A powerful Tarot card because its possibilities start in nothingness and reach into infinity Rider-Waite tarot deck, public domain

How the hatred for Catholic Rome in the 14th century would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep-state; and how this conflict would lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church, whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would complete its cycle on November 22, 1963 in the Anglo/Norman America of the present era.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Knights Templar, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets

Whether or not the Knights Templar practiced heretical beliefs as charged, the immolation of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the hands of the Pope’s Inquisitors in 1314 would serve as an inspiration to generations of people who did. Pope Innocent III’s brutal Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 against the powerful dualist Cathar movement pitted Northern France’s Catholic nobility against the lesser nobility of the south who were tolerant and supportive of it.

As a pre-Christian faith deeply rooted in the ancient world and spread by Rome’s legions through Mithraism to the four corners of the pagan Roman Empire, Catharism represented an old and powerful belief system which refused to be suppressed by the sterile and often contradictory doctrines of Rome’s Christian Empire.

As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword:

“To mention only its roots in Mithraism, its links with the Gnostics, its theological dualism, its asceticism, the ritual of life and death as cosmic mysteries, the appeal of the troubadours, Arthurian legends and the cult of the Holy Grail, the passions aroused for and against witchcraft, the intimate connection between sex and religion — all these things are sufficient testimony to the deep rooted vitality of a stream of religious consciousness which cannot be superciliously dismissed by rationalists and moralists.”

Writing on the heels of World War II, and with Europe still in ruins from the rise of an irrational and immoral pagan faith called Nazism, Demant feared that such a vital apocalyptic belief system with its “robust religiousness” and commitment to a struggle against an evil material world was bound to rise again, as it had so many times in the past.

Yet, he might not have been surprised to know that his own “Protestant” faith, of which he was a senior officer as the Canon of St. Paul’s, had its own roots in the same heresy.

Now lost in the cross weaves of history, Britain’s version of the heresy represented a new and far more dangerous version of life-denying Catharism than was ever imagined by the Templars, Bernard of Clairvaux or Jacques DeMolay._________

A Grudge that lasted through the Centuries

Much has been speculated about the survival of the Templars following their dissolution in 1312. Today’s popular fiction about their life as a secret society rests not on any particular historical accounting but mainly on 18^th century Masonic myth-making and Sir Walter Scott’s early 19^th century stories that romanticized the Templar Knighthood.

The 18^th century men of the Enlightenment found great interest in mystical illumination through Masonic rituals. To these men, the newly industrializing West needed a new prophetic tradition to anchor it in history. Rediscovery of the ancient world, as a result of imperial interventions in the Near East and Egypt, spawned a renewed interest in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Cabbalism and their roots in a life-denying Gnostic creed. In fact, the very act of returning in victory to the origin of these Gnostic beliefs was in itself proof that they had been chosen to fulfill a cosmic cycle, as prophesied by the ancients.

Bestowing the Templars with occult mystical powers fit neatly into the early Romantic Movement and helped to promote Enlightenment thinking as part of God’s plan for mankind.

But the ravages of the Inquisition and the growing anger over a corrupt Roman Catholic Church were anything but myth to those living in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.

As a military order of religious warriors responsible only to the Pope, the Templars and their Cathar backers in France and England represented a powerful autonomous deep-state within medieval society. In many ways orthodox Christianity was no match for the life-denying, dualist doctrine of the Cathars. Catharism’s simple focus on the cosmic battle between a spiritual good and a material evil, and its promise of a time-ending apocalypse in which the material world would be consumed in fire, was an extreme seduction.

Driven to ground by a corrupted Roman Catholic Church and greedy French King, “the heresy” appeared to have been trampled out by the middle of the 14^th century. But with the onset of the Reformation in the early 16^th century, Rome’s authority faced a new challenge and as it spread to Ireland, the old Anglo/Norman warlords like the Fitzgeralds, would face their own apocalypse.

