The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar Read online

  While any explorer or treasure seeker could have stumbled across such a cache, only Saunière had access to the altar stone and the genealogies and coded tombstone that directed him to the treasure—a treasure possibly owned by Zion and by the Merovingian king Dagobert II. The Frankish Merovingians were part of the huge barbarian wave that was being pushed westward by the Huns from Central Asia. Their history and roots are shrouded in legend. The Merovingian kings have their own telling of the story of their descent from King Clodio. After the king had impregnated his queen, she went swimming in the ocean. There she came upon a sea creature, who impregnated her a second time. The sea creature was a “Quinotaur”; of such a beast we have no description.14 To the queen a child was born, who carried the blood of kings and the blood of a sea beast. He was named Merovee, which, like the name Mary, has connotations related to the sea.

  The legend could be a literary device to explain the intermingling of two great powers. Just as Jesus was the descendant of the priest Aaron and the king David, Merovee, too, had great and powerful ancestors—one a king, who in Europe before the French Revolution would typically claim to rule by divine right, and the other a supernatural creature. As a result of this unusual bloodline, the Merovingians claimed the ability to heal by the “laying on of hands,” a power that the Essenes were reputed to command, as did Jesus, whose healing is recorded in the Gospels. Merovingians also believed that their power resided in their hair, which could never be cut. In the case of Samson, too, his hair was the source of his power. When the once long-haired Spartans defeated the Argives in 564 B.C., they forced the Argives to cut their hair in recognition of the fact that the Argives no longer had a claim to the Peloponnesos. Hair also featured significantly for James, the brother of Jesus, who was regarded as holy by Eusebius because “no razor touched his head.” We remember also that the words caesar and czar are derived from the German for “kaiser,” meaning crown of hair. The Merovingians, then, were like Jesus, priest-kings with both supernatural ability and a royal blood-line stemming from earthly kings.

  The grandson of Merovee, the half-man, half-fish founder of the dynasty, was Clovis, the conqueror of the Visigoths.15 The comparison with Jesus holds no further coincidence with this brutal ruler. He did not lack in imagination as he plotted to consolidate his role as king of France. He told the son of another king, Sigibert, to murder his father, which the son, Cholderic, did. Cholderic then showed Clovis a chest of gold coins he had taken from his father. While Cholderic bent over the chest, Clovis split his head with an ax. Another minor king was beheaded alongside his son for challenging Clovis.

  History tells us that Clovis converted to Catholicism to appease his wife, but a more likely reason was that the diabolical Clovis needed a strong ally and the Roman Church proved such a powerful friend and provided justification for attacking the neighboring Visigoths. Marriage had given him Burgundy. Once an Arian, he stated, “It grieves me that these Arians should hold a part of Gaul.” 16 With support, he soon extended France to its historical limits. After the death of Clovis his kingdom was again divided, among his four sons.

  The history of the Merovingians is one of murder and treachery. Grandsons of Clovis continued their rule by murder, and Merovingian women were not to be outdone by their men in terms of cruelty. Chilperic murdered his first wife to marry a second. Fredegund, the mistress, even tried to kill her own daughter, Rigunth, who constantly irritated her.17 The dowager queen Clotild was given a choice, to have her grandsons’ hair cut off or to have them killed. She responded that if their hair was cut off, they could not rule, so they might as well be killed.

  Later, rule passed down to Dagobert II, the king mentioned on the gravestone at Rennes-le-Chateau. As we recall, he married a Celtic princess, and after her death the Visigothic princess Giselle in Rennes-le-Chateau. The brief record of Dagobert’s life tells us that he amassed a large fortune, which aided his efforts to take over the rule of most of France.18 His inheritance of the Visigothic treasure hoard may have been the basis of this war chest, but his rule did not last forever. On a hunting trip near his northern capital at Stenay, he was stabbed with a lance. The area surrounding Stenay is known as Lorraine, and a later duke of Lorraine became the grandfather of Godfrey of Bouillon, who would be the conqueror and king of Jerusalem.

