"The Order of the Temple included women"

"The Order of the Temple included women. Within the first years of its existence many women took the Order’s oath, although they remained members of the lay persons’ Temple. 

While there is no suggestion that there was a secret enclave of warrior queens within the Templar Order, as Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh write in The Temple and the Lodge (1989): …a late twelfth-century account in England speaks of a woman being received into the Temple as a Sister, and seems quite clearly to imply some sort of feminine wing or adjunct to the Order. But no elaboration or clarification of the matter has ever been found.

Even such information as might have been contained in official Inquisition records has long since disappeared or been suppressed. Nicole and Charles, from their close study of Templar documents, are more emphatic: If you go back to the twelfth-century documents, there are numerous instances of women having joined the Order, certainly in its first century. Anybody that joined had to take an oath to give ‘my house, my lands and my body and soul to the Order, of the Temple’. You have women’s names at the end of these documents as well as men’s, and you often have couples joining—so the women must have taken the oath too.

These documents are mainly in this area [the Languedoc], and there are enough instances to show that there must have been quite a large number of women involved at one time. They also point out that there was a later change to the rules, in which the Templars were specifically forbidden from accepting women — with the implication that up until that time they had been doing so.

When we expressed some surprise that this was not more widely known, and certainly, apart from some vague hints, the women’s involvement does not feature in the standard works on the Templars, Charles explained: "At times it appears as though a lot of this information has been intentionally overlooked. What you get in the books is a lot of redundant information, the same thing hashed over and over again. There are only two things it could be: either these people are blind, or for some very specific reason they are not focusing on that information. If you are a researcher, which supposedly these people are, it should leap off the page at you. But it’s dismissed"."

source text: The Templar Revelation; illustration source aumagic.blogspot.com (FairUse)

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