Rule of the Templars

The Rule of the Templars is the framework of vows and daily discipline that organized the Knights of the Temple as both monks and soldiers. In Casaubon’s account, it begins with the order’s founding purpose—defending pilgrims in the Holy Land—and develops into a detailed regimen governing clothing, food, sleep, worship, rank, equipment, and relations between the sexes. Its austerity makes the order’s unusual combination of cloister and battlefield legible: Templars were expected to live under monastic constraints while remaining fully engaged in war.

Origins and Institutional Purpose

The rule belongs to the history of the Knights of the Temple, whose nucleus, Casaubon explains, was established in 1118. Nine young men led by Hugues de Payns arrived in Jerusalem during the reign of Baudouin II. They took the familiar monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, adding a fourth obligation: the defense of pilgrims. Jerusalem’s king and bishop, along with others in the city, supported them with money and lodging; the knights were eventually given quarters in the cloister of the old Temple of Solomon, from which their name derived.

Casaubon attributes the order’s rapid institutional development in large part to Saint Bernard. Bernard supported the original group and recast it as a Militia of Christ, helping establish the heroic image later associated with the Templars. In 1128 he convened a council at Troyes to define the new soldier-monks’ role and subsequently composed an encomium and a rule consisting of seventy-two articles. The rule thus did more than regulate conduct: it gave a religious and organizational form to a novel vocation, one that joined a monastic life to armed service.

Daily Discipline and Hierarchy

The rule described by Casaubon reaches into the small material arrangements of communal life. Templars were to attend daily Mass and wear simple white cloaks, avoiding furs except for such limited garments as lambskin or ram’s pelt. They were forbidden fashionable curved shoes and were to sleep in their underwear, with one pallet, one sheet, and one blanket. Meals were controlled as closely: two men shared a bowl, ate in silence, and were permitted meat three times a week. Friday penance and an early daily rising reinforced the rhythm of a life ordered around religious discipline.

Even exceptions were regulated. After especially hard work, a knight might sleep an extra hour, but had to recite thirteen Paters in bed in return. The rule also organized the order as a hierarchy, from the master down through lower ranks that included sergeants, squires, attendants, and servants. Military provision was specified alongside religious routine: each knight was to have three horses and one squire. Bridles, saddles, and spurs were to be undecorated, while weapons were to be simple but well made. Hunting was prohibited except for lions. Together, these provisions make austerity practical as well as symbolic: the order’s members were to be equipped for combat without turning their equipment or appearance into displays of luxury.

Chastity and Life in the World

Chastity receives particular emphasis because the Templars were not secluded monks. They fought and lived outside a monastery, in the difficult conditions of the Holy Land. Casaubon describes the rule as addressing the pressures of that life directly: it warns that women’s company is perilous and restricts permissible kisses to mothers, sisters, and aunts. The restriction sits beside rules about food, sleep, and equipment as part of the same attempt to discipline bodies exposed to hardship and temptation.

The rule’s severity also gives the order’s communal life a tension that Casaubon acknowledges rather than resolving. Templars might spend months in the desert, sharing a tent with a comrade who had eaten from the same bowl, while exhausted, cold, thirsty, and afraid. In that setting, the requirement of chastity is not an abstract monastic ideal detached from circumstance; it bears on the intimate dependence created by military life. Casaubon raises the historical accusation of sodomy and the association of Baphomet with the Templars, but the discussion at this point does not establish either as a fact. Instead, the contrast between formal discipline and the pressures of shared life opens onto a question about how the order’s members managed fear, closeness, and desire.

Later Echoes: Possession and Initiation

The novel places the Templar rule within a broader inquiry into religious discipline, belief, and bodily experience. In Brazil, Casaubon encounters Afro-Brazilian cults whose rites involve initiates entering trances and being possessed by higher beings: in candomblé these are the orixás, while in Umbanda they are spirits of the departed. The accounts of these practices arise amid political disagreement. Amparo’s comrades variously interpret the cults as a return to cultural roots, as a means by which the ruling class contains revolutionary energy, or as a mixture of Indigenous, white, and Black traditions whose purpose remains uncertain.

At a later rite, a German psychologist who had participated for years is described as unable to enter a trance, despite her intense efforts. Other worshippers do enter ecstasy, and observers distinguish different movements and apparent forms of possession. When Amparo trembles and says she feels unwell, the pai-de-santo tells her that she has the qualities of a medium and has responded to the pontos. Her immediate denial and request to be left alone leave the meaning of her reaction unsettled. The scene presents possession through competing accounts—the ritual leader’s recognition, Amparo’s refusal, and Casaubon’s observation—rather than supplying an independent proof of supernatural agency.

Aglie later interprets the episode through a distinction between mysticism and initiation. He argues that cultural inheritance and shared archetypes can remain active beneath a person’s conscious convictions, and says that Amparo’s rejection of the orixás has not erased their presence within her. In his account, the mystic undergoes and visibly manifests forces, whereas the initiate undergoes a slow, inward transformation of mind and body and can learn to control what the mystic experiences. He explicitly rejects treating possession as a positive achievement and distinguishes it from the discipline of initiation. The Templar rule’s controlled routines and the novel’s discussion of initiatory training therefore stand in suggestive contrast to ecstatic surrender: both concern religiously charged bodies, but one is presented as an externally codified communal regimen and the other, in Aglie’s theory, as a secret and inward mastery.