Turning the Templar Key, Robert Lomas. Lewis Masonic, paperback, 2020. ISBN: 159233279X

When I was first initiated into Freemasonry way back in April 1998, I was presented with a gift by my main proposer, that gift was a book called The Hiram Key, and it was co-authored by Dr Robert Lomas. Fast forward a few years and I met Dr Lomas, who is himself a Freemason, at a talk I was giving to a Welsh lodge, and what struck me was that he was a fountain of esoteric knowledge, and that many people can learn from this knowledge. I was sent the new paperback edition of Turning the Templar Key just before Christmas, and being asked to review it, got stuck into it over the holiday period.

The book was first published in 2007 and can be seen as a book of two parts; the first part examines the origin of the Masonic Order of the Knights Templar, and searches for connections to the medieval Knights Templar Order. In doing so, Lomas takes us on an esoteric journey, looking at numerous rituals, including Richard Carlile and his Masonic exposé, a radical and writer, who I also examined in my disguised Masonic biography of him entitled Rediscovered Rituals of English Freemasonry, which came out last year with Lewis Masonic (an interesting connection here is that Dr Lomas wrote the foreword). Another set of rituals Lomas examines in his search for the essence of Templar Masonry is the Early Grand Rite, a rite with a Scottish connection that also explored a Templar pathway.

Lomas continues his search in part one, then springs on the reader new questions in part 2, which as Robert informed me, was a reworked part of another earlier work entitled Uriel’s Machine, examining the Goddesses of early religious practices. The two parts, which both blend together and assist in answering the question, make for compelling reading, and are presented in a large chunky work of nearly 400 pages that you won’t be able to put down.