Original subtitles

What made the Templars spiritual practices

unique when compared to other practices of the time?

I'm Scott Wolter.

I'm a forensic geologist and a Knights Templar.

And I'm Timothy Hogan, grand master

of the Knights Templar.

The Templar founders originated

from Gnostic families.

Whenever I think about the true founding of the Templar order,

I always go back to Bernard.

In 1113, he joined the Cistercian order

with 30 family members.

They all came together, including two of his uncles

who were part of the original Nine Knights

that founded the Templar order in Jerusalem, which would

be only a few years later.

Now, obviously, there's something going on here.

In my mind, I look at this as a deliberate event.

This was intentional.

30 family members, that's not a coincidence.

What this sounds like to me is the beginning of a coup d'etat.

Yeah, Bernard was also responsible for--

he had sent by the church to go down and investigate

a group of Gnostics in Southern France known

as the Albigensians, also known as the Cathars,

another name for them.

These were the Gnostic families that the Templars came out of.

His mission was he was supposed to go down and condemn them.

But he actually came back and praised their way of life,

saying that they were even more Christian

than the Christians of Rome.

Right, right.

So isn't there a very famous saying

that goes back to the Albigensian crusade

when the church mounted a crusade against the Cathars

and these Albigensian families.

And interestingly enough, this happened around 1204,

I believe to 1244 not long too many years

after Bernard died, right.

And there were groups of Knights that

were sent down there by the church, not the Knights

Templar, by the way.

But there's an old story that goes that one knight said

to another knight, when they were

about to raid one of these Cathari families

and kill them all.

And he'll say-- he basically said,

how do we know the good Christians

from the bad Christians?

And the other Knight said, kill them all

and let God sort it out.

Yeah, it was a brutal crusade.

It was actually one of the first Crusades of Europe,

and it was against other Christians.

And it's important to note that the defender of the Cathari

families of the Albigensian families, a man

by the name of Lord Raymond, he was actually

taken into hiding by the Templar order.

And after he died, he was buried on Templar properties,

actually in the Templar preceptory in Toulouse

because he was denied burial in Holy Land

amongst the Roman Catholics of the time.

So this Albigensian crusade

was Christians against Christians.

What was it that the church was upset about?

Why did they kill these people?

What were they practicing that was perceived as a threat?

Well, there was a number of things going on.

One was Toulouse was bigger than Paris at the time.

So this was prime real estate.

But the people that were practicing

in this area of Southern France, their form of Christianity,

which was a Gnostic Christianity,

was different than what was being practiced

other places in the world.

OK.

In fact, the word gnosticism

or and when I refer to a Gnostic family,

it really comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means

divine experiential knowledge.

And it was the belief that anybody,

through their own efforts, could attune with the greater God

consciousness, sometimes referred to as the Christos,

the collective consciousness.

The word gnosis would be equivalent in the Eastern

traditions to enlightenment or even nirvana.

But it was a state of experiential knowledge

in which the individual, through their own efforts,

attained this illumination.

OK, now we're getting to the meat of the matter,

really to the core of the issue.

And basically, what you're saying

is to achieve a connection with deity, whoever

and whatever you call it, that was something

in their version of Christianity this achievement

or striving to achieve Christos, right,

or this spiritual enlightenment, they

could do all by themselves, whereas the Roman church

required a human conduit.

Now, this would be a big problem.

And now, I think we're starting to see where the issue is.

Yeah, the Gnostics, while they had priests,

their job was more as a facilitator to initiate people

into experiences.

But it was believed that the divine spark,

the sacred flame within was within everybody.

So anybody--

We were born with it, right?

We were born with.

It was an inalienable right.

This goes back to these God given rights

that we were born with.

That's exactly right.

Because it came from the creator, came from source.

Because we are all connected to that,

anybody could attune with it.

Whereas within the Roman church, you

needed the intervention of a priest to get to there.

And this is why the priests would perform sacraments

of different kinds in order to basically

be the middleman between you and heaven.