  Later Merovingian kings lost their drive, and as the line lost control, power was seized by the mayors of the palace, regents of the kingdom. Instead of remaining pledged to the cause of the Merovingian line, as the Roman Church had done under Clovis, the Church threw its support behind Charlemagne. The rule of the Merovingians came to an end. There was one heir, Sigisbert IV, who survived the hunting trip to Stenay. He inherited the Merovingian throne (in name) after being rescued from the enemies of his father. It is said that he was brought back to safety at Rennes-le-Chateau. With no chance of taking the crown, Sigisbert was given the title of count of Reddis, duke of Razes. He was not the last of the Merovingian kings, but he was a direct descendant. Sigisbert’s progeny took the surname Plantard, which means “ardently flowering shoot.”19 Sigisbert himself became the scion of the Merovingian dynasty, as the Levis were the scions of the Davidic kingship.

  One branch of the vine descended through Bera VI. Bera came to be called the “Architect,” a name that Freemasons regarded highly. Northern families still went out of their way to marry into the Merovingian line despite the fact that power was no longer theirs. Intermarriage between the house of Lorraine and the Merovingian heirs made sure that Godfrey of Bouillon’s veins flowed together with the sacred bloodline of the French kings. It was the Merovingian heirs who conquered Jerusalem. Had they a secret agenda?

  One hypothesis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail is that the Merovingian dynasty was a continuation of the Davidic line, which flowed through the family of Jesus or even through Jesus himself. The heirs of Jesus living in France intermarried with the Visigoths. Later ruling families of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties would make it a point to marry into the families of the heirs of Jesus. Marie de Negri D’Ables was one of the heirs in the Davidic line. Saunière’s secret might have been much more significant to the world than simply the booty of looted Rome and Jerusalem or other ancient caches of Visigothic treasures. The secret may have been that Jesus’ heirs were alive and well and ready to assume power when the time was auspicious.

  Chapter 10

  THE CONNECTING THREAD

  Our English word clue comes from a much older word, clewe, meaning a ball of thread. In the myths of the Greeks, children were carried off each year to Crete, where the evil king Minos had them sacrificed to a monstrous creature, half man and half bull, called the Minotaur. The Minotaur lived underground in a maze of passageways called the Labyrinth. The children, seven boys and seven girls each year, were thrown into the maze, and the Minotaur would kill and devour them. The Greek hero Theseus asked that he be sent to Crete as part of the yearly offering.

  In Crete Theseus attracted the eye of the daughter of the king, who fell in love with him. Her love led Ariadne, the princess, to devise a plan to free Theseus from death. She supplied him with a ball of thread, which he could unwind as he traveled through the maze in order to find his way back out.1 The word took on a new meaning when the “clewe” provided the “clue” to solving the mystery of the Labyrinth. In the mystery of Oak Island it is a long thread unwinding through a labyrinth of history that we must follow to find the source of the treasure hidden in the Money Pit. The trail starts in the Jerusalem of Solomon and David.

  David and Solomon

  Undeniably one of the holiest places in the world, Jerusalem is claimed as the center and birthplace of three distinctly different religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Together these religions encompass the majority of the population of the planet—billions of people believe Jerusalem is their cradle. Ironically, this holy city started as a pagan site of worship before these major world religions laid claim to it. The area surrounding Jerusalem had been
home to the Canaanites and other peoples who might have settled the area from the sea.2 The Canaanite religion included many gods—their god of prosperity, Salem, was worshiped in Jerusalem.

