Open Veils · Answer
What is the relationship between the Ankh and the Templars?
The Ankh entered Templar-adjacent initiatic systems through a documented 18th-century channel: Johann August von Starck's Clerks of the Temple, founded 1766, which bore the crux ansata on its altars and official documents in its two highest degrees. Before that, the bridge runs through the Tau cross — the lower element of the Ankh — which was the symbol of the Knights Templar of St. Anthony of Leith in Scotland, itself inherited from the Order of the Hospitalers of St. Anthony, who absorbed vast quantities of Templar wealth after 1307. The transmission is not mythological; it is institutional.
Evidence
- The key to this relationship is the Tau cross — the T-shaped lower body of the Ankh — which in Freemasonic Royal Arch tradition stands explicitly for Templus Hierosolyma, the Temple of Jerusalem, and doubles as the Companion's Jewel when a serpent-circle is added above it, reconstructing the full Ankh form.
- The most concrete institutional link appears in Starck's Clerks of the Temple (founded 1766), a Masonic system explicitly of Templar and Rosicrucian inspiration, which claimed continuity with the sacerdotal branch of the Order of the Temple.
- Manly P. Hall argued in his encyclopedic work that the Ankh encodes a cosmological key — the looped cross representing life-force circulating through matter — a reading that Rosicrucian-Templar systems absorbed through Hermetic channels going back to Paracelsus and beyond.
- The Hospitalers of St. Anthony — who received much of the dissolved Templar wealth and relics in the 11th and 14th centuries — transmitted Tau symbolism westward into France and Scotland.
- Per documented Masonic historical records published via Nos Colonnes (2025), at the Convent of Kohlo in 1772 the Clerks of the Temple were united with the Strict Templar Observance — the dominant neo-Templar Masonic system of the era.