The Swagger Sword

by David S. Brody

  Cam dug deeper, eventually finding a handful of other historians who concurred with his conclusion. A book entitled The Horizons of Christopher Columbus, by Anne Molander, added an important layer of context to the Columbus voyage: Cam wondered why Columbus would brave the North Atlantic in the dead of winter, and Ms. Molander’s research gave him his answer—the ambitious navigator wanted to take longitudinal measurements during a rare solar eclipse. European astronomers had predicted an eclipse on February 13 of that year, and Columbus knew that these measurements, and the rare opportunity to establish precise longitudinal map points, would be crucial to any future Atlantic navigational efforts. Intriguingly, Ms. Molander’s research placed Columbus specifically in Clark’s Harbor, less than a day’s sail from Oak Island, to view the eclipse. Cam smiled: There was no doubt that Columbus kept careful track of eclipses, as evidenced by an incident in Jamaica, decades later, when the navigator cowed unruly natives by making the moon “disappear” that night at his command.

  Cam rubbed his eyes and rotated his stiffening neck. This was dense stuff, parsing through archaic and incomplete writings. But the possible connection to Oak Island and its mysterious treasure was tantalizing. Could Columbus have been following an old Templar map in plotting his course to Nova Scotia? Cam would need to return to a possible Columbus connection to Templar maps and Oak Island at a later time.

  For now, Cam needed to end his Columbus research detour and refocus on the 1178 Templars. He turned back to the Zena Halpern book. According to the Templar journal, while in New Brunswick and northern Maine the Templars lived for a time with the Mi’kmaq tribe, apparently renewing an old friendship. The Templar group even joined the Mi’kmaq in a battle against an enemy tribe, further cementing the alliance. Cam again paused—Prince Henry Sinclair and his crew lived with the Mi’kmaq in 1398 before continuing down the coast to southern New England, where they carved the Westford Knight and likely also built the Newport Tower. The pieces continued to fit together, the journal corroborating the legends and filling in many missing pieces of history.

  The Templar group—some crossing New England by land with Native American guides, and others traveling by boat—made its way to the Catskill Mountains of New York, to the Onteora settlement, where they deposited their secret scrolls and other treasures in a remote temple high in the mountains. Of all the revelations in the Templar journals, the description of this Onteora settlement most intrigued Cam. Comprised of a matriarchal group of Goddess worshipers, these residents descended from the outcast Israelites of Old Testament times, the ones who had refused to give up the ancient Goddess. Later, Jewish refugees from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the first century AD joined the settlement, apparently bringing with them treasures—both religious and pecuniary—of the Jewish people. High in the mountains, this group lived in peace with the surrounding Native American tribes.

  Cam and Amanda had always believed that the Templars secretly believed in the duality of the godhead—that is, that God was both male and female, and that recognition of the feminine aspect of divinity was crucial to a healthy, vibrant society. It was this heretical move away from Catholic orthodoxy which in the end caused the Church to turn on its army of fighting monks. But it was also this socalled heresy which formed the basis for the Templar alliance with the Onteora settlement. Unlike other Christians (or for that matter, other Jews or Muslims) of the day, the Templars felt comfortable within a society which venerated the ancient Goddess. More to the point, they felt comfortable entrusting their treasures—again, in the form of both monetary treasure and also religious artifacts and scrolls—to the ancient people of Onteora.

  In addition to depositing their treasures in the Onteora temple, the Templars also removed certain documents from Onteora with the intention of bringing them back to Europe. It is unclear why they did so, but there were hints that they hoped to use them as leverage against—or even to blackmail—the Vatican.

  Having completed their mission, the Templars traveled down the Hudson River to Long Island Sound, from where they sailed across the Atlantic back to Europe. The mission leader returned to Seborga, on the coast of Italy near Genoa, where he dictated the report of their mission. This report later became known as the Templar journals and formed the basis for Zena Halpern’s book and Archbishop Marcinkus’ treasure quest.

  Cam looked up from his tablet to see Amanda studying him. “What?” he smiled.

