The Oak Island Mystery (15 page)

Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire.

The Shepherd's Monument at Shugborough Hall.

The Indomitable Templars

T
he
Templars' full Latin name was
pauperes commilitones Christi templique Salomonici
: the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Templar of Solomon. In 1119, Godfroi de St. Omer and Hugues de Payns of Burgundy went to Jerusalem with the stated intention of giving up worldly chivalry, living in poverty, chastity, and obedience, fighting for the true and supreme King (Christ), and guarding the public roads so that pilgrims could travel in safety. Six other knights joined them. Baldwin II, who was king of Jerusalem from 1118–31, gave the Templars part of his palace. This area was close to the al-Aksa Mosque, which was popularly referred to as Solomon's Temple. From that location the order took its name.

Graham Hancock, in
The Sign and the Seal
,
[1]
makes some very interesting and well-researched alternative historical suggestions about the earliest days of the Templars. In his view, the nine original founders (not eight!) went to the Temple site for a completely different purpose. Hancock points out with a fair degree of logic that eight or nine knights would have been hopelessly inadequate defenders over the many miles of road that the pilgrims had to cover. The Order would need to grow significantly before it could function as an effective defence force.

In Hancock's opinion, the founders of the Order went to the supposed site of Solomon's Temple to excavate beneath it for lost secrets and hidden treasures — much the same reason that Bérenger Saunière had for acquiring the living of Rennes-le-Château some seven centuries later.
[2]
Perhaps the original Templars suspected that the Ark of the Covenant had been concealed in a secret cave below Solomon's Temple before the city fell. Perhaps it was the Holy Grail they hoped to retrieve.

It may well have been that they were searching for something even older and more mysterious — something which might also have been called the Grail, the Greal, or the Gral, but it was not the traditional Cup which Christ used at the Last Supper. Was it something which had left Egypt at the time of the Exodus and been carefully preserved by Solomon the Wise, one of the very few
illuminati
who recognized it for what it really was and who understood at least part of its proper use and its potentially immense powers?

During their earliest period, the Templars wore no special uniform, habit, or dress, and they seemed genuinely poor. They were also very much an evangelical and redemptive order. Part of their function was to look for former knights who had fallen from grace and failed to live up to the high standards expected of them. For these excommunicated men they sought absolution, and then welcomed them into their Order as fellow Templars.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), like Hugues de Payns, was a member of the Burgundian nobility. He was a curiously shy and timid boy, even during his education by the Canons of St. Vorles at Chatillon, although he gained there the reputation of being a young literary genius.

The death of his beloved mother, Aleth, when he was only seventeen, had a profound effect on Bernard's life. Richly gifted with the power of objective self-appraisal, he despised his own weakness and timidity and decided to do something drastic and dramatic to put it right. The very strict Benedictine monastery at Citeaux had recently been opened, and Bernard told his family that it was his intention to go there. Not surprisingly, they tried to dissuade him. The results were almost incredible. It was the quiet, shy, timid Bernard who persuaded some thirty of them to join him at Citeaux! In 1115, Abbot Stephen Harding sent him to Champagne to found the Abbey of Clairvaux. All through his life he had this same amazing charisma and power to persuade, yet it was the last characteristic that anyone who met him would have expected from such a shy, withdrawn, self-effacing, and solitary man. His influence on the politics, the theology, and the monastic organization of his day was incalculable. He was “the conscience of Europe” in the twelfth century, and he was a conscience who had the power to direct the mighty. Popes, kings, and princes all responded to his massive influence.

Needless to say, he was a key force in the establishment of the Knights Templar. Bernard himself wrote that Israel at that time was infested with “rogues, impious men, robbers, committers of sacrilege, murderers, perjurers, and adulterers.” The Templars reclaimed this human flotsam and jetsam and gave it a worthwhile purpose in life. In consequence, like the French Foreign Legion some seven centuries later, the Templars were characterized by their strength and determination and an independence of spirit that other soldiers envied. They were rugged and free: honour mattered more to them than life. Not for nothing did they choose their well-deserved motto and battle cry: “First to attack and last to retreat!”

Freedom from excommunication by any local clergy — mere parish priests and Bishops — gave the Templars a clear edge over most other organizations. In twelfth-century Christendom, the fear of excommunication was taken seriously. It kept many a tyrant in check. Like their symbol, the chessboard knight, the Templars were free to “jump” over administrative, political, and religious barriers that blocked most others. Like a multinational company in the modern world of high finance, their Order could laugh at most state governments.

Bernard of Clairvaux gave the Templars his invaluable support in 1127 in
De laude novae militiae
. The Council of Troyes recognized them officially in 1128.

Yet there remains a dark shadow to cloud these shining ideals. Historians have argued long and hard over whether there was a secret rule the Templars followed, as well as their widely publicized open rule, rendered in French as
Règle du Temple
.

Adventurers who travelled as the Templars did inevitably came into contact with Eastern civilizations and the strange secrets they nurtured. Much esoteric Eastern wisdom undoubtedly came the Templars' way, and undoubtedly they treasured it and made the most of it. They also came into contact with Byzantium and the ancient knowledge that had flourished there for over a thousand years.

Templars were like war-canoes that flourished amid the white water of frequent battles. When the tides of war crash over ancient cities, secrets that have lain safely hidden for centuries tend to get exposed. A bastion falls here. A tower crumbles there. Secret rooms and hiding places are revealed to the light like the egg chambers of ants' nests when a plough goes through them.

Many Templars were rough-and-ready soldiers of fortune who had been reformed and restored by the Order. Who knows what they might have pillaged here, there, and everywhere in the past — only to bring it to their central treasury once they had re-started their lives. An isolated piece of jigsaw is meaningless, but bring a score such pieces together and some proto-idea of the picture may begin to crystallize. Combine a yarn from Damascus with a souvenir from Alexandria; link a legend from Cyprus with a fable from Eschol; add a curio from Cairo to a keepsake from Thebes: let the travelling adventurers talk long into the night around their campfire at Damietta. Who knows what intricate patterns may emerge?

Most significant of all was Templar acquisition of ancient Egyptian knowledge. Egypt was the traditional home of the secret Hermetic texts, the ancient home of Thoth (otherwise known as Hermes Trismegistus), author and wielder of the famous Emerald Tablets of Power.
[3]
If there was a secret order of the Templars — and its existence is probable rather than merely possible — then it is equally likely to have been the twelfth century human repository of the ancient hermetic secrets, and, in particular, of the greatest of all, the Hermetic treasure: the Emerald Tablets of Trismegistus.

Bernard of Clairvaux, the great power behind the Templars, died in 1153, but long before they lost him, the Templars were well-established in practically every Christian Kingdom — even, perhaps, in the semi-legendary Kingdom of Prester-John.

Who was Prester John? Legends of him began in the twelfth century with the arrival in Rome in 1122, during the pontificate of Calixtus II, of a church official from India (or the Indies) an area frequently confused with Abyssinia and Ethiopia. Tales grew that Prester John had a massive Christian power base in the Far East and would appear at any moment to assist the Crusaders in their struggles against the Saracens — rather like King Arthur in Britain or Good King Wenceslas in Bohemia, who are both said to be sleeping, ready to appear in their lands' hour of need.

The first written comment on Prester John seems to be in the chronicle of Bishop Otto of Freisingen. Otto tells of a visit he made to the Papal court in 1145, where he met the Bishop of Gabala (which was probably Jibal in Syria). This Syrian church leader told Otto about Prester John, who ruled a kingdom well to the east of Media and Persia. It was said that John, who was a good Christian but a Nestorian,
[4]
had fought his neighbours and beaten them soundly, then headed for the Tigris to assist his western brethren against the Saracens. Unfortunately, he had been unable to cross it, and had gone home again.

In 1165, a letter went into wide circulation describing Prester John's amazing kingdom, his invincible armies and his untold wealth. A second letter — this time attributed to Pope Alexander III — went out on September 22, 1177, no less than fifty-five years after the first rumours of Prester John's existence! The gist of this epistle is that Pope Alexander had heard of Prester John via the Papal physician, Philip, who had in turn received the information from “honourable members of that Monarch's Kingdom” whom he had met in eastern lands. In response to John's various requests for a church in Jerusalem, and other privileges, Alexander III advised him that humility would bring these great rewards sooner than vaunting pride.

Further confusion arose during the thirteenth century with persistent rumours of a great new army from the east attacking the Muslims. Unfortunately these newcomers tuned out to be the Mongol hordes of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan (c. 1162–1227) rather than Prester John's long-awaited Christian reinforcements.

Christian travellers in India and the East tried to find a local potentate on whom the title of Prester John could reasonably be conferred. In 1248 Carpini described him as the Christian King of India. Rubruquis in 1253 thought that Prester (or King, as he called him) John was in reality Kushluk, ruler of the Naimans, who was the brother of Ung Khan, Chinggis's ally. Marco Polo says that this same “Unc Khan” [
sic
] was Lord of the Tartars until Chinggis rose to power. At about the same time, the peripatetic Friar John of Montecorvino was authoring reports that Prester John's descendants held territory in Kuku Khotan (about 500 kilometres north of present day Peking). Odoric, another friar, supported John of Montecorvino's accounts, but after their time the Asian stories petered out, and the reported location of Prester John's kingdom shifted to Africa.
[5]

As historians and researchers wend their way cautiously through the myths and legends concerning Prester John, one or two solid and highly significant facts begin to emerge. Fra Mauro's wonderful map of 1549 situates a great city in Abyssinia with the words: “Here is Prester John's principal residence.” From 1481–1495 King John II of Portugal was sending missions to Africa to try to establish communications with Prester John, and Vasco da Gama was certainly convinced that Prester John's kingdom was somewhere in that continent.
[6]

To obtain the first clear perspective on the facts relating to Prester John and his mysterious kingdom, it is necessary to go back nearly two millennia before the Prester's era and examine the account of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to the Court of King Solomon.
[7]
R.S. Poole, an authoritative academic writer on the staff of the British Museum in the nineteenth century, makes out an interesting case for identifying the Kingdom of Seba (or Sheba) with Ethiopia rather than an Arabian kingdom. He also points out that the proper names of the first and second kings of the Ethiopian Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt were Shebek and Shebetek. In the Biblical list of patriarchs and tribal founders, Seba is shown to be the son of Cush (Noah's grandson) which also makes him brother to Nimrod, “the mighty hunter.” Poole argues that these ancient Cushite kingdoms extended throughout the Arabian Peninsula and down into North Africa.
[8]

An ancient Ethiopian document, the
Kebra Nagast
(which means “The Kings' Glory”)
[9]
gives a clear account of the relationship between Solomon and Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, and its sequel. It is related that their son, Menelik (which means “Son of the Wise Man”), eventually took the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia and became the first of the great dynasty which lasted until the tragic overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. In this Ethiopian tradition, each local church contains a replica of the Ark known as a
tabot
, but, surprisingly, these replicas are flat tablets and not, as would naturally be expected, box-shaped containers. The Ethiopians themselves believe that the original Ark is now preserved in safety and secrecy in the city of Axum. How does all this link up with the Templars?

Chartres Cathedral in France had beautiful Gothic additions made to it between 1194 and 1225. The carvings then made on both its north and south porches include the Queen of Sheba. On the north porch she is shown next to Solomon, and accompanied by an African attendant.
[10]
Those Gothic carvings are contemporary with the mysterious old Ethiopian document, the
Kebra Nagast
— and with Wolfram von Eschenbach's
Parzival
, which tells of a young knight's extensive travels and strange adventures during his quest for the Holy Grail.

One episode relates how the handsome young knight, Gahmuret of Anjou, travels to distant Zazamanc and has a love affair with its beautiful black queen Belacane. A son, Feirefiz, is born as a result of their union. He grows up to become a great warrior hero. Inexplicably, Gahmuret leaves the exquisite Belacane, returns to Europe and marries Herzeloyde, by whom he has another son. This second boy grows up to become Parzival himself, the hero of the Grail saga which bears his name. The inference must be drawn that the early thirteenth-century sculptors at Chartres were taking their instructions from someone who knew of the Ethiopian tradition contained in the
Kebra Nagast
, and of the strange parallels between Solomon's love for Makeda, Queen of Sheba, and Gahmuret's affair with the lovely Belacane.