by Steven Sora
In England, Bacon and his circle seemed to be pressing Elizabeth for their own “New Atlantis” agenda. Dr. John Dee, another in the circle of the Invisible College, had the ear of Queen Elizabeth.22 While he is not noted for his science of navigation, his work, The Perfect Art of Navigation, led Sir Francis Drake to believe it was possible to sail around the world. Dr. Dee, however, was more noted for his work as a magician. Among other tasks, he was astrologer to Queen Elizabeth. She chose her coronation day only after Dr. Dee pronounced a fortuitous date. She and her ladies-in-waiting traveled to the estate of Dee in Mortlake, where he kept his magic mirror that could see the future.23 Witnesses to its magic were never able to describe what they had seen.
In his laboratory Dr. Dee experimented with alchemy and wrote on this secret science and on the Cabala. His library reputedly contained more books than any other in Europe—many on forbidden arts that today might be regarded as science. When discussion of the Drake voyage first emerged, backers of the scheme enlisted Dee to help. Through the use of some convoluted logic Dee convinced Elizabeth that she was a linear descendant of Arthur and was entitled to be the queen of America (and Scandinavia and Russia for good measure). Elizabeth and other backers put up the funds for Drake’s secret mission. The voyage of the Golden Hind yielded a 4,700% return for the investors.24 Dr. Dee’s collection also included the charts and maps of the Zeno-Sinclair expedition; the explorer Sir Martin Frobisher had obtained these from Dee. In the end, Dr. Dee’s magic did not always work on his behalf—a mob attacked his house, destroying his library, when they heard he was using familiars to perform his magic.
Still another member of the Invisible College, the scientist Robert Boyle, took over as grand master of the Prieuré de Sion after Johan Andrea. Both had studied alchemy. Boyle was connected to the Medici family and to Isaac Newton and philosopher John Locke. Locke was connected to the Guise family and became a student of the mysterious history of Rennes-le-Chateau (long before Saunière’s nineteenth-century discovery). Boyle’s work on alchemy passed to the hands of Newton.
Among Newton’s writings was a study of Judaism, which was said to include divine knowledge that had been lost. Newton was aware that astronomers from Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece had built temples to serve as models of the universe, preserving cosmic knowledge in microcosm. Solomon was the first. Newton wrote of the significance of the dimensions of Solomon’s temple, which itself revealed certain secrets. The Apocalypse of Saint John and Ezekiel further taught Newton the value of following the exact plan of the temple. He believed that a select few had possessed the philosophers’ stone throughout history, and this group included Solomon, Moses, Plato, Hermes, and Jesus. He himself believed in God but followed the Arian doctrine that stated that Jesus was not equal to God the Creator.25
Newton’s own belief mirrors the Masonic mythology that Solomon had been aware that he was creating a structure that would resemble the universe. Solomon was preserving within the structure the arcane knowledge of secrets meant to be understood only by a few. Those few included Persian magicians, Babylonian priests, and Greek philosophers, who passed on this knowledge through history. When Newton died, most of his writings were scattered and lost. The English economist John Maynard Keynes came across Newton’s papers in 1936 at an auction and studied them in detail. He concluded that Newton was the “last of the magicians.”
After one hundred years, the leadership of the Prieuré de Sion, once in the hands of scientists, returned to men of more political orientations. In England the Catholic Stuarts were returned to the throne in 1660. Because they had the support of Freemasonry, that secret society was allowed to conduct itself more openly. Charles Radclyffe, active in Scottish Freemasonry, became the grand master. He was cousin to the Bonnie Prince Charles, who was active in the Royal Society. The Royal Society, the Invisible College, and Rosicrucianism were all reactions to the oppression of church and state and the general fears of the populace, who put their faith in the Church. The patronage of such groups by members of royalty allowed them to further their ideas about science with less fear of being branded as witches or heretics. And these fears were not exaggerated—Galileo was imprisoned, threatened with torture, tried, and confined to his home for life for stating that the Earth moved around the sun.
