President John F. Kennedy motorcade, Dallas, Texas, Friday, November 22, 1963
(Image by United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division) Details DMCA
On Friday, October 13, 1307, the French King Philip IV ordered the powerful Catholic military order known as the Knights Templar arrested and charged with heretical practices and a month later, on November 22, under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize the Templar's extensive assets. Deeply in debt to the Templars for their military service in his war against England it has long been suspected that the charges against them derived more from the king's depleted treasury than actual acts of heresy. But following an extensive inquisition and trial including torture, the Templars and their Grand Master Jacques De Molay were found guilty and on March 18, 1314, were burned at the stake outside the Cathedral at Notre Dame de Paris.
Whether or not the Knights Templar maintained heretical beliefs, the immolation of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the hands of the Pope's Inquisitors would serve as an inspiration for generations to seek revenge on the Roman Church. And so begins the legend that winds its way from Jerusalem to Paris to the Holy Grail, to Rosslyn Chapel and Scottish Rite Freemasonry and from there to the death of JFK.
Pope Innocent III's brutal Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 against the powerful dualist Cathar movement pitted Northern France's Catholic nobility against the lesser nobility of the south who were tolerant and supportive of it.
As a pre-Christian faith deeply rooted in the pagan world and spread by Rome's legions through Mithraism to the four corners of the Roman Empire, Catharism represented an old and powerful expression of Gnostic belief that refused to be suppressed by the sterile and often contradictory doctrines of Rome's christianized Empire.
As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London's St. Paul's Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword:
To mention only its roots in Mithraism, its links with the Gnostics, its theological dualism, its asceticism, the ritual of life and death as cosmic mysteries, the appeal of the troubadours, Arthurian legends and the cult of the Holy Grail, the passions aroused for and against witchcraft, the intimate connection between sex and religion--all these things are sufficient testimony to the deep rooted vitality of a stream of religious consciousness which cannot be superciliously dismissed by rationalists and moralists.
Writing on the heels of World War II, and with Europe still in ruins from the rise of an irrational and immoral pagan faith called Nazism, Demant feared that such a vital apocalyptic belief system with its "robust religiousness" and commitment to a struggle against an evil material world was bound to rise again, as it had so many times in the past.
Yet, he might not have been surprised to know that his own "Protestant" faith, of which he was a senior officer as the Canon of St. Paul's, had its own roots in the same heresy.
Much has been speculated about the revival of Catharism and the survival of the Templars following their dissolution in 1312. Today's popular fiction about their role as guardians of the Holy Grail rests not on any particular historical accounting but mainly on 18th-century Masonic myth-making and Sir Walter Scott's early 19th-century stories that romanticized the Templar Knighthood. A deeply researched 2017 book by British Ambassador Craig Murray about the first Anglo/Afghan war (Alexander Burnes: Master of the Great Game) not only connects Afghanistan to the Grail legend but maintains that the legendary Burnes and his brother James are the source of the Templar connection to Scottish Freemasonry and that - not surprisingly - they invented it.
The men of the Enlightenment found great interest in mystical illumination through Masonic rituals. To these men, the newly industrializing West needed a new prophetic tradition to anchor it in history. Rediscovery of the ancient world, as a result of imperial interventions into Asia and Egypt, spawned a renewed interest in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Hermetic Cabbalism and their roots in a life-denying Gnostic creed. In fact, the very act of returning in victory to the origin of these Gnostic beliefs was in itself proof that they had been chosen to fulfill a cosmic cycle, as prophesied by the ancients.
Bestowing the Templars with occult mystical powers fit neatly into the early Romantic Movement and helped to promote Enlightenment thinking as part of God's plan for mankind.
As a military order of religious warriors responsible only to the Pope, the Templars and their Cathar backers in France and England represented a powerful autonomous deep-state within medieval society. In many ways orthodox Christianity was no match for the life-denying, dualist doctrine of the Cathars. Catharism's simple focus on the cosmic battle between a spiritual good and a material evil, and its promise of a time-ending apocalypse in which the material world would be consumed in fire, was an extreme seduction.
Driven to ground by a corrupted Roman Catholic Church and greedy French King, "the heresy" appeared to have been trampled out by the middle of the 14th century. But with the onset of the Reformation two centuries later, Rome's authority faced a new challenge. And as it spread to Ireland, the old Catholic Anglo/Norman warlords like the Fitzgeralds would be drawn into a struggle for their existence.
To Rome, the Protestant Reformation represented a heresy that was at once secular and religious. Martin Luther and John Calvin confronted a papacy that claimed an earthly kingdom, as well as a spiritual one. In 1534, the English Parliament's Act of Supremacy answered that claim by declaring Henry VIII "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England", and in 1559, his daughter Queen Elizabeth I became the Church's "Supreme Governor."
Cathar territory remained fertile ground for insurrection against the church. The French Calvinist Huguenot movement of the late 16th century grew from exactly the same ground in France, where 300 years earlier, the Cathars had been brutally suppressed by the Papal Crusade.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
