Knights Templar seal Knights Templar

By Dr. Margaret Hollis, Lead Editor Last reviewed First published Fact-checked by Prof. Aidan McGrath, University of St Andrews

Templar Mythology, Symbolism and Hidden Knowledge

Few institutions in history have given rise to as rich a mythology as the Knights Templar. Within a few years of their suppression in 1312, legends of hidden treasure, surviving brothers, and secret rituals had begun to circulate. Over the following centuries, these legends merged with other traditions — the Holy Grail, Celtic Christianity, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and occult traditions — to create a vast and complex body of Templar mythology that continues to fascinate and inspire.

Key takeaways

  • The first layer of Templar mythology is the legitimate symbolic vocabulary of the Order: the white mantle, the red cross, the Beauseant, the round church, the dedication to the Temple of Solomon.
  • The second layer is the post-1312 legend — hidden treasure, surviving brothers, a secret that the Order carried to the grave. Most modern historians treat this as a retrospective construction, not a historical claim.
  • The third layer is the esoteric and occult tradition — Baphomet as the goat of Mendes, the Order as the keeper of the Holy Grail, the link to the Freemasons. These claims emerged principally in the 18th and 19th centuries.
  • The fourth layer is the modern popular culture — Assassin’s Creed, Dan Brown, the New World legends, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the Rosslyn Chapel tales. These continue to evolve.

This pillar page is an overview of that mythology. It complements the complete history of the Templars and the trial and suppression pillar.

The Symbolism of the Order

The first layer of Templar mythology is the symbolism of the Order itself. The Templars’ distinctive white mantle with the red cross, the famous Beauseant battle standard, and the Order’s most important church — the Temple Church in London — were all rich with possible meanings. To a medieval eye, these symbols would have communicated the Order’s vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. To a modern observer, they have been read as something deeper.

The symbolism of the Order is examined in detail in The Templar Cross and Mantle and in The Meaning of Beauseant.

The Charge of Heresy

The charges of heresy brought against the Templars in 1307 — denial of Christ, worship of a head called Baphomet, obscene kisses at initiation, and so on — were the foundation on which much of the later mythology was built. Almost all modern historians believe the charges were largely false, but they have been taken up and elaborated by esoteric and occult traditions for centuries.

The Baphomet legend is examined in What Was Baphomet?, and the trial of the Order in general is told in The Trial of Jacques de Molay.

The Hidden Surviving Order

The most enduring of all Templar myths is the idea that the Order survived its suppression in 1312. According to this tradition, the Grand Master Jacques de Molay appointed a successor Grand Master, the surviving brothers went into hiding, and the Order continued in secret. This idea first appeared in a small way in the writings of the late-medieval Rosicrucian and Huguenot traditions, and was developed extensively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and by various occult writers.

The idea of a surviving Order is the basis of most modern neo-Templar organizations, including the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH), the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (OSMTJ), and various Rosicrucian-inspired groups. The modern Orders are discussed in Do the Knights Templar Still Exist Today?.

The Rosslyn Chapel Legend

One of the most famous stories of a surviving Templar Order is the legend of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. According to the legend, a small group of Templar knights fled to Scotland after the suppression, took refuge with the Scottish king Robert the Bruce, and were given the protection of the noble Sinclair family. They then built Rosslyn Chapel as a kind of secret meeting place, encoding their hidden knowledge in its remarkable carvings.

The story of Rosslyn is told in Rosslyn Chapel and the Sinclair Connection.

The Portugal Legend

In Portugal, the suppression of the Templars took a different course. The Portuguese branch of the Order was simply transformed into a new order, the Order of Christ, which inherited the Templars’ Portuguese estates and their crusading mission. The Order of Christ went on to play a major role in the Age of Discovery and the Portuguese Empire, and it has sometimes been suggested that the Order was in fact a continuation of the Templars in disguise. The story is told in The Order of Christ in Portugal.

The Holy Grail and the Templars

The connection between the Templars and the Holy Grail is one of the most influential strands of the Order’s mythology. The story was popularized in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes and by the German writer Wolfram von Eschenbach in his great poem Parzival. According to Wolfram, a small band of knights — sometimes identified with the Templars — guarded the Grail in a mysterious castle called Munsalvaesche (Montsalvat).

The idea of the Templars as Grail-guardians was revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and by Freemasonic writers. It was popularized in the modern era by the novelist Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum and by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.

The Freemason Connection

One of the most influential ideas in modern Templar mythology is the link between the Templars and Freemasonry. This idea first appeared in the early eighteenth century, with claims by certain Masonic writers that the craft of masonry had been founded by medieval stonemasons who had worked on the Templars’ castles and churches. According to this tradition, the original Masonic lodges in Scotland and elsewhere had been founded by surviving Templars.

The actual historical relationship between the Templars and the Freemasons is examined in The Templars and the Freemasons. Most modern historians reject the idea of a direct link, but the connection has had an enormous influence on modern Western esotericism.

The Secret of Solomon’s Temple

A central motif in Templar mythology is the idea that the knights had excavated beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and discovered secret knowledge, hidden treasure, or even the Ark of the Covenant itself. The Order, after all, was named after the Temple of Solomon, and excavations under the Temple Mount in modern times — by the Israeli archaeologist Benjamin Mazar in 1968–1978, by the Temple Mount Sifting Project since 2004, and others — have fueled continuing speculation.

The story of the Temple Mount and its Templar associations is told in Templar Sites in Jerusalem.

