The Head of God: The Lost Treasure of the Templars

Dust jacket notes: "At dawn on Friday 13th October 1307, under orders from King Philip Le Bel, armed men broke into the properties of the Knights Templar across the whole of France and arrested every Templar they could find. The knights were tortured and many of them burnt to death as heretics; the Order was dissolved, and the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the grandest of the crusading orders of warrior-knights, disappear from mainstream historical record. But it is clear that some of the knights escaped, along with their treasure and their records. Most tantalisingly, all sign of a series of 'heads', whose existence is widely testified in the records of the Inquisition, where they are described as 'idols', disappeared with them; in particular one that was clearly of greatest importance to the Templars, a head known as Baphomet ('Father of Wisdom'). This intriguing historical footnote provides the starting point for Keith Laidler's extraordinary quest through Europe's history to discover the truth about the Templar heads and their significance. His investigations take him back to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Israel of Samson, David, Solomon and Jesus himself, then on to the medieval Cathar heretics, tracing a hidden tradition of the worship of the severed head to the heyday of the Templars. Laidler also follows the subsequent travels of Baphomet to its eventual resting place beneath a small chapel outside Rosslyn Castle in the West of Scotland, where it lies to this day, the conclusion of the story of his stunning identification of the Baphomet as the embalmed head of Jesus Christ, the very 'head of God'. Laidler's quest takes him into the heart of many of history's most fascinating mysteries, the true identities of Moses and Joseph, the Scottish Stone of Destiny (otherwise known as the Stone of Scone), the Holy Grail and the religion of the Druids...."