This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of Fraternal Review titled, “The Knights Templar and The Origins of Freemasonry”.
We have seen that there are only two organizations that have found their principal identifications in the Temple of Solomon: Freemasonry and the Crusading Order of the Temple. The great mass of circumstantial evidence has clearly indicated that the common identification was no mere coincidence, but rather that the secret organization was born in the ashes of the public organization that had been condemned by both the church and state in an era of the most brutal bodily punishments. The only way the hunted Templars could continue to stay in contact with each other and help each other was in the darkest secrecy. That state of secrecy required no great adaptation for Templars, to whom secrecy was part of their vows and of their Rule. Every Templar was subject to swift punishment if he revealed any portion of the Rule of the Order, or any part of the proceedings of their chapter meetings, which were kept secret by means of guards stationed outside the meeting room, their swords at the ready. […]
Fortunately, the circumstances of the time, as outlined earlier, were in their favor. […] Robert Bruce in Scotland was pulling his people together, preparing to take the state of war between England and Scotland from a stalemate to the ultimate Scottish victory at Bannock Burn. He would welcome any fighting man in flight from the English dominions in Britain or on the continent. Having ignored the papal directive to arrest the Templars in Scotland, he had made that country a haven for Templars on the run. […]
Had the matter of the Templars been put to rest quickly, the fugitive monks and their comrades might simply have helped one another in a cursory fashion, based on the hasty needs of the occasion as they arose. The suppression dragged on, however—Grand Master de Molay was burned almost seven years after the initial arrests in France—and this delay gave the loose threads of contact among the fugitives time to mature into strong bonds of brotherhood. The formal organization that developed provided a base from which to establish a permanent institution, fed by a ceaseless flow of dissenters and protesters against the church.
Although claims have been made that the Masonic secret society originated in the builders of Solomon’s temple or medieval guilds of stonemasons in Britain, along with other suggestions even more fanciful, no beginning other than the Knights Templar provides such clear explanations of the lost meanings of the Masonic symbols of the circle and the mosaic on the lodge room floor, or the lambskin apron and gloves that comprise the “clothing” of Masonry. The compass and square appear allegorically as the unfinished Seal of Solomon, directly symbolizing the unfinished temple. The compass and square hidden in the Seal of Solomon provide a graphic link impossible to ignore, a link between the major badge of Freemasonry and the interruption of the building of Solomon’s temple in the legend of Hiram Abiff, as symbolized by the “unfinished” Seal of Solomon.
That legend, which is the central feature of Masonic ritual, adds credence to the Templar origin, especially since it is based upon an allegorical temple whose construction was halted because of the beating and murder of Grand Master Hiram Abiff. We know that the real Temple of Solomon was fully completed and in use for several centuries. The Temple of Solomon that was not completed can only be the Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, the Knights Templar. The dead master is replaced by the initiate who is raised to the degree of Master Mason. He not only “becomes” Hiram Abiff in the ritual drama, but also assumes the Grand Master’s interrupted objective, the completion of the temple, by keeping the secret society alive and growing, symbolically rescuing the Order of the Temple from the cessation ordered for it by king and pope.
The legend also gives the Grand Master the title of Master Builder, and the allegory of the construction of the temple provided the basis for the eventual cover story of the secret society as a society of stonemasons. These were symbolic masons, completing in secret a symbolic temple that the world believed had been destroyed. […] The rules of the ancient guilds are well known and they bear little relationship to the Old Charges of Masonry, which are clearly structured to support a secret society of mutual protection. No guild required that one protect the secrets of a brother that might cost him his life or property if discovered, nor with a locally chartered guild was there ever any call to provide “employment,” lodging, and pocket money for brothers from other local guilds passing through.
That risk of life and property was not a loose, undefined fear, but a very specific punishment set by the church. […] It is clear, then, that the secret of a brother that could cause the loss of his life and property was that he was guilty of heresy, a charge that was never leveled against any craftsmen’s guild. The ancient guilds were almost militantly religious, and all clung overtly to the established Roman Catholic church. None could have had, or would have wanted, a code of religious toleration that provided full brotherhood to those whose opinions were in any way at odds with the teachings of the church. […]
The Templars, however, were cut off by the church as a group. It was unlikely that a common ground of dissent or protest would be arrived at quickly, but the need for a belief in God was immediately necessary to give substance to mutual oaths of secrecy and support. Their first concern would have been saving lives, not souls, and a solution to the immediate need for binding oaths was found in the insistence upon an avowed belief in God, without any requirements as to the individual’s mode of worship or his attitudes toward the established church. […] The answer lay in banning all religious arguments, or even discussions, as each man’s own beliefs were accorded full respect by his brothers. […] The Templar rejection by the church, accompanied as it was by the sort of ferociously brutal punishments that engender hatred and a desire for revenge, provided a very clear foundation for a secret society with that religious philosophy, which cannot be approached by any other event or organization in British history. […]
Finally, the discovery of the lost meanings of Masonic terms in medieval French gives vital support to the hypothesis of the birth of Masonry in the French-speaking Knights Templar, and provides a matching time frame. There remained no reasonable doubt that Freemasonry had originated in the plight and the flight of the Knights of the Temple, an organization uniquely equipped to form a secret society quickly, since so much of their own order had functioned in secrecy with codes, passwords, and its own spy system.