  “Nothing. I just like watching you when you’re deep in thought. You’re always so wide-eyed, like a child at Disney World.”

  “How do you know I wasn’t looking at porn?” he mouthed, leaning back so Astarte wouldn’t catch what he was saying.

  “Because you have me,” she said airily.

  He chuckled. “Touché.”

  Five minutes later it was his turn to interrupt her. “I’m just reading about how Onteora was a matriarchal society. It always seems to come back to that for the Templars, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. For a brawling bunch of warrior monks, they were surprisingly liberated.” She paused. “In fact, I’ve been working on something I wanted to share with you. Just give me ten minutes. In the meantime,” she smiled, “I’d fancy a Diet Coke.”

  “And a Sprite for me,” Astarte added.

  Cam stood and arched his neck. “It’s not exactly a medieval quest. But I’m not above doing errands for my women-folk.”

  “Good,” Amanda said. “In that case, find us some pretzels also.”

  Brian staggered into the Meyrick Hotel after a late lunch, acting more drunk than he felt. In fact, he was perfectly sober, which was just one of the reasons he was in a foul mood. Who vacationed sober in Ireland? But there was a treasure to be found, and his best bet to find it—in the name of Cameron Thorne—had gone missing. Which was the other reason he was in a foul mood.

  He approached the front desk, stumbling into it. A forty-something woman with half a chin more than God had given her greeted him with a professional smile. Moira, read her nametag. Full-figured, the way Brian liked them. He held her eyes for a second. After a lifetime of trying, and often failing, to charm the ladies, Brian had developed a keen sense of when to flirt and when instead simply to pay up. Moira crossed her arms in front of her chest and eyed him coldly, apparently amused by neither him nor his green pants. Resigned to paying up, he removed a 20 euro note from his wallet. “I was hoping you could help me. I am supposed to meet a friend, Cameron Thorne, for a drink in your bar. But he’s not there.” Brian shrugged. “I don’t want to phone his room because I think his daughter is asleep.” He put the twenty on the counter. “Could you give me his room number so I can go find him?”

  The clerk flicked out her hand and snatched the bill. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Thorne checked out last night.”

  Brian narrowed his eyes. As he feared. “Did he leave a forwarding address?”

  She glanced down. “No.”

  Damn. Without Thorne, there was no way to find the treasure. In fact, even with Thorne the chances weren’t great. He turned and eyed the bar. “Guess I’m alone then.” This would be his last night in Ireland; he would need to chase Thorne, probably back to New England. More out of habit than any real expectation of success, he offered a crooked smile. “What time you get off work?”

  She had already turned away.

  The plane cruised at 30,000 feet, the cabin awash in an orange glow from the setting sun out the port window. The two most important people in her life seated on either side of her, Amanda’s eyes flew across the screen of her tablet, her brain racing to keep up. The mysteries of the medieval Templars fascinated her: How did an obscure order of monks sworn to protect Christians on pilgrimage to the Holy Land become, in less than a generation, the most powerful entity in all of Europe? And, then, 200 years later, why did the Church turn on them, outlawing its own elite fighting force and imprisoning and executing many of its leaders? A comparable action in modern times would be the President disbanding and outlawing the Ma
rines.

  So, again, why?

  Amanda and Cam had been wrestling with this mystery for the better part of a decade. As Cam had said, with the Templars, it always seemed to come back to the role of women in society—the medieval Church was about as misogynistic an institution as the world had ever seen, and the Templars, apparently, had pushed back. Fatally so.

  Like Cam, Amanda believed one key to understanding the Templars was through studying their spiritual founder, Bernard de Clairvoux. He famously, and perhaps scandalously, dreamt that he drank milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary, and that this milk gave him the wisdom of God. Many historians viewed this as an attempt by Bernard to elevate the status of the Virgin Mary—and of women in general—within the medieval Church.

