Translation: Jon Alkorta Martiartu, PhD (UPV/EHU)
A Few Templar Enigmas
The Templars, the mythical Christian knights, are shrouded in mystery. We are going to take a closer look at those issues related to the Order of the Temple that have yet to be deciphered, to shed at least a little light on them. Let’s travel back to the Middle Ages.
The history of the order
The Order of the Temple is the name by which the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon is usually known. It was founded in 1118 or 1119 by nine French knights led by Hugo de Payns after the first crusade against the infidels to conquer the Holy Land.
At that time numerous pilgrims from all over the West wanted to travel to Jerusalem and the other sites of Christ’s life.
But the road was not safe. That is why the Order of the Temple was created: to guarantee safe passage to the Holy Land.
This is where the mysteries begin, as the order gradually gained more and more power, both in terms of the number of knights and gold. It is said that the Templars invented the bill of exchange, so that pilgrims did not have to carry their money on their pilgrimage.
The knights’ history of prosperity continued for two centuries, until the Holy Land was lost, which raised some mistrust of the Knights Templar. But their real trouble came elsewhere: Philip IV of France, heavily indebted to the order and frightened by its growing power, tried to persuade Pope Clement V to eradicate the Knights Templar. A few years later the Order of the Temple fell into disgrace and almost all of its members were killed on Friday 13 October 1307. Hence the nefarious condition of the 13th falling on a Friday.
The curse
Jaques de Molay.
Some of the order’s leaders managed to avoid Friday 13. Among them, its leader Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple. On 18 March 1314, already at the stake to be burned, he launched a curse against the execution of the sentence that had sealed the dissolution and fall from grace of the Templars. De Molay prophesied an imminent divine punishment for Pope Clement V and the French King Philip IV, who had brought about the end of the Order and the condemnation of its leaders.
As if it were divine justice, the pontiff and the monarch died in the course of the same year. The curse had been fulfilled and De Molay became a legend.
The Templars disappeared. Well, did they?
Did the Templars arrive in America?
Rosslyn chapel.
After the fateful Friday the 13th, the surviving Templars headed north. Many headed for the port of La Rochelle in France and it is also believed that many of them made their way up through Britain and settled in Scotland.
But why head north, and where were they going when they embarked on the French Atlantic coast?
Well, some say that the Templars knew of the existence of America and that is why many knights would have gone into exile there.
Although dated a little over a century later, there is a building in Scotland linked to the Templars: Rosslyn Chapel, very close to Edinburgh. This Gothic building was promoted by the Sinclair family.
Prior to the construction of the chapel, one of the members of this family, Henry Sinclair, presumably with the financial support of the Templars, assembled a fleet to make a voyage to the New World. The date is earlier than 1400, as we know that Henry Sinclair was killed that year after returning. This voyage would explain Rosslyn’s strange ornamentation in which we see ears of corn and aloe vera plants, which were unknown in the West at the time.
Baphomet
Trifacial head in the Convent of Christ in Tomar (Portugal).
One of the accusations that led to the execution of the Templars was the rumour that they performed a strange rite of initiation into the order that involved the worship of a strange head, which the accusers claimed was an object of the Evil One. This head is known as Baphomet.
You might link this name with an occultist symbol. In fact, the magician Eliphas Levi, in the mid-19th century, included a drawing of Baphomet in his book The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic. It was a billy goat with all the demonic attributes.
There is another theory. The Templar Baphomet could be a vultus trifrons, a head with three faces, the opposite of the trifacial trinity.
If we travel to the Convent of Christ in Tomar, one of the most important Templar sites in Portugal, in one of the keystones of the refectory vault we can also find an enigmatic head with three faces. Could this be the form of the presumed Baphomet? We do not know for sure.
Some say that the name Baphomet is a derivation of the name of Muhammad: “mahomet”. It is true that the keystone just mentioned has Arabic features, but this is just a theory.
Another supposed Baphomet would be in the chapel of San Bartolomé in the canyon of the river Lobos in Soria, where we can see a corbel with four opposing faces.
The truth is that it is all supposition. There is no certainty as to what the Templar Baphomet might have looked like or what its ritual might have been.
The black virgins
Virgin of Montserrat.
If Baphomet may have had pagan reminiscences, it is quite possible that the black virgins did too.
The fact is that most of the black virgins that have come down to us (such as the Moreneta of Montserrat) date from around the 12th and 13th centuries, the period of the rise of the Templars.
We know of the Temple’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, but it has sometimes been hypothesised that this devotion came from ancient pagan deities that may have come, for example, from Egypt. Remember that the dark-skinned goddess Isis suckles her son Horus, an image on which the iconography of the Virgin Mother is based.
But were the black virgins really pagan goddesses from Egypt or the Eastern world? If you want to know a little more about it, here is a video with an interview I did with Jesús Callejo on this fascinating subject.
Bibliography
Here are some interesting references about the Templars in case you want to know more:
- The Temple and the Lodge, by Michael Baigent.
- Los templarios y el secreto de las catedrales, by Mariano F. Urresti.
- The magazineMistérica Ars Secreta 2, with an article on the Temple by Antonio Ballesteros.
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (6 de octubre de 2023). Algunos enigmas Templarios. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 19 de marzo de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/unvx