Right.

Within the Gnostic tradition,

there was no middleman.

Because you were already connected into that,

which is great if you're a free person.

But it's really bad for business if you're

trying to act as the middleman.

Well, yeah.

And I think we see the conundrum here.

This is the crux of the issue.

The other thing that separated gnosticism

at the time from some of the Eastern Orthodox,

and Roman Catholic, and other traditions

was the Gnostics interpreted the crucifixion, death,

and resurrection of Jesus as a metaphor.

Right.

They didn't believe that he actually

physically died and came back from the dead.

They interpreted it as a metaphor.

In fact, the word Resurrection in Greek

is anastasius, which just means to wake up.

And so they interpreted this as waking up

to gnosis, the death of the old self

that was attached to the physical world

and the awakening to the new realization of gnosis.

They saw metaphors of, for example,

Plato's description of his cave for those

who are familiar with that philosophical model in which

a person is born into a cave, looking at shadows on a wall,

and is interpreting those shadows as reality.

And every once in a while, somebody

will come into the cave and say, hey,

there's a whole other world out there.

And the people either revile them and say, you're crazy,

or they'll go out.

And if they go out of the cave, then they

have a responsibility to help liberate others.

If you go back and you look at depictions of Jesus

on the cross with Mary Magdalene sitting at the base,

right, if you look at the position of their heads

relative to each other.

This is the position of both Venus

and the sun on a particular point on the winter solstice.

Yeah, there were layers of this metaphor.

I mean, from the Gnostic standpoint,

these theragnostics also looked at Mary Magdalene

as representing the Sophia, which was the goddess of wisdom

and that Jesus represented the Christos

or the universal consciousness.

And according to the Gnostic cosmology,

Sophia also represented the human soul that

incarnates on down into this world,

becomes trapped in matter, and it's only

through her wedding of the Christos,

the universal consciousness, that she's in turn liberated

and experiences gnosis.

So this whole play takes place also within the story

of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, which

if we accept that the wedding of Cana

was actually the wedding of Mary Magdalene to Jesus.

According to the Gnostics, this was the story

of how the soul weds itself with the universal consciousness.

Really, the soul represented the Sophia,

and the Universal consciousness was the Christos.

So Jesus, representing the universal consciousness,

marrying Mary Magdalene, represented--

Sophia.

Sophia, represented the individual soul

coming to illumination.

And in fact, we even see this alluded

to again in going back to the death and raising story.

Who's the first to witness the resurrected Christ?

Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene.

She's there at the tomb when he is resurrected

according to the church, right.

That's right.

And not only that, but Jesus was also

known for doing things like liberating seven demons

from Mary Magdalene.

Well, to the Gnostics, this was a metaphor

for opening the blockages of the seven chakra, the seven

psychic centers, are also known as the Seven seals

before revelation.

And with the opening of each seal,

our old perception of the world dies, and then

our new perception of who we really are opens up.

Well, and the fact that Mary Magdalene

was present at the time of the resurrection, if we go back

to that metaphor of the sun on the winter solstice

when the son comes back, who is always there?

Venus.

Venus.

Even though you can't see her

when the sun is above the horizon, she's always there.

It's also believed that there

were initiation rites that were designed to illustrate this.

And it may even be that Jesus himself was performing

these initiation acts.

Exactly.

An example I like to point out

is the story of Lazarus.

In the story of Lazarus, he said to have died.

He was put in a tomb for three days.

And then Jesus resurrected him in the town of Bethany.

Well, the word Lazarus in Hebrew is El'azar.

And it should be pointed out that El in Hebrew means God.

Yes.

And Azar was the ancient Egyptian name

for Osiris, the God Osiris, who also went through this death.

Same death and resurrection ritual.

And the town of Bethany in Hebrew came from Betanu.

Bet means house in Hebrew, and Anu

was the ancient Egyptian abode of the dead.

