The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar

by Steven Sora

  The painting itself depicts three shepherds and a shepherdess looking at an ancient tomb. Two of the shepherds have their fingers extended, pointing to part of the tomb with the message “Et in Arcadia ego.” The shepherdess could be Mary Magdalene (as she was the wife of the shepherd Jesus). Mary showed the apostles the tomb after discovering Jesus was not there. Now in Poussin, she is saying, he is here, and he is dead (il est mort). That specific tomb is six miles from Rennes-le-Chateau, and it held further secret codes and clues to the mystery of Father Saunière.28 In 1448, when d’Anjou established his Order of the Crescent, the revival of Order of the Ship and the Double Crescent, William Sinclair was in the early stages of building Roslin and starting the construction at Oak Island. Related by marriage, brought together by the secret societies in which they both participated, united by a religion under siege, it is tempting to speculate that there might have been correspondence from William Sinclair to d’Anjou, telling him of the land the natives call “Acadie.” It is also tempting to speculate that the reports of Sinclair’s western explorations found their way to another man in the service of d’Anjou, young Christopher Columbus. And it is tempting to read more significance into another coincidence.

  René d’Anjou’s daughter, Iolande de Bar, had taken over as grand master of the Prieuré de Sion after her father. She hired Georges Antoine Vespucci as tutor to her son. Another Vespucci, Amerigo, gave his name to the map of the “discovery” of America, brought back by Columbus. Iolande’s son was also named René, and he inherited several titles, including duke of Lorraine. The younger duke, as well as the Vespucci family, were patrons to both Leonardo da Vinci and the artist Sandro Botticelli. The patrons of Botticelli included the Medicis, Gonzagas, and Estes, who were all contemporaries and peers of the Zeno family in Venice. Botticelli incorporated the Arcadia theme into his own work and played an active role in the Prieuré de Sion.

  Like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci counted the Estes and Medicis among his patrons and grew in stature and prominence with their help.29 When he was a struggling painter he became acquainted with the wealthy Florentine family of Vespucci—he had followed Amerigo Vespucci’s grandfather around the streets to sketch his face. As a reward for his talent, Vespucci helped Leonardo gain admittance into the inner circles of the rich families in northern Italy. One such family was that of Ludovico Sforza, whose father was in René d’Anjou’s order. Leonardo also served as grand master to the Prieuré de Sion from 1510 to 1519. In 1515 da Vinci took employ with this viceroy of Milan and Languedoc. While he started his career as an artist—and art is central to his greatness—he was also an inventor, physicist, geologist, and engineer. It was in the latter capacities that he was employed. As a military engineer, he designed an underwater suit and was able in the art of hydraulics. Water always played a role in his scientific pursuits—from its use as a power supply to its harnessing for agriculture to its potential application to weaponry. Da Vinci was a student of botany as well.30

  Did da Vinci play a role in designing or building the complex system of flooding tunnels, artificial beaches, and clog-proof drains protected by eelgrass that became the Money Pit? One invention of this grand master was what he called the “cogged bracket,” a movable sluice. Grouping these sluices together, he said, could act as a barrier to the current. He could cause water to rise and fall. A series of sluices and dams could control the widest bodies of water, depending on just how many were used. He also invented a portable dredger that floated on two rafts.31

  In 1510 he wrote that he had decided to cut short his work on anatomy into order to put more time into his mechanical inventions. His writings may have served as a blueprint for his design of such a complicated vault and protective trap. Could a bay like Mahone in Nova Scotia be held back by a sluice of his design? Upon his death, thousands of pages of his notebooks were spread around Europe as collectors’ items. Many were illegible, and many were coded. Da Vinci had a shorthand that divided or combined words for reasons known only to himself. Some notes were written backward with his left hand so that a mirror was needed to read them. It is said that despite all the work that Leonardo da Vinci completed in his capacity as engineer and inventor, there is no monument, no completed work of his architecture that bears his name.

