The Templars [antikvár]

Preface Who were the Templars? One view of this military order comes from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The Templar knight in Ivanhoe, Brian of Bois-Guilbert, is a demonic anti-hero, 'valiant as the bravest of his Order; but stained with their usual vices, pride, arrogance, cruelty, and voluptuousness; a hard-hearted man, who knows neither fear of earth, nor awe of heaven'. The two Templar Grand Masters are little better. Giles Amaury in The Talisman is treacherous and malevolent while Lucas of Beaumanoir in Ivanhoe is a bigoted fanatic. In Wagner's opera Parsifal, by contrast. Templar-like knights appear as the chaste guardians of the Holy GraU. The nineteenth-century libretto was based on the thirteenth-century epic poem by Wolfram of Eschenbach in which the Templeisen bear only a superficial resemblance to the Knights of the Temple but the germ of fact has been enough to persuade posterity that there is truth in the fiction. Thus, in the nineteenth-century imagination, the depraved brutes of Ivanhoe and The Talisman coexisted with the chivalrous brotherhood of Parsifal. In the twentieth century, there emerged a more sinister image of the Templars as the prototypes of the Teutonic Knights who, in the late 1930s, were the historical models for Himmler's SS. Coupled with a common perception of the crusades as an early example of west European aggression and imperialism, the Templars came to be perceived as brutal fanatics imposing an ideology with the sword. Or, quite to the contrary, it is said they were seduced from their commitment to the Christian cause by their contact with Judaism and Islam in the east, forming a secret society of initiates through which the arcane mysteries of ancient Egypt, conveyed to the masons of the Temple of Solomon, were passed on to the Free Masonic lodges of modern times. It has also been claimed that the Templars were xi