Scott Wolter's New Show Claims the Templars Sought the Secrets of Atlantis

​Scott Wolter, the former host of ​America Unearthed on H2 and the Travel Channel and Pirate Treasure of the Knights Templar on the History Channel, has a new streaming series on Gaia that takes Wolter’s previous claims to their illogical conclusion. Mysteries of the Knights Templar, which Wolter co-hosts with so-called “Templar Grandmaster” and esoteric researcher Timothy Hogan, claims that the Knights Templar were secret adepts of Atlantis and devoted their mission to seeking out preserved elements of Atlantean wisdom from before the Noachian deluge. 

Scott Wolter (left) and Timothy Hogan in "Mysteries of the Knights Templar" (Gaia TV)

​“The Templar order was founded because there was a knowledge that there had been a prediluvian civilization,” Hogan told Wolter in the trailer for the premiere episode, devoted wholly to Atlantis, “and that it had collapsed during a massive cataclysm. And not only that, but the Mayans and other Nahuatl cultures, they all had a myth that they had come from a previous civilization that had been destroyed by cataclysm.”
 
“So, what I’m hearing you say,” Wolter replied, “is that Atlantis was not necessarily a place that sunk into the ocean. It was a high culture.”
 
“Yeah, it was more like a worldwide network. The Templars understood that they needed to track down the pockets of survival of the knowledge, the technology, the philosophies that had been preserved from this prediluvian civilization,” Hogan said.
 
The two men discussed Atlantis in a room decorated with Knights Templar flags similar to those sold on Amazon.com and at other retailers. The flag, featuring a red cross pattée atop black and white bars, is a modern design revising the late version of the baucent, or Templar war flag, to move the cross to the center instead of the white field, as was done in Masonic Templarism.
 
If the claims about Atlantis sound familiar, there is a good reason. Hogan has lifted his ideas straight from Brasseur de Bourbourg, the nineteenth century French cleric who claimed that New World peoples preserved the knowledge of Atlantis, and from Eugène Beauvois, the Belle Epoque French hyperdiffusionist writer who posited that the Templars had traveled to Central America. If I were a betting man, I’d wager they derived some these ideas more directly from Beauvois’s intellectual heir, the Nazi collaborator Jacques de Mahieu, a diffusionist writer who rehashed Beauvois’s ideas and is frequently cited in Scott Wolter’s self-published books.
 
We can, of course, see also the influence of Graham Hancock in the denial of the literal truth of the Atlantis legend’s reference to a sunken continent in favor of a more diffuse “network” of civilization similar to the one described in Hancock’s books.
 
The idea of seeking out wisdom preserved from before the Flood is an old one, going back to the Mesopotamians, who told of how the survivors of the Flood in Xisuthrus’ Ark recovered tablets of wisdom buried before the Flood in order to restart civilization. This story remained current into the Middle Ages when it became part of the Arabic legend of the restarting of civilization in Egypt after the Flood, a story that was adapted into esoteric and occult works of Early Modern Europe, the foundational texts for contemporary esoteric history and “secret” revelations. Such stories have been linked to Atlantis and its secret wisdom at least since the flat earth believer Cosmas Indicopleustes linked Atlantis to the destroyed antediluvian civilization of the Nephilim, as well as to the story of Xisuthrus, in the sixth century CE (Christian Topography 12).
 
In short, Mysteries of the Knights Templar is recycling old material and treating long-debunked ideas as revelations.