  A recent book on one of the most controversial icons in Catholic history, the Shroud of Turin, declares that Leonardo da Vinci was the artist behind that sacred relic. The shroud, which is not claimed as a true relic by the Catholic Church, has been dated to medieval times or earlier. The provenance of the shroud is questionable; it arrived in France sometime after the Crusades but was denounced by the bishop of Troyes as a fake. It was then given to the House of Savoy and suddenly appeared again on exposition in France in 1492. The authors of the Turin Shroud, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, believe that da Vinci had invented a sort of proto-camera and captured his own image.32 Improved carbon dating now dates the shroud to an earlier period than was previously thought. But the authors of the Turin Shroud tell a very interesting biography of their own candidate for creator of the alleged fake.

  An alchemist and a necromancer, da Vinci was troubled by his lack of sexual identity. The son of an unmarried Cathar woman, he may have been homosexual; he was accused of heresy along with a group of young men. At that time, such a charge was often taken to mean that the crime was sodomy, according to Picknett and Prince, who mention other indications of his orientation. His connection to the Medici family saved him.33 Turin Shroud also asserts that, like many other alchemists, da Vinci was a devotee of the goddess Isis, the Black Madonna worshiped in secret in Christian Europe and venerated in hundreds of churches, grottoes, and caves. Whatever da Vinci’s shortcomings, there is no question of his being a master of many trades and, as a scientist, someone who could be considered a borderline heretic and magician. At the same time, he was a grand master in the same order that tied together the wealthy elite of France and Scotland.

  If the moving of the treasure guarded by the Sinclairs took place at the time of the construction of Roslin, then it is possible that later in that century, when further discoveries of the western lands took place, the Sinclairs and their Guise counterparts in France felt there was a threat to its discovery. It was on the Feast of John the Baptist in 1497 that John Cabot, sailing from Bristol, England, landed in Nova Scotia. If fishermen from Europe had not been sailing to the Grand Banks of Canada earlier, they were now. Such fishermen were not potential colonists, although their tiny shacks dotted the Saint Lawrence Seaway, but Cartier and others threatened the secret lands with invaders. A simple mining tunnel and shaft might have been regarded as no longer safe for the treasures of the Templars. If the entire complex, complete with false beaches and flooding tunnels, had not been put in place earlier, there was suddenly a reason for it. In the dual role of Prieuré de Sion grand master and military engineer, could da Vinci have designed and planned for the protection of the treasures that the elite families controlled?

  It is said that history is written by the victors. Those in power in Europe were a handful of elite families married to each other, if not always allied. They were the patrons of the arts and often had artists use their faces as those of religious personages. They commissioned the sciences, and they supported the writers, who in turn acted with due caution in not biting the proverbial feeding hand. Most likely, we will never know the full extent of the effect they had on history as it has been preserved for the twentieth-century reader.

  The Prieuré de Sion and the New World

  If these select families had a secret society that mysteriously placed great value on Saint John the Baptist, it is more than coincidence that John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and Samuel de Champlain all reached the New World on his feast day. Is it then design that the capital of Newfoundland (Saint John’s), the original name of Prince Edward Island (Île-St-Jean, or Isle Saint John) and the capital and harbor of New Brunswick (Saint John) all commemorated that saint? Even the naming of the new con
tinent leaves us with questions. John Cabot’s principal backer was Sheriffe Richard Amerike. The same year that Columbus reached America, relatives of his ex-employer sent Amerigo Vespucci to Seville to protect their interest. Vespucci, in the employ of the Medicis drew extensive maps for the newly explored lands. The duke of Lorraine’s salon in Sion-Vaudemont, that sacred pilgrimage site, bound the maps into books with two famous mapmakers on the cover—Ptolemy of Greece and Amerigo Vespucci. The editor of this atlas commented that the continent should be named for Vespucci, a man of great ability. We are told in history books that the name “America” was an accident. Because it was placed on the map as someone’s name, people misinterpreted it to be the actual name of a place.