  David, king of one of Israel’s twelve tribes, had understood that by having one fortified city as a base he could unite the twelve tribes into a nation. He chose Jerusalem to be that unifying capital.3 The young king was experienced in war, having learned the art of war as an ally to enemies of Israel called the Philistines. He understood that the siege of an established, walled fortress like Jerusalem could take years, but through spies he discovered that the water supply of the city came from a spring called Gihon. The designers of the city had planned ahead for a siege that might hinder their ability to obtain water from outside wells. They built a large tunnel underneath the city and connected it to a vertical well. David used their strategy against them and sent his men through the underground water tunnel and up the well shaft. The city surrendered.4

  David then had himself anointed king of Israel. He was the savior of his people; he was the messiah. The Hebrew people called him the “Shepherd.” The title was not descriptive, since David was a warrior and a king, but it had been a custom from as far back as the time of the Sumerians to designate kings as “shepherds.”5 God, too, was a shepherd, and Christians pray to Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

  Monotheistic beliefs were just starting to take precedence over religions with literally hundreds of gods. David was part of the trend; he tried to push his own flock in this direction and to wean them from such customs as idol worship, which was characteristic of premonotheistic religion, and having more than one wife. For himself, he did not wish to change too fast. He kept many wives.6 His most important wife was Bathsheba, a Jebusite woman, to whom a son was born. The relationship started as an adulterous affair. David promised Bethsheba that her son would rule over the sons whom David had fathered earlier, with his other wives. They named their son “Solomon.” Standard translation tells us the name means “peace,” but a truer rendering is “Sun God of On.”I Worship was not standardized, as it is now and such sanitized versions of the names of religious figures, with little reference to their more pagan forms of worship, would come much later.

  With such a great importance placed on bloodline and genealogy, it is odd that the son in whom David placed the kingship of the Israelite people was half Jewish and half Jebusite. The Jebusites were of the groups of peoples that had started settling the area hundreds of years before as invaders. These “sea peoples,” as Egyptian texts call them, included tribes like the Shardan and the Peleset. “Peleset” became corrupted as “Philistine”; the Jebusites were a related subset of this larger family of sea kings. The invading sea kings were the downfall of the Hittite Empire, one of the strongest in the region. They might have brought down Egypt, too, if the pharaohs had not wisely hired them as mercenaries.7

  The bloodline of Solomon, therefore, was a combination of the king-ship line of the Hebrews and of another strain extending from a people that came by sea. The bloodline of Jesus was derived from the priestly caste of Aaron and the kingship caste of David. The quality of a priest was often determined by his ability to perform magic. The priest-kings from the east who visited the birthplace of Jesus were called “magi,” since magic was indeed the priestly art. Similarly, the heirs of the blood-line of the Merovingian dynasty were born after a queen was first impregnated by the king and then by a mysterious creature from the sea—an “other world” father and an earthly father.

  Members of the Blair Syndicate circa 1909, including a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt (third from right).

  Cross section of hole originally drilled in 1845. During this drilling several platforms of wood and metal were hit before striking what they thought to be a treasure trove. (Photo by Terry Sora)

  Memorial to Prince Henry, first Sinclair of Orkney. (Photo by Terry Sora)

  Oak Island, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.

  Inscription found in Westford, MA. The chalk-filled grooves reveal Gunn Clan heraldry. (Photo by Terry Sora)

  Replica of an inscribed stone found at ninety feet that allegedly tells of a treasure buried forty feet below. The original stone, once a part of John Smith’s fireplace, has disappeared. (Photo by Terry Sora)

  David’s energies were spent in planning a great temple as befitting the center of the Hebrew world, but it would be left to Solomon to carry out the plan. A Jebusite farmer owned the land surrounding the sacred site, which was a rock called Moriah. With the god Salem already deposed by the Canaanite god El, a more supreme being, the Hebrew people now accepted El as their own. El had once been a “bull god” that the sea peoples had adopted from contacts across the Mediterranean. At this point El simply became the Father God.8 The sacred premises of Salem—Moriah—was sold by the farmer to the Jews and it, too, underwent a name change. It became Zion.