The Protestant Reformation represented a heresy that was at once secular and religious. Martin Luther and John Calvin confronted a Papacy that claimed a material domain, as well as a spiritual one.  In 1534, the English Parliament’s Act of Supremacy solved that problem by declaring Henry VIII “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England”, and in 1559, his daughter Queen Elizabeth I became the Church’s “Supreme Governor.”

Cathar territory remained fertile ground for insurrection against the church and that insurrection came with the Protestant Reformation. The French Calvinist Huguenot movement of the late 16^th century grew from exactly the same ground in France, where 200 years earlier, the Cathars had been brutally suppressed by the Papal Crusade.

In England, Queen Elizabeth I’s deep-state, comprised of the Earl of Leicester Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Philip Sydney, found common cause with the Huguenots and supported them with soldiers, guns and money. Their armies waged holy war against the Papacy across Europe and in Catholic Ireland where they targeted the last visible threat to Elizabeth’s supremacy at home, the Fitzgeralds.

16^th Century deep-state competition

The Fitzgerald family had drawn their original power from France and Italy in the 11^th century as the muscle for the Cathar-friendly Anglo/Norman royals. They had clearly performed their duties well enough to be rewarded by their feudal lords with lands and titles, but when they came to Ireland, their paths diverged. Gerald of Wales makes clear in his book that, by 1170, this family of Anglo/Norman Samurai was fed up with royal excess and wanted to strike out on their own under their own banner.

But three centuries of the Fitzgerald family’s immersion in Irish culture transformed them. Forsaking the English language, English customs and English law, the Anglo/Normans married the land and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”. Known as the “Old English” (Seanghaill), their ongoing intermarriage with Irish clans produced furious resentment from London, while the coming of the Protestant Reformation produced outright hatred.

Known for their love of Ireland and their willingness to renounce their loyalty to England, the Fitzgerald family were feared and hated as representatives of a Roman Catholic deep-state bent on reversing the Reformation. On the other hand, the Sidney Circle represented a very old deep-state of its own; that “stream of religious consciousness,” that had been suppressed for centuries, had risen in rebellion and was committed to ridding the world of evil.

The Sidney Circle and its primary operatives, Francis Walsingham, Edmund Spencer, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Dee, represented the militarized edge of Renaissance Neoplatonism, bent on establishing England not just as a global empire to rival Catholic Spain, but as a spiritual empire headed by Queen Elizabeth I that would cleanse the material world and restore its spiritual destiny.

The first step to that destiny was the conquest of Ireland. Inspired by the Hermetic-Cabbalist Neoplatonism of John Dee, the Sydney Circle would take on the Fitzgerald Earl of Desmond in a genocidal war of extermination. Viewed from the 21^st century, the idea of an all-or-nothing Manichean holy war between white Europeans seems bizarre.

But the feud between the European deep-state factions of the Counter-Reformation was a no-holds-barred fight to the death that embodied no less than the core principles of a cosmic war between light and dark.

In 1580, the prospect of this apocalyptic war of genocide coming to Ireland prompted the Holy See in Rome to send an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Fitzgeralds under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine.”

Dubbed by Richard Berleth, author of The Twilight Lords: Elizabeth I and the First Irish Holocaust as the “Twilight Lords”, the Fitzgeralds’ struggle against the Elizabethans and their Renaissance Neoplatonism offers a window into a thousand year old factional struggle of a European “deep-state” rooted in a Gnostic belief system. As allegorized in Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds satisfied the Manichean requirement for evil in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth and her Red Cross Templar knights represented Christian purity in the tradition of King Arthur and the Round Table.

It is of no small importance that the death of Gerald Fitzgerald, the last Earl of Desmond in 1583, marks the beginning of the British Empire. The eternal struggle of good against evil, the ancient Iranian war of light against dark by design required a victory over the darkness, and the Earl of Desmond filled that sacred role. As was the custom at the time, his decapitated head was sent to London where, legend has it, Queen Elizabeth sat with it for the morning before having it impaled on London Bridge.

With the incorporation of the British East India Company in 1600, Elizabeth’s victory would be spread around the world through imperial expansion. Elizabeth’s favorite courtier Walter Raleigh would sail to America and establish the colony that came to be named Virginia for the “Virgin Queen.”