  In The Mysterious History of Columbus, John Noble Wilford points out just who might be responsible for such an accident.34 “In those days, a small group of scholarly clerics lived in obscurity at the ancient village of St. Die on the slopes of the Vosges Mountains in Lorraine.” These “obscure” clerics were not too obscure, since they had a printing press in the very early days of the availability of that invention, and they had a patron, René, duke of Lorraine. It is possible that the naming of America was more by design of the duke of Lorraine and his relatives, the heirs of “Good King René.” The duke of Lorraine married the sister of Connetable Bourbon, who was then grand master of the Prieuré de Sion. His brother-in-law was the employer of da Vinci. It could have been that Columbus, having left the employ of René d’Anjou and his group, discovered the continent for a rival Spanish dynasty. And it may have been pride that led the “salon” of the duke of Lorraine to deny Columbus the credit and instead give it to a current employee of their tight circle.

  Later historians claimed that Vespucci actually sailed to the New World, and deserves a certain amount of credit for his own explorations, but the basis of this statement is flimsy. A letter in the possession of René, dubbed the Soderini letter, describing the voyage of Vespucci to America has proved to be a fabrication. Vespucci never left Europe, but he had powerful and well-connected friends.35 It is possible that it was the wish of this tight-knit group that the continent was best left secret. D’Anjou, and the St. Clairs had no interest in their secret lands being uncovered. Neither did their Italian contingent—the Medicis, the Sforzas, and the Estes. These Italian families shared control of northern Italy with the Zeno family, who had been equally secretive about the discovery. The voyage of Columbus changed all that. Suddenly, the Prieuré de Sion needed to assert their prior claim. They wanted the New World to be named by them and possibly even controlled by them.

  In 1524 an Italian banker in the circle of the Medicis, Bonacorso Rucellai, backed another expedition to the New World. Rucellai was based in Lyons, where the Carolingian dynasty was no longer able to protect the Jews against the avarice of others who sought their property. Many Jews had converted, often more in name than in spirit. Rucellai hired a captain from another noble family to take charge of his exploratory journey. The Captain was Giovanni da Verrazano. The family crest of the Verrazanos was, remarkably, the six-pointed Star of David, a symbol of the bloodline of that Jewish king and those who claimed descent.

  Verrazano took the Prieuré de Sions’ passion for the Arcadia theme to the New World. Sailing by a coast with tall trees, he said that it reminded him of Jacopo Sannazaro’s idyllic Greek land, and called the place Arcadia. The harbor now called Newport he dubbed Rhodes after the harbor in Greece. Rhode Island’s modern harbor city still debates the origin of the “Viking Tower”that Verrazano labeled as a “Norman villa”on his map. The secret lands of the Sinclairs were becoming less secret.

  When Oliver Sinclair set sail in 1545, the grand master was Ferrante de Gonzaga, son of the Duke of Mantua and Isabella d’Este, da Vinci’s patron. Both Ferrante and Leonardo da Vinci assisted Charles de Montpensier in military operations in France.36 France and England were at war, and Scotland was dragged into the fray. After Oliver Sinclair left, the duke of Somerset attacked Scotland on the River Esk. Ten thousand Scots nobles and commoners were slaughtered in the action.

  Mary Stuart, through her emissary, William Sinclair, asked France to send help, but France, even while declaring that Scotland was now part of France, failed to support her ally.37 England and Queen Elizabeth did not want a French queen on the Scottish throne, and Scotland, almost leaderless, was unable to protect itself. Scotland and the Sinclair family were backed into a corner.

  King James VI of Scotland, who allowed his mother to be executed by Elizabeth without protest, was persuaded as the inheritor of the Scottish crown to grant land in the New World to those in his court. But he was no friend to the Catholic Sinclairs; instead, he distributed land and baronies to those Protestant members who later came to the support of Elizabeth in England. Sir William Alexander was given a charter for Nova Scotia—New Scotland—and even Sir Francis Bacon was numbered among the friends with a land grant in the New World.

  Officially, Sir Francis Bacon was the Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal. Unofficially, he was connected to the “Invisible College” we have spoken about—the collection of scientists and alchemists, physicians and writers, that served as the conduit for an underground stream of knowledge. In those days, such knowledge could get one excommunicated or worse.38 This group resembled the Prieuré de Sion but held no Catholic leanings like the Guise-Lorraine families. Bacon was not able to reveal his secret side until he left government, and, as discussed, he very likely was a critic of the divine right of kings and the government in general in his disguised authorship of the Shakespearean texts. Under his own name he published an interesting work, The New Atlantis.