  Whatever Bernard’s true motivations, his dream and the popularity which it attracted inspired a body of artwork known as the “Lactation of Saint Bernard” paintings. Entire websites were devoted to these depictions, which usually showed the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus with one hand while squeezing her bare breast with the other, thereby squirting her milk into the open mouth of the waiting, genuflecting Bernard. She pulled a medieval painting up on her tablet.

  Cam returned with the beverages and pretzels, and she showed him the image. “Remember this?”

  “I’m sorry, did you want milk?” He smiled. “I thought you said Diet Coke.”

  “Very funny.”

  He sat. “I showed a similar painting to Brian at the Tower last week. Not very subtle of Bernard, was it?”

  She chuckled. “No. I suppose his dream could have been that she touched his head with her fingers, or bathed him in a warm glow or something else, you know, religious. The breast milk is definitely in your face, no pun intended.”

  “I think he wanted to make it clear that the wisdom of God stemmed from something uniquely feminine, like breast milk. Just so the Church couldn’t spin the message.”

  “Well, I think the message was spun all right. But not in the way the Church wanted it to go.” She smiled. This spun message was what she wanted to share with him.

  He angled his head. “How so?”

  “In most of these depictions, it’s clear that the Virgin Mary is, well, the Virgin Mary. Her head is covered and she’s wearing white or blue, which is how she’s always depicted. But I started noticing something. I started finding a bunch of depictions like this, many from medieval times.” As she turned her tablet toward him, the plane lurched violently. Their drinks flew, drenching them, while Amanda clutched her tablet. Cam, who had not yet refastened his seatbelt, was thrown upward, cracking his head on the storage bin above him before bouncing into the aisle. The plane lurched for a few more seconds, then, just as suddenly as the turbulence began, the jet passed through it and resettled.

  “Cam! Are you okay?” Amanda called amid the chaos and screams.

  Nodding, Cam pulled himself to his feet and rubbed the top of his head. “Well, that felt good.” He blinked. “Just what my neck needed.”

  Amanda smiled nervously as Cam stumbled back to his seat. She dabbed at her clothes with a cocktail napkin. “Perhaps someone doesn’t want me to show these pictures.”

  “Or perhaps someone wants to make sure I’m paying full attention.” He fastened his seatbelt. “Okay, show them to me now. Before it’s too late.”

  After waiting for the captain to explain away the turbulence, Amanda turned the tablet for a second time. “So look at all these versions of the Lactation of Bernard. I’ve pulled up just four, but I could show you dozens.”

  Cam’s eyes widened. But it was Astarte who spoke. “That’s not the Virgin Mary. That’s Mary Magdalene.”

  “Astarte’s right,” Cam said as Amanda nodded. “She’s wearing orange and green, and her hair is down. Plus it’s long and red.” Artists almost universally used orange and green clothing, along with red hair, to depict Mary Magdalene, while the Virgin Mary typically was portrayed with her dark hair covered wearing white or light blue. Cam remembered Brian’s crass comment about Mary being hot. Perhaps he wasn’t just being a pig. “She doesn’t look like she’s collecting beads at Mardi Gras, but she’s not exactly chaste, either.”

  “Okay then, so who’s the baby?” Astarte asked.

  Amanda eyed her. “Who do you think?”

  Astarte titled her head. “It must be Mary Magdalene and Jesus’ baby then.”

  “Right,” Amanda said. “Which is what makes these images so provocative.”

  “Provocative is one word. Heretical is another.” Cam smiled. “No wonder the plane shook. Essentially what these paintings are saying is that the wisdom of God, as given to Bernard, comes from the wife of Jesus, not his mother.”

  Amanda smiled. “Yes. It was one thing for Bernard to push for the veneration of the Virgin Mary. After all, everyone has a mother they loved, even the most misogynistic of the Church elders. So of course there’s a place for a mother figure. But this takes things to another level. It not only says that Jesus had a wife and child, but that God’s wisdom flows through her, Mary Magdalene, not just through Jesus.”

  “I don’t know why that should be so heretical,” Astarte said. “Why shouldn’t wisdom come from the wife in addition to the husband?”