  Modern Freemasons make the claim that it was Solomon who was instrumental in starting the traditions of their craft.9 The temple was not the first major work of the ancients, and highly developed technicians were needed to create such large buildings. These technicians were usually found in specialized guilds. The Hebrew herding peoples had no tradition of constructing much more than tents; they had always been a nomadic people. They had to consult with those who had greater ability and experience in architecture. Solomon consulted the Canaanite king Hiram. In Masonic lore, much of which was invented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Masonry took a decidedly occult turn, Hiram is regarded as the master builder. In reality, Hiram had master technicians at his command.

  Hiram instructed Solomon to send thirty thousand workers to learn from Phoenician craftsmen. Hiram took on the role of developer as well and funded the work that soon employed one hundred eighty thousand laborers. In turn, Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns. The temple grew to become a massive structure whose facade opened to face the rising sun in the east. This vestibule received the early light, just as structures from Ireland to Asia were so aligned to receive the first rays of the sun. History and religion conceal the importance of such structures largely because their functions are not understood completely.10 From Sumerian times onward, the learned men who were architects believed that the heavens could and should be replicated on Earth in the form of such monumental structures. From Sumeria to Stonehenge, monuments and complete cities were built and organized with such a master plan in mind, representing their highest amalgamation of religion and science. Later “modern” religion came to feel threatened by this science, which was once considered a function of another religion or, worse, “magic.” The desire of the master builders, the architects, to replicate heaven on Earth is manifest in the Masonic statement “As above, so below.”11 This undercurrent of science that was forced to remain secret to avoid the wrath of organized religion existed throughout the medieval age.

  The Christian cathedral at Chartres is one of the most important monuments to pagan science and to God. It actually measures the date of the summer solstice by strategically placed flagstones that receive the sunlight on that date. One mystery of Chartres is that it was not dedicated to the Virgin Mary but to Mary Magdalene.12 Both had been given the ambiguous title “Notre Dame,” meaning “Our Lady.” But they had different meanings to their followers.

  When the Christian religion was imposed on the Celtic people, the Church had to overcome the goddess worship that prevailed from India to Ireland. In place of the goddess, they tried to substitute the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of Jesus, but she was not the same as the pagan goddess. The pagan goddess had three aspects, that of maiden (virginity), mother (fertility), and crone (death). She was at once her own trinity, who brought both life and death.13 This goddess was remembered as Isis, among other names, and her symbol was the dove, as was the symbol of Mary Magdalene, the Cathari, and Saint John the Baptist. The “underground stream,” the secret celestial knowledge, was also preserved from ancient religion. Pa
rt of this secret knowledge was an understanding of the universe. The Masonic adage “As above, so below” exemplifies the job of the mason to create on Earth a representation of heaven.

  This body of knowledge of the celestial world helped create a structure where the sun could penetrate the darkest recesses on a sacred day of the year. Such knowledge was used in structures from prehistoric New Grange and Stonehenge to Jerusalem and Chartres. The original master builder, Hiram in Masonic lore, built the Temple of Solomon according to this celestial outline. On the north, west, and south, auxiliary temples were built around an area called the Ulam. Entering through the facade, one would first reach the nave, sixty feet in length. The main hall was called the Hekal. At the western extreme was the Debir. The Debir was the Holy of the Holies, a perfect thirty-foot cube. Only the privileged could enter, and the way was barred with chains of gold. The Ark of the Covenant holding the Ten Commandments was housed there.14

  Solomon did not leave anything to chance. In his temple concessions were made to pagan gods and goddesses just in case his own god let him down. He believed in the Supreme God, El (or Jehovah), but at the same time there were other gods and goddesses to appease. The Tyrian sun god Melek (Moloch of the Bible), the goddess of Sidon named Astarte, and the moon goddess Sin (who became male and the source of the word “Sinai”) were all included. Solomon built another temple to Chamos, the idol of Moab, and two temples to the great mother goddesses.15