  The so-called new Atlantis was very much like the Arcadia of the Catholic d’Anjous and St. Clairs—a utopia where the true Renaissance man could be free to publish and study science without fears of a censoring government or a church inquisition. The name of this utopia was Bensalem. Jerusalem means “Foundation of Salem,” and Bensalem means the “Son of Salem,” in the context of a second holy place. Here in “New Salem,” said Bacon, a secret society resided, to which few were admitted and even fewer were privy to the secrets. Was this Masonic-like society similar to the Prieuré de Sion? This secret society had as its founder a wise king, and the order this wise king started was called Solomon’s House. Bacon made a point of declaring that Jews were allowed to reside on the secret island and practice their arts and sciences.

  In Bacon may lie the connection to a Merovingian-Davidic dynasty, forced underground first by Rome and later by the Roman Church. Even after England turned to the Protestant Reformation, this secret Jewish group still feared the repression of Europe. The secret society could also just have been a refuge for those who practiced astronomy, anatomy, geology, or just about any science and who would have been branded as heretics or witches—for whom Europe reserved its cruelest punishments. Or perhaps they were simply members of the Invisible College who wanted academic freedom. While this argument seems more credible, it was Bacon’s own declaration that the secret society and their utopia were both very Jewish in background and tolerance.

  In his writings Bacon discussed flasks of mercury as part of a system for hiding documents. On Oak Island such empty mercury flasks have been found.39 And, of course, so has a most complex feat of engineering, which may have been designed by another true Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. Sir Francis Drake had the means and the money to put together an expedition to the Money Pit with the members of the Invisible College and even to bring along the designs of da Vinci to use in such a place. On the surface, it does not seem likely that devout Protestants and devout Catholics would act in collusion. The writings of Bacon and the Masonic concept of accepting common ground, however, suggest that a joint undertaking might have taken place, especially as a means to stop the monopoly over science, learning, and free thought that religion had seemingly claimed for itself.

  Chapter 12

  OAK KINGS, SEVERED HEADS, AND THE SECRETS OF THE
ANCIENTS

  Darkness has fallen, and the light of the bonfire blazes. The entire village surrounds the fire, and the young men take their turns jumping through it. One stumbles and falls, obviously due to the weight of his transgressions throughout the year. Chosen to wear the hide of a cow or goat, he walks at the head of the New Year’s Eve procession through the village. Anything but orderly, the procession goes to each house as the other young men beat on the sinner and on each house while circling it. Three times they march around each house, clockwise, always keeping the house to the right of the “leader.” At each house a strip of meat, still hot from the bonfire, is given to the occupants. The Winter King, the human sacrifice chosen by his failure to leap across the fire, is kept alive until the new year. Then he is given to the fire, and every villager takes part of that fire home to restart their own hearth. Welcome to Hogmanay, the New Year’s Eve of the northern Celts. This festival is still celebrated in Scotland and the offshoreisles, but with a twist—the Winter King is not really beaten or killed.1

  Remnants of such barbaric customs survive in many of our own. This rite was conducted to ensure that the sun would return and to celebrate the new sun. When the Julian calendar was still in use, the New Year, as well as the corresponding death and rebirth of the sun, was celebrated on December 25. According to the Golden Bough, the celebrants would cry, “The Virgin has brought forth.” The goddess had given birth to a new sun.2

  The major religions of the world—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—have all sought to impose their own dogma, myth, and tradition on older beliefs. In this interest, they are not often free to create everything anew. Instead, cathedrals are built over pagan sites, male god trini-ties replace threefold goddesses, and river gods become saints. In the fourth century the Catholic Church decided they had to celebrate the birth of Christ. While they did not known what day of the year it had occurred, assigning it to the pagan birth celebration of the sun seemed fitting. The guardians of the Church chose Christmas, the birth of the Son of God, to be that same day the non-Christians celebrated the birth of the sun. The Roman Church also replaced a Roman state religion called Mithraism. As a result, the holy day of the week came to be “sun” day, instead of the Jewish Sabbath, which was traditionally on Saturday. Those who are in power get to write history.