About Stephen
Stephen Dafoe is a Canadian journalist and the author of several books on the Knights Templar and Freemasonry.
Dafoe was born in Belleville, Ontario in 1962 and spent the first 40 years of his life in that province. He moved to Alberta in November of 2002 and now resides in Morinville, a community just north of Edmonton. Here he runs an online daily news publication and is currently serving a second term as a town councillor.
A decade of historical books
Dafoe is perhaps best known for the two speculative history books he co-wrote with Alan Butler in the late 1990s. These books were The Warriors and the Bankers, due to be republished by Lewis Masonic in 2020 and
The Knights Templar Revealed, published by Constable and Robinson in 2006.
Stephen stepped away from the speculative style of his earlier books to write three straightforward historical books for Lewis Masonic: Nobly Born: An Illustrated History of the Knights Templar, The Compasses and the Cross: A History of Masonic Templarism, and An Illustrated History of the Knights Hospitaller. All three of these books are scheduled to be released in paperback form in 2020.
Dafoe’s presence as an author and the owner of TemparHistory.com led to his appearing on three television documentaries: A&E’s Sacred Societies, MSNBC’s In Search of Satan, and The Prince and the Grail, which ran on Canada’s Vision TV.
Writing of a different sort and a return to writing books
After writing a book each year for roughly a decade, Dafoe started Morinville News, a community newspaper in Western Canada, which he has run for the past 10 years.
His most recent book is a stark departure from his previous works. Getting Shitfaced & Living To Write About It is a humorous collection of classic and original cocktail recipes as well as scotch and whiskey history and trivia. Originally written in the summer of 2019 as a gag gift for friends, requests for the book prompted the expansion of the original book for a wider audience.
He is currently working on the second edition of the book he is most proud of: Morgan: The Scandal That Shook Freemasonry, a 500-page examination of the abduction and probable murder of William Morgan by Freemasons. Set 50 years after the American Declaration of Independence, the story of the disappearance of William Morgan and the five years of trials that sought to discover what became of him is told in a narrative style, supported by a wealth of endnotes and appendices reprinting the primary sources from which Dafoe was able to retrace historical steps and uncover a 183-year-old cold case.