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Knights Templar Thread

Do the assistants dress up? :)
 
Nah, tis a pity they don't tho, altho the shop is a tad pokey, so if they did they wouldn't be able to move.
 
Knitted chain mail sprayed silver is flexible, lightweight and takes up no more bulk than a jumper! I think that and a variety of helms would give a real flavour :)
 
:agree: LOL, but it may be marred by the fact that you have to more or less move round the shop sideways, we would end up looking like a old video game, humans being chased by weird soldiers
 
Hang onto your hats.
Firstly, let's split the eras. The original Templars ended, because their job was done. The modern ones aspired to the same spiritual goals, and have achieved something miraculous in their work: the Medical Division of Johnson Matthey exists because the senior Management are all Royal Arch Masons, and made a breakthough in Platinol research which was actually miraculous, because it directly involved the niece of one of them, as the test subject. This happened in complete ignorance to all concerned, including myself, present as her husband.
Let me focus in on that Company a little more. They are dealers in precious metals and above all esle, gold refiners. Their subject is how to refine gold, and the alchemical process has produced gold which is 100% pure. What nobody has noticed is that mercury and gold are immediate neighbours on the atomic table, and so are the easiest to transmute in a plasma. We just don't know how to control it. Effectively, there are two forms of alchemical transmutation, Wet Path and Dry Path. The former takes a year at room temperature, allegedly. The second, a month. Therefore, I impute that the Law of Conservation of Energy implies temperatures 12 times higher in the second than the first, grosso-modo. That's 12 times a temperature of 200-300 C, ie plasma heat. Corroboration step 1.
Next up, Phillip II's Palace of the Escorial, designed as the Third Temple of Solomon. The Temple of Solomon houses the Ark. Royal Arch. In Professor René Taylor's work on that aspect of the foundation (Arquitectura y Magia, Consideraciones sobre la idea de El Escorial, ISBN 84-7844-134-4) he addresses this question as a major focus, and concludes that his thinking was alchemical. Read the Spanish edition, not the English translation, as it includes critical appendices. The place holds one of the few surviving alchemical laboratories, in the basement, which is why it was chosen to host the 2010 Chymia conference. The hard history of the factual roots of Chemistry. That work firmly places the context of Phillip's knowledge in Brussels, which is where I picked up the thread.
 
Next up, Brussels. In 1618, Jan van Helmont, parish priest of the nearby village of Neder over Heembeek, and part-time Paracelsian student, spent an evening in discussion with an otherwise unnamed alchemist who left him a packet of red powder. He wrote up what followed as a scientific experiment, explaining that he took 8 ounces of mercury, put it in a clay crucible, and added the red powder, putting the lid on, before sealing it with clay and placing it in the embers of the hearth fire overnight. In the morning, he came down to discover the crucible had fallen from the embers onto the hearth, breaking, and releasing its contents. 8 ounces of assayable gold. The celebration which followed produced progeny, Franz Mercurius van Helmont, who became Leibnitz' tutor. The essential lesson of this was that Paracelsian thinking was disproved, in that cold wet mercury should not be able to produce hot solid gold. And yet it obviously had. So van Helmont started over, empirically, discovering oxygen, and from there modern chemistry was born. I should not neglect to mention that Isaac Newton wrote twice as much on the subject as ever he did on cosmology. What we were seeing is the slow elimination of noise from the understanding, but at the loss of the emotional side.
It should be noted that van Helmont did not address the question of transmutation again, nor name the alchemist: however, we can be fairly certain from other dates that it was a certain Nicholas de Cerclaers, who had been driven into exile in 1568 and had only just returned, impoverished. However, within a year he was back in funds, buying his way into the Middle Class, next door neighbour to the Breughels on Rue Haute, and obvious inspiration to their work.
de Cerclaers (or in the original Anglo-Flemish, T'Sir Klaes, one of the heritage lines of the founders of the City) had come to attention before. In 1568, the Counts of Hoornes and Egmont were executed for heresy. Not treason, heresy. The reason is that they had finally gone to far poaching on Phillip's private area of interest, which is what I was just talking about. As heads of the Flemish, they had fought to maintain the influence the Flemish had enjoyed under Charles V, Phillip's father, in the teeth of evident prejudice (when Phillip's explorers came across dim-witted birds with magnificent plumage spending most of their time up to their knees in water, they took one look and yelled "Flemings" - or in Spanish, Flamingos). Anyway, the next result was that they ran out of money in the mid-1560s, and made it known they were looking for more funding. de Cerclaers turned up at their door, suggesting he could, in return for the title of Count of Hoornes. The deal was agreed, he disappeared off to the Castle at Hoornes, safely out of the way in the Netherlands, and nothing more was heard for a year. Then, one day, he returned to Weerde, bursting in in a state of excitement, he'd succeeded. Nobody noticed the Counts' Jesuit confessor in the corner, until the door banged as he slipped out. The Counts lost the race to Brussels, and the rest is history. Decapitation, and martyrs to the cause of Revolution, per Goethe, although Beethoven's Overture to his play is better known. By comparison, de Cerclaers disappeared back into the Netherlands, and relative penury, until his return in 1618. And the money? That existed, it was transferred into the safekeeping of the Prince-Bishop of Liege, who returned it to Egmont's widow in1600: I discovered the receipt in the French Regional Archive at Lille. 40000 moutons d'or. Just to tidy the story off, de Cerclaers was one of those rather long-lived alchemists: his grave is in the cemetary complexe in Uccle (technically in the graveyard of the Church of St Nicholas, most appropriately. The widow's coat of arms is in the glazing of the Cloister at the nearby Abbey of the Cambre, and my attention now turns there.
 
