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THE TEMPLAR ORDERS IN FREEMASONRY An Historical Consideration of their Origin and Development By ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE HAVING regard to the fact that Emblematic Freemasonry, as it is known and practised at this day, arose from an Operative Guild and within the bosom of a development from certain London Lodges which prior to the year 1717 had their titles in the past of the Guild and recognised its Old Charges, it would seem outside the reasonable likelihood of things that less than forty years after the foundation of Grand Lodge Knightly Orders should begin to be heard of developing under the aegis of the Craft, their titles in some cases being borrowed from the old institutions of Christian Chivalry. It is this, however, which occurred, and the inventions were so successful that they multiplied on every side, from 1754 to the threshold of the French Revolution, new denominations being devised when the old titles were exhausted. There arose in this manner a great tree of Ritual, and it happens, moreover, that we are in a position to affirm the kind of root from which it sprang. Twenty years after the date of the London Grand Lodge, and when that of Scotland may not have been twelve months old, the memorable Scottish Freemason, Andrew Michael Ramsay, delivered an historical address in a French Lodge, in the course of which he explained that the Masonic Brotherhood arose in Palestine during the period of the Crusades, under the protection of Christian Knights, with the object of restoring Christian Churches which had been destroyed by Saracens in the Holy Land. For some reason which does not emerge, the foster-mother of Masonry, according to the mind of the hypothesis, was the Chivalry of St. John. Ramsay appears to have left the Masonic arena, and he died in the early part of 1743, but his discourse produced a profound impression on French Freemasonry. He offered no evidence, but France undertook to produce it after its own manner and conformably to the spirit of the time by the creation of Rites and Degrees of Masonic Knighthood, no trace of which is to be found prior of Ramsay. Their prototypes of course were extant, the Knights of Malta, Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, Knights of St. Lazarus, in the gift of the Papal See, and the Order of Christ in Portugal, in the gift of the Portuguese Crown. There is no need to say that these Religious and Military Orders have nothing in common with the Operative Masonry of the past, and when their titles were borrowed for the institution of Masonic Chivalries, it is curious how little the latter owed to the ceremonial of their precursors, in their manners of making and installing Knights, except in so far as the general prototype of all is found in the Roman Pontifical. There are, of course, reflections and analogies: (I) in the old
knightly corporations the candidate was required to produce proofs of noble birth, and the Strict Observance demanded these at the beginning, but owing to obvious difficulties is said to have ended by furnishing patents at need; (2) in the Military Order of Hospitallers of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalern, he undertook, as in others, to protect the Church of God, with which may be compared modern Masonic injunctions in the Temple and Holy Sepulchre to maintain and defend the Holy Christian Faith; (3) again at his Knighting he was "made, created and constituted now and for ever," which is identical, word for word, with the formula of another Masonic Chivalry, and will not be unknown to many. But the appeal of the new foundations was set in an6ther direction, and was either to show that they derived from Masonry or were Masonry itself at the highest, in the proper understanding thereof. When the story of a secret perpetuation of the old Knights Templar- outside the Order of Christ- arose in France or Germany, but as I tend to conclude in France, it was and remains the most notable c