The medieval order Steiner read as a Christ-stream, sworn to the Mystery of Golgotha and destroyed by the gold-driven will of Philip the Fair.
The Knights Templar in Anthroposophy is the medieval Christian knightly order Rudolf Steiner read as a Christ-stream: a brotherhood founded in 1119 at the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem and dedicated wholly to the Mystery of Golgotha. In his 1916 lecture cycle Inner Impulses of Evolution (GA 171), Steiner described the Templars as souls who let the Christ feel, think, and will within them, carrying the Grail-impulse outward across Europe. Their wealth, held only for the Order's spiritual work, drew the avarice of Philip the Fair of France, whose gold-inspired, Ahrimanic will engineered their suppression between 1307 and 1314. For Steiner the Templar tragedy is a twofold attack of Lucifer and Ahriman on a Christ-bearing movement, whose spiritual substance passed on into the Rosicrucian stream.
The Knights Templar were a military-monastic order founded in 1119 to guard the holy places of Jerusalem. Rudolf Steiner placed them inside the spiritual history of Europe as bearers of the Christ-impulse, knights whose inner devotion to the Mystery of Golgotha opened a real path of Christian initiation before gold-driven politics cut their work short.
In Steiner's Own Words
Five French knights united under the leadership of Hugo de Payens and, at the holy place where the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, they founded an order dedicated entirely to the Mystery of Golgotha. Its first important home was close to the place where Solomon's Temple once stood, so that the holy wisdom from most ancient times and the wisdom of Solomon could work together for Christianity in this spot with all the feelings and sentiments that have arisen from entire and holy devotion toward the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer. In addition to the religious vows of duty to their spiritual superiors usual at that time, the first Knights Templar pledged themselves to work together in the most intensive manner to bring under European control the place where the events of the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred.
What it Means Today
Read through comparative esotericism, the Templars belong to the same lineage of Grail-bearing communities that runs from the Arthurian romances to the Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century. Steiner's distinctive claim is historical and concrete: the Order founded in 1119 was not merely a banking and crusading institution but a school in which a number of knights reached a genuine Christian initiation, letting the Christ think and feel within them. That spiritual achievement, he held, is what made the Order dangerous to a different power rising in the same centuries, the materialized "wisdom of gold" that he saw inspiring Philip the Fair of France. The suppression of 1307 to 1314, the torture engineered through Pope Clement V at Avignon, and the burning of Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314 were, in this reading, a twofold attack of Lucifer and Ahriman on a Christ-stream. The point is not to romanticize the historical Order but to trace where its impulse went. Steiner connected the Templar wisdom directly to the Rosicrucian current that Christian Rosenkreutz carried forward, and to Goethe, who "knew the secret of the Templars" and hid it in the gold of his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. For the contemporary reader, the Templar episode is Anthroposophy's case study in how a spiritual movement meets, and is broken by, the power of money, and how its substance survives the breaking.
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