FROT The Templars

The Templars

12-20-2005

I've been reading about the Knights Templar lately. They were knights and monks (Monastic Knights) who fought during the times of the Crusades in the Middle Ages. At the time of their demise many charges were leveled against them by the Catholic Church. One of those charges was that the members of the Order were forced to pledge themselves to sodomy with each other. During their trials some of the Templars "confessed" to this being true and then recanted after their trials were over saying that sodomy (anal) was not part of the requirements for the Order.

These Templars were masculine men and warriors. I highly doubt that sodomy (butt banging) was a requirement in their Order. They prided themselves on their masculinity and warriorship. I think it more likely that these warriors engaged in frot with each other which is a far cry from sodomy. I think the Knights Templar are just one more example of groups of warriors who engaged in what comes NATURAL to masculine men, FROT. Sodomy at that time in history was still considered the "ultimate defeat" of any man. I highly doubt that the Templars would seek to defeat themselves from within their own ranks.

It's amazing just how easily the BFD takes history and distorts it into something it was not. The Templars were NOT a bunch of butt-bangers! Frot may not have been widely discussed in the Templar circle but I'm sure that at least some of them engaged in frot with each other over the years of their existence. It's even more amazing that when it comes to frot it is automatically assumed that there must also be sodomy involved. That is the distortion that the BFD creates to lead masculine men away from truth and towards illusion. And, all done in an effort to promote the myth that sodomy is "normal."

The Templars were noble men who came together as brothers and warriors. I think it more likely that frottage was one of their practices but I think it highly unlikely that sodomy ever entered into their minds as that would be considered the ultimate defeat and humiliation of their brethren. Frot is what comes NATURAL to masculine male warriors. Sodomy is NOT!!

Sir Robert

Bill Weintraub
Re: The Templars
12-23-2005
Thank you Robert.

The Templars were noble men who came together as brothers and warriors.
..
Frot is what comes NATURAL to masculine male warriors. Sodomy is NOT!!

That's correct.
The sodomy charge was invented by those within the Church who wanted to destroy the Templars.
And of course their inquisitors used torture to obtain confessions.
As Robert notes, the Templars "recanted after their trials were over saying that sodomy (anal) was not part of the requirements for the Order."
Their recanting is significant because recanting guaranteed that they'd be burned at the stake or die an equally grisly death.
But they recanted nevertheless.
Because they didn't do anal.
The Church used the charge to smear the Templars and frighten away any potential allies.
Not because there was any truth in it.
Robert:

It's amazing just how easily the BFD takes history and distorts it into something it was not. The Templars were NOT a bunch of butt-bangers!