The cloister is normally entered from the South transept of the Church, and that transept is bare, other than four wall bosses, capuchin monkeys telling a tale in dumb crambo: "Something deadly dangerous is here, and the Sisters don't know". At least, that something deadly dangerous was there, laid up for safe keeping by the Head of the Abbey, Konrad von Urach, while he built its lasting home, the Terarken Béguinage. Terarken is explicit: French Catholics have tried to cover it up with linguistic games which don't work in Flemish, it is undeniable dedicated not to an intercessory Saint or Angelic Power, but to a thing. The Ark of the Covenant. Anyway, to finish with the Cambre, it was built by Konrad von Urach in around 1200, and he is still there: his bones lie in a sarcophagus halfway up the wall of the South Transept.
Conrad is one of the more interesting characters of that time. Cousin on the female side to Simon I de Montfort, he became a monk and then entered the priesthood under his Uncle, a far earlier Bishop of Liege. Rising rapidly because of his connections (his father, Count of Urach, was the starting point of the Ducal Line of Wurtemburg), he soon became notorious by taking on the Rhineland. We know of the monastic lifestyle there from the Carmina Burana, the Songs of the Abbey of Buren: licentiousness was normal. Not so to Konrad, he went through the Rhineland like a dose of salts, leaving hatred behind him. So strongly notorious did he become that the Vatican, in need of a warrior Cardinal to lead the Albigensian Crusade, appointed him. And so it was that one winter, he helped himself to the biggest Christmas present of all time, the Templar Commandery of Bézu. The arrival of the relic is documented in the studies undertaken by André Douzet, in the work done in the passage of the thing through Wallonia. But that's just minor corroboration: the critical aspect is what we know of Bézu.
Simon I de Montfort had led the way when Jerusalem fell, diving straight down the undercellars through Solomon's Stables. He then made his way back, getting as far as Bézu before being forced to put on a show at Toulouse. Which ended up at the hands of one of the doughty womenfolk of the town, who ended his days with a well-aimed mangonel bolt. He wasn't buried there, but among the Popes, the only non-papal inhumation in the Vatican Undercroft since the very earliest days. Connect the dots, please.
I'll go back a little further. de Montfort's Templars were from the Ardennes. As was my great-grandfather, Louis Nestor Guiot. A curious choice of names, in family tradition explained by the presence of a clandestine Nestorian sect in the area. One which might have known what other strange secrets of Syria were to be found.
 
