The Origins of the Knights Templar

The First Crusade

 A Secret Objective?

"When the crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they heard from such Jews as remained in the city that the Holy of Holies was right there in the Dome of the Rock. The crusaders mistakenly identified the Moslem Dome of the Rock with Solomon's Temple." - Noel Curer-Briggs, The Shroud and the Grail - A Modern Quest for the True Grail

"In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East, among whom were Geoffroi de Saint-Omer and Hughes de Payens, consecrated themselves to religion, and took an oath between the hands of the Patriarch of Constantinople, a See always secretly or openly hostile to that of Rome from the time of Photius. The avowed object of the Templars was to protect the Christians who came to visit the Holy Places: their secret object was the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model prophesied by Ezekiel." - General Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma

"The real task of the nine knights was to carry out research in the area in order to obtain certain relics and manuscripts which contained the essence of the secret traditions of Judaism and ancient Egypt, some of which probably went back to the days of Moses...There is no doubt that [they] fulfilled this particular mission and that the knowledge obtained from their finds was taught in the oral tradition of the Order's...secret circles." - Gaetan Delaforge, The Templar Tradition in the Age of Aquarius

Did the Templars discover the Ark of the Covenant beneath the Temple of Solomon?

In the 1960's "Louis Charpentier...in two books not remarkable for the clarity of their ideas, claimed that the Templars were despatched to the Holy Land by St Bernard to fetch the Ark of the Temple of Solomon back to Europe. His evidence that they were successful in this enterprise is the building of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, which the Templars financed partly with silver produced by the practice of alchemy, partly with more silver which (three centuries before Columbus) they imported from the Americas, and disembarked at La Rochelle!" - Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians

"...A number of Jewish and Islamic legends spoke of a sealed and secret passage beneath the Well of Souls leading into the bowels of the earth, where the Ark supposedly been concealed at the time of the destruction of Solomon's Temple - and where many believed that it rested still, guarded by spirits and demons." It is "highly probable that Hugh de Payens and his backer the Count of Champagne could...have been motivated by a desire to find the Ark - and that they could have established the Templars, and taken control of the Temple Mount, in order to achieve this goal. "If so, however, then they failed in their objective. In the twelfth century, as one expert put it, 'the asset value of a famous relic was prodigious'. Possession of a relic as uniquely significant as the Ark of the Covenant would, in addition have brought enormous power and prestige to its owners. From this it followed, that if the Templars had found the Ark, they would certainly have brought it back to Europe in triumph." - Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal