A likely fourth reason the Masons distanced themselves from Nimrod was that Nimrod was a giant, one of many giants in the Bible portrayed as villainous or evil, Goliath being the most notable. In fact, according to many ancient sources, Noah’s flood was intended by God to wipe the evil giants off the planet. Randall smiled and nodded: The heroes were always the short ones.
Finally, of course, the name Nimrod had in modern times taken on the meaning of ‘dimwit.’ Plenty of boys were given the name Solomon in modern times but Randall had yet to meet a man named Nimrod.
The bottom line to all this: It would have been self-defeating for the Freemasons to glorify as their founder a God-hating, child-sacrificing, devil-worshiping, dimwitted giant. Masons had enough trouble fending off accusations of being the anti-Christ as it was. Just yesterday one of the Lodge Brothers had emailed Randall an image of Washington, D.C., in which some people saw an owl—a symbol for Molech, a pagan god closely associated with Baal—imbedded in the street design around the Capitol building. Supposedly this was evidence the Masons, who the conspiracy-theorists believed secretly ran the government, continued to worship the old pagan gods.
Washington, D.C. Owl Image
Randall had examined the image on his computer; to him, it looked more like a cat than an owl. But the fact that so many people believed it might be true meant the Masons had a problem. One that Nimrod only added to.
He gently closed the leather-bound books, coughing a bit as dust filled his lungs. All this explained why a couple hundred years ago the Masons began to rewrite their history to erase Nimrod from it. What it did not explain, and what Randall found even more fascinating, was why and how Nimrod had taken on such an important role in Freemasonry to begin with. What, exactly, had his Masonic forefathers found so appealing about this pagan giant?
Dozens of novels had been written focusing on Freemasonry’s dark secrets, but none of them touched on any of this Nimrod ugliness. Sometimes truth was indeed stranger than fiction.
CHAPTER 3
The next morning, as instructed, Cam wore a blue baseball cap and parked facing the woods at the Dunkin’ Donuts near his Westford home. The possibility of being brainwashed was a constant irritant, like a pebble in his shoe. Was it possible Randall was playing him and was still part of the CIA? If so, was Randall doing the brainwashing? Cam grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge before buying Randall his coffee and muffin.
Randall awaited him, scrunched on the passenger seat floor of Cam’s SUV. But he was not alone. On the floor next to him rested an underinflated full-size blow-up doll.
“All right, I’ll bite. Who’s your friend?”
“His name, actually, is Robert.” Without further explanation Randall blew into the doll’s thigh, inflating him further. Under his wool topcoat Randall again wore an argyle sweater vest—this time blue and gray. Robert wore only a windbreaker and blue baseball cap.
Cam waited, figuring eventually Randall would tire and offer an explanation. He sipped his Diet Coke.
Half a minute later Randall closed the air valve. “That should do.” He turned on the floor, lifted himself and, using the side-view window which he had apparently adjusted earlier, slowly surveyed the parking lot. Another half minute passed. “When I give the word, Mr. Thorne, I would like you to slip out of this vehicle and, staying low, make your way into the woods. If anyone happens to question you, pretend you are making water.”
“Making water?”
Randall ignored him. “Wait five minutes and then circle around through the woods to the gas station on the far side of this strip mall. Anyone watching your car will see our friend here in the driver’s seat. My car is a maroon Ford Taurus. Enter the driver’s side. You will be driving.”
Cam did as told and, feet wet from the snow, found the Taurus and climbed in. Randall, again, sat curled on the floor of the passenger seat.
“That doll really going to fool anyone?”
“Robert accompanied me for twenty years as I drove the highways around Washington, D.C.”
“I thought you lived in Boston.”
“Yes, but I spent half my time in Washington. Stupefying highway rules—many roads are restricted to multi-passenger vehicles. Hence, Robert. And he only needs to fool someone, as you say, for a few minutes today. Until we are safely out of the parking lot.”
“Okay, where to?”
“Proceed to Route 3,” Randall proclaimed. “I will take my seat once we are on the highway,”
“Where we going?”
“Rhode Island.” He reached up and took the blueberry muffin from the bag Cam had dropped on the passenger seat. “What do you know about the Vinland Map? The one at Yale.”
Cam had read about the map—purportedly a Viking map depicting an area of North America southwest of Greenland that they called Vinland—but never actually examined it. “I think the parchment dates to the 1400s. But the map itself is maybe a hoax, maybe real, depending on which ink test you believe.”
“And what does your common sense tell you?”
“Didn’t some guy pay a million bucks for it?”
“Indeed. And in 1959 that was a considerable sum.”
“Wasn’t he an art collector?”
“Correct again. Paul Mellon was heir to the Mellon banking fortune. He purchased the map and donated it to Yale.”
“So I guess I’d assume it was real. You don’t get that rich by pissing away your millions on forgeries. And if he was an art collector, presumably he had experts look at it for him.”
They stopped at a red light. Randall waved his hand at Cam. “Drag the map up … or whatever the correct term is … on that phone of yours.”
Vinland Map
It had been a while since Cam had studied the map. It really wasn’t all that impressive—a crudely drawn map of Europe, taped together in the middle, with Greenland and also the three regions of Vinland (Helluland, Markland, Vinland) displayed in the upper left. The map did nothing to settle the debate whether Vinland was located in Newfoundland or further south—the depiction of Vinland at a rough location southwest of Greenland hardly constituted a ‘newfound’ clue, as it were.
Cam accelerated through the intersection. “Putting everything else aside, why would a forgery be so crude and rough? Wouldn’t it be more valuable if it actually added to the debate in some way? I mean, it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”
“Now you are allowing common sense to factor in,” Randall said. Curled on the floor under the glove compartment in his top hat, he peered up at Cam like a garden gnome. “From what I have observed with academic types, common sense is not one of the tools they regularly employ.”
Cam nodded. “Okay, but since neither of us are academics—”
“Neither is,” Randall interjected. “The word neither is a singular noun.”
Cam chuckled. Something about a little old man on the floor correcting his grammar struck Cam as amusing. “Like I said, since I’m not an academic, I can use common sense. And if I were going to go to the trouble of forging a medieval map, I’d try to make it as valuable as I could. I’d add a detail showing where Vinland really was located.”
“Your analysis is sound. And the ink tests support both possibilities—authenticity and fraud. Yet the experts conclude the map is a fake.”
Cam shrugged. He had spent the past couple of years being told by experts that all sorts of artifacts were fakes. As if nobody had anything better to do with their time than to carve ancient scripts on boulders in the middle of the woods, or to take medieval parchment and make a fake map out of it. “In my experience in doing this research, the experts are wrong as often as they’re right. Especially when it comes to ancient history. They defer too often to the archeologists. And the problem with archeology is that only a micro-fraction of the earth has been excavated.” Cam shrugged again. “Their conclusions are, by definition, limited to where they happen to dig.”
Randall waited for Cam to glance down at h
im. “I assume you are going to support this statement with some examples,” Randall said. Despite Randall’s haughty mannerisms, he seemed open-minded and interested in Cam’s opinions.
“Sure,” Cam said. “Until just a few years ago every text book in the country said that civilization as we know it began in Mesopotamia six thousand years ago. Now a new site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe doubles that, to twelve thousand years ago. So the historians, listening to the archeologists, were wrong by a factor of two.”
“But you are talking about archeological conclusions. I was talking about an artifact, in this case a map, being considered fake.”
“Don’t you see how one frames the other? The archeologists define the history, and then artifacts are made to fit that history.” He shook his head. “Do you know it is accepted protocol on an archeological dig to throw an artifact away if it doesn’t fit the established time line? It’s called an anomaly.”
“I did not.”
“What a great profession,” Cam continued. “So as a lawyer, I could say to the jury: ‘Since we already know my client is innocent, we are going to simply disregard his fingerprints on the murder weapon as an anomaly.’” He sighed. “For archeologists, the only evidence that is valid is the stuff that fits their conclusions.”
Randall smiled. “Are we approaching the highway? The fact that I can still at my age contort my body does not mean I enjoy doing so.”
“We’re just about to turn onto the ramp.”
Randall climbed up and buckled the seat belt; the shoulder strap passed across his windpipe so he slipped it behind his back. “I like the idea of these ancient civilizations.” He raised a dark eyebrow. “How tall were the men?”
“You would have been a giant, Randall.” Cam thought of Amanda, home doing research on giant skeletons.
“Ah, to never have to hem my pants,” Randall sighed.
Cam drove in silence, his mind on the Vinland map. “Getting back to the whole idea of making the evidence fit your conclusion, the same thing happened with the location of Vinland. The archeologists found a Viking site in northern Newfoundland called L’Anse Aux Meadows. And here’s their logic: Since it’s the only site we’ve found, it must be the only site there is. And then they try to take all the evidence and make it fit that conclusion.”
“Allow me a supposition: You are going to provide evidence which rebuts this particular conclusion.”
They drove south. Cam pulled his sunglasses from his jacket pocket; it was one of those cold, cloudless New England days where the sun reflected off the snow-blanketed landscape. “Since you asked, I will. You’ve heard of the Icelandic Sagas?”
“I have, but for today’s purposes assume I am ignorant.” He smiled. “We both know otherwise, of course.”
“Okay. The Sagas recount the journeys of Leif Eriksson and his crew to Vinland around 1000 AD. They describe Leif and his crew spending a snowless winter in Vinland, with the cattle grazing. And they also talk about the crew finding grapes and making wine and getting drunk, which is where the name ‘Vinland’ or ‘Wine-land’ comes from. But if you look at the L’Anse Aux Meadows site, grapes don’t grow that far north and even in Al Gore’s worst global warming nightmare Newfoundland is not going to have a snowless winter.”
“Perhaps the climate was different then.”
“Not enough for grapes and snowless winters. L’Anse Aux Meadows was a trading post, linking Vinland and Greenland. Archeologists found butternut shells during their dig up there—butternuts, like grapes, don’t grow that far north. So how did they get there? The obvious explanation is Leif and his gang brought them from New England. From Vinland.”
Randall took a bite of his muffin, wiped a crumb from his mouth and raised his bushy eyebrows. “And how do the so-called experts explain away these trifling details?”
Cam sniffed. “So Leif Eriksson’s father was Eric the Red, who discovered Greenland. And he named it ‘Green’-land even though it was pretty much all ice. So, the experts say, since Eric was lying when he put the ‘Green’ in Greenland, ipso facto his son Leif must also have been lying when he put the grapes—the ‘Vin’—in Vinland.” Cam exhaled. “Like father, like son. Case closed.”
“And the butternut shells?”
Cam rolled his eyes. “Floated up there. Against the currents, no less. Like magic.” Every time he discussed this he got angry. The archeologists couldn’t explain away the grapes or the snowless winters or the butternut shells so instead of opening their minds to other possibilities they invented ridiculous explanations.
Randall chewed and nodded. “Hardly examples of academic rigor. Based on what you’ve told me, it seems that Vinland is likely located somewhere in New England.”
“No doubt.”
“And this is important because?”
“Because you asked me about it.”
“Yes. But why does it matter in the greater scheme of things? Who gives a rodent’s rear end where Vinland really is?”
Cam took a deep breath. “Because if Vinland is further south—say Cape Cod or Narragansett Bay—then all these other sites and artifacts we’ve found scattered around New England become more believable. The way it is now, the academics say the Vikings touched their toe on northern Newfoundland and then scurried home for five hundred years. Therefore nothing else can be authentic.”
“Frightened away by the Eskimos, no doubt. You know how timid the Vikings were.”
Randall knew more about this than he was letting on; he was testing Cam, trying to get a sense of him. Cam drove in silence for a few seconds. “So if the Vinland Map is at Yale, why are we going to Rhode Island?”
“Certainly.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Certainly. We are going to Rhode Island.”
Cam gripped the steering wheel. “This conversation is like that old Abbot and Costello routine,” he muttered. “So, who’s on first?”
Randall grinned. “Certainly.”
“All right, you win. Where in Rhode Island are we going?”
“The University of Rhode Island, Narragansett campus. Proceed south on Route 95.”
A straight answer, at least. “Why?”
He half-expected Randall to answer “Left field.” Instead he got something equally obtuse, along with another sly smile: “Like father, like son.”
Normally Amanda liked to join Cam when he was doing field research, but today she was happy to be left alone. His absence gave her a free day to dive deeper into some of the source material in her giants research.
Sipping a hot chocolate at a writing table looking out over the frozen lake, Venus at her feet, Amanda surfed the net and scratched out notes on one of Cam’s old legal pads. Apparently the discovery of giants’ bones occurred frequently in Colonial America—she found dozens of accounts of early pioneers and farmers reporting oversized skeletons. At some point she would try to verify these finds, but for now the thing she found most fascinating was a recurring detail among the reports: Many of the so-called giants possessed a double row of teeth. She reviewed her notes:
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, circa 1893: Complete skeleton of 7-foot male giant with “complete row of double teeth on upper and lower jaws.”
Hadley, Massachusetts, date unknown: 7 foot skeleton with “double rows of teeth and skull of remarkable thickness.”
Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1895: Nearly 8-foot skeleton with “head as big as a peck basket with double teeth all round.”
Lompock Rancho, California, 1833: 12-foot skeleton with “double rows of upper and lower teeth.”
Santa Rosa Island, California, circa 1800: Giant found “distinguished by its double row of teeth.”
Chesterville, OH, 1829: Giant with “skull that could have easily fit over a normal man’s head and additional teeth compared to modern man.”
Seneca Township, OH, 1872: Three “at least 8-foot tall skeletons” found; “all had double rows of teeth.”
Ironton, OH, 1892: Gia
nt found with “all double teeth.”
West Hickory, PA, 1870: 8-foot giant with “teeth all in their places, and all of them double.”
Lake Delevan, WI, 1912: 18 giant skeletons ranging in height from 7.5-10 feet tall, most with “a double row of teeth.”
Amanda stared out over the lake. She tried to take herself back to the 1800s, to a time before modern communication. Most of these towns would not even have had libraries. It was possible that, independently, scores of citizens would locate bones and—out of boredom or ignorance or greed or mischievousness—fabricate stories about giant skeletons. After all, even back then, most people knew about giants from the Bible. And it would not be surprising if these giants shared qualities with the Biblical giants, such as a sixth finger. But what was the likelihood that so many of these individuals would, independently, ascribe to their make-believe giants a second row of teeth? This was a detail that would have been beyond their scope of knowledge, beyond the universe of anything they had heard before. This was not only a coincidence, but a statistically impossible one at that. And as Sherlock Holmes famously observed, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth…
Yet despite the scores of newspaper articles and books written about the giants, there didn’t seem to be any remaining skeletons. Many of the bones were given to the Smithsonian and have simply disappeared. Others have been lost to history. The whole thing seemed queer—shouldn’t at least some of the bones have survived?
She decided to approach the problem from a different angle, scientifically. Was there any kind of biological or environmental reason giants could not have existed in ancient times? A couple of hours of research and another hot chocolate later Amanda felt fairly certain the answer was no. In ancient times, especially before the great flood, the earth’s ozone layer was much thicker, protecting the earth from harmful radiation and allowing for longer and healthier life. The dinosaurs were the most obvious example—a giant humanoid would have seemed puny during the Jurassic period. Moving into more modern times, even within the past ten thousand years there is strong evidence of species shrinkage. Most mammals at the end of the last Ice Age were at least fifty percent larger than today—giant beavers, in fact, grew to the size of today’s black bear. As for the question of whether a humanoid’s physiology would support a giant’s weight, Amanda read reports of a 1,100 pound man living in New York in the 1990’s—using a formula she found in a book, 1,100 pounds would approximate the average weight of an eleven-foot giant. So at least up to eleven feet, the science seemed to work. Which is not to say giants might not have been taller—multi-ton elephants, after all, seemed to defy physiology by standing on two feet.
The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series) Page 7