ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 13
The Templar Arrests
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Before dawn on October 13, 1307,
royal agents across France moved on every Templar preceptory in the kingdom at
once, acting on sealed orders King Philip IV had
distributed weeks earlier with instructions not to be opened until the
appointed day. Hundreds of knights were seized in a single coordinated sweep,
charged with heresy, and handed to inquisitors instructed to extract
confessions by whatever means were necessary. It remains one of the most
efficient acts of state-sponsored persecution in medieval history…
The real story needs no
embellishment. King Philip IV was deeply in debt, partly to the Templars themselves, who had grown over
two centuries from a small band of knights protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land
into one of medieval Europe’s wealthiest financial institutions, holding land,
running what amounted to an early banking network, and answering to the Pope
rather than to any king. Philip had already expelled France's Jewish population
and seized their assets for similar financial reasons; the Templars were a
considerably larger and more tempting target. Working with his minister Guillaume de Nogaret
and the Grand Inquisitor of France, Philip built his case on accusations
supplied by a disgruntled former Templar named Esquiu de Floyran, charges that initiates
were made to deny Christ, spit on the cross, and exchange obscene kisses during
secret induction rituals, along with the inevitable accusation of sodomy. On
the appointed morning, the arrests proceeded exactly as planned. Grand Master Jacques de Molay was taken
along with the rest, interrogated within days, and, probably under torture,
confessed that some of the charges were true, though he held firm in denying
sodomy specifically. He would spend the better part of the next seven years
recanting that confession, being re-tortured, and confessing again, a cycle
that ended only when he was burned at the stake in Paris in March 1314 as a
relapsed heretic, having retracted his confession one final time just before
the fire was lit.
Jacques de Molay’s death produced its
own piece of enduring legend, and this one, unlike the Friday the 13th
connection, is at least an old story rather than a recent invention: tradition
holds that as the flames rose, de Molay cursed both Philip IV and Pope Clement V, summoning them to face
divine judgment within the year. Whatever the truth of that account, which
surfaces in sources written after the fact rather than at the stake itself, the
coincidence that followed is real and verifiable. Clement V died in April 1314.
Philip IV died that November, thrown from his horse in a hunting accident. Two
of the most powerful men in Christendom, both dead within eight months of the
man they had destroyed, is the kind of detail that makes a curse legend feel
considerably more credible than it has any right to, regardless of what
actually caused either death.
Folklorists who have gone looking for written evidence of Friday and the number thirteen being combined into a single joint superstition have found essentially none before the nineteenth century; the earliest documented reference in English comes from an 1869 biography of the composer Rossini, who happened to die on a Friday the 13th and was noted to have regarded both Fridays and the number thirteen as independently unlucky, in the old, separate folk traditions behind each. The superstitions existed individually for centuries, Friday tied to the Crucifixion, thirteen tied to the Last Supper and to older numerological unease, but nobody seems to have fused them into the single modern taboo before the 1800s, and the combined superstition didn't become genuinely widespread until the twentieth century, likely accelerated by Thomas W. Lawson’s bestselling 1907 novel Friday, the Thirteenth, about a stockbroker who exploits the superstition to engineer a Wall Street panic. The Templar connection specifically is even more recent than that. It was popularized by Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, building on earlier speculative nonfiction including John J. Robinson’s 1989 Born in Blood, and historians specializing in the Templars have been fairly blunt about it ever since: the 1307 arrest happening to fall on a Friday the 13th is a genuine historical coincidence, not the superstition's origin, and the connection most people now take for granted is, in the most literal sense, a twenty-first-century invention grafted onto a seven-hundred-year-old tragedy.
A king who owed his creditors money
had those creditors arrested, tortured, and eventually burned, using the
machinery of religious heresy as cover for what was, at bottom, a debt he
preferred not to pay. The Order was formally dissolved by Clement V at the
Council of Vienne in 1312, its remaining assets largely transferred to the
rival Knights Hospitaller, and the Templars passed from the most formidable
military order in Christendom to a cautionary tale inside the span of seven
years.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the order whose destruction this post has spent so many words untangling from its own legend, we're recommending a book that takes the Templars’ actual heresy charges seriously as a subject worth real investigation...
Templar Heresy: A Story of Gnostic Illumination
By
James Wasserman | Inner Traditions / Destiny Books
James Wasserman’s Templar Heresy:
A Story of Gnostic Illumination, published by Inner Traditions in 2017,
asks a question most popular Templar writing skips past entirely: what if the
heresy charges, lurid and politically convenient as they clearly were, weren't
pulled from nowhere? Wasserman, a longtime esoteric scholar with decades of
work in Thelemic and Masonic history behind him, traces the real doctrinal
territory the Templars occupied during their two centuries in the Holy Land,
proximity to Gnostic, Sufi, and other heterodox currents largely absent from
Western Europe, and builds a case for genuine, if quiet, spiritual heterodoxy
within the Order, distinct from the specific fabricated charges Philip's
inquisitors actually used to convict them.
What makes the book worth pairing
with today's post is how carefully it separates two questions that popular
treatments tend to collapse into one: whether the Templars were guilty of the
specific crimes Philip IV's agents tortured confessions out of them for, and
whether the Order had, independently, developed genuinely unconventional
spiritual ideas during its long exposure to the religious diversity of the
Crusader states. Wasserman argues for something close to the second without
defending the first, a more careful distinction than most books in this space
bother making, and one that lets him take the Order's own inner life seriously
as a subject of real historical interest rather than either pure propaganda
victim or secret heretical cult.
This is speculative intellectual
history rather than straightforward documentary biography, and Wasserman is
openly working from inference and comparative religious context rather than a
smoking-gun primary source confirming Templar Gnosticism outright. Readers
wanting the more conventional, document-grounded account of the trial itself
should pair it with a standard academic history of the suppression. But for
readers who finished today's post curious about what the Templars might
actually have believed, as opposed to what they were tortured into confessing,
Wasserman's book is a genuinely thoughtful place to keep going.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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