The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors

by Dan Jones

‘We prohibit pointed shoes and shoe laces and forbid any brother to wear them... for it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans.’

According to ‘very reliable people’, brothers were forced on entering the order to deny Christ three times, spit on his image, remove their clothes and stand naked before their receiver, who celebrated their entry to the order by kissing them ‘first on the lower part of the dorsal spine, secondly on the navel and finally on the mouth, in accordance with the profane rite of their Order but to the disgrace of the dignity of the human race’.

Having thus entered the Temple, brothers were obliged by their vows to have sex with one another,