"Jacques deMolay You are Avenged"

[jack_babalon]

Maybe it's just the Martinist in me, but every Friday the 13th I feel it necessary to toast the 23rd Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques deMolay. The Knights Templar were an monastic order of knights founded in 1118 to defend the Holy Land ( a recent addition to the Christian Empire thanks to the First Crusade (think Desert Storm only it was for Jesus instead of oil and knights instead of tanks). Now let's fast forward a 189 years to 1307. The Order of the Knights Templar is one of the most powerful organizations in both Europe and the Middle East. How? Simple. Banking. The order had stumbled upon that one power mightier than Christ,King & Army put together: Money! Now this naturally made some people very uncomfortable. Nothing worse than a bunch of religious sons of bitches telling the nobility how much money they can and can't have. The only thing that was possibly worse was when said religious sons of bitches had an army behind them backed up by the Pope himself. When the king of France (now known as "Freedomville" by us Americans), Philip the Fair, asked the Templars for a little walking around money and got a royal "No" in response, well let's just say what happens next isn't 'fair' at all. The king tried to get the Pope, Boniface the VIII, to excommunicate them. When the pope refused the king sent one of his councillors to kidnap the pope and have his mind changed the old fashioned way. The pope died three days later from shock. The French huh?
Well two popes later and Philip finally got his wish: An investigation into the activities of the Templars. So on Friday the 13th a massive raid
occured all over France. Templars were snagged out of their beds before dawn. This, for all you Paraskavedekatriaphobes out there, is why Friday the 13th is considered a particularly unlucky day. Accused of heresy, homosexuality and whistling on a tuesday, the knights were ruthlessly tortured. By 1314 the Grandmaster of the lodge, along with two other compatriots equally condemned by the pope, were burned at the stake as relapsed heretics (remember this kids next time you worship a goat headed god).

According to some shadowy sources of mine in the Lodge Geburah and the Order of Laughing Buddha Assassins:
It is just that, in so terrible a day, and in the last moments of my life, I should discover all the iniquity of falsehood, and make the truth triumph. I declare, then, in the face of heaven and earth, and acknowledge, though to my eternal shame, that I have committed the greatest crimes but it has been the acknowledging of those which have been so foully charged on the order. I attest - and truth obliges me to attest - that it is innocent! I made the contrary declaration only to suspend the excessive pains of torture, and to mollify those who made me endure them. I know the punishments which have been inflicted on all the knights who had the courage to revoke a similar confession; but the dreadful spectacle which is presented to me is not able to make me confirm one lie by another. The life offered me on such infamous terms I abandon without regret."
Reports say they were slowly roasted over a hot, smokeless fire prolonging their agony as their flesh slowly cooked and blackened. Jacques DeMolay insisted that his hands were not to be bound so that he could pray in his final moments and before he died he cursed both Philip and Pope Clement, summoning both of them to appear before God, the supreme judge, before the year was out. His last words were, "Let evil swiftly befall those who have wrongly condemned us - God will avenge us." Guy of Advernge is reported to have added, "I shall follow the way of my master as a martyr you have killed him. You have done and know not. God willing, on this day, I shall die in the Order like him."

And ol'Jacques was a man of his word. Pope Clement died a month later, Philip the Fair six months after that. In fact when the last living relative of Philip the Fair died during the French Revolution a voice was reported to have yelled from the crowd:Jacques deMolay you are avenged!"

Alright that's enough old schoolin'. Class dismissed.

Comments

[vomikronnoxis.livejournal.com]

It made me sad yesterday because I mentiond this as being the origin of Friday 13, and one of my coworkers asked me if I'd gotten that from "The Davinci Code." :(

~rl