The Temple and the Lodge By Michael Baigent,Richard Leigh (2011)
The man chiefly responsible for publicising the Templar heritage
within Freemasonry was a German nobleman, Baron Karl Gottlieb von Hund.
Having first joined a lodge in Frankfurt, Hund, very much a man of the
world, travelled widely in Freemasonic circles. Between December 1742
and September 1743, he was in Paris. Early in the 1750s, he began to
advertise an ostensibly ‘new’ form of Freemasonry which claimed, quite
specifically, a Templar origin.
When pressed to justify himself,
Hund declared that during his nine-month visit to Paris he had been
introduced to ‘Templar Freemasonry’. He arrived six months before
Ramsay’s death, three years before Radclyffe’s. He had, he said, been
initiated into ‘higher degrees’ and dubbed ‘Chevalier Templier’ by an
‘unknown superior’ identified to him only under the appellation of
‘Eques a Penna Rubra’ – ‘Knight of the Red Feather’.
This ceremony, he
declared, had been performed in the presence of, among others, a certain
Lord Clifford (probably the young Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, related
by marriage to Radclyffe) and the Earl of Kilmarnock. Not long after his
induction, Hund said, he was presented to Charles Edward Stuart in
person, whom he was led to believe was one of the ‘unknown superiors’,
if not indeed the secret Grand Master, of the whole of Freemasonry.7
7 Le Forestier, La franc-maçonnerie templière, pp. 109, 135—6.
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