The Templar cipher: the history of a modern legend

Among the secret alphabets found in books on esotericism and in travel guides, one of the most evocative is the so-called Templar cipher. Its letters are derived from the shapes of an eight-pointed cross and from a system of angles and triangles. According to a widespread tradition, the Knights of the Temple used it to protect letters of credit and the correspondence between their commanderies. The documents, however, tell a different story.

What history confirms

The Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in Jerusalem around 1120 and suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312, after the trial instigated by Philip IV of France. In its two centuries of existence it accumulated property all over Europe and performed financial functions of great importance: it held money in safekeeping, granted loans and transferred sums between the West and the Holy Land.

A pilgrim could deposit money at a house of the Order in Europe and withdraw the equivalent in the East by presenting a document. This system, which historians regard as a forerunner of some banking practices, certainly required forms of control and authentication. It is onto this real fact that the legend of a ciphered alphabet guarded by the knights has been grafted.

An alphabet without manuscripts

No medieval Templar document known so far contains the alphabet of the cross. The Order's archives are largely lost, but the surviving papers, including those of the trial, show no trace of this system. The first descriptions seem to appear much later, in the modern era, within esoteric and Masonic literature, which from the eighteenth century onwards made the Templars the ideal ancestors of various initiatory societies.

The scheme itself, moreover, closely resembles the grid ciphers widespread in the modern period, such as the Masonic cipher known as pigpen, in which the shape of the enclosure around each letter indicates its value. The Templar cipher applies the same idea to a symbolic figure, the cross, and derives from it a repertory of signs with immediate appeal.

Why the legend endures

The alphabet's success depends on the aura of mystery surrounding the end of the Order. The charges of heresy, the confessions obtained under torture and the burning of the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, in Paris in 1314 have fuelled for centuries the idea of a secret kept and handed down. A cipher attributed to the knights seems to offer concrete proof of that secret, even though the proof is missing.

Added to this is the tendency, typical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, to look for coded messages in the architecture of commanderies, in prison graffiti and in carved symbols. Some of these signs are authentic and interesting, such as the graffiti in the castle of Chinon, attributed by tradition to imprisoned Templars, but their interpretation as ciphered writing remains speculative.

The Templar cipher should therefore be presented for what it is: a symbolic alphabet of modern origin, tied to the Templar imagination rather than to the documented history of the Order. This does not cancel its interest. On the contrary, it shows how the myth of the knights went on producing signs, stories and languages for centuries after their disappearance.