The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and their Myth

Peter Partner's The Murdered Magicians, The Templars and Their Myth, published by Oxford University Press in 1982, is a scholarly history of the Knights Templar's suppression in the early fourteenth century and, at greater length, of the elaborate mythology that grew up around the order in the centuries after its destruction, from Freemasonic origin claims to twentieth century occult revivals. Partner was a historian working from the medieval trial records alongside the later literature that invented a hidden Templar tradition. Its strength is that it separates the documented medieval order from its much later mythologized afterlife with real historical rigor. Its limit is that as a survey of centuries of myth-making it moves quickly through any one strand of that later mythology, so a claim about a specific modern Templar-derived group or claim needs a source focused on that particular movement rather than this general history alone.