Freemasonry came out into the open during this era. On June 24, 1717 (Saint John’s Day), four London lodges went public. In 1725 a lodge in Ireland followed suit. Finally, in 1737, under Andrew Ramsay, who was in the French order of Lazarus, the Scottish Lodge officially entered the world. Ramsay linked the Templars and the Freemasons by calling the new organization “returning Crusaders.” He educated Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ancient mysteries of Freemasonry, which he believed were connected with the goddesses Ceres, Isis, Minerva, and Diana. His agenda was more political and similar to that of the Sinclairs—he wanted to unite France and Scotland again.26
At that time, however, the Scottish Masons were no longer devout to the Catholic Church. The Church in Rome condemned the Freemasons and excommunicated all Catholic members. Pope Clement XII declared in 1738 that the true purpose of the Freemasons was to subvert the Catholic Church. This pope may have understood Masonry as an Arian heresy. Today we know that once a Mason rises in rank above the first three degrees, he is initiated into an indoctrination of a religious nature. He is told, as all initiates are, that the organization accepts members of any religion that believes in a supreme god. Later he is told that there is only one god and that Jesus is not part of the godhead. Nor is the god of the Freemasons the same god as in the Catholic religion. God is Jabulon, a mystic combination of Jah (or Yahweh, Jehovah of the Jews), Ba’al (god of the Phoenicians and Celts), and On (a god of Egypt, Osiris).27
Stephen Knight has discussed the god of the Freemasons in a chapter entitled “The Devil in Disguise.” The god of the Masons was the Great Architect who built the universe. The further one progressed up the Masonic ladder of initiation, the more of the nature of this god would be revealed. Few would talk to Knight about this, since outside their organization Masons belong to more accepted religions. It is difficult to resolve one’s “visible” religion with one’s membership in an order that believes in Hebrew and pagan gods at the same time.
Bacon had failed to create his utopia, Dr. Dee had failed to gain the rulership of the entire New World for Elizabeth, and Drake had failed to do more than build up his own coffers and those of his queen with the booty of the Spanish galleons. The new utopia, which visibly sought to end religious prejudice and the religious grip on all matters of learning, crumbled in a world where Christians now fought Christians and religious persecution took even more novel forms, as in the prosecution of witchcraft. The intellectual side of Freemasonry had failed. The military side of the order took precedence again. America in the eighteenth century was moving toward the Baconian ideal, but Europe was moving further away.
The Success of the Guardians in America
It was a Scottish Freemason who was instrumental in bringing what is often called the “craft” to the New World and preserving Nova Scotia. Sir Jeffrey Amherst led a regiment called the Royal Scots and drove the French out of Nova Scotia in 1758.28 It was Amherst, wishing to increase the population, who divided the territory and created the document known as the Shoreham Grant, one year later.29 Oak Island for the first time officially had an owner.
Threat of revolution in America brought many New England families north to Nova Scotia. Many Highland families from Scotland migrated to “New Scotland” as well. Where Amherst went, Freemasonry followed. His unit chartered the first British lodge in America and trained such fellow Masons as Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold, and George Putnam. Serving under Amherst was a Lieutenant Colonel John Young. Young had been appointed deputy grand master of the Scottish Lodge by none other than William St. Clair of Roslin. In 1761 Young turned over the lodge to another Lieutenant Colonel, Augustine Provost. Provost became the grand master for all the Scottish lodges in Ame
rica.
The Freemasons would take a leadership role in diplomacy behind the scenes and the military resistance that became the American Revolution. The utopian dream of a free country, where religion and the state were separate, was realized. The success of the American Revolution brought such revolutionary ideas to France. The revolution that started with the philosophy of the elite degenerated in France into a mob-run slaughterhouse. By this time the secret treasures of the Sinclairs, the Templar treasury, the loot of the Temple of Solomon, and the relics of the Scottish Catholic Church were all guarded by the secret society, which operated within the frame of militant Freemasonry. The Oak Island repository was a part of Nova Scotia that was threatened by the hostilities of the French and English.