It may seem that there is a great leap from the Templar suppression in 1307 to the public revelation of Freemasonry in 1717 with no evidence of any Masonic existence within that four-hundred-year span, but that is not true. Evidence does exist, but since no historian even suspected a Masonic connection, much of that evidence has been passed over with no connection made. […]
And so once again we are faced with a battery of what some may choose to label coincidences, but which might just as easily be termed items of circumstantial evidence. A group of protesters against the church and its clergy was based on a chapel named for St. John the Baptist, a patron saint of Freemasonry. They held secret meetings. They preached against the use of lawsuits for payment of debt, a basic Masonic precept. They provided “lodging” to itinerant travelers who shared their point of view. They were protected by local knights. When one of their number was condemned to be burned alive for heresy, a royal duke just “happened” to be on hand to persuade, or coerce, the bishop of Lincoln to reduce the sentence. Taken all together, it would appear that a Masonic “lodge” was active at Leicester toward the end of the fourteenth century. For more possible circumstantial evidence we can leap all the way to the seventeenth century, to an event that occurred generations after Lollardy is believed to have totally disappeared, although what happened seems strangely related to the happenings at Leicester. […]
Of course, in contrast to the almost total lack of recognized historical documentation of Secret Masonic existence, those familiar with Masonic history know that there were frequent claims, after Masonry became public, of a Templar connection with Freemasonry. We have seen one of them in the shortlived “Strict Observance” Masonry, which claimed that fugitive Templars had traveled to Scotland, where they teamed up with a guild of stonemasons. […] Others saw the Templar connection to Masonry in Ramsay’s Oration, although Ramsay never mentioned the Templars by name.
Somehow the ancient relationship of the Templars and Freemasons had been kept alive as a concept, but with no documentable proof. The response of some of those convinced of the concept was to try to create proof, and as those proofs were proven false the Templar connection lost all credibility. One theory proposed, for example, was that the Templars had deliberately chosen the al-Aqsa Mosque as their headquarters because it was on the site of the Temple of Solomon, and that in their secret meetings the Templars were keeping alive the order of Freemasonry, which had been founded in the building of that temple. When it became clear that Masonry had no
connection whatsoever with the construction of the actual Temple of Solomon, the Templar connection, too, was exposed as a spurious claim. Over time, the attempts to link Masonry with the Knights of the Temple by fantasy and forgery seemed to kill off any chance of discovering the true source of Masonic origins and directed Masonic researchers to ever more far-fetched allegations of origins in the Steinmetzen (stonemasons) of Germany, the Culdees, the Essenes, and the Druids, for none of which does the tiniest wisp of evidence exist. Out of the explosion of French Masonry following Ramsay's Oration did evolve the “Masonic Orders of Chivalry,” including a series of side degrees in Masonic orders of the Knights of Malta and the Knights of the Temple. […]
Apparently Ramsay's contention that the Masonic Crusaders had effected an alliance with the Knights of Malta was taken as justification for creating a new Order of Malta as a part of Freemasonry. As for the Masonic Knights Templar, they first appeared in Germany, then spread to France and, with variations, were established in the United States before 1770 and in Great Britain by 1778. None of those orders were based on the true origin of Masonry in the flight of the Templars from the clutches of Pope Clement V. […]
Furthermore, we have not dwelt on the side degrees beyond the basic “Blue Lodge” of Craft Masonry because they do not relate to any of the mysteries of pre-1717 Secret Masonry; nor, as “made up” societies, do they have any unsolved mysteries of their own, nor any direct connections with either ancient Secret Masonry or the original Knights of the Temple. Those connections stop with the three basic degrees of Craft Masonry.
As to that basic Craft Masonry, how might it be affected by the discovery that it evolved from a protective society of fugitive Templars, and not from medieval guilds of stonemasons? Should present workings be abandoned? Of course not. The stonemason cover story is an important part of Masonic tradition. […]
All traditional symbolism and ritual should remain intact, although acceptance of the findings in this book would require changes in aspects of the Masonic lectures. Those changes would amplify and enrich the traditions of the order and might even enhance membership by being able to cite origins that are at the same time more sensible and more exciting than those recited to new members today. Secrets that save a man’s life are much more to be respected than secrets of a trade, and a secret recognition
signal is more dramatic when used to identify a blood brother than to validate a fellow chisel owner. The Old Charges, too, move from behind the cover story to be exposed as the basic rules for a brotherhood based on the preservation of life itself. Nothing about Templar origins detracts from Masonry. In fact, much is added, especially in the areas of understanding about Masonry’s birth, its purposes, and the fabric of religious freedom that was important enough in its time that men would risk their lives and liberty for centuries on end under the shelter of the common goals that forge true brotherhood. They placed their lives in each others’ hands with vows of security, secrecy, and support. And it might not hurt to remind the brotherhood that the world is not yet in such a state that we can assume that freedom of religion is universally accepted and so need not be maintained as a central purpose of the order, as it was in the days of Secret Masonry. As far as that basic principle is concerned, the unfinished Temple of Solomon is still unfinished.
Excerpted from John J. Robinson, Born In Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, “Monks Into Masons,” (M. Evans & Co., N.Y., 1989), pp. 277-290.