  “It should,” Cam replied. “But that’s not what the medieval Church thought.”

  “But the Templars did,” said Amanda. “They agreed with Astarte. That’s what these paintings are telling us: Bernard, and the Templars who followed him, understood the importance of women, both in society and in the godhead. Balance. Duality. Not all this male primacy nonsense the Church was preaching.” She shifted in her seat. “This all sets the stage for the Prince Henry Sinclair voyage and the Hooked X stuff.” She explained to Astarte that the Sinclair family was long believed to be the family most closely descended from the Jesus-Mary Magdalene union. And the Hooked X, a modified runic character discovered by researcher Scott Wolter on many medieval North American carvings, was believed to be the symbol of the family. She showed Astarte an image of the Hooked X rune.

  Amanda took a deep breath, explaining that the upper part of the ‘X,’ the ‘v,’ represented the womb, or the female, while the lower part, the inverted ‘v,’ represented the phallus, or the male. The ‘v’ and inverted ‘v’ combined to represent the union of male and female and was used by medieval supporters of Mary Magdalene as a secret sign for those who believed in her marriage to Jesus. And the hook on the upper right stave of the ‘X’ formed a small ‘v’ inside the larger ‘v,’ representing a baby girl within the womb of Mary Magdalene, a girl believed to have been named Sarah.

  “You with me?”

  Astarte nodded. “I’ve grown up with this stuff. But I’m only now beginning to understand it all.”

  Amanda continued. “Here’s the take-away: The Templars came to America in 1178 to find a safe haven for those who believed in the bloodline, in the Jesus-Mary Magdalene union, in the importance of women in society, before the Church quashed them.”

  “Which they eventually did, in 1307,” Cam said. “The Church couldn’t have a rich, powerful force of fighting monks questioning its teachings. And the Crusades were over, so the Vatican didn’t really need the Templar army any more. So the Church and the King of France attacked. Friday the thirteenth of October, which is why Friday the thirteenth is considered unlucky. All the Templar leaders were rounded up, thrown in jail, and tortured. It took the Templars a couple of generations, until the late 1300s, to reorganize and make another trip back to America.”

  “Which brings us back to the 1178 trip and the Catskills treasure,” Amanda replied. “The Templar treasure was never found after 1307. It had disappeared. I think the Templars saw the writing on the wall, even as early as 1178, and had already begun to hide their treasures. They weren’t stupid. The Albigensian Crusade had not formally begun yet, but by the 1160s the Church had already declared that all Cathars should be imprisoned and their property confiscated.” She explained to Astar
te that the Cathars of southern France practiced a variant form of Christianity, one that did not recognize the moral authority of the Vatican or its priests. Later, in the early 1200s, hundreds of thousands of Christian Cathars were slaughtered by Church forces in what many historians called the world’s first religious genocide.

  Astarte swallowed. “Hundreds of thousands?”

  Amanda nodded. “I’ve seen some estimates of a million.”

  “Just for practicing the wrong kind of Christianity?”

  Amanda nodded again. “Apparently, in the eyes of the Church, it was not enough to be a good Christian. You had to be the right kind of Christian also.”

  “You mean the kind that didn’t question the Pope,” Astarte said.

  Cam added, “And don’t forget, many of the Templar leaders were from France. They probably figured, rightly so, that if it could happen to the Cathars, it could happen to them.”

  “Which it did, a century later,” Amanda said. “They, too, were not the right kind of Christians.”

  “And that gets us back, again, to the 1178 trip,” Cam said. “Fearing that someday the Church might turn on them, it would make sense for the Templars to go look for a safe haven. It says so right in the Templar journal—something to the effect that America would make a great place to settle, but don’t tell the Pope.”

  “And, not to sound like a broken record, also a great place to hide their treasures,” Amanda added.

  Their explanation now complete, Amanda and Cam turned to Astarte. She grinned and shook her head. “Well, life in this family sure isn’t boring. Let me guess: We’re going to go looking for that treasure when we land.”