The Failure of the Guardians in Europe
In Europe the elite families that made up Prieuré de Sion were not the self-sacrificing heroes who risked their own wealth and their lives to bring about their ideals. The European elite were seen as self-absorbed, power-hungry, and greedy. The aristocracy became the first target of the mob, and soon all wealthy individuals were considered antirevolution-ary. Members of the family of Lorraine who survived the revolution came to hold the title of grand master, but surviving was accomplished only by maintaining a very low profile. Meanwhile, the title of grand master was invested in artists and writers, most likely figureheads being paid by their patrons to avoid the risk that such patrons might attract.
Charles Nodier, a major literary figure in nineteenth-century France tried to revive interest in the Merovingian dynasty and in secret societies in general.30 He indicated that his group was based both in biblical and Pythagorean philosophy. But such secret societies began to suffer a backlash that a Masonry-related scandal in America and the bloodshed of revolutionary France had caused. After Nodier’s term, the writer Victor Hugo and the composer Claude Debussy were at least the titular heads of the underground Prieuré de Sion. Victor Hugo certainly fits the profile of a known artist with less than orthodox religious learning. His family was from Lorraine, and he was attracted to both secret societies and the occult. Regarded as deeply religious, he did not believe in the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus. He married in the Saint Sulpice church in Paris (where Saunière was sent after his discovery) and vacationed in the Pyrennees. He was anti-pope and pro-Freemason when the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Masons were opposing the pope in Italy. His best-known work, Les Misérables, earned him his wealth during his lifetime, but his greatest literary effort was the very unusual La Légende des Siècles. This work, rewritten twice, is a treasure story that starts with Adam and Eve and moves to the south of France, specifically the Rennes-le-Chateau area, according to several researchers.31 Claude Debussy, too, was immersed in the occult, and it was he who introduced Emma Calvé to Father Saunière.
Both of these grand masters, Hugo and Debussy, kept interesting company. One of their circle was Jules Doinel, the bishop of a neo-Cathar church in Languedoc, France, and the librarian of Carcassonne. His heretical church was consecrated in 1890 at the home of Lady Caithness, wife of the earl of Caithness, Lord James Sinclair. The social circles of Doinel, Debussy, and Hugo included Emma Calvé, a famous diva of her day, also immersed in the black arts and occult sciences; she became a frequent visitor to Father Saunière after their introduction through Debussy.32
During Debussy’s term as grand master (1885–1918), the Catholic modernist movement embarrassed the Church in Europe, and the reaction of the pope was to brand the modernists as Masons. The center of this modernist movement may have again been Saint Sulpice. Those who believe the Prieuré de Sion did not last through the ages, as asserted by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, say that the organization became the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrament.33 This group and its acivities are well documented, and its members included the founder of the seminary of Saint Sulpice. In the outer world this organization claimed good works as its purpose, but gathering intelligence and manipulating the business of church and state were its real goals. It was a true secret society and often took an anti-Church stance. Whatever the true aims of the Compagnie, it is interesting that Saunière was sent to Saint Sulpice with his discovery.
After Debussy, the French writer Jean Cocteau became the next grand master. His overt connections with the other grand masters are few, but he had a fascination with monarchy, specifically the Hapsburgs. The Hapsburgs and Masonry are connected in that the family played the same role in Germany that the Sinclairs took in Scotland. They were guardians to the Teutonic Knights, the survivors of the Knights Templar that ruled in Germany.
One of Father Saunière’s most important visitors was Archduke Johann von Hapsburg, cousin to the emperor of Austria. This contact came in a very crucial era for monarchs. Not too long before, America had overthrown the English monarchy, and France had followed by chopping off the heads of her rulers. The Hapsburgs were, at the least, threatened by the civil wars that raged throughout most of Europe during the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century the threat had escalated.
