ABSTRACT
This chapter explores in detail four examples where Los Caballeros Templarios de Michoacan (LCT) appropriated and reshaped characteristics closely associated with the medieval order in service of its own ends: silence, communal life, protection and, perhaps most surprisingly, the possession of a spiritual justification for its defining struggle. The reasons why the leadership chose to adopt a new identity as Knights Templar in the course of its efforts to establish both legitimacy and strong internal discipline have, however, been little examined to this point. The conscious usage of ‘vow of silence’ in the Código, playing upon the term’s particular monastic connotations, clearly denotes an effort by LCT leadership to legitimise this culture of silence which it sought to impose through the invention of, and appeal to, a worthy historical precedent. The Templar Order required its members to give up their individual property and wealth in order to live the cloistered, communal life common to many strands of Christian Monasticism.