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OK, how did I get mixed up in it? Well, I was Jonahed into it. In the best traditions of the thing, I landed a house opposite the Roman Catholic ArchiAssociation of the Eucharist, declared the Perpetual and Universal Seat of the subject by Pope Leo XIII in the 1870s. Perpetual seems to have meant 130 years, because it was finally closing, definitively. The attribution of the site was illegal, and so the neighbourhood defeated the ArchDiocese in Court and left them so emmeshed legally they could not move. We ended up with the charge, and so needed to know exactly what that meant.
Fortunately, my hyperserendipity had cut in, allowing me to lay my hands on the history of the foundation, signed by the foundress, which made the purposes clear beyond any possible legal challenge. It also provided context, in the key act of it's original foundation, knowingly immediately next door to the Terarken, in 1434 - the new Order simply put old robes on, in addition to its original vocation of Church Restoration after 50 years of neglect at the hands of the Post-Revolutionary French. Pope Eugenius IV, the first Pope of the Renaissance, was a follower of the Windesheim School of Gerardus Groot, who, allied with the Flemish Philosopher Jan van Ruusbroec, had set a path of reformation in the Church which would lead to Luther and Erasmus. The choice of the path was made by Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, setting up the Council of Constance (1414-18) to resolve the Papal Schism, very clearly deciding to follow Jean Gerson's thinking that the Church had played second fiddle to the secular powers for too long, and now needed to become dominant (cf the study in Guenée, Between Church and State, ISBN 0226310329). The theology was that of van Ruusbroec's Spiritual Tabernacle (ISBN9020090000), consolidating the scattered dogma of the Mass and Eucharist as prefiguration of the Second Coming, in the form of the Devotio Moderna. It was backed by a full academic case, according to the norm of the day, the Quadrivium: that was handled by two very junior acolytes in d'Ailly's retinue at Constance, namely Guillaume Dufay and Jan van Eyck. Dufay covered arithmetic and music in his L'Homme Armé cantus Firmus Mass (the reference work here is Craig Wright's The Maze and the Warrior, ISBN0674013636) and van Eyck the same, graphically, in the original version of The Fountain of Life (I believe the version in the Prado to be a copy from memory of a lost original, none the less painted by van Eyck while on a diplomatic mission to Spain)and his far more famous Mystic Lamb polytich - the works speak for themselves. Dufay opened the batting with Pope Eugenius' Coronation Anthemn, Ecclesie Militate, calling upon the Church to take up arms, to become the Church Triumphant, The Armed Man, Christ in Judgement. Professor Wright's text actually bridges far further than this, including the entire role of the Mystic Labyrinth adopted as an alternative to the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in expiation of sins, after the fall to Saladin.
 
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And for that to be housed immediately adjacent to the posited home of the Ark could hardly be more explicit - in theory.
In practice, there is some exidence of it. As is not unusual in Spanish holdings, the sites - and the one Templar foundation in Brussels - are connected by tunnels. In 1843, Charlotte Bronte, while mistress of Paul Heger, was housed in a school adjacent, and reports ball lightning coming from the said tunnels, in her semi-autobiographical novels The Professor and Villette. In very short order after that, Leo XIII, at that time Nuncio to Belgium, is dispatched persona non grata: I have discovered why. His Nepote Capo di Guarda Nobile, Camillo Pecci, was born that year. Talk about the Holy Father! The mother became the foundress of the Order, and as Head of a Prima Primaria ArchiAssociation, had access to his Holiness at any hour of the day or night. Sweet.
Essentially, what I'm dealing with is a major piezo-electrical battery. Brother to the Anubis Chest found in Tutankhamun's tomb, Isis and Nephthys on the lid, so one guards the entry into the afterlife, the other the exit, it is thought to have stopped at an Egyptian temple in Sinai immediately over a quarry full of piezo-electric stone. Stick a couple of large chunks of rock in, several million times the size of the grain in my stove lighter, take it jogging, the wood insulates it until you lower it to the ground, reducing the spark gap. Wham, bam, goodbye Jericho.
 
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Those of you versed in the Alchemical will recognise the dark side. The Massacre of the Innocents. I found a coherent pattern stretching as far back as Dagon, and including Weinstein of the Dutroux Gang. And widely spread as part of OTO in America. Gilles de Rais, Joan of Ark's lieutenant. Note the nickname. de Rais is of the same house of de Montmorency as Egmont and Hoornes. Catherine de'Medicis' work with Ruggieri at Chaumont. Herod. You name it - it's been checked with the Belgian CID. Many of the intellectual elite of France, exiled in the 1870s, in the same area of Brussels.
 
Hang onto your hats.
Firstly, let's split the eras. The original Templars ended, because their job was done.

I'll probably regret this but the Templars were dissolved as an order not because they had finished anything but due to persecution. A lot of the heads of state of Europe owed them money so took part in destroying the order.

The surviving remnants went on to form the Order of Christ in Portugal.
 
True in miniscule detail, but not in terms of drive and dynamic. That's why I put the word "original" in.

The original vocation, focused on the Temple, changed soon after Jerusalem fell, to become a form of armed escort for pilgrims, and as you say, finance. It's the pre-change set, the 12 Belgians, I'm focused on.
 