So here, you have Jesus raising the God

Osiris in the house of the dead, which is either

a metaphor that he was passing on this earlier

ancient Egyptian tradition or the person represented

a candidate who is symbolically being initiated.

And it was tied into this idea of the soul attaining

this new level of awakening.

Let me just jump on something for a second

that I think might add a little something to the argument

that maybe we are talking about Jesus

was performing a ritual as opposed to physically really

dying.

And if you look at the 14 stations of the cross

when you go to a Catholic Church, three of those stations

talk about Jesus stumbling, right.

And then he gets back up on his way

to where he's ultimately going to be crucified.

Now, as you know, within Freemasonry,

we have a degree where there are three stumbles, if you will,

that the candidate goes through.

I find this an interesting parallel.

I also find it interesting that the grand architect

of the building of the temple, a guy whose name was

Hiram Abiff, who is killed, and then his body

is buried out in the mountains for 14 days.

I find this to be a very interesting connection

and I think supports the argument that maybe this

is allegorical, and it represents a ritual rather

than an actual death.

Now, having said that, I think it's very important

that you and I both make it clear to people

watching this show that we are not advocating

one position for another.

We're not saying this is that or that is that.

I think that's for the individual to research it,

hear what we say, look into it yourself, and then decide

for yourself.

Again, the hallmark of templarism

was this belief that the divine, spark the sacred flame

was in everybody.

And this is again what allowed them to associate

with so many people of different faiths.

But they did find that within a lot of the faiths,

there was always this mystic element that understood

these things metaphorically.

And it's part of what allowed the Templars

to travel and associate with groups all over the world.

There were Jewish kabbalists that represented

a Gnostic tradition.

There were Druze in the Middle East or Tawhid Mudun.

They were Gnostic Unitarians, they still are.

And they had very close relationships with the Templars

in the past and still do to this day.

In fact, many Druze are Templars.

So I think it's really important for us

to try to make a distinction between gnosticism

and religion.

And if the Templars were truly Gnostics, is that a religion?

How do we define that?

For some gnosticism were a religion, for others,

it was more of a philosophy.

And there were some that will say, well,

there's no evidence that the Templars were Gnostics.

You can sit here and say they were Gnostics.

But where's the proof?

And I'll tell you where the proof is.

If you look at old Templar documents,

they used a wax seal on many of them

of a figure known as Abraxas.

Abraxas was a Gnostic talisman.

Abraxas was a strange looking figure.

He had a rooster head, a human body,

where he was holding a whip.

He wore an apron, and he had snake legs.

And he was said to be the son of Sophia,

again, the goddess of wisdom.

So what does that mean?

I mean, that seems like an apparent contrast,

this freaky creature with Sophia.

What's the connection?

According to the Gnostic cosmology,

Sophia gave birth to four main children.

Three of them were known as faith, hope, and charity.

Yeah, and then the fourth one was Abraxas.

Well, Abraxas was said to originally

be known as an archon.

And what the archons were is they

were like prison guards that kept

people enslaved to this planet until they

had attained illumination.

And so their job was to test people,

to try to put people in situations

to see if they would really practice what they were

preaching, if they were really practicing

from the sacred flame within or if they

were going to act out of fear.

According to the Gnostic myths, Abraxas attained

illumination himself.

He started out as a prison guard,

trying to keep people enslaved.

He came to gnosis.

He found gnosis, this divine revelatory knowledge.

And then he became a liberator of others.

Now, the stages of his body were said

to represent the stages of initiation

that in fact, the Templars practiced.

The snake legs represented being bound to the Earth.

I mean, there's no animal that crawls closer to the Earth

than a snake

Yeah.

That represented the people

of an Earth bound personality.

The people who are completely ruled by the physical,

and that's all they think about.

They don't really appreciate the consequences of their actions.

They live for titillations, and to avoid pain, and seek

pleasure, and that's it.

Otherwise known as hedonist.

Otherwise known as hedonism, correct.