The dynasty that had begun in the tenth century lost everything in the twentieth. The Hapsburgs had risen to prominence in the Alsace region, neighboring the Lorraine province of the Prieuré de Sion. At their peak they owned Austria, Germany, Spain, parts of Italy and the Middle East, and even lands in the New World. Hapsburg and Lorraine united in 1735, when François, duke of Lorraine, married Maria Theresa of Austria. Masonic groups had been on both sides of the antimonarchist actions in Europe, and the group known as the Illuminati had plotted against the Hapsburg dynasty during the French Revolution. But the Hapsburgs prevailed until the twentieth century when an assassin’s bullet brought down the archduke Franz Ferdinand and triggered World War I. Emperor Franz Joseph’s death in 1916 left his cousin Karl and Karl’s wife, Empress Zita, as the Hapsburg heirs, but the war found them in exile first in Switzerland and then in Portugal after two attempts to restore their monarchy failed.
When Zita died in 1989, thousands attended her funeral in Vienna, and millions watched the ceremony, four and a half hours long, on television. Her titles were read aloud; among the fifty-two that she had kept was “Queen of Jerusalem.” Her life’s work—reclaiming the throne for her son Otto—remained unaccomplished. Otto is now a member of the European Parliament and holds the dynastic titles of his family, which is still called the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine.34
The death of Cocteau in 1963 left the post of grand master apparently vacant. The organization has complied with the rules of the French government requiring that all such societies file statements of purpose and provide lists of their officials. Holy Blood, Holy Grail says that the next grand master was a Pierre Plantard de St. Clair. Unlike his apparent predecessors, he was not unusually wealthy or on the way to becoming famous as a writer, playwright, or alchemist. In his favor, he owned land in the Rennes-le-Chateau area as well as near Stenay in the north, where Dagobert II was killed. He had been in the French Resistance in World War II and fought behind the scenes as a supporter of Charles de Gaulle. When he finally made himself available to be interviewed, he claimed that his organization did, in fact, “hold the lost treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem.” But his reign as grand master was not destined to last for life. The publicity of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and concurrent media attention on Rennes-le-Chateau played a part in St. Clair’s resignation from the post. Today the post is held by a lawyer in Barcelona, and the organization has once again become publicity shy.35
The Power of the Secret Society
For better or worse, secret societies have always existed. Often they work on behalf of good causes, but some also have an insidious side that breeds corruption and favoritism, attributes not necessarily monopolized by organizations. Revolving around the Catholic Church are several cultlike groups—not surprising in an era of great change—whose nature and size are certainly eye-opening. The Opus Dei (the “Work of God”) is a very right-wing group that counts seventy-three thousand members in eig
hty seven countries.36 While their size is not considered huge, their commitment extends way beyond anything required of a Mason. Members swear to unquestioning obedience and celibacy and conform to a daily ritual that includes self-flagellation. There is at least one documented case of a parent hiring a deprogrammer to extricate a child from the group. Opus Dei boasts that it influences 487 universities and high schools, fifty-two radio and television stations, and almost seven hundred publications. While they are most influential in Spain, Mexico, Columbia, and Peru, they are also represented in major cities in the United States.
Comunión y Liberación (Communion and Liberation) is another, less secretive group that boasts six thousand members; its aim is to change Italian society.37 About one tenth of its members are priests. Chapters have sprung up in New York, Washington, and Boston. They are more traditional Catholics who refuse to work with less traditional groups, such as Catholic Action. Described in the New York Times as “armed, active and tough,” Catholic Action is not tough in its anti-abortion stance, which is one reason they are alienated from Communion and Liberation.
The most influential group in the Catholic world is the Knights of Malta. Penny Lernoux describes the group as the “old boys club for European aristocracy and the political right in the United States and Latin America.”38 The Knights of Malta was founded on the wealth of the order that it destroyed, the Templars, and it is now headquartered in Rome. There are fifteen hundred American members. Past and present members include William Casey (CIA director), William and James Buckley, Clare Boothe Luce (publisher of Life magazine), William Simon (former Secretary of the Treasury), Frank Shakespeare (Radio Free Europe and CBS), Lee Iacocca (CEO of Chrysler), Republican senator Pete Dominici, Alaskan governor Walter Hickel, and J. Peter Grace (conglomerate magnate). The Sovereign Military Order of Malta and its knights have played roles in protecting Nazis during the war crime trials after World War II, in the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, in right-wing coups in Italy, and in handling logistics for the Contras in Nicaragua.