris Temple and make off with the treasure, which consisted of the seven-branched candelabra stolen from the Temple by the Roman Emperor Titus, the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and a shroud. These were taken to the Atlantic port of La Rochelle from
where eighteen Templar galleys made their escape to the Isle of Mull where they called themselves Freemasons. The Scottish Freemasons, said Johnson the fake Scotsman, were the Templars’ direct heirs.

Then came the French Revolution in 1789, which shook the European public to the core. In an effort to understand those dramatic events, many accepted the fiction that secret organisations were manipulating public affairs.

The Revenge of James of Molay

James of Molay was burnt to death in Paris on the evening of 18 March 1314. The one eyewitness account of the burning of Molay, written by an anonymous monk, says that he went to his death ‘with easy mind and will’. There is no contemporary reference to him uttering a curse, yet it has since been said that as the flames engulfed the Templars’ last Grand Master he cried out for vengeance and called on the king and Pope to appear with him before the tribunal of God within a year and a day. Less than five weeks later, on 20 April, Pope Clement V died of the long and painful illness that had afflicted him throughout his pontificate. And still within that same year King Philip IV died, on 29 November, after falling from a horse while hunting.

The supposed secret survival of the Templars through the centuries opened the way for agents of the order to take their revenge for the burning of James of Molay. With a sense of prophecy owing everything to hindsight, James of Molay was now remembered to have brought his curse down on the heads of the king and Pope. The downfall of the French royal house of Capet, and the humbling of the Catholic Church in France, would come with the French Revolution–brought about by a secret conspiracy controlled by the Templars working through the Freemasons. That anyway was the belief of some extreme conservative elements in France, among them Charles de Gassicour, the author of
Le Tombeau de Jacques Molay
, published in 1796. Describing the death by guillotine of Louis XVI, Gassicour has someone rise up and shout, ‘James of Molay, you are avenged!’–a hated Freemason, or a Templar, whose subversive organisation had overturned the established order.
Gassicour also claimed that James of Molay had founded four lodges, one in Edinburgh; that the Templars/Freemasons were associated with the Assassins and the Old Man of the Mountain; that they supported Oliver Cromwell; and that they had stormed the Bastille.

Others added their voices to the story. For example in 1797 Abbé Augustin Barruel published
Memoirs
, his account of the French Revolution, which he helped explain by saying that Freemasonry had derived from the Templars after their suppression, when:

Addressing the Freemasons directly, he continued: