The French historian Raimonde Reznikov’s book ‘Cathares et Templiers’ can be something of a scholar’s antidote to the wilder extremes of conspiracy mongering. As reported by Reznikov, besides the evident link that Templars and Cathars were suppressed by shared conspiracy between state and church, the solely genuine sympathetic link originated from the imaginations of eighteenth-century Freemasons. She writes: The Templar mythology, fabricated in the 18th century in the bosom of German lodges by the vanity...
