I’ve heard that this was largely a financially motivated accusation/ lie leveraged by the monarch Phillip IV who used Pope Clement V as a mouthpiece bearing religious authority. However, elsewhere I’ve also heard that inscriptions of Aphrodite were made by the Knights Templar and that Baphomet was thought to be a misrendering of prophet Muhammad of Islam and that whilst they hadn’t converted to paganism that they’d adopted or converted with Islamic thought which would still be held to be blasphemous by the Church at the time. So, I ask, what is the historical case that they actually did adopt esoteric, occult or non-Christian theology?
To be honest there doesn’t seem to be much to support the connection between the Templars and the worship of Baphomet. I think Norman Daniel’s argument in this respect is interesting, with him highlighting actually how little emphasis was actually placed on the importance of ‘crypto-Islam’ in accusations against the Templars (Arabs and Medieval Europe, p 312). The accusations made against the Templars reflect a common stock of ideas of how a supposedly corrupted group of people in medieval Europe were seen to act, as is shown by their supposed veneration of a cat (said by Walter Map in his Trifles of Courtiers to have been worshipped by Cathar heretics, who it kissed on the anus and were inspired into orgiastic behaviour by it) or their alleged practise of new recruits kissing senior Templar commanders on the anus to complete their reception into the order (such a practise also ascribed to Muslims and heretics alike as it represented the complete inversion of the Christian kiss of peace).
I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that people didn’t believe in the truth of these allegations, but instead I think it’s important to highlight the extent to which they replicated pre-existing tropes. As I mentioned above, the role of crypto-Islam in these allegations was relatively small, with the focus placed more on their supposed heresy and willingness to deny Christ rather than there potentially Islamic religious practises. Furthermore, only in France and Italy were the accusations against the Templars actually ‘proven’, with investigations in Germany, Spain and England all failing to find any real evidence (Théry, p. 124).
Personally I find the more recent scholarship on the subject more convincing than the older work. A good summary of the latter, can be found in AJ Forey’s ‘Were the Templars Guilty?’ in Viator 42.2 (2011). Forey essentially looks at the positivist conclusions drawn by predecessors and says that actually little of what they claim, including the heretical, pseudo-Islamic, and homosexual practises imputed to Templars can be proven through their testimonies.
More interesting to me are the conclusions of Julien Théry and James Given. Given argues that King Philip was ‘chasing phantoms’, essentially creating an enemy out of thin air, before vanquishing it, in order to demonstrate his ability to protect the moral order of the realm. Im protecting such order the king had recourse to extraordinary powers at a time where his ordinary powers (like those of tax collection) were often contested. Théry similarly argues that the trial of the Templars was instigated by the king as he sought to bring both church and state increasingly under his control, with the testimony of the Templars unable to read for any element of truth. He states historians cannot make an assessment of truth or falsehood from these allegations in the case of the Templars, thanks to the their creation by the ‘implacable judicial machine designed to grind down the will of the accused’ and that historians are both naive and all too willing to legitimate state power in trying to hunt for truth in the records of the trial of the Templars.
J. Théry, ‘A Heresy of State: Philip the Fair, the Trial of the Perfidious Templars and the Pontificalisation of the French Monarchy’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 39/2 (2013) 117-48
J. Given, ‘Chasing Phantoms: Philip IV and the Fantastic’ in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of RI Moore (2006) 271-89 (definitely do not use Lib Gen to find this one)
Sorry if the grammar is shit and formatting is bad, I can’t be arsed to sign into my account on pc so I’m doing this on mobile.