The arrival of the knights Templar

 The Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem was founded in 1099, shortly after the First Crusade. Less than fifty years later they established their headquarters at the Priory in Clerkenwell, the remains of which are now a museum. Across town, the Knights Templar established a base in High Holborn, in a Roman temple once revered by Hugues de Payens. The Knights Templar outgrew their headquarters and built Temple Church between Fleet Street and the River Thames, a round church based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In keeping with their power elsewhere in Europe, the Order installed the Master of Temple Church in Parliament, thus ensuring that their powerful occult views would become part of the nation’s legislature. The land between Fleet Street and the Thames was owned by the Knights Templar and divided into Outer Temple and Middle Temple, with Temple Church serving as Inner Temple. Each existed above the covered-up River Fleet and, in occult tradition, an underground stream provides divine augmentation to rituals and spiritual attainment. Come the middle of the 19
the century the tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, began to emerge. The gory urban myth appears to be without historical merit, causing some to speculate that the legend of a serial killer in the vicinity of the Templar precinct may be a memory of former ritual sacrifices. Today a dragon guards the entrance to Temple Bar and reminds one of the esoteric traditions once practiced
there.Despite the recent Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, the legend of Sweeny Todd has largely been superseded by one that took place half a century later, in 1888, when a serial killer by the name of Jack the Ripper murdered five women, forming a 5-sided pentagram in the process and removing their organs along the way, including, in some instances, their hearts. Ritual killings continue in London, and the river Thames continues to be the depository for the ritual remains of victims. In recent years the analysis of limbless torsos discovered in the Thames has prompted authorities to suspect ritual murder and superstition as the reason for the crimes. This is not a new tradition in London. The nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’, is said by English Myths and Legends author Henry Bett to be the folk memory of the ancient practice of human sacrifice at the building of a bridge.