Prutz’ Geheimlehre Revisited: The Secret Teaching of the Knights Templar Today
By: Eamon Kiernan
Bestsellers such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and more recently, The DaVinci Code have catapulted the military order of the Knights Templar into public consciousness like never before. In these books and many others, the Templars appear as noble guardians of an ancient and superior wisdom which was forced into hiding by the perfidy of the Roman Catholic Church.
This fulsome praise for the soldier-monks of the Crusades completely obscures the fact that in their own time, the Templars were hated and feared by their fellow Christians, and for good reason. They regularly deserted the Christian cause on the battlefield; not out of cowardice, it can be said, but because the advantage of their Order took precedence. In the territories under their control they set up a system of exploitation second to none in its ruthlessness. No pope and no Christian monarch could rely on them. The ancient wisdom which they supposedly protected with such pure devotion was, in fact, an early form of Satanism.
All of this emerges clearly from a short and thought-provoking book which first appeared in Germany in 1879: Hans Prutz’ Geheimlehre and Geheimstatuten des Tempelherren-Ordens. This much cited work has long lacked an accessible English translation. The gap is now filled by the independent publisher, Aontau, which has brought out an English edition under the title: The Secret Teaching of the Knights Templar (www.aontau.com).
One of the foremost historians of his day, Hans Prutz was almost alone in attempting to piece together the nature of the heresy which corrupted the Order of the Knights of the Temple from the depositions made at the Trial of 1309. These open a horror vista that almost beggars belief. The reception of new members into the Order involved the desecration of the cross, the exchange of ritual kisses to naked parts of the body, and perhaps even homosexual intercourse between the participants. The Order had its own highly unorthodox variations of the Catholic Sacraments. Its prayers and liturgical rites were not addressed to the Christian God, but to an idol in the form of a metallic head which went by the name of Baphomet.
The Secret Teaching of the Knights Templar offers a cogent explanation of how such a heretical development could have taken root in the Order after a seemingly innocent beginning. Many enabling factors come together: the Frankish mixed-culture in the embattled Christian States in the Holy Land, which were moving away from Catholic orthodoxy as a result of the day-to-day contact with their Muslim neighbours; the heretical noble families of the Provence, from which many of the Knights Templar were recruited; the privileges granted to the Order which made it independent of outside scrutiny; and of course, the corrupting effects of wealth and power. Above all, it was the catastrophic failure of the Crusades that prepared the way for large-scale betrayal. The loss of the Holy Places was proof to many at the time that Christianity, far from being the one true religion, was nothing more than a lie.
Under these influences, and impelled, no doubt, by the personal power of one or more of its leading members, the Order first adopted a version of the Albigensian heresy, before giving itself over to a derivation of Luciferianism which was expressed in part by the strange behaviour which came to light at the Trial.
Lamentably, much of the evidence is provided by a collection of statements extracted under torture at the behest of King Philip the Fair of France. Many historians have argued that the Trial was therefore a farce, and that the Order was innocent. The Secret Teaching of the Knights Templar, however, rightly emphasises one salient fact: these dubious confessions were borne out by confessions made in places where the French King’s writ did not run, and where there was no threat of torture, for example in Pisa and Florence. Therefore, the confessions are unlikely to have been an invention of the sick minds of the King and the Inquisition. In many cases, Prutz finds it justifiable to take the confessions at face value, and concludes that despite the political pressure, the Trial of the Templars proves the Order to have systematically cultivated an extreme form of religious aberration.
In his later work, Prutz came to abandon this strong view of the Order’s guilt. Much of the argument in The Secret Teaching of the Knights Templar concerns a supposed Secret Statute, a Rule expressing the heretical belief-system of the Templars, which Prutz found had been written at Castle Pilgrim in Palestine around the time of the Siege of Damietta in 1229. In Entwicklung und Untergang des Tempelherrenordens (1888), Prutz notes that new archival research had failed to produce a physical example of this Secret Statute. This leads him to assume that there never was a Secret Statute in the Order, and therefore no systematic body of secret teaching. The Order was indeed guilty of heresy, but not in the organised way he had earlier believed. The Luciferianism which had played such a strong explanatory role now loses its importance.
However, this later position is much less convincing than the former one. The absence of a definitive and binding codification, which a Secret Statute would have represented, does not necessarily mean the absence of an organised heretical doctrine. It might prove useful to reopen the possibility of an oral transmission of the heresy, which Prutz dismisses all too quickly in his earlier work. A primarily oral transmission would be in keeping with both the dangerous nature of the teaching and the low standard of education which prevailed in the Order. Despite the push towards rehabilitation, which, to be fair, Prutz never joined, there is ample reason to adopt a strong view of the Order’s guilt.
The Secret Teaching of the Knights Templar certainly discourages the false romanticism one finds in most literary treatments of the Templars today. The Knights Templar, we learn, created its own Church for its own ends, while preserving the appearance of orthodoxy and faithful service. To put it plainly, it served Evil, while pretending to serve Good, and it did so with the connivance of the highest Church authorities.
To anyone with any sympathy for the Christian Churches, or indeed, for any spiritual path, there is a disturbing implication which might not be evident at first sight. There is nothing, apart from the intrinsic goodness of its members, if they are good, to prevent an institution of the Church, or even the Church as a whole, from turning to Evil, while at the same time going through the motions of faithful observance. This is as valid for the Orders and Institutes of the Roman Catholic Church as it is for free evangelical congregations, or for spiritual communities which invoke the protection of gurus or guardian spirits, or indeed for intentional communities of any kind. It was possible for the Order of the Knights of the Temple to have gone thoroughly wrong as an organisation while many individual members, their lives closed off by systems of obedience and need-fulfilment, were left in ignorance. The discernment of Good and Evil, of Right and Wrong, is not a task that can be left to elders or theological professionals, no matter how impressive, but poses a constant daily challenge for everyone, through humble listening to the Holy Spirit. This is perhaps the most noteworthy lesson that the story of the Knights Templar holds ready for us today.
Eamon Kiernan, born in Ireland in 1961, is a schoolteacher, poet and novelist.