The Templar Genesis of Freemasonry: Turning the Templar Key Revisited

About 60% of the content of this revised edition was first published in 2007 to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1307, under the title Turning the Templar Key. I have revisited that material to create this new edition that is a fuller discussion of How, Where and Why Freemasonry started and returns to the issue of whether the Knights Templar had anything to do with the genesis of Freemasonry. The main questions which I posed myself when I wrote Turning the Templar Key were. 1. Did the original Knights Templar survive their apparent destruction and morph into Freemasonry? 2. Are the Masonic Knights Templar the legitimate successors of the original Order of Knights Templar founded in Jerusalem and disbanded in 1307? Whilst investigating these questions, and explaining and discussing them in Masonic lectures, I uncovered the real history of Freemasonry. I discovered how it came to have such a strange legacy of mythical histories, including