After the suppression, the Order survived for a few decades outside of France, but by the early 15th century at the latest, the Templars had completely disappeared.The idea that the Templars had secretly continued their activities until the 18th century first spread within French and German Freemasonry; according to a version accepted in these circles, Molay passed on his authority – in prison – to Pierre D’Aumont, who, having fled to Scotland, was elected Grand Master of the Order on June 24, 1313 (the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, which has strong symbolic significance for Freemasons) and established the Order's headquarters in Aberdeen, using an organization of operative masons (in this case, literally understood as stonemasons) as a cover.Freemasonry had originated in England, presenting itself as the heir – albeit through a process of philosophical and esoteric reinterpretation – of the stonemasons' guilds (which included not only architects but also simple masons). From a certain point of view, this was too "humble" an origin, which the nobility of continental Europe accepted with difficulty.Thus, the legend of persecuted knights who had "hidden" themselves within the English and Scottish guilds of freemasons to continue their activities was elaborated.Especially in Germany, these mysterious knights were identified with the Templars.
This is the origin of the Templar degrees of Freemasonry which – born on the European continent but also spread in the United Kingdom thanks to the work of Thomas Dunckerley (1724-1795), founder in 1791 of a Grand Conclave (later Grand Priory) of the Knights Templar within English Freemasonry – are today found in both the Scottish Rite and the York Rite, and of the current Encampments of Knights Templar, to which only Freemasons can belong and which are quite widespread in Anglo-American Freemasonry. In the particularly turbulent moment of Masonic history constituted by the years of the French Revolution, not everyone agreed on the assumption (later peaceful in the majority Masonic obediences and rites) according to which the complex of Templar degrees constituted only a part of the Masonic system and had to remain subordinate to Freemasonry as a whole.In a Parisian lodge, that of the Knights of the Cross, it began to be argued that this was not the case at all; if the Templar legend was true, if the British guilds of freemasons were "interesting" only insofar as the heirs of the Order of the Temple had been hidden within them since the 14th century, it followed that the Order of the Temple was prior to Freemasonry, and that therefore the Masonic organizations should subordinate themselves to the neo-Templar ones and not vice versa.The origin of this controversy dates back to an adventurer active during the years of the French Revolution, the former seminarian Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat (1773-1838), who in 1804 declared that he had discovered – together with his colleagues from the aforementioned lodge of the Knights of the Cross – documents proving an uninterrupted succession of clandestine Templar "Grand Masters" from the suppression of 1307 until 1792 (the year in which the last "hidden" Grand Master, Duke Louis-Hercule-Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac, 1734-1792, would have died, massacred in Versailles by the Jacobins).The Knights of the Cross declared that a document (the Larmenius Charter), allegedly found in the drawer of a piece of the duke's furniture, authorized the lodge to proceed with the election of a new Grand Master once the revolutionary storm had passed.La Carta di Larmenio è un documento redatto, apparentemente, nel 1324, dal templare (rimasto a Cipro durante le persecuzioni) Jean-Marc Larmenius, che sarebbe statoThe Larmenius Charter is a document drawn up, apparently, in 1324 by the Templar (who remained in Cyprus during the persecutions) Jean-Marc Larmenius, who would have been secretly appointed by Molay as his successor (a thesis that contradicted that of D’Aumont’s investiture, described above and leaked in Masonic circles) in 1314 and who, proclaimed Grand Master of the Order after Molay's death, would have reorganized the Templars, providing them with a parchment (precisely the Larmenius Charter, also called the Carta Transmissionis), on which the names of the various secret Grand Masters, successors of Molay and Larmenius, were gradually written.
