Lévi also exonerates the majority of the Templars from complicity in either anti-monarchical or anti-religious designs:
These tendencies were enveloped in profound mystery and the Order made an outward profession of the most perfect orthodoxy. The Chiefs alone knew whither they were going; the rest followed unsuspectingly.<sup></sup>
What, then, was the Templar heresy? On this point we find a variety of opinions. According to Wilcke, Ranke, and Weber it was "the unitarian deism of Islam"; Lecouteulx de Canteleu thinks, however, it was derived from heretical Islamic sources, and relates that whilst in Palestine, one of the Knights, Guillaume de Montbard, was initiated by the Old Man of the Mountain in a cave of Mount Lebanon. That a certain resemblance existed between the Templars and the Assassins has been indicated by von Hammer, and further emphasized by the Freemason Clavel:
Oriental historians show us, at different periods, the Order of the Templars maintaining intimate relations with that of the Assassins, and they insist on the affinity that existed between the two associations. They remark that they had adopted the same colours, white and red; that they had the same organization, the same hierarchy of degrees, those of fedavi, refik, and dai in one corresponding to those of novice, professed, and knight in the other; that both conspired for the ruin of the religions they professed in public, and that finally both possessed numerous castles, the former in Asia, the latter in Europe.<sup></sup>
But in spite of these outward resemblances it does not appear from the confessions of the Knights