Of course they weren't.
It's absurd to think that the Templars, who depended on each other in battle, would have humiliated and degraded a fellow knight.
How about Frot?
Is it likely that the Knights rubbed cocks with each other?
Yes.
Extremely likely.
Guys who became Knights Templar were members of the warrior class.
It's difficult for us to conceive of now, but these guys spent virtually all their time, from childhood on, with other warriors:
Training, playing, fighting -- and occasionally going to war.
Most of their lives were passed in all-male environments.
Where among other things they would have wrestled and rubbed.
Wrestling is a universal male activity.
Kids and teens -- especially -- wrestle.
Adolescents wrestle.
They're into contests of strength.
They're into the testosterone, the muscularity, the eroticism.
Many Frot men have reported that their first experience of Frot came during adolescence when they were rough-housing and wrestling with a bud.
That's not something which is unique to the 20th century.
It is rather a result of male physique and male hormones.
Which of course are particularly intense in adolescence.
So: guys playfully struggling with each other face-to-face during adolescence often get hard-ons, and those hard-ons may touch and rub.
It's a completely natural male experience, which is an expression of our natural male sex aggression -- what Jedi calls our "masculine aggressive energy."
And it's very common in adolescence.
Interestingly, the great historian Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror, her history of the 14th century, comments on how adolescent the behavior of men during the Middle Ages -- and specifically of men in the warrior class -- was.
Why?
Well, for one thing, many of there were adolescents.
They grew up fast, they acceded to their titles or their land or their fighting status young -- because often their fathers had been killed or died -- and they didn't live long.
Of course there were men among them who lived into their thirties or even what we would call middle age.
But the Knights Templar, or any other aggregation of warriors, were basically a bunch of horny young guys who spent virtually all their time together -- training with sword, shield, and spear, wrestling around, and otherwise just hanging out.
It would have been impossible to prevent them from rubbing cocks.
Just as it would have been impossible to prevent them from forming passionate, erotically-bonded, friendships.
Of course that was, from the Church's point of view, a problem in monasteries as well.
Hincmar of Reims, a Carolingian theologian, complains specifically about "rubbing."
That's his word -- "rubbing."
Monks rubbed.
And so did Knights.
Why did the Church go after the Templars?
Because the Templars were a warrior brotherhood which existed outside the control of the Church.
And in that sense the problem of the Templars is the problem of male homosex writ large.
No one has ever come up with a persuasive answer to the question of why certain societies at certain times have persecuted those who engage in homosexual acts.
No one, that is, other than the Greeks.
The Greeks argued that tightly-bonded male-male pairs -- who in their time were warrior pairs -- constituted a threat to tyrants, since their relationships existed totally outside the control of the state.
Hetero marriage is virtually always regulated by the state, and family ties are very important as well.
But same-sex love exists independent of the state and often of the family too.
The allegiance of male lovers, of course, is to each other -- not the family and not the state.
The Greeks claimed that the Persians, who had an Empire and a "King of Kings," would not tolerate same-sex love.
But the primary model for the Greeks of a tyrant trying to destroy an erotically-bonded warrior pair was the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who attempted to come between Harmodius and Aristogeiton.
As I discuss at length in The Warrior Bond, his interference led to his death and the eventual establishment of Athenian democracy.
So that the Greeks associated their form of Heroic Homosex with individual and political freedom.
And indeed, Greek homosex came into full flower among the citizen-soldiers of the independent Greek city-states, which flourished from 776 to 323 BC.
That's to say, 450 years.
Although homosex continued as a force under the Hellenistic kings and then the Roman Empire -- for example, there are many Hellenistic novels with homosexual protagonists -- the citizen-soldier was increasingly replaced both in the Hellenistic kingdoms and in Rome by the mercenary.
Which in a sense deprived the erotically-bonded warrior pair of their reason for being.
The Greek city-states still maintained their fight schools, the palestrae, and it's said that Sparta, which had not been a power since 361 BC, maintained its fiercely male and intensely homoerotic warrior training program, the agoge, well into Roman times.
But the products of the palestra and the agoge were seldom called upon to be warriors, and certainly not warriors in the Greek sense.
To Roman writers, true warrior virtue was now to be found among the Barbarians who threatened Rome -- the Celts and Teutons and various others.
And indeed the Romans hint at homosex among them.
For example, this is from The Germania of Tacitus:

They have only one kind of public show, which is performed without variation at every festive gathering. Naked youths, trained to the sport, dance about among swords and spears levelled at them. Practice begets skill and skill grace; but they are not professionals and do not receive payment.

This naked dance, of course, sounds identical to the Greeks' own Pyrrhic Dance, a series of stylized defensive and offensive movements performed nude to the accompaniment of a flute -- and which would have been presented at festivals such as the Spartan Gymnopaedia, or Festival of the Naked Youths, sacred to Apollo, which included choral dancing.
So we see this sort of ritual among the Greeks and Italic peoples like the Veii, and among those the Greeks and Romans considered "barbarians."
But, said the Romans, their barbarian warrior virtues persisted only so long as they were unconquered.
In Tacitus' famous phrase, "their valour perished with their freedom."
Can the same be said of Heroic Homosex?
Yes.
Heroic Homosex -- and remember, Heroic Homosex is WARRIOR Homosex -- is abhorred by totatalitarian systems, whether the medieval church or the fascist state or -- analism.
Men united by bonds both warrior and erotic frighten the powers that be.
Which is why the Templars were crushed.
In The Age of Warriors, Warrior Jedi speaks of our Warrior future.
In a separate message thread, Jedi asks

are other powers behind
establishing this degenerative anal culture
to weaken human civilisation in spirit and soul
in order to make humans
better dumb and controllable???

Possibly.
It's certainly the case that a system like analism wants its subjects to be "dumb and controllable."
What it doesn't want are free men, warriors, who are freely bonded one to another.
Which is precisely what we are.
In our work, we must always proceed with full awareness of the forces which seek to destroy us.
SAVE YOUR LIFE

Bill Weintraub
Re: The Templars
1-7-2006
AMOR MASCULUS
In this thread, we've talked about why Heroic Homosex is common among warriors.
And that the Greeks believed that Warrior Homosex / Heroic Homosex was "inimical to tyranny."
Here's a passage from Plato which expresses that idea:

[I]n Elis and Boeotia, having no gifts of eloquence, they are very straightforward; the universal sentiment is simply in favor of these [same-sex] connections, and no one, whether young or old, has anything to say to their discredit. The reason is, as I suppose, that they are men of few words in those parts, and therefore the lovers don't like the trouble of pleading their suit.
[Boeotia -- pronounced Bay-o-shuh -- was the home of Thebes and the Sacred Band of Thebes, the military unit consisting of 150 erotically-bonded male-male couples.
Positioned in the center of the Theban line at the battle of Leuctra, the Sacred Band broke the Spartan line -- which had been unbeatable for 200 years -- and routed the Spartans.
Under the leadership of Epaminondas, the Thebans then marched through Laconia, freeing the helots and ending forever the Spartan hegemony.
Victor Davis Hanson asserts that Sherman modeled his march through Georgia on Epaminondas' march through Laconia.]
But in Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians
[the "barbarians" are the Persians; Ionia was the name for the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor, which were subject to the Persian Empire]
, loves of youths share the evil repute of philosophy and gymnastics [nude athletics, especially wrestling], because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, and love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire this, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power.
And therefore, the ill repute into which these attachments has fallen is to be ascribed to the evil condition of those who make them to be ill-reputed; that is to say, to the rapacity of the governors and the cowardice of the governed.
Plato, Symposium, 182 b c d.

Let's take the last paragraphs again, without those annoying annotations:

in countries which are subject to the barbarians, loves of youths share the evil repute of philosophy and gymnastics, because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, and love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire this, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power.
And therefore, the ill repute into which these attachments has fallen is to be ascribed to the evil condition of those who make them to be ill-reputed; that is to say, to the rapacity of the governors and the cowardice of the governed.
Plato, Symposium, 182 b c d.
[emphases mine]

We can see in this passage several themes common to Greek homosex -- that is Heroic Homosex aka Warrior Homosex -- which have informed thinking about the male-male bond in the Western world for more than 2000 years:
1. The association of Warrior Homosex with both philosophy and athletics;
2. the importance of "constancy" -- that is Fidelity -- in Heroic Homosex;
3. the natural enmity between Warrior Homosex and tyranny, an "evil condition" marked by "the rapacity of the governors and the cowardice of the governed."
I've characterized Warrior Homosex as
Martial Monogamous Masculine
Phallic Masculine Heroic

In the first formulation, Martial = phallic and warrrior; while monogamous and masculine speak for themselves;
and in the second, phallic and masculine speak for themselves, while Heroic in this context answers to monogamous.
Guys, you cannot be both promiscuous and Heroic -- doesn't work.
The Heroic ideal is Faithful -- and therefore monogamous.
Thus another triad:
Phallus, Fidelity, Masculinity
This formulation was well understood in the ancient world.
For example, four hundred years after Plato wrote the Symposium, and even as Rome was moving toward an entirely "professional" army, the Roman poet Virgil wrote of an heroic pair of warrior-lovers, Nisus and Euryalus, who serve the Trojan Aeneas, destined to found Rome:

Nisus guarded a gate, a man-at-arms with a fighting heart, Hyrtacus' son. The huntress Ida had sent him to Aeneas' side, a quick hand with a javelin and arrows.
Euryalus was his comrade, handsomer than any other soldier of Aeneas wearing the Trojan gear: a boy whose cheek bore though unshaven manhood's early down.
One love united them, and side by side they entered combat, as that night they held the gate on the same watch. ...

"a man-at-arms with a fighting heart ... handsomer than any other soldier ... one love united them"
The two, alone, launch a night sortie against the enemy, and kill many, until they're killed in turn, their bodies falling decorously one atop the other; they'll be remembered, Virgil says, so long as Rome stands:

Pierced everywhere, he pitched down on the body of his friend, and there at last in the peace of death grew still.
Fortunate, both! If in the least my songs avail, no future day will ever take you out of the record of remembering Time...
The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

That's a description and celebration of what in Latin is termed
AMOR MASCULUS
Amor = love
Masculus = male, manly, bold
Let's for a moment look at how these concepts play out in Latin -- the language of Rome:
AMOR MASCULUS
Masculine Love
AMOR HEROICUS
Heroic Love
AMOR VIRILIS
Virile Love
AMOR MILITARIS AMOR BELLATOR
Warrior Love
AMOR HEROICUS EST AMOR MILITARIS
AMOR VIRILIS EST AMOR HEROICUS
AMOR MILITARIS EST AMOR VIRILIS
Heroic Homosex is Warrior Homosex
Virile Love is Heroic Love
Warrior Love is Virile Love

In Latin, both "miles" and "bellator" are warriors.
While both "homo" and "vir" = man
A "homo" or "vir militaris" is a warrior.
And a "vir fortissimus" -- fortissimus means most strong -- is a brave man.
While "virilis" and "masculus" both mean masculine.
So in Latin, at least as much as in English, the definitions are recursive.
Which is why we say that masculinity is that which is natural to a man.
A man is masculine; a vir is virilis.
And "virtus" = "manliness"; as does "animus virilis" -- animus is defined as the spiritual or rational principle of life in man.
Animus virilis = having a masculine spiritual principle = having a manly spirit = manliness.
While the word "virtus," meaning manliness, is also synonymous with "moral virtue."
As it is with "excellence, worth, goodness, bravery, and courage."
So a masculine man, a vir virilis, possesses virtus -- manliness, which is synonymous with moral virtue: excellence, worth, goodness, bravery, and courage.
It's all linked: a man / vir -- who is manly / virilis -- partakes of virtue / virtus -- manliness as defined by moral virtue: excellence, worth, goodness, bravery, and courage.
VIR
VIRILIS
VIRTUS

Nice, huh?
That's the Masculine ideal in a Warrior culture.
Again, in Warrior Homosex, there's a concept of Heroic Love -- the love of one fighting man for another.
That love is
Masculine;
Faithful;
and Phallic;
and completely rejects the "cowardice of the governed."
Heroic Love is Warrior Love.
Warrior Love is Heroic Love.
David and Jonathan understood that.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu understood it.
The Greeks; the Romans; the Celts -- they understood it.
The Templars understood it too.
Question: When are you going to understand it -- and start living it in your own life?
Everything in your culture -- whether that culture is analism or mainstream hetero culture -- tells you that none of this is true.
Again: when are you going to understand that this IS the truth -- and start living it in your own life?

Guys
I realized after I posted that when I say Rome, you're probably going to think Roman Empire.
But the Roman conception of vir, virilis, virtus long predates the empire, and goes back to when the Romans were just another wandering Warrior tribe.
So their concept of "virtus" -- virtue -- is a warrior concept.
That's why Tacitus, writing around 100 years after Virgil -- when the Roman Empire was at its height -- speaks favorably of the Germans and other peoples the Romans considered barbarians.
He, like many of his countrymen, saw the Germans as still possessing their warrior ideals.
But, said the Romans, their barbarian warrior virtues persisted only so long as they were unconquered.
In Tacitus' phrase, "their valour perished with their freedom."
So: the Roman ideal is a warrior ideal.
To Tacitus, the Empire, which had flooded the city with money and destroyed political freedom, had corrupted that ideal.
As it corrupted the peoples whom it conquered.
But the ideal remains.
Tacitus wrote a short biography -- what I would call an encomium -- of his father-in-law Agricola, who had been the Roman governor of Britain.
Tacitus admired the man -- greatly.
Why?
Clearly, because in Tacitus' eyes, he possessed virtus.
Again: the ideal remains.
I also urge guys to go back and read the Templars message thread.
And eventually I'll probably just appendage this thread to the Templars thread as well.
Because what Robert Loring and Jedi and Greg Milliken and myself and others are talking about here is that there is something which we can call Masculine Virtue.
And if you strip masculinity from the man, then you take his "virtus" -- his manliness as defined by moral virtue -- from him as well.
If he's a gay man, stripped of that virtue he becomes lost in the anomic world of analism, of promiscuous, anything goes, "sex," and soon loses his identity as a man and takes on the identity of a slut and a whore.
That's the problem.
It's not just the anal, though clearly anal is key.
I'll have more to say about that in a later post.
For now, let's take a look at:
AMOR MASCULUS II
Two accounts of warrior marriage

Both are taken from John Boswell's Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which you can find on the Reading List.
Boswell was the openly gay head of the history department at Yale who died of AIDS in 1995.
He was also a practicing Catholic.
Same-sex Unions was published in 94, and was much criticized by the gay establishment / secularists, who at that time were very suspicious of the idea of marriage.
And of course it was attacked by homophobes.
But Boswell's erudition is formidable, as his scholarship.
Bascially, he argued that up until about 1200 AD, the Church and local communities didn't just tolerate but celebrated same-sex marriages, and that one can find many records of same-sex ceremonies conducted by priests.
Boswell presents many of those records, which are primarily documents of same-sex marriage.
Here are two of the less formal entries in the book:
This first is from "the Gesta Romanorum, a high Medieval collection of Latin fables":

Boswell: Two knights in a tale in the Gesta Romanorum "loved each other" and decided to form a bond by drinking each other's blood. The nature of the bond so created was that afterward neither would "divorce" the other "in prosperity or adversity," and whatever either one earned would be shared equally with the other. Then they "lived each other in the same house."

Here Boswell is quoting a description of a same-sex marriage in Ireland as described by an anti-Irish commentator named Gerald of Wales writing in the late 12th century:

Under the pretext of piety and peace they come together in some holy place with the man they want to join. First they are united in pacts of kinship, then they carry each other three times around the church. Then, entering the church, before the altar, in the presence of the relics of saints and with many oaths, and finally with a celebration of the Mass and the prayers of priests, they are permanently united as if in some marriage. At the end, as further confirmation of the friendship and a conclusion to the proceedings, each drinks the other's blood, which is willingly shed for this. This however they retain from the rites of pagans, who customarily use blood in the sealing of oaths.

What's striking to me in this second account is how closely it resembles the marriage ceremony Patrick devised for us.
I sometimes joke with Patrick, who's Irish, that he channels Celts, and in this case he seems to have done just that.
We didn't carry each other three times around the church, but we were married in a Holy Union ceremony conducted by a priest, during which we took communion.
At the end of the ceremony, though again we didn't drink each other's blood, there were warrior elements which Patrick created for us.
The basic model then was a Christian mass concluded with a warrior act.
Gerald was writing around 1200 AD, and we were married in 2005 AD.
That the ceremonies were similar is not because Patrick had seen this account, which he hadn't, but because people in similar circumstances will do similar things -- even across many years.
So concepts such as Amor Masculus and Amor Militaris are not romanticized tom-foolery, but are genuine; and present both a link to the past and the possibility of a warrior future.
A true warrior future.
For those willing to work for it.

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