THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
Arcade Publishing, 1989
344 pp., $22.95
"I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor picks out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he's always a lunatic."
--- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Even in our age of furious intertextuality, it may seem odd to begin a review of a new book on the Templars and the Freemasons with an extract from a fictional work. But beside the light the above epigraph sheds on the kinds of writers who interest themselves in the subject, the use of already existing colorful stories for practical purposes is a hallowed tradition for both the Templars and Freemasons. The Templars managed to appropriate much of the force of the Grail legend, and the Freemasons constructed an imaginative past for themselves out of Templar and biblical materials. The historian who looks at these two orders today, therefore, must resist a double temptation toward mysticism, intrigue, and speculation.
These temptations are not merely of antiquarian interest. Though the authors of The Temple and the Lodge are at pains to show that Masonic secrecy has created more suspicion than Masonic principles warrant, mysterious incidents continue to dog that secretive society. Just a few years ago when the Vatican found itself embarrassed by some undesirable connections with figures involved in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, one of the principal figures, Roberto Calvi, turned out to be a member of a secret Masonic lodge, Loggia P-2, in Italy. Calvi disappeared and then, in a fashion worthy of any mystery story, was found in London hanging from Black-friars Bridge not far from that former Templar property, the Temple. The bridge's black and white motifs, commentators were quick to point out, were precisely the colors associated with the Knights Templar since the Middle Ages.
In The Temple and the Lodge, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh have admirably resisted the most virulent temptation in recounting the semilegendary, semihistorical record of the Templars and Freemasons from their foundings down to their influence on the American Revolution. At the same time, they have preserved the excitement of the pursuit of elusive clues, unexplained convergences, and maddening historical gaps inevitable in examining these two institutions. The authors do not refrain entirely from attempts to leap certain chasms, nor are their leaps always plausible, even on the basis of their own evidence. But they get into their narrative all the fast-moving magnetism of a good detective novel.
Remarkably, they also manage to preserve the rich historical texture - religious, political, military, and intellectual - that is crucial to understanding these institutions. They weave these strands together as a skilled polyphonic composer produces four-part harmonies. The result is both informative and - as any account of these fascinating groups should be - entertaining in the best sense.
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