by Christopher Hodapp
If you were a fan of the 2018-19 A&E TV series Knightfall, or discovered it on Netflix more recently, be aware that the streaming network is dropping the show on August 14th. Netflix's licensing deal was for a limited time, so if you had intended to go binge watching the show, do it now.
The HIGHLY fictionalized series about a group of French Knights Templar in medieval Paris and their clash with King Phillip starred Tom Cullen, Jim Carter and Mark Hamill, and only ran for two seasons. As history goes, it was lousy. But it was decent bit of storytelling about the Templars, who have rarely been portrayed in onscreen dramas.
There's no serious scholarship that supports the theory that Freemasonry descended out of the Knights Templar who fled France just ahead of King Phillip's mass arrests of the Order's leaders in 1307, even though John Robinson's classic work of speculation, Born In Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, has inspired countless men to join the Masons over the last 30+ years. And the modern day Masonic Knights Templar make no claims to have been directly descended from the medieval order of warrior monks.
Nevertheless, many Masons have long accepted the famous oration of Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay's in which he introduced the notion that Freemasonry was brought to Europe from the Holy Land by the crusading warrior monks of the 12th–14th centuries. Even though he didn't mention the Templar's by name, audiences eventually took him to mean that specific group of crusading warriors, and French-derived "higher orders" (hautes grades) of Masonic degrees soon developed around the Templar story. A chivalric, "knightly" origin of Masonry appealed to the French Masons far more than the English and Scottish explanation of evolving from a group of scruffy old rock-carving stonemasons. Consequently, the Templar story appears today in the degrees of the U.S. York Rite, the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite, the Royal Order of Scotland, the Knights Beneficent of the Holy City, and others.
"Are we knights?"
"Do you want to be?"
If you're a fan of the film National Treasure, the Templar connection to the Freemasons appears right up front in the opening five minutes of the picture, as kindly old Grandpa Gates answers his grandson's question, "Are we knights?" Which, of course, folds in the theory about the infamous Oak Island Money Pit (eight seasons of A&E shows about it and STILL no treasure) as being the spot where fleeing Templars dumped the "greatest treasure the world has ever known," where it sat undisturbed until George Washington and the American Masons, led by their French Masonic allies from the Lodge of the Nine Muses, dug it up, paid the bills of the Revolution, and then reburied it under Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York.
But that's another story...
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