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Did “Freemasons” betray the Knight Templar? - think corporate takeover :
:The bodies of Freemasonry include a series of degrees often characterized as “Knight Masonry,” “degrees” of feeemasonry, which incorporates the symbolism of the medieval Knights Templar and, in some cases, uses the murder of the head of the Knights Templar as a warning about the tyranny of the Church and the State. That led to rumors (some circulated by Freemasons themselves at the time) that Freemasonry was the descendant of the Templar Order, forced underground in the fourteenth century and propagated as a secret society down to the present day. Historians and Freemasons alike now regard that as a baseless conspiracy theory.
The Knights Templar, of course, were a powerful medieval institution heavily involved in the Crusades. In the fourteenth century, they were accused of heresy, arrested, and tortured, and many of them were executed. Among the “heresies” extracted by torture was the claim that the Templars worshiped an “idol” called Baphomet, often depicted as a severed head. The name was known in the Middle Ages and was thought to be a corruption of the name Mohamed, implying that the Templars had incorporated elements of Islam into their religious practices.
