The Rite of Strict Observance - Part 1
By Burton E. Bennett
The Strict Observance:
An Overview
The system of the Strict Observance grew out of what is known as Templarism. Templar Masonry commenced to grow up in France soon after true Freemasonry was introduced. This was about 1725. However, no Grand Lodge was established till 1752. It is not till then that we are on sure footing. What went before can only be approximated. The Strict Observance as a separate system was formed Germany and dates from about 1748. It was produced by a process of evolution. The Strict Observance, and our present Knights Templar Masonry, as well, cannot, even, be reliably understood without knowing something out the Crusades, and with the three great orders that they produced, the Teutonic Knights, the Hospitallers and the Knights Templar.
The Crusades were a series of wars carried on Western Europe to recover the Holy Land from the Moslems. They began in the 11th century and extended over a period of some five hundred years. The Christian Crusades utterly broke down in 1449, and in 1453 Constantinople fell before the Mohammedans. It has ever since remained under Moslem rule, as has the Holy Land, and all of Asia Minor, till the end of the Great War. During all of the time of the Crusades the Church of Rome largely governed the Western World. The Crusades mightily changed European History.
In one sense of the word the Crusades were a continuation of the age-old fight of the East against the West, and while, apparently, the West started it, and it was carried on offensively, still it was really defensive--the Christian world trying to stem the onrush of the Moslem hordes. It was a religious war--a war between the Christian and the Infidel. It was an attempt of the Roman Church, as a temporal power, to conquer the world with the sword, just as the Moslems were trying to do. It failed. The Moslems nearly succeeded in their aim. They took all of Asia Minor, all of civilized Africa, Sicily and other Mediterranean islands and even Spain in the West. They took a great part of Eastern Europe and reached as far West as Vienna. Here in 1683 they were finally stopped. But for the Crusades it is possible that they might have entirely overrun the Western World and suppressed the Christian religion, or, at least, absorbed it entirely within their system. The impartial student of history, comparing the civilization of the Moors in Spain with that of the Church and its Inquisition, which replaced it, must decide that the former was, by far, the preferable. The civilization of Medieval Europe certainly had little to commend it. However, taking a broad survey there can be no question that it is a mighty blessing that the West prevailed over the East, as it always had before, and that the beneficent religion of Christ was not replaced by the religion of Mahomet. No handicap, however great, can permanently stand before the onward progress of the Western division of the Aryan people, their intellect has become too great for this; too many brains stand at the perpendicular.
The Hejira took place in 622. Omar took Jerusalem in 637, and in Moslem hands it remained till the end of the first Crusade. The Church of the Sepulchre was fanatically destroyed in 1010. In 1071 the Seljukian Turks captured Jerusalem. Till then pilgrimages to the Holy Land were fairly easy and especially so up to the final separation of the Eastern and Western Churches in 1054. Now not only were the native Christians persecuted, but the Pilgrim Christians as well.
The Causes of the Crusades
It has been stated that the purpose of the Crusades was to recover the sepulchre of Christ from the Infidel. The underlying causes, however, were deeper and far greater. They were:
- the desire of the Papacy for conquest,
- the desire of the mercantile classes to open up trade routes to the East,
- the desire of the Byzantine emperors to recover their lost territories and
- the desire of princes to carve new kingdoms out of the East
The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire had hardly become settled among the ruins they had caused, and commenced to repair them, when Scandinavian pirates sailed up their rivers and sacked and plundered their towns just as they had sacked and plundered the mighty cities of the Empire. Some of these pirates finally settled down in Northern France and established the Dukedom of Normandy. In 1066 the Norman Duke, William the Bastard, conquered England and established his kingdom of England. In 1090 the Norman Duke Roger conquered Sicily from the Moslems and established his kingdom there. The Norman Duke Godfrey was one of the commanders in the first Crusade. On July 15, 1099, Godfrey took Jerusalem, and while the shrieks of the dying were heard and the rivers of blood still gurgled and eddied, he founded his Norman kingdom of Jerusalem. The traders, the princes, the Emperor and the Pope devoutly thanked God for the successful termination of so glorious a cause. But the Crusades for the purpose of conquering the world for Christianity, and extirpating the Infidel, was a complete failure. However, good came out of them--incalculable good. They helped to dissolve feudalism, to develop trade, to build up cities and to increase knowledge. It would be foolish to say that they were the cause of all this, but they certainly contributed toward it.
But above all, by far, they show the strivings of man for an ideal, for the infinite, for immortality, as nothing on this earth has ever done before or since; they attempted to answer the age-old question as it has never been done before nor since--can mortality be shaken off for immortality, can the finite be merged in the infinite?
More Modern Templars
