by Colin Wilson
An outline of the carving at Rosslyn showing a Knight Templar initiating a candidate into Freemasonry.
Why did the St Clairs call their home Rosslyn? A little research revealed that they didn’t. The chapel, like the castle, was then called Roslin (as the village is today). In the 1950s the name had been changed to Rosslyn to pull in the tourists because it sounded more ‘olde wo rlde’. Village names usually have meanings. Lomas and Knight checked a Scottish Gaelic dictionary and found that ‘Ros’ meant knowledge, and ‘linn’ meant generation. They consulted modern Gaelic speakers and learned that a better translation would be ‘ancient knowledge passed down the generations’, which sounded exactly what they were hoping for – the place had been specifically named by the Gaelic-speaking Henri St Clair to hint at the Templars’ secret.
The dates did not fit, though. Henri had returned from the First Crusade about 1100, eighteen years before Hugh de Payens and his knights moved into the Temple and began their search.
Yet surely the name Roslin, with its implication of ancient knowledge, could not be coincidence? The two authors had already wondered precisely why the nine knights went to Jerusalem. Were they merely seeking treasure? Or did they already have an idea of what they were looking for? The name Roslin suggested that the answer was yes. Studying the chapel more closely, the authors found something even more exciting. One of the pillars had a tableau that showed a figure – presumably a knight – holding up a cloth in both hands. On the cloth there was a bearded face. The head of the figure holding the cloth had been hacked off, presumably to disguise his identity. Nearby was a frieze showing the crucifixion, yet it did not seem to be Jesus’s crucifixion. To begin with, the people shown were in medieval garb, and some were hooded – members of the Inquisition. Another frieze showed Templars with an executioner next to them.
The face on the cloth, the authors felt, bore a resemblance to that of Jacques Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars. Molay had not been tortured in the torture chamber of the Inquisition, but in the Paris headquarters of the Templars. The rack and suspension chains would not have been available. Lomas and Knight argue that Molay was, in fact, tortured by being crucified.
The inquisitor William Imbert, a devout Catholic, would have been horrified to learn that the Templars denied that Christ was the son of God. And he would have felt that the Templars’ use of a ceremony of resurrection in their rituals was simply blasphemous. It would have been highly appropriate to torture Molay by nailing him to a door. Lomas and Knight believe that Rosslyn provides the evidence that this is what happened.
After Molay had confessed to whatever the Inquisitors had accused him of, he was taken down and wrapped in a piece of cloth. He was laid on his bed in this ‘shroud’, his body streaming with perspiration and blood containing a high lactic acid content. The authors suggest that the blood and perspiration
‘fixed’ Molay’s image on the cloth, in a process similar to that which creates the image of flowers pressed between the pages of a book. (In The Second Messiah, they include an appendix by an expert on photography, Dr Alan Mills, on the chemistry of this process.) The piece of cloth, they believe, is now known as the Holy Shroud of Turin, the shroud that is supposed to contain the image of Jesus.
What evidence is there that the figure on the Shroud of Turin is Jacques Molay? To begin with, there is the interesting fact that in 1988 carbon-14 dating revealed that the fabric of the shroud was woven between AD 1260 and 1390, which conclusively rules out the possibility that the shroud was used to wrap the body of Jesus. But these dates do cover the arrest and torture of Jacques Molay.
There is an even more powerful piece of circumstantial evidence. The shroud belonged to the family of Geoffrey de Charney, who was roasted to death with Jacques Molay in 1314. In 1356, England’s Black Prince routed France’s John II, son of Louis X, at Poitiers. And another Geoffrey de Charney, probably the grandson of Geoffrey’s brother Jean, died beside his king. Later, when Geoffrey’s widow Jeanne de Vergy was searching through her husband’s effects, she found a piece of cloth, about 14 feet long, with the brown image of a man on it – a man with a bearded face. Both his front and his back were visible, and bloodstains indicated that he had been crucified with nails through the wrists.
The Romans carried out most crucifixions with nails through the wrists, for the palm is not strong enough to support the weight of a body and tends to tear open via the fingers. Jesus must have been crucified in this way.
Not unnaturally, Jeanne was inclined to believe she was looking at an image of Jesus, and since she had been left penniless by her husband’s death she decided to put the ‘Holy Shroud’ on display in the church at Lirey, built by her husband. It drew an unending stream of pilgrims and – presumably – solved Jeanne’s financial problems.
Henry of Poitiers, the Bishop of Troyes, declared it to be a fake that had been ‘made by human hands’, and tried to seize it. He was unsuccessful, but in 1532 the shroud was almost destroyed in a fire, and molten silver burned a number of holes into it. Luckily, they missed the central image, and when the cloth had been repaired by nuns it looked as good as new. It was moved to Turin Cathedral in 1578.
More than five centuries later, on 25 May 1898, it was again put on public display, and a photographer named Sendono Pia was commissioned to photograph it. And when he looked at the negative, he was amazed to see that he was now looking at a real face, which could only mean that the brown image itself must have been a negative that had now become positive.
Clearly, the Bishop of Troyes was wrong; this was not a forgery, for it had not been painted. The ‘miraculous’ reversal of a negative left most pious Catholics in no doubt that this was an image of Christ himself. A majority of believers still hold this view.
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have even developed a highly original theory that the image in the shroud is a photographic negative, and that the photographer was Leonardo da Vinci himself, who filmed his own image on the shroud by a process he had invented.17 The dates, of course, are all wrong, since Leonardo was not born until 1452, almost a century after the shroud had first been exhibited, but they argue that Leonardo swapped his self-portrait for the original shroud.
Alan Mills, the photographic expert, believes that immense physical stress caused the release of oxygen-free radicals in Molay, arguing that these ‘photographed’ the image on the shroud, which then developed during the fifty years the cloth was stored. Lomas and Knight theorise that after the torture of Jacques Molay and Geoffrey de Charney, the two men were sent back to Charney’s family to be nursed back to health, but it seems equally possible that the shroud was simply taken back to Charney’s home by relatives who came to visit him – and Molay – during their next seven years in prison.
Lomas and Knight argue that, as the shroud became a famous relic, the Bishop of Troyes did his best to suppress it, afraid that enough people knew it to be an image of the murdered Jacques Molay to create the danger of a cult of ‘the second messiah’, which might cause serious embarrassment to the Church. So the Bishop of Troyes announced that it was a forgery, and that the forger had been caught and the shroud destroyed. In fact, the shroud was hidden and put on exhibition again in 1389, when the fuss had died down.
The Rosslyn image of the headless man holding a cloth that contains a representation of a bearded head certainly supports the theory that the shroud contained an image of Jacques Molay. Lomas and Knight found an extremely interesting piece of evidence in the twenty-seventh degree of Freemasonry, a ritual concerning the false condemnation of the Templars and their denial of the cross. The nineteenth-century occultist A. E. Waite had written a book about the Templars, but expressed distaste at this ritual, on the grounds that the cross used in it – a cross of Lorraine – had two sets of initials on it, JN and JBM. Waite had been told that these stood for Jesus of Nazareth and Jacques Burgundus Molay. So the Freemason tradition appears to suggest that Molay was crucified. That there was some kind of cult of t
he Master of the Templars is evidenced by an event that happened in 1793, during the French Revolution; as Louis XIV was about to be guillotined, a member of the crowd shouted, ‘Jacques Molay is avenged!’
One major mystery of Freemasonry still intrigued Lomas and Knight: why did the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon’s Temple, play such an important part? In fact, it is the central legend of Freemasonry, and every Mason ‘becomes’ Hiram Abif as he undergoes a ritual murder and resurrection in his initiation ceremony. As Hiram Abif is resurrected, certain words are spoken aloud. They sound like gibberish: ‘Ma’at-beb-men-aa, Ma’at-ba-aa.’
But Christopher Knight happened to know that ‘ma’at’ is an ancient Egyptian word. It meant originally ‘ordered and symmetrical’, like the base of a temple. Then it came to mean righteousness, truth and justice, concepts that play such a central role in Freemasonry. Knight realised that the ‘gibberish’ is ancient Egyptian, meaning ‘Great is the Master of Ma’at, great is the spirit of Ma’at.’
In the Old Testament Hiram is referred to as ‘Hiram the King of Tyre’ (I Kings), and also as ‘Hiram of Tyre’, son of a Tyrian bronzeworker (II Chronicles). It seems that he was not just the architect of the Temple, but the master builder who directed operations. He was attacked and killed by three of his own workers, who struck him three blows, apparently because he refused to divulge the secret signal that would have enabled them to claim a higher rank than they actually possessed (and thus higher wages). It all sounds highly unlikely – surely workers on the Temple could not get away with such a crudely conceived swindle? Lomas and Knight suspected that the story of Hiram Abif concealed some important historical truth.
Why is the ritual of Freemasonry so full of hints that its origin lies in ancient Egypt, and why is the Great Pyramid one of its central symbols? The forefathers of modern America, all Freemasons, were responsible for placing the pyramid symbol on dollar bills. Since there are so many connections between Jews and Egyptians in the Old Testament, Lomas and Knight felt that the answer probably