True in miniscule detail, but not in terms of drive and dynamic. That's why I put the word "original" in.

The original vocation, focused on the Temple, changed soon after Jerusalem fell, to become a form of armed escort for pilgrims, and as you say, finance. It's the pre-change set, the 12 Belgians, I'm focused on.


Protection of Pilgrims?
 
I can't see this having previously been highlighted - one of my favourite subjects as well.

Rabbit hole leads to incredible 700-year-old Knights Templar cave complex

Source: archaeology-world.com
Date: 29 November, 2019

An outstanding discovery was made when a 700-year-old Knights Templar cave was found beneath a farmer’s field in Shropshire, England, in a complex known as the Caynton Caves network.

The Knights Templar was a major catholic order which was popular during the Crusades and their name comes from Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The Knights Templar were first created in 1129 according to the order of the Pope, and it was their first duty to help religious pilgrims who visited the Holy Land and Jerusalem.

The photographer Michael Scott, from Birmingham, saw a video of the 700-year-old Knights Templar cave in Shropshire and decided to visit the Caynton Caves network to witness them for himself.

Some of Scott’s photographs of the cave have been published, including those in The Mirror, and these show an exotic candlelit labyrinth which Fox News note looks extremely similar to scenes straight out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

https://www.archaeology-world.com/r...le-700-year-old-knights-templar-cave-complex/
 
True in miniscule detail, but not in terms of drive and dynamic. That's why I put the word "original" in.

The original vocation, focused on the Temple, changed soon after Jerusalem fell, to become a form of armed escort for pilgrims, and as you say, finance. It's the pre-change set, the 12 Belgians , I'm focused on.

I'm probably going to regret this, but wasn't it 9 knights, under the direction of Hugh de Payens, who founded the order? And wasn't de Payens from Troyes? Which, as far as I recall, was always in France?

If I recall the history, it later became 11 knights, until formal recognition and recruitment started.

So, who are these 12 Belgians, of which you speak?
 
Warning : History Channel show.

But Hamilton White does have a fedora hat and something Indiana Jones could only have dreamed of... a £100m treasure trove dating back to the 1200s.

The antiquities hunter has spent 10 years painstakingly piecing together more than 100 pieces from a collection believed to have belonged to the Knights Templar.

It includes a libation cup, a sword which bears three Templar crosses, a helmet and an Obsidian chalice.


https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/real-life-indiana-jones-reveals-21963379
 
Warning : History Channel show.

But Hamilton White does have a fedora hat and something Indiana Jones could only have dreamed of... a £100m treasure trove dating back to the 1200s.

The antiquities hunter has spent 10 years painstakingly piecing together more than 100 pieces from a collection believed to have belonged to the Knights Templar.

It includes a libation cup, a sword which bears three Templar crosses, a helmet and an Obsidian chalice.


https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/real-life-indiana-jones-reveals-21963379
I admit I’m watching it and there is an element of spoilt rich kid about White. A lot of things he talks about purely in terms of their financial worth and some of the items he literally throws around and doesn’t seem to be bothered if he damages them. And he does seem to have a fair bit of Nazi material, in fairness he has a large collection and it could just be editing to highlight that small section.
 
This CNN item is a travel / travelogue piece, but it describes an area of Templar long-term activity and construction not previously mentioned here on the forum - a cluster of 3 villages in western Poland.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/knights-templar-holy-grail-poland/index.html

The fortifications and churches built by the Tamplars survive to this day and are only now being explored in detail. There are suggestions of hidden tunnels and treasure that have yet to be investigated.
 
714 years ago today, a Friday morning started badly for a large group of men.

Just last week, I discovered that the remains of a Templar estate church lie not far from me, beneath a 16th century addition.

Going to check it out next weekend.
 
I was watching an episode of the wacky "search the hole" series Curse of Oak Island, and there was an episode of them finding a weird cross that looked semi-eerily like one carved by Knights Templar prisoners in a particular prison in Domme France.

I'm not questioning that the cross was seeded into the fig to make TV excitement, but instead I'm curious about:
- Is this a unique cross design to the Templars in terms of historic cross design that we have other examples of?
- Or is it just an example of two freehanded works bearing a resemblance to each other?
Video showing both:
And a screen grab:

cross.png
 
I was watching an episode of the wacky "search the hole" series Curse of Oak Island, and there was an episode of them finding a weird cross that looked semi-eerily like one carved by Knights Templar prisoners in a particular prison in Domme France.

