the Crusades appear to have belonged to the second of these traditions, the unperverted Cabala of the Jews, known to the Essenes. There are, in fact, striking resemblances betwen Freemasonry and Essenism--degrees of initiation, oaths of secrecy, the wearing of the apron, and a certain masonic sign; whilst to the Sabeist traditions of the Essenes may perhaps be traced the solar and stellar symbolism of the lodges. The Hiramic legend may have belonged to the same tradition.
The Templar Tradition
If then no documentary evidence can be brought forward to show that either the Solomonic legend or any traces of Judaic symbolism and traditions existed either in the monuments of the period or in the ritual of the masons before the fourteenth century, it is surely reasonable to recognize the plausibility of the contention put forward by a great number of masonic writers--particularly on the Continent--that the Judaic elements penetrated into Masonry by means of the Templars. The Templars, as we have already seen, had taken their name from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. What then more likely than that during the time they had lived there they had learnt the Rabbinical legends connected with the Temple? According to George Sand, who was deeply versed in the history of secret societies, the Hiramic legend was adopted by the Templars as symbolic of the destruction of their Order. "They wept over their impotence in the person of Hiram. The word lost and recovered is their empire...." The Freemason Ragon likewise declares that the catastrophe they lamented was the catastrophe