The Templars were founded to protect the Holy Land and especially the pilgrimscoming there.  That was their publicly known mission, but they had anothermission.  A “secret” mission whose details were not released to thepublic.  Mystae.com gives the following series of book excerpts on thisintriguing subject:  

From http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/masons/templars.html

A Secret Objective?

“Receive this writing that you may know how to preserve the books which I shall deliver to you; and set them in order and anoint them with oil of cedar and put them away in earthen vessels in the place which He made from the beginning of the creation of the world until the day of repentance in the visitation when the Lord will visit you in consummation of the end of the days.”

– Assumption of Moses

“Thisdescribed only one place to the Jews; the rock beneath the Holy of Holiesin the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem, because this was the firstpoint of creation.”
          – Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas,TheHiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrollsof Jesus

Pictured Right:  The Rock under the Holy of Holies, the Dome of theRock is built over it.  The Templars were headquartered in this buildingfor 80 years.  CLICK ON PICTURE to see larger image, details of therock  and the Templar-crafted iron fence around the rock.  Is thisthe first point of creation? The place of the Holy of Holies?

“…In 1894 a group of British Army officers, with a budget of just fivehundred pounds, set out to try and map the vaults below the ruins of Herod’sTemple. The contingent of Royal Engineers led by Lieutenant Charles Wilsonconducted some excellent work under very adverse conditions and they couldconfirm that the chambers and passageways they found were often vaulted withkeystone arches. They also confirmed that they were not the first visitorsto the subterranean galleries when they came across Templar artifacts discardedsome seven hundred and forty years previously. These consisted of part ofa sword, a spur, part of a spear or lance, and a small Templar cross.”
           – Christopher Knight and RobertLomas,TheHiram Key

“When the crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they heard from such Jewsas remained in the city that the Holy of Holies was right there in the Domeof the Rock. The crusaders mistakenly identified the Moslem Dome of the Rockwith Solomon’s Temple.”
          – Noel Currer-Briggs,TheShroud and the Grail – A Modern Quest for the True Grail

“In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East, among whom were Geoffroi deSaint-Omer and Hughes de Payens, consecrated themselves to religion, andtook an oath between the hands of the Patriarch of Constantinople, a Seealways secretly or openly hostile to that of Rome from the time of Photius.The avowed object of the Templars was to protect the Christians who cameto visit the Holy Places: their secret object was the re-building of theTemple of Solomon on the model prophesied by Ezekiel.”
          – General Albert Pike, Morals andDogma

“The real task of the nine knights was to carry out research in the areain order to obtain certain relics and manuscripts which contained the essenceof the secret traditions of Judaism and ancient Egypt, some of which probablywent back to the days of Moses…There is no doubt that [they] fulfilledthis particular mission and that the knowledge obtained from their findswas taught in the oral tradition of the Order’s…secret circles.”
          – Gaetan Delaforge, The Templar Traditionin the Age of Aquarius

In the 1960’s “Louis Charpentier…in two books not remarkable for the clarityof their ideas, claimed that the Templars were despatched to the Holy Landby St Bernard to fetch the Ark of the Temple of Solomon back to Europe. Hisevidence that they were successful in this enterprise is the building ofthe Gothic cathedrals of Europe, which the Templars financed partly withsilver produced by the practice of alchemy, partly with more silver which(three centuries before Columbus) they imported from the Americas, anddisembarked at La Rochelle!”
          – Peter Partner,TheMurdered Magicians

“…A number of Jewish and Islamic legends spoke of a sealedand secret passage beneath the Well of Souls leading into the bowels of theearth, where the Ark supposedly been concealed at the time of the destructionof Solomon’s Temple – and where many believed that it rested still, guardedby spirits and demons.” It is “highly probable that Hugh de Payens and hisbacker the Count of Champagne could…have been motivated by a desire tofind the Ark – and that they could have established the Templars, and takencontrol of the Temple Mount, in order to achieve this goal.

Pictured Right:  Marble archway inside the Dome of the Rock leads acavity beneath the rock known as Bir el-Arwah, “the Well of Souls.” It issaid that here the voices of the dead mingle with the falling waters of thelower rivers of paradise as they drop into eternity.

“If so, however, then they failed in their objective. In the twelfth century,as one expert put it, ‘the asset value of a famous relic was prodigious’.Possession of a relic as uniquely significant as the Ark of the Covenantwould, in addition have brought enormous power and prestige to its owners.From this it followed, that if the Templars had found the Ark, they wouldcertainly have brought it back to Europe in triumph.”
          – Graham Hancock,TheSign and the Seal

“We had recently discovered that a duplicate of the Qumranian copper scrollhad been deposited in the ‘Shith’, or cave, directly beneath the altar ofthe Temple – that cave that was capped with the marble block with a ringat its center. Had it been this stone that the Templars lifted and descendedto the vault below?”
          – Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas,TheHiram Key

The Templar’s ArchitecturalSkills

“On the other side of the palace [i.e., the Al-Aqsa Mosque] the Templarshave built a new house, whose height, length and breadth, and all its cellarsand refectories, staircase and roof, are far beyond the custom of this land.Indeed its roof is so high that, if I were to mention how high it is, thosewho listen would hardly believe me.”
          – Theoderic (1174)

“Clearly he had regarded the Templars’ architectural skills as almostsupernaturally advanced and had been particularly impressed by the soaringroofs and arches that they had built….Soaring roofs and arches had alsobeen the distinguishing features of the Gothic architectural formula as expressedat Chartres and other French cathedrals in the twelfth century – cathedralsthat…were regarded by some observers as ‘scientifically…far beyond whatcan be allowed for in the knowledge of the epoch’ [Louis Charpentier, TheMysteries of Chartres Cathedral].”