But then initiation within the Gnostic tradition

first involved a baptism by water or some sort

of illustration of water.

Water represented the emotions.

And it was believed that all the liquid functions of the body

are generated in the abdomen, at the place where the apron hung

in Abraxas' body.

So this represented the first stage of initiation, this apron

that Abraxas wore.

First degree.

Right.

Then the goal of this was the initiate

had to learn to subdue their passions at this stage

within the Gnostic tradition.

They taught that not to get rid of your passions

but rather to use them as an energy for transformation.

They believed that metaphors in the Bible like walking on water

was symbolic of learning to stabilize your emotions

and not drowned in them.

So use your emotions for transformation.

Because then the next stage was associated with air.

And this is where you have Abraxas with his whip

that cracks in the air.

And it represented the intellect, and the mind,

and the studying of the arts and Sciences

that were things of the mind, not

for the purpose of being able to prove how smart you

are at memorizing facts.

That wasn't the purpose.

The purpose of it was to see the bigger order

and recognizing that all of these sciences of the mind

pointed to the fact that all of our minds

are connected to a universal mind.

This was the Christos.

And getting to this place was where you experienced

gnosis or enlightenment.

Now, the final stage within the Gnostic traditions

of which the Templars were passing this on

was between the air stage and then going

to the rooster head of Abraxas.

The rooster head of Abraxas represented fire.

And it represented the calling forth

to the experience of gnosis of illumination.

I mean, what is a rooster do when

it sees the light of a new day?

Calls out--

Calls out.

the crows.

So this was the experience

of recognizing the light, the source of light,

which was meant to be the gnosis.

But before that could happen, the Gnostics

would usually have--

perform a ceremony in which the candidate

had to symbolically die to their old self and then be raised.

Resurrected.

Resurrected to the new light of understanding.

This is what was found within all

the different Gnostic traditions of the ancient world.

It probably came from Egypt, where they were performing

the same initiations.

And even before that, going back to Atlantis.

Because we know that even other groups

on the other side of the Atlantic,

like the Mayans and such, were also

performing these ceremonies.

So the Templars inheriting this understood what it meant.

They utilized it.

And when they encountered these other cultures that were also

practicing these initiation rites,

they immediately recognized them as brothers and sisters

because they knew they understood

this mystery that had been passed down

from ancient Atlantean times.

And this was the foundation of the gnosis.

It just seems to me the evidence keeps

building that it comes down to philosophy, ideology,

and ultimately this death and resurrection ritual,

and gnosis, and enlightenment that

was this connecting thread between these cultures,

not just between Europe and North America

but throughout the world.

And in fact, when I met with the Maya down

in the Yucatan, they have a similar ritual

in which the candidate is brought into the Senote area,

where the ritual is being held.

This big open hole that's got water at the bottom.

Water at the bottom.

And they have five altars.

They have four at the Cardinal directions

and one in the center.

And the candidates, they have to offer sacrifices

of earth, water, air, and fire at the four Cardinal directions

after which they're led to the center altar.

They're given an oath that they have to take.

They have to take an oath, then symbolically killed

after which they're raised from the dead.

Yup.

Reborn.

Reborn and presented with an apron

by the shaman, who has an all seeing eye painted

on his chest.

It's done with a particular handshake

that just happens to be the same handshake that's

used by Templars.

It's used by Druze.

It's used by Hopi.

It's used by a whole number of other traditions

around the world, again, which according

to all of their traditions goes back

to Atlantis or in the Mayan case Atzlan.

And this ties in ultimately with some of the mysteries

of the Holy Grail.

We've talked about the Grail a number of times already.

The Templars were said to be the Guardians of the Grail.

According to the Gnostic traditions,

the Grail was the meeting point between

the individual consciousness and the collective consciousness.

That was the point.

So to drink from that Grail symbolically,

we meant to drink from that universal consciousness.

Beautifully said, Tim.

Thanks for watching this episode of "Mysteries of the Knights