orient, joined to those of the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish doctrines, which new Platonists had equally adopted in the Occident." And what he's saying here is that the Gnostics developed their own version of Nimrod's religion, but they brought it into the New Testament setting, the New Testament time period, and they took the passages of the New Testament and tried to spiritualize them away. Now, the reason that I would be choosing to trace this history, and this history is easy to go document for yourself, but I wanted to start here because we're going to look at a group of knights that get drawn into this environment of Gnosticism and trace a little bit of their history. One branch of Gnosticism that we're going to look at here was a religious order that was established in 1118 AD in Jerusalem by a group of French knights that were led by Hugues de Payens of Champagne, now Champagne, France. Their mission, this knight, their purpose for existence was that they were, this was during the time period of the Crusades, and they would bring pilgrims from Europe to the Holy Land to make pilgrimages to the Holy Place, and they would also bring knights and warriors over there, and they just provided the means of transportation to and from the Holy Land, and Baldwin II, the king of Jerusalem, gave these knights quarters in his palace, which was located on the site of Solomon's Temple, and because that became their headquarters initially, these knights from France, with their headquarters on Solomon's Temple site, became known as the Knights of the Temple or the Knights of the Templar. Their order grew rapidly, and in 1128, just ten years after they started, they came into the protection of the Pope, so they became a branch of Catholicism, and they were receiving gifts and patronage for bringing people back and forth from Europe to the Holy Land, and they began to become very, very wealthy. They, as the Holy Wars continued, they moved in 1187 to Acre, and then in 1291, they moved to Cyprus, but by the time 1291 came, and they had moved all the way to Cyprus, they were still known as the Knights of the Templar. They had developed a philosophy, which Albert Pike addresses on page 819 and 820, and other historians address, and this is what their watchword was.