The Order of the Temple was suppressed in 1312, and medieval sources show no clandestine continuation. Yet from the eighteenth century onwards the idea spread forcefully that the Templars had survived in secret, passing on doctrines and degrees into the modern age. Studying this myth means studying not the Middle Ages but the way modern Europe sought prestigious ancestors for its initiatory societies.
What really happened to the Templars
After the suppression, the brothers who had not been executed met different fates. Many entered other orders, above all the Hospitallers, who had received the Temple's property. Others lived in monasteries on a pension. In Portugal the property passed to the new Order of Christ, in the kingdom of Aragon to the Order of Montesa. These are documented continuities of property and people, not a secret transmission.
Ramsay's oration
The starting point of the modern myth lies in a Masonic setting. In 1737 the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scot living in France, prepared an oration intended for the Parisian lodges. In it he argued that Freemasonry descended from the crusading knights, who had supposedly united the art of building with religious devotion in the Holy Land.
One detail is important: Ramsay spoke of crusaders and referred mainly to the Knights of St John, not specifically to the Templars. But the idea of a chivalric lineage for Freemasonry opened the way to the so-called "chivalric" degrees and, soon, to a Templar reading.
The Strict Observance
In the 1750s the German baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund created a Masonic system that became known as the Templar Strict Observance. Hund claimed to have been received into a surviving Templar order, led by "unknown superiors" who never showed themselves.
The system enjoyed considerable success in Germany and central Europe:
- it organised lodges into provinces, echoing the old provinces of the order;
- it gave members Latin chivalric names;
- it promised the revelation of Templar secrets in the highest degrees.
The unknown superiors, however, never appeared, and doubts grew.
The Convent of Wilhelmsbad
In 1782 a great Masonic convent met at Wilhelmsbad, near Hanau, to settle the question. The outcome was the abandonment of the claim to historical descent from the Templars. The system was reformed along the lines developed in Lyon by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, and the inner chivalric degree took the name of Knights Beneficent of the Holy City. The Temple remained as a spiritual ideal, not as a genealogy.
The Larmenius Charter
In early nineteenth-century Paris, Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat presented himself as grand master of a restored Order of the Temple. In support of this claim he displayed the so-called Larmenius Charter, a document in ciphered Latin according to which Jacques de Molay had handed leadership of the order to one John Mark Larmenius, followed by an unbroken list of grand masters.
Scholars regard this document as an eighteenth-century forgery. Fabré-Palaprat's order also developed its own religious doctrine, inspired by an apocryphal version of the Gospel of John known as the Leviticon, and gained some visibility during the Napoleonic era.
The Scottish legend
Another version of the myth links the Templars to Scotland. According to this story, some knights fled to Robert the Bruce and fought at Bannockburn in 1314, later handing down their secrets through the Scottish lodges. No contemporary source records any Templar participation in that battle.
The same goes for Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, begun in 1446 by William Sinclair: it is a building rich in carvings, but it was built more than a century after the order's suppression, and there is no evidence linking it to the Templars.
Why the myth succeeded
| Need | What the myth offered |
|---|---|
| Antiquity | A genealogy reaching back to the crusades |
| Prestige | The appeal of chivalry and nobility |
| Mystery | A secret kept by hidden superiors |
| Redemption | Moral vindication of an unjustly destroyed order |
The myth answers real symbolic needs. For many eighteenth-century initiates the Templar represented the union of spirituality and action, of loyalty and sacrifice. From the perspective of the Studio Esoterico Cornelio, it is this ideal value that can be embraced, provided it is not presented as documented history.
How to tell history from legend
Anyone who comes across claims about Templar survival can ask a few simple questions:
- Is there a medieval source attesting the fact?
- Has the document cited been examined by independent historians?
- Is the chain of transmission documented at every step?
- Does the story appear before or after the eighteenth century?
Almost always the answers reveal modern constructions, interesting as a cultural phenomenon but not as historical proof.
In short
- After 1312 the Templars joined other orders or lived in monasteries, with no documented secret continuity.
- Ramsay's oration of 1737 linked Freemasonry to the crusaders, opening the way to chivalric degrees.
- Von Hund's Strict Observance spread the idea of unknown Templar superiors, abandoned at Wilhelmsbad in 1782.
- The Larmenius Charter, used by Fabré-Palaprat, is considered an eighteenth-century forgery.
- Templar presence at Bannockburn and a link with Rosslyn find no support in the sources.
