The Templars have something to do with everything

The Templars have something to do with everything is both a repeated slogan and a working axiom in the Plan. It marks the point where an appetite for connections becomes a rule: no fact may remain ordinary, because admitting that one does would violate hermetic thought.

From Caution to Axiom

The maxim emerges in a late-night discussion among Casaubon, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi. One voice warns against overdoing the search for meaning; another insists that the search must be pushed further. If even one fact in the universe fails to disclose a mystery, the reasoning goes, hermetic thought has been breached. Casaubon accepts the premise and adds the Templars as a fundamental axiom, which Diotallevi agrees goes without saying.

The Rule at Work

The sentence is not merely a conclusion about the Templars. It supplies a method: every detail can be recruited as evidence for a hidden design, and an apparent gap becomes a problem of interpretation rather than a limit on the theory. The maxim thus makes the Plan effectively unfalsifiable. A connection confirms the rule; the absence of an obvious connection invites more searching.

From Axiom to Printed Proof

After the group disperses, Belbo stays behind at the office to work, asking Gudrun to collect the papers from the floor. The next morning he returns radiant and presents a printout, announcing that the results exceed their hopes. The maxim appears among the generated statements, alongside assertions that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate and that the Merovingians claim divine-right kingship.

Diotallevi calls the output obscure. Belbo answers by pointing to connections and to the repeated question of who married at Cana. He then interprets the material as evidence that Jesus was not crucified, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, and that the Templars’ rejection of the Crucifix follows from this concealed history. These are Belbo’s interpretive claims, not established facts: the printed maxim helps demonstrate how the Plan converts scattered statements into an apparently coherent secret history.

Narrative Significance

The maxim’s force lies in its circularity. It begins as a deliberately excessive principle of interpretation and returns as an axiom that makes excess seem compulsory. Repeated in conversation and on the printout, it links the group’s playful construction of the Plan to Belbo’s increasingly elaborate reading of its output: once everything must connect to the Templars, coincidence itself can be made to look like proof.