I'm not questioning that the cross was seeded into the fig to make TV excitement, but instead I'm curious about:
- Is this a unique cross design to the Templars in terms of historic cross design that we have other examples of?
- Or is it just an example of two freehanded works bearing a resemblance to each other?
Video showing both:
And a screen grab:

View attachment 56469

The picture on the left was obviously not meant to be a cross but a figuration of Jesus. If you look at the horizontal bar, you can still distinguish an attempt to represent the charcater's fingers. Same remark about the attempt to display two legs on the vertical bar.

If the picture was indeed taken in a prison where Templars did sojourn, it doesn't necessarily refer to some kind of specific "templar cross". I suspect it simply draws a parallel between the prisoner's situation and Jesus. One possible reading of the Bible is that Jesus was betrayed (for money) and persecuted by the very people he came to "save". Similarly, an anonymous Templar could regard himself has having been persecuted for worldly reasons (King Philip's lust for power and money), and betrayed by those he wanted to protect (the Christians as a whole, and the Pope, who did not do much to save the order). And it is quite true that templars were subjected to heavy torture by the French authorities. In this context, it would have been comforting to them to envision these trials as a kind of replay of Christ's passion.

Regarding the right hand side picture, the cross shape suggests it is a poor work of craftmanship. The geometry of the cross is very irregular, one arm of the cross being longer than the other, and the vertical and horizontal segments being hardly perpendicular. In my opinion (I might be wrong), it was a probably a cheap attempt to create a pendant. The amateur jeweller made the head of the pendant wide enough to pierce a hole with the square edge/tool he had access to, so that a chain could pass through the cross. I doubt any symbolism is to be found here. It's just an easy made cross. It was lost in the area, and perhaps not searched for because of its low value.

Now, if you nonetheless search for a symbolic pattern here, you could see an "Ankh". Not something specifically "templar", but well, that's what it looks like from afar : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankh

For me, it is simply a cheap cross pendant.
 
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Regarding the right hand side picture, the cross shape suggests it is a poor work of craftmanship. The geometry of the cross is very irregular, one arm of the cross being longer than the other, and the vertical and horizontal segments being hardly perpendicular. In my opinion (I might be wrong), it was a probably a cheap attempt to create a pendant. The amateur jeweller made the head of the pendant wide enough to pierce a hole with the square edge/tool he had access to, so that a chain could pass through the cross. I doubt any symbolism is to be found here. It's just an easy made cross. It was lost in the area, and perhaps not searched for because of its low value.
To me, it looks like it was cast from lead or pewter, using sand or clay as the mould.
Probably made by someone with only basic skills - definitely not a jeweller.
 
Thanks @AmStramGram and @Mythopoeika - ya'll are likely right. But I was thinking that as real Templar information is a little on the light side, that the image on the wall in particular might represent a new take on the Cross that emphasized the human on it over just representing the wood, which might have some interesting Gnostic-esq takes on what the Knights Templar were really thinking.
 
Knights Templar graves discovered at Coventry village church

A historian has uncovered graves belonging to members of the Knights Templar at an English village church in one of the “most nationally important discoveries” of its kind.

Researcher Edward Spencer Dyas has been investigating the discovery after finding the medieval tombs at St Mary’s Church in Enville in Staffordshire.

He found three 800-year-old forgotten graves belonging to members of the ancient order in the churchyard in 2021 and has now discovered five more.

Each grave features a Templar cross within double circles in a standard Templar design.

One of the graves also includes a Crusader cross indicating the knight was a Templar and a Crusader.

Mr Dyas believes the medieval building could be one of the most nationally important Templar churches in the country due to its links to William Marshal.

Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, is considered the most famous Templar in history and is often dubbed “England’s greatest knight” of the Middle Ages.

The Knights Templar were a wealthy, powerful and mysterious military organisation of devout Christians in the medieval era, formed in 1119 and tasked with providing safety to pilgrims to Jerusalem.

Legend has it that their wealth was coveted by the nobility, however, and they were charged falsely with heresy - and the order eventually disbanded in 1308/9.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...overed-at-coventry-village-church/ar-AA1fjuBJ

maximus otter
 
On this day, Friday, 13 October 1307, the raids began before dawn to arrest what had been the most prestigious religious military order in all of Christendom and began a sad tale of persecution whose ripples come down the centuries to this very day.

A black Friday of a different sort.
 
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