The Shroud of Turin

One of the most famous physical objects associated with the Templars is the Shroud of Turin, a length of linen cloth bearing the faint image of a crucified man. The Shroud’s image was first displayed in Lirey, France in the 1350s, only a few decades after the suppression of the Order. The connection between the Shroud and the Templars is one of the enduring mysteries of medieval history, although no direct evidence links the two. The story is told in The Shroud of Turin and the Templars.

The New World Legends

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Templar mythology expanded to include a series of legends about pre-Columbian voyages to the New World. According to these legends, Templar or pre-Templar Christians had visited the Americas centuries before Columbus, and various pieces of evidence — inscriptions on stones, certain Native American legends, architectural similarities — were taken as proof.

The most famous such legend concerns the Templars in America, allegedly reached by Prince Henry Sinclair of Orkney in 1398. The story is closely related to the Westford Knight, a stone carving found in Westford, Massachusetts, in the 1950s, and to certain controversial inscriptions in Nova Scotia and New England. The Templars in America is one of the longest-running modern Templar myths.

The Occultists and the Templars

The Knights Templar have been a particular favorite of Western esoteric and occult traditions since the eighteenth century. The first major occultist to take up the Templars was the French ceremonial magician Éliphas Lévi, who in the 1850s identified the Baphomet of the Templar trial with the goat of Mendes, the Horned God of occultism, and used the Baphomet as a symbol of the union of opposites.

Subsequent occultists, including the Theosophists and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, developed elaborate cosmologies in which the Templars were cast as the original Guardians of the Secret. The Golden Dawn and its successors, including the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) founded in the early twentieth century, used Templar imagery extensively. Aleister Crowley, the most famous modern occultist, was an initiate of the O.T.O. and was styled Baphomet by his followers.

From the primary sources

“Interfectos esse novimus milicie Templi … qui, dum in defensione Terre Ierosolimitane constituti, contra paganos pro fide Christiana dimicantes, ab eisdem paganis occubuerunt … eorum nomina apud Deum scripta sunt in celis.”

(“We know that the soldiers of the military order of the Temple who, established in the defence of the Holy Land and fighting against the pagans for the Christian faith, were killed by the same pagans, are written in the heavens before God.”)

— Honorius III, Liber censuum, marginal note recording papal recognition of the Templar dead, trans. by the editorial team from the printed text in Fabrice Delivré (ed.), Les Templiers: De l’Histoire à la Légende (Paris: Perrin, 2021), p. 7.

The Latin and vernacular sources for the modern mythology are gathered in Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth (Oxford, 1981; reprinted 2001), ch. 1, and the corresponding French materials in Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge (Seuil, 2005; English 2005), pt. III.

The Templars have had an enormous influence on popular culture. They appear in:

  • Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and The Talisman (1825), which established many of the modern romantic ideas about the Order.
  • Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask and other novels.
  • Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), a novel that brilliantly parodies and reworks the Templar mythology.
  • The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown, a worldwide bestseller in which the Templars are cast as the guardians of the Holy Grail.
  • The Indiana Jones film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), in which the search for the Holy Grail is the central theme.
  • The video game Assassin’s Creed (2007–present), in which the Templars are the villains.
  • Numerous documentaries, podcasts, and YouTube series that continue to popularize the Order.

The modern legacy is examined in detail in The Modern Legacy of the Knights Templar.

The Modern Historiography

The modern academic study of the Templars is largely a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first major modern work on the Order is generally taken to be Pierre Dupuy’s Histoire de l’Ordre Militaire des Templiers (1654), followed in the nineteenth century by the Romantic-nationalist historians (Michelet, Wilcke, Lavocat). The early twentieth century saw the first critical French work, Georges Lizerand’s Le Dossier de l’affaire des Templiers (1923), followed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by the Anglophone school of Régine Pernoud, Alain Demurger, Malcolm Barber, and Helen Nicholson, and the post-2001 Italian work of Barbara Frale. This has produced a rich, critical, and increasingly nuanced picture of the Order.

Modern Templar scholarship has shown that many of the most popular myths — the idea of a vast hidden treasure, the idea of a surviving Order, the idea of a connection to the Freemasons — do not stand up to historical scrutiny. The Order, however, remains a rich subject for serious historical inquiry.

Sources & Further Reading

For scholars and serious readers, the standard works on the modern mythology of the Templars are:

  • Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth (Oxford, 1981; reprinted with a new introduction, 2001) — the standard critical account. Required reading for anyone interested in the modern mythology.
  • Malcolm Barber, “The Templars and the Modern Myth”, in The New Knighthood (Cambridge, 1994) and “Templar Survivals: A Historiographical Enquiry”, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 65 (2014) — two short but important treatments by the leading Anglophone historian of the Order.
  • Karen Ralls, The Templars and the Grail (Quest, 2003) — a critical survey of the Grail–Templar claim, written for a general audience.
  • Sean Martin, The Knights Templar: The History and Myths of the Legendary Military Order (Chartwell, 2005; revised 2014) — a popular but careful survey of the mythology.
  • John J. Robinson, Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry (M. Evans, 1989) — a popular but unreliable Masonic-origin account, which the standard historians treat with caution.
  • Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Cape, 1982) — the popular book that did most to put the modern mythology into wide circulation. Now generally regarded as a work of fiction by mainstream historians, but historically important.

For the occult and esoteric tradition, see the chapters in:

  • Arthur Edward Waite, The New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (2 vols, London, 1923) — the standard early-twentieth-century reference on the Masonic tradition.
  • Alexandrian, History of Occultism (1983) — the standard single-volume history.
  • Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2 vols, Brill, 2006) — the standard scholarly reference for the Western esoteric tradition.