The East India Company would establish trading posts from India to America and play a key role in the economic causes leading to the American Revolution.

It would make its founding families rich beyond dreams of avarice and make the English language universal and English culture the standard by which all other cultures would be judged. But the competition with Rome and the suspicion over its motives would never stop.

In the 400 plus years since Elizabeth I’s time, much of what was once deemed heretical by Church authorities has become commonplace. The Irish feudal society the Fitzgeralds died to preserve was already obsolete by Elizabethan times, and would have vanished with or without them.

The sexual practices of the “heretics”, forbidden by law as recently as a generation ago, have become accepted and even openly embraced. The perfection of the human race through magic and alchemy sought by John Dee and the Sidney Circle has been replaced by computer science, physics and biotechnology, but the final product of such perfection is far from clear or even desirable.

Unknown and often unseen, the bitter struggle for power within the Anglo/Norman deep-state has raged beneath the surface down through the centuries.

On November 22, 1963, Americans were shocked by the public execution of their President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the years since every manner of conspiracy theory has been advanced to explain what happened. But killing the only Roman Catholic President of the United States on the site of the first Masonic Temple in Dallas on the Masonic day of revenge for the destruction of the Knights Templar (November 22) bespeaks a ritual; and the ritual to which it bespeaks belongs to the Cathars and the De Clare family.

The discovery that George Bush was descended from Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow,” the same man who drew the Fitzgerald family en masse into Ireland in 1169 was one of those moments few may understand without access to the deep-state script.

If the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have been an act of retribution for an eight hundred year old vendetta, then we all must begin to view history from a much more complex perspective. In order to understand a “deep-state”, we must all begin to ask “deep-questions” and be willing to accept “deep-answers”, no matter where they lead.

But with some clues to our own past, with an understanding of the ancient cycles of revenge and retribution and a rudimentary knowledge of the ancient rituals of death and rebirth, we can move forward to enthusiastically greet whatever is about to come next in much better shape than we might have thought possible.

Copyright © 2016   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

COMMENTS  FROM OPEDNEWS                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Submitted by Bill Johnson Dec 16, 2016:  Playing games with the comments I see. Apparently a little truth bothers those who would otherwise misrepresent history.  Surely we can expect better than this???  I am a heretic.

Submitted by Paul and Liz Dec 13, 2016:  Is it really possible to move beyond the horrific stage of revenge and retribution that has trapped so many humans for millennia?

Submitted by Bill Johnson Dec 14, 2016: Again, a very interesting spin on history – even if one-sided. You neglected to mention why to this day there is a lasting historical dislike, disdain, contempt, and grudges against the Roman Catholic empire church leading to revenge carried out to this day.You failed to mention the seemingly endless tortures or murders the Roman Catholic killing machine engaged in all across Europe for centuries. We call it the Dark Ages today. “We will quote Catholic documents just as they were printed, so you can see the true face of this beast that slaughtered 75-100 million people over 1,200 years;” Millions of humans were tortured and murdered by “representatives”of the Roman Catholic empire church. In fact, that church tortured and killed in all corners of the world, even here in Florida their Jesuits were involved in killing thousands of Native Indians in their conquest of this new world.

So the backlash and revenge and reformation were a natural and much needed occurrence. And you seem to think everyone should just forgive and forget that bloody past? Even when it is our own families??? For you see, I am a living example of the Alta Vendita. My family and family history was caught up in all that inglorious past. In fact my entire homeland was excommunicated from the RC empire because of our choices.

