ABSTRACT
The Knights Templars, a crusading religious order, were founded 1118-1119 in Jerusalem: to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. Spring is the law of spawn, of identity with the earth mother. Similarly the outsider, both taming and rescuing her in "Templars", is the one "who always fought her and her law". The role of the needed outsider, the redeeming outlaw, was always the author's obsession but never so successfully universalized as here. In Angelus Novus, the marvelous German critic Walter Benjamin analyzes the greatness of "Templars". "Templars" shouts at the reader the author's break with the Magna Mater religiosity of the "Cosmic circle" of Ludwig Klages and Alfred Schuler, his former friends. The real Templars were, in their own odd way, Christians, the poem not only distorts and idealizes them; it mixes them with very different religions. The King Philip IV of France accused them of heresies, conspiracies, Satanic abominations, and sexual perversions.
