Demythologizing the Knights Templar

More pseudohistory than fact surrounds this ancient’s order’s depictions in pop culture.

by Brian Dunning via skeptoid
Read transcript below | download podcast

This ancient order of knights, cloaked in mystery and intrigue, find their way into more of today’s movies and novels than just about any other famous characters. For a fair summary of the degree to which made-up Knights Templar mythology has permeated pop culture, one need look no further than the History Channel, the world’s central warehouse of sensationalized pseudohistory. They’ve cast the Templars in some shadowy overlord capacity in just about every phase of human history. They’ve involved them in the Oak Island Money Pit, a sinkhole discovered in Nova Scotia in 1795; inexplicably entangled them with various alleged pirate treasures; with ciphers pretended to exist on the tomb of Jesus; with modern day Freemasons, separated by four centuries; and granted them fantastic treasures that they discovered buried beneath the Temple of Solomon and have kept secretly hidden ever since — and various described as either the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin, or even all three.

These, and many more veins of Templar mythology, all extend from the mother lode: the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, best known today as Dan Brown’s main inspiration for The Da Vinci Code, in which he cast the Templars as guardians of the secret that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. But although Holy Blood, Holy Grail is clearly the main influence of today’s Templar mythology to which The History Channel owes so much of its programming, it was not the first to employ them in fiction. Sir Walter Scott used Templars for a number of characters in his 1820 novel Ivanhoe, which is set when the Templars existed, but heavily fictionalizes who they were and what they did. A number of French authors picked up this theme, most notably Maurice Druon, whose series of seven novels have been cited by modern author George R. R. Martin as his original inspiration for his series A Song of Ice and Fire and the HBO series Game of Thrones. Yes, the Templars, willingly or not, have had a massive impact on modern popular mythology.

So for now, that’s enough of asserting that everything we’ve heard about the Knights Templar is fiction, and it’s time to now look at their true history.

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Also See: Knights Templar (wikipedia)