“…What if, in their excavations on the Temple Mount, they had unearthedscrolls, manuscripts, theorems or blueprints relating to Solomon’s Templeitself? What if these discoveries had included the lost architectural secretsof geometry, proportion, balance and harmony that had been known to the buildersof the pyramids and other great monuments of antiquity?”
          – Graham Hancock, The Sign and theSeal

“Almostall of Western Architecture, particularly church buildings, were built accordingto the proportions of the human body. This changed in the last 150 yearsor so which produced Modern Architecture, which is based on Cartesian mathematicsrather than the human scale. Before that, Western Architecture was basedon Greek and Roman architecture, and the Greeks and Romans used the humanform as a basis for building their temples. The U.S. Capitol, for instance,is an example of Roman architecture and it was modeled directly after theRoman Pantheon (a Greek word meaning ‘all of the gods,’ i.e., a TEMPLE forall the gods. The Romans got many of their architectural ideas from the Greeks).When the Rome Empire became christianized, therefore, churches were builtaccording to the human proportions gotten from them. The result is knownas Classical and Neo-Classical Architecture. This does not mean that churcheswere built in the shape of a human (although some were, as is shown inarchitectural drawings) but that their proportions were based on the humanscale. Also, many churches adopted a cruciform floor plan signifying Jesus’body. This probably gives new meaning to the Jesus’ own statement, ‘Uponthis rock, I will build my church.'”

– Tony Badillo, (private communication)  Visit Tony’sillustrated website, Temple Secrets of Solomon

Geoffrey de St Omer “knew an elderly canon by the name of Lambert, who wasa retired schoolmaster of the Chapter of Our Virgin in St Omer…who spentmany years compiling an encyclopedia of human knowledge.”

“Today, one of the most famous of all of Lambert of St Omer’s works is hishasty copy of a drawing that depicts the heavenly Jerusalem. It shows thatthe two main pillars of the heavenly Jerusalem are both named ‘Jacob’, andapparently shows the founder to be John the Baptist.”

“…The concept of a ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ or a ‘New Jerusalem’ was discoveredin scrolls recovered from five different caves in Qumran, all based on Ezekiel’svisions in which the new city is described in detail with fifteen hundredtowers, each a hundred feet tall.”
          – Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas,The Hiram Key

“And what if the Templars had shared these secrets with Saint Bernard inreturn for his enthusiastic backing of their order?”
          – Graham Hancock, The Sign and theSeal

St. Bernard, the patron of the Templars, “played a formative role in theevolution and dissemination of the Gothic architectural formula in its earlydays (he had been at the height of his powers in 1134 when the soaring northtower of Chartres cathedral had been built, and he had constantly stressedthe principles of sacred geometry that had been put into practice in thattower and throughout the whole wonderful building).”

“Gothic architecture…had been born at Chartres cathedral with the startof construction work on the north tower in 1134….In the years immediatelyprior to 1134 Bernard had cultivated a particularly close friendship withGeoffrey the Bishop of Chartres, inspiring his with an ‘uncommon enthusiasm’for the Gothic formula and holding ‘almost daily negotiations with the buildersthemselves’.”

“When asked ‘What is God?’, Bernard replied ‘He is length, width, heightand depth.’

“The entire edifice had been carefully and explicitly designed as a key tothe deeper religious mysteries. Thus, for example, the architects and masonshad made use of gematria (an ancient Hebrew cipher that substitutes numbersfor the letters of the alphabet) to ‘spell out’ obscure liturgical phrasesin many of the key dimensions of the great building. Similarly the sculptorsand glaziers – working usually to the instructions of the higher clergy -had carefully concealed complex messages about human nature, about the past,and about the prophetic meaning of the Scriptures in the thousands of differentdevices and designs that they had created.” (For example a tableau in thenorth porch depicts the removal, to some unstated destination, of the Arkof the Covenant – which is shown placed upon an ox-cart. The damaged anderoded description, ‘HIC AMICITUR ARCHA CEDERIS’ which could be ‘Here ishidden the Ark of the Covenant’.)”
          – Graham Hancock, The Sign and theSeal

“In 1139, Pope Innocent II (whose candidacy, incidentally, had also beenenthusiastically backed by Saint Bernard), granted the order a unique privilege- the right to build their own churches. This was a privilege that theysubsequently exercised to the full: beautiful places of worship, often circularin plan like the Temple Church in London, became a hallmark of Templaractivities.”
          – Graham Hancock, The Sign and theSeal

“In a single century from 1170 no fewer than eighty cathedrals and almostfive hundred abbeys were built in France alone, involving more masonry thanwas ever cut in ancient Egypt! These buildings were built to a startlingnew scale never seen before.”
          – Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas,The Hiram Key

“The great effort of the Order was the transfer of funds and men to the east.They erected numerous building in the west – preceptories, churches, granges- for training and administration, but these were humble and utilitarianin nature, with a few exceptions. There was no standard form of Templar church:a very few, curricular or polygonal, recalled the shape either of the Domeof the Rock at Jerusalem (the ‘Temple of God’ of the Templar seal) or ofthe octagon of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusalem. But most Templarchurches were orthodox apsidal structures.”
          – Peter Partner, The MurderedMagicians