Feast · 18 March
Jacques de Molay
Address · Square du Vert-Galant, 75001 Paris
Metro · Pont Neuf (7)
Today · Free access. Square du Vert-Galant, free access.
The story
In the Middle Ages, the western tip of the Île de la Cité was made up of small separate islets, including the Île aux Juifs. It was there, on 18 March 1314, that Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, and Geoffroy de Charnay, preceptor of Normandy, were burned alive. That same day, on the parvis of Notre-Dame, the judges had sentenced them to life imprisonment for heresy; as the two men then proclaimed their innocence and denounced a conspiracy by Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V, they were deemed relapsed heretics and sent to the stake that very evening. The legend of a curse laid on the king and the pope has never been verified.
The islets were joined to the Île de la Cité during the construction of the Pont Neuf, completed in 1606. The land, later occupied by baths and then by a café-concert swept away by the flood of 1879, was bought by the City in 1884 and became the square du Vert-Galant, named after the nickname of Henri IV, whose equestrian statue, recast by Lemot in 1818, overlooks the site.
Thelema's link with Molay runs through the Gnostic Mass, Liber XV, written by Crowley in Moscow in 1913 for the O.T.O. and its Church, the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. In the Collect of the Saints, Molay appears under the Latin name Jacobus Burgundus Molensis, “the Martyr”, in all published versions. The O.T.O., whose name translates as Order of the Templars of the East, placed itself symbolically in the Templar line; Crowley took in it the name Baphomet, the idol that the trials of 1307-1314 attributed to the Templars. The eleventh collect, “The End”, is a prayer for those whose life has ended, that they may accomplish their true will.
A plaque commemorating the execution of 1314 is placed on the site of the former islet, at the entrance to the square, below the Pont Neuf and the statue of Henri IV. The square, of about 1,640 square metres, planted with willows, horse chestnuts and a ginkgo, is sometimes submerged when the Seine floods. Every 18 March, the map suggests reading the eleventh collect there and laying flowers.