This country (USA) was created by FreeMasons to escape the killing machinery of the Roman Catholic church. The United States of America exists as a place of refuge from the Catholic killing machinery. It was created as a safe haven from which to launch a counter war on that church hence separation of church and state along with religious freedom requirement. And yes, JFK, a Catholic, was taken out because of a history beyond his control. Who would allow a Catholic to run a Masonic refuge? The implementation of the Alta Vendita is the other way around- for a Mason to rule the Catholic empire from within. Success has been attained! Do unto others and it will be done unto them. And it has. Alta Vendita! So no, we will not forget and we do not forgive an evil institutional empire of conquest and profit and power. It is our work to bring it to a halt. That is no church of Jesus. Satan is more like it. Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriamNemo me impune lacessit

America, an Empire in Twilight Series

PART I: When America Became the Dark Force

PART II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant

PART III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire

PART IV: The End of Illusion

FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL

This excerpt from the Steiner lecture analyzed in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture alludes to why the strange Trump/Putin alliance may be its fulfillment

“When Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) reflected on the history of civilization, he envisioned a special role for Russia, because he considered Russia the country that could best embody the spirit of a new cultural epoch. In Russia, Anthroposophy developed beyond the mere study of an esoteric doctrine and its theory of knowledge. Anthroposophy sought to evaluate Russian and Soviet reality concretely, to interpret Russia’s historical development in the context of world history, and to become the basis of action for Russian cultural activities. Russian Anthroposophy is more than a variant of the Anthroposophical movement. Russia occupies a prominent place in the Anthroposophical conception of culture.

Steiner structured the history of civilzation in seven (post –Atlantean) periods: Indian, ancient Persia, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Roman, Central European, Slavic, and American. According to his scheme, humanity at the end of the fifth ,the central European period-that is, at the threshold of the end of the fifth, the Central European period-that is, at the threshold of the sixth period, the Slavic period. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch began in the first half of the fifteenth century among the Germanic peoples. It manifested itself through an increase in individualism and through a growing interest in the sciences and technology. Around the year 3500, this era of perception was to be succeeded by the sixth epoch, the epic of the “Spirit Self” the characteristics of the Slavic people were to prevail: a sense of community, selflessness, patience, and the ability to accept a higher truth. These qualities constitute the basis for the ’seed’ of the world spirit incarnation in the Russian people, according to Steiner, the broad Russian masses already carried in them the seed of the coming civilization. Steiner used the image of ’seed’ repeatedly to describe the state of Russia’s development, the embryonic, nuclear state of the East as opposed to the ‘hypertrophy’ of the West. The spirit of the Russian people was ‘young and fresh in it’s hopes’ and ‘yet to confront it’s task.’ This task, to suffuse all aspects of life with new meaning, would be realized only in the course of history. Steiner called the Russian a child, in whose very soul one could find the questions that must be answered if humanity was to master the future. From the Russian character traits Steiner derived the capability of holistic thinking. In the Russian way of thinking, as he saw it, two opposing concepts can hold sway simultaneously so that rationality was mysticism and mysticism is rationality. ‘The Russian does not have the slightest understanding of what Westerners call ‘reasonableness.’ He is accessible to what we term ‘revelation. Basically, he will accept and integrate into the content of his soul anything he owns to a kind of revelation.”

In Soloviev’s ideas Steiner saw the seed of the philosophy of the ‘Spirit Self’ of the sixth epoch, for here the religious and philosophical worldviews merged. Soloviev’s philosophy spoke the language of religion, while his religion strove a philosophical worldview.” According to Steiner, this was where the superiority of the Russian philosophy over the aging Western philosophy lay: it transcended the limits of reason and it built a basis for a new holistic understanding. In order to develop the capacities and to fulfill its mission, Steiner said, the Russian people needed contact with the West; the ‘female East’ should be impregnated by the ‘male West.’ Intellectuality and technology, the achievement and problem of the fifth epoch of civilization, had led the life force to stagnate in Europe. Meanwhile this life force was at work in Russia, but was so lacking in form that it could fall into chaos. That was why Steiner felt that Russia depended on a Western awareness of form and consciousness. ‘To imagine that the East, at its present state, would develop on its own would be comparable to the foolish hope of a woman who wanted to have a child without a man. In the past, Eastern Europe had proved its receptiveness to the West. Steiner pointed to the reception of the Byzantine religion in Russia. Thus the Slavic peoples showed that they were also capable of absorbing higher truths- that is, the spirit of the sixth epoch.”

Edgar Cayce’s 1945 prophecy also explains Russia’s similar role in the future of the West.

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516)
(image by The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.) License DMCA Details

Neoconservative pundits howled when Yale historian Paul Kennedy suggested in his 1987 study The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that America and its global Empire, like all empires before it, was in a process of decline. The disintegration of the Soviet Union just a few years later in 1991 seemed to undermine Kennedy’s thesis as the United States expanded its influence into the U.S.S.R’s former territories and moved on Moscow to bury the former communist economy. However, following the financial crash of 2008 and the chaos caused by Washington’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the illusion of American inevitability quickly vanished. Now, 30 years later, the idea that any empire facing unprecedented debt, political gridlock and military failure could somehow sustain itself purely on willpower and social media can only be described as delusional. Yet despite rising opposition to the costs and consequences at home and abroad, Washington’s demented imperialistsremain committed to Unipower dominance and are desperate to force the incoming Trump administration to obey its ghost.

Understanding the forces that drive Washington’s quest for empire may appear on the surface to be limited to money and power. But when it comes to the ultimate objectives of the so called Anglo/American “deep state” the foundations of today’s realities may be better explained by looking into the deep past.

The term Anglo/American itself bears within it a complex matrix of races, heterodox religious beliefs, families and family grudges that date back before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The army of Normans and mercenaries that gathered under William the Conqueror to invade England was drawn from across Europe but differed little from the population of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans that had already migrated there in previous centuries. The battle of Hastings established the nation of Britain as we know it today but what remains unappreciated is the degree to which those original Anglo/Norman warrior families continue to control decision-makingand remain at the epicenter of financial and political power nearly 1000 years later.

In its current expanded iteration consisting of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand; known as the “Five Eyes”, the Anglo/American “deep state” came to gain political hegemony over the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, although popularly known as the “Anglo/Saxon” nations, a more accurate description of the genetic legacy should read Anglo/Norman.

In 2005 when a historian in Wexford Ireland discovered that President George W. Bush was a descendent of the 12^th century Anglo/Norman Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow” it caused something of a commotion in the British press not to mention our own personal shock. I’d first heard the name Strongbow at the age of ten when my family-historian-aunt told me our branch of the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland with him. During the 1990s I’d written a novel about his influence on the family and here he was again staring out from the imperial White House of George W. Bush.

As Strongbow’s vassals and veterans of the conquest of Wales, the Fitzgeralds had done their share of the dirty work of empire building. After taking part in the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the family and their extended clans had become deeply entwined in Angevin family politics as part of King William I’s invasion force of South Wales. The marriage (arranged by Henry I) of the patriarch of the Fitzgerald family, Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor to Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys Ap Tewdwr (Tudor) the last king of the Britons, cemented the Fitzgeralds to an ancient British dynasty of kings and the Arthurian legends surrounding them. But our discovery of an old book titled Strongbow’s Conquest of Ireland forced us to realize that the standard historical accounts we were accustomed to have never included the deeper inside forces at work that made a true understanding of the past, possible.

The first Crusade to Jerusalem in 1099 came at a time of deep social unrest in Europe. Muslims occupied Portugal, Spain, Sicily and Southern Italy. Pagans warred with Christian Crusaders throughout Eastern Europe. Pope Urban II’s call for a Crusade to the holy land began a movement that would last until the failed Crusade of the Spanish Armada against Elizabeth I’s English heretics in 1588. Unlike most dry, bowdlerized accounts of the origins of British history, Strongbow’s Conquest offered up a personal account by a family prelate named Gerald de Barry (Gerald of Wales). Gerald was also the personal tutor to the future Angevin King John and offered plenty of insight into dealing with Henry II’s internecine warfare with and between his three sons. For us, the family feuds surrounding the conquest of Ireland detailed by Gerald of Wales personalized our understanding of an historical event and the beginnings of British history. Now with the Bush connection to Strongbow came a chance to take those family feuds and track them a thousand years into the future.

Ever since John Fitzgerald Kennedy, tracing a presidential candidate’s lineage to Ireland is a common pastime. But the Guardian’s description of Strongbow as “a desperate land-grabbing warlord whose calamitous foreign adventure led to the suffering of generations” was a sadly deficient twist on what had really happened. Strongbow was an Anglo-Norman Earl with a long Viking lineage from one of the most powerful Norman/French families in 12^th century England. His grandfather Gilbert and great uncle Roger were closely affiliated with William the conqueror’s son King William Rufus and were among the few intimates present at his mysterious murder by Walter Tyrell in the New Forest in 1100. The de Clare brothers were never implicated in Rufus’s death but along with a select handful of Norman barons gained great wealth and prominence from backing the rise of his successor, Henry I.

Evidence of heretical cult practices swirls around the 11^th century court of William Rufus and his ruling nobles. William Rufus regarded himself as divine, was an avowed pagan, openly homosexual and fiercely anti-Christian. He surrounded himself with long haired, clean shaven “effeminati”, compared himself to Alexander the Great and acted as a patron to the Troubadours. The conquest of Wales brought him into contact with a Prince of Dyfed named Bledri, author of the original Grail romances who remained friendly to William Rufus throughout the wars against the Welsh. Norman mercenaries who’d fought Muslims in southern Italy were no strangers to dualist life-denying heresies and neither were the courts of France from where the new English royalty drew its political base.

The threat to the Roman Church by these heresies was not a simple challenge. As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword, “It was in fact a rival religion and almost succeeded in being a counter-Church with its own rival and ritual system.”

By 1170 the struggle for power within that system extended to Strongbow’s challenge to the authority of King Henry II’s House of Anjou and his threat to set himself up as a rival Norman King of Ireland. Upon his death in 1176 the challenge extended to the Fitzgerald antecedents of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. At the behest of Strongbow a number of Fitzgerald vassals married directly into the de Clare family line shortly after coming to Ireland and to the horror of the Angevin royal court, proceeded to establish themselves as a competing dynasty. With political and military independence and with religious connections to Rome, the Fitzgerald’s ambitions were viewed from London as dangerous from the very beginning and as the medieval Catholic Church evolved that danger would grow in bitter hatred.

Strongbow had been a Crusader, served in the Holy Land and was known to be a generous supporter of both the Knights Hospitaller and the infamous Knights Templar, the warrior monks for whom the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux penned De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) thereby redefining the very nature of murder when done in the name of Christ.

The early Catholic Church was riven with multiple dualist heresies left over from the conversion of the Roman Empire from pagan to Christian. Much has been romanticized in the past decades about the Knights Templar and their supposed dedication to the divine feminine as represented by the Holy Grail. Credited with magical powers of prophecy and divination, popular mythology such as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code has them guarding the secrets of the Messianic Grail lineage, i.e. the royal descendants of the House of David from the marriage of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.

Other supposed Templar secrets link them to life-denying Gnostic cults like the Paulicians, Manicheansand Cathars. But less has been said about the Templar’s central role as bankers to Europe’s royalty and their practice of financing wars between Europe’s rival kings and princes.

The Templar Knighthood walked a fine line between two worlds in their role as bankers and “warrior monks” and often failed to maintain a balance between them. The Knights Templar’s circular “Temple” in the very center of the city of London still echoes their primary military and financial role as a prototype multinational bank opening trade routes between Europe and the Middle East. But their internecine political rivalries with the other Christian knighthoods, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights and their long string of military defeats causing them to lose Jerusalem, precipitated their downfall.

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Templars, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets.

Instead of capping a feud between the rival knighthoods and their benefactors, the dissolution of the Templars and the subsequent transfer of their vast assets to the Hospitallers by Pope Clement in 1312 would create an anti-Catholic firestorm. The repercussions from November 22, 1307 would set the stage for the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Britain’s empire and the destruction of the competing dynasties, especially the Fitzgeralds.

Join us for the finale of this saga as we explain how this hatred for Catholic Rome would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep state. This conflict would in turn lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church, whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would finally come to fruition in the Anglo/Norman America of the present day.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould.