by Steven Sora
Matthew wrote his Gospel to make sure that the life of Jesus conformed to the prophecy of the Old Testament. The elite families of Sion paved the way for the Messiah to emerge from their circle. Did they have in mind a more earthly kingdom as their goal?
There are several possible raisons d’être for the Prieuré de Sion. One would be the advancement of the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. If such a bloodline did extend back two thousand years, the number of “heirs” would be in the millions. Would it be practical for one of these heirs to claim any kind of unique distinction that would give millions a reason to believe in him or her as a god or king? Another, more secretive agenda would be to promote the worship of a more ancient god. Perhaps the goal was to foster the advancement of a religion wherein the goddess would be represented by Mary Magdalene, mated to a god-king represented by a Saint John, a Templar/Masonic–style higher authority that would unite the world in one Holy Empire. The rule of such an empire might be claimed by the “heirs.”
The establishment of a secret society is also an end in itself. Societies such as the Prieuré de Sion, the Masons, and hundreds of others often have numerous levels of “achievement” and rank. The higher one is elevated, the more secrets he is privy to. Membership in the P-2 in the twentieth century may have paved the way for an individual’s success within the group. The P-2 was a masonic group in Italy so powerful that it was said that whoever controlled the P-2 controlled Italy. However, after the exposure of the organization and its alleged crimes, members soon found out that the elite pinnacle group was both corrupt and a terrible embarrassment to the membership.
Similarly, individual Masons, as they become more deeply involved, are almost blackmailed into staying and concealing the secrets of bizarre religious ideas and practices. Did the Prieuré de Sion and their Scottish relatives conspire to create a Masonic kingdom on Earth?
Chapter 13
THE GRAIL GUARDIANS AND THE MODERN WORLD
Secret societies have always existed and have always been feared by kings and presidents and the general populace alike. They thrive on myth to create an illusion of strength and power and to ensure the loyalty of the members. The main aspect of Masonry that is different from other secret societies is the complexity of its myth history and its ladder of initiation that members must climb to further immerse themselves in the myth. Seen from the outside it appears as innocent as the local rotary. From the inside it is meant to resemble a religion.1
This secret society of Masons has a membership of more than one million men (and no women) in the British Isles alone. In the United States there are currently sixteen thousand lodges and several million members. England and Wales has six hundred thousand members, and there are perhaps another hundred thousand in Scotland. Stephen Knight, writing in The Brotherhood, a study on the effects of Masonry in England, detailed the corruption that Masonry has wreaked on the police department and the court system there. For most low-level members, Masonry is a social club, a self-help society, and a mutual assistance organization to help in getting a job and attracting customers and clients. Members are initiated into the lower levels and told that there are three in number. After reaching what they think is the highest level, they find that there are thirty more levels to achieve. One student and critic of the organization said that there are most likely three even higher levels that are never mentioned and that are protected by a strict discipline of secrecy. Some believe Stephen Knight’s work led to his mysterious death shortly after it was published.2
Initiates are schooled in the “sacred geometry” of the ancients from the time of the master Hiram. The earliest Masons would have had to have been knowledgeable in remedial geometry to have done their job. A master mason would have had to have been skilled in higher mathematics to have planned and overseen the construction of cathedrals and churches. In that same fashion initiates would have shared in a small degree of secrets and more advanced levels would have been initiated into higher forms of such sacred knowledge. Members can ostensibly reach the thirty-third degree, but this makes little sense in a mystic scheme where thirty-six is half of the sacred seventy-two degrees.3 Ex-presidents Gerald Ford, William Howard Taft, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman as well as such notables as J. Edgar Hoover, Melvin Laird, Nixon’s defense secretary, and Steven Bechtel (the construction magnate) all reached the thirty-third degree.4 What did these people know that was so secret?
In Genesis, David Wood explains that Freemasons regard the number thirty-three as the sum of eighteen (an Isis number) and fifteen (for Osiris).5 Such sacred connections are significant in this pseudo-religion. The number five is a sign of feminine power associated with the penta-gram. The number eight is also sacred to Isis, possibly the oldest universal goddess. Eight is recognized as being symbolic of both birth and infinity. And the number fifty-eight (five and eight) is held holy by the Templars and the modern-day Prieuré de Sion. Five plus eight adds up to thirteen, a number deemed bad luck for Christians in light of its goddess association. While eight can be a positive or “lucky” number for Christians, thirteen can only represent the goddess. The goddess letter “M” is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet and it is used as a symbol for the female constellation Virgo. Friday the thirteenth in the year 1307 was not lucky for those Templars who were arrested on that day. Is this magic significance of numbers just silliness?
There are two explanations for such myths and magical numbers. Most likely in the craft of architecture, little was written down. The significant numbers all had stories behind them used as memory devices simply to make recalling a lesson easier. We get our own measurement systems from the oldest civilization we know, the Sumerians. They divided the circle into 360 degrees and the hour and minute into units of sixty. They established the twelve-inch foot and the count of a dozen for eggs. They measured time and space in this number system based on sixty. They measured time by space as well.6 The time it took for the shadow of the sun to cross a given area, for example, would allow a mathematician (and architect) to determine its distance.
Such measurements took on cosmic significance.7 The equinoctial sun occupies each house of the zodiac for 2,160 years. A complete cycle of the zodiac would take 25,920 years. On the 360-degree circle it takes seventy-two years to shift one degree. The complete cycle of the zodiac (25,920 years) divided by 432 (a number Berossus uses much as Euclidian geometry uses π), gives the answer 60, the number on which the whole mathematical system is based. Certain key numbers would be remembered with the help of legends.
The Norse Valhalla had 540 doors, through which eight hundred warriors would enter; multiplying these two numbers gives 432,000. Chinese tradition claims that the history of the cataclysm that created the Earth was written in 4,320 volumes. And the Babylonian mystic and historian Berossus says there were 432,000 years between the first king and the Flood. In the Rig Veda of India there are 10,800 stanzas with forty syllables in each (or 432,000 syllables). In the New World certain numbers featured prominently as well. The Mayan time measurement one katun was 7,200 days, and five baktuns were equal to 720,000 days. The legends behind numbers may simply have ensured that this sort of knowledge could be concealed within myths and not forgotten. Sacred geometry was in fact simply geometry that would be required knowledge for anyone in the building trade.
On the other hand, the occult nature of Masonry was later exploited to control members more fully. Swearing allegiance to strange pagan gods and playing roles in secret ceremonies were enough to get one burned at the stake in relatively recent times. Membership in a Masonic organization has broken political careers in Italy even today. It is evident that use of manipulative methods and blackmail can be a very effective means of controlling members. In certain organizations and movements secrecy and control are very important.8
Manly P. Hall, an expert on Masonic law and history, may have been the first to point out just how many founders of the United States were high-ranking members of the Masons.9 In fact,
it appears that the notion of the United States as a country was that of the Masons’ in Europe. Independence was the culmination of a long-term effort by the society, which secretly backed and financed the establishment of the United States and outwardly joined the military effort to ensure its survival. The architects of the American Declaration of Independence and the writers of the Constitution were almost all Masons, as were the governors of each of the thirteen colonies. The leading military, both organized and underground, were Masons. And the first president was a prominent Mason. Even the military supporters of the Revolution, who hailed from diverse countries in Europe and came to America to join the war, were Masons.10 Coincidence? It is doubtful.
The seeds of what flowered into the American Revolution were planted when European colonies were formed in the New World. While the mass of immigrants harbored no ulterior motives, the movement toward revolution and the establishment of a utopian society were orchestrated by a select elite in Europe. The idea of such a freethinking world was supported in the philosophy of contemporary writers, and the words were soon followed by deeds.
The list of Masons who participated in the revolution reads like a Who’s Who of American history.11 Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee were said to be Masons. John Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and Paul Revere were members of the Scottish Lodge, which in America had a degree of rank called the “Knight Templar.” Paul Revere was also part of the Sons of Liberty, connected to Saint Andrew’s Lodge, which was behind the Boston Tea Party. Benedict Arnold and his father-in-law, the high sheriff of New Haven, were Masons in that small city’s lodge. Benjamin Franklin was the grand master of the Pennsylvania lodge and a member of a lodge in Europe whose name suggests a secret society within a secret society—the Royal Lodge of the Commanders of the Temple West of Carcassonne. Carcassonne, we remember, was central to the Church’s war against the Arian Cathari. In an effort to prepare for war, Benjamin Franklin went to France. His mission was to keep open trade with France that would provide the colonies with the needed munitions. He was received by Dr. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg and Sieur Mountaudoin. Franklin’s meeting with the Montaudoin family of Nantes, a Mason stronghold, led to a deal that lasted for three generations, shipping illicit arms and other goods to America. Mountaudoin was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and a fellow Mason. Before war broke out, the colonies were already being armed for the coming conflict.
In January of 1775 the French ship Jean Baptiste—a fitting name for a Masonic enterprise—carried weapons to Portugal, which were then put on a Dutch ship heading for America. The cargo included a thousand muskets, five hundred pairs of pistols, and barrels of powder. When open warfare finally broke out after the years of rebellious skirmishes, many foreign Freemasons rushed to the aid of the new country. Baron von Steuben, Kazimierz Pulaski, and the marquis de Lafayette were several such notables who joined the war effort. There were Masons on the British side as well, and a student of the Revolution might suspect that they sabotaged the British effort. The British constantly had Washington and the American forces in general on the run—outgunned and outmanned—yet they lost several key battles and thus the entire war.
General Arthur St. Clair, who was descended from William Sinclair of Roslin, had served with the British military leader Sir Jeffrey Amherst in Nova Scotia.12 When the cause was France against Britain during the American Revolution he chose the British side. When asked to fight against the American colonies, he resigned his commission and was made a major general of the American army. He later fought against the Indians for his new country. He married the daughter of a wealthy French family but died in poverty. His tombstone inscription reads, “This stone is erected over the bones of their departed brother by the members of the Masonic society.”13
General Horatio Gates, who had fought under Amherst and was George Washington’s friend, married the daughter of the grand master of Nova Scotia. Ironically, he was chosen over Washington for the position of commander-in-chief by a cabal that included Charles Lee of Virginia and John Adams of Massachusetts.14 George Washington had been sworn in as a Mason in 1752, when he was only twenty, and rose quickly through the Masonic ranks as well as the military ranks. He eventually became grand master of the grand lodge of Virginia. Lafayette himself observed how committed Washington was to his fellow Masons and noted that he rarely awarded independent commands to those who were not Masons. His generals Horatio Gates, Henry Knox, and Israel Putnam were fellow Masons. Washington used Masonic tradition and brotherhood as a way to keep the army together and conducted lodge ceremonies even at Valley Forge.
George Washington prevailed against the British and American conspirators and was soon elected president of the new republic. He was sworn in by the grand master of New York, Robert Livingston, with the Bible of the Saint John’s Lodge of New York.15 The dollar had and still has Masonic symbols, including the unfinished pyramid, the “all-seeing eye,” and a scroll proclaiming a “new secular order.” The first U.S. attorney general, Edmund Randolph, was a Mason as was one of the first chief justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. Masonry triumphed in the United States. There the utopia of Bacon came to fruition.
Bacon and the New World Order
Several writers were instrumental in developing the idea of freedom and democracy, but Bacon was one of the few elite who could further the exploration and settlement of the New World. He was a true Renaissance man in terms of both political thinking and science. In his book The New Atlantis, he called for openness in the arts and sciences, freedom from persecution for Jews, and higher ideals for all. Written at the same time, another work, a play that defied the divine right of kings, cost a friend of Bacon’s his life. For this reason, it is speculated, not all of his work could be published under his name. That was the motive for allegedly giving an illiterate actor the credit for such works as Richard II.16
As we have seen, Dr. Orville Ward Owen of the United States traveled to England to search for the original Shakespeare-Bacon manuscripts. With clues from the writings of Bacon and Shakespeare, Owen scoured the countryside for fifteen years. Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum had described preserving documents through the use of mercury, placing parchments in quicksilver for long-term preservation. Owen looked for ruined castles, hidden stairways, and secret chambers where boxes sealed in mercury might be hidden. His search led him to a tunnel under the Wye River and a nearby castle. In the silt of the river Owen found a vault of cement and stone as large as a room, but empty.
Owen’s conclusion was that Bacon had used this vault but that he, or someone else, had moved the manuscripts to a safer location. In Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon also wrote of constructing artificial springs by using stone, sand, and ferns. Was the refuge of Bacon in Nova Scotia? Bacon and two of his closest friends had received land in eastern Canada. One was William Rawley, who protected Bacon’s manuscripts until his death in 1660. The other was Thomas Bushell, a mining engineer whose expertise was in extracting ore from flooded mines.17 Both may have had a role in keeping the Shakespearean plays of Bacon from seeing the light of day.
In the tight-knit circle of Bacon and his friends, we find the group that constitutes the Invisible College. They were the thinkers and the doers of the Elizabethan court. But they operated in a world that regarded science as magic and heresy—crimes that were punished by torture and death. The idea of a utopia that did not ban experimentation and theorizing appealed deeply to them. The line between science and magic, apparent to modern readers, was very thin in the Elizabethan age. One might be rewarded handsomely for a new discovery or thrown to the Inquisition for heresy. A good example was in the early study of medicine.
Bacon himself studied the human body. He incorrectly stated that there was no norm for body temperature. Another Renaissance pioneer who agreed with him was the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. Their circle included Dr. Robert Fludd, who asserted that the Bible recorded the use of a thermometer in measuring human temperature.18 While such theories would be laughed
at today, science was coming out of a sort of dark age, and wild theories precede finding truth. Another in their circle was William Harvey, who was soundly criticized in his time for pioneering the use of cadavers for medical and scientific research, but who is remembered with distinction today.19
Dr. Fludd was a Rosicrucian.20 This secret society, which first appeared in Germany in the early seventeenth century, claimed as its founder Christian Rosenkreuz, who wrote The Chemical Wedding. Works on alchemy, such as this one, could earn their author execution. The true author, Johan Valentin Andrea, feared the Church and wrote using a pseudonym. The text of The Chemical Wedding discusses the Templars, Grail literature, and the lost royal lineage. Being associated with a secret science of the “Rosy Cross” did not endear Dr. Fludd to modern science. Fludd’s father was treasurer to Elizabeth I and served in her court along with Bacon. At that time the court was sending aid to France, whose finance minister was Louis de Nevers. Fludd himself tutored Henry of Lorraine’s children in Marseilles, including Charles, the duke of Guise. Charles of Guise, whose family had commissioned the Grail romances, married Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse, who owned the village of Couiza, near Rennes-le-Chateau. And Fludd, de Nevers, and Andrea were all linked in another way—they each served as grand masters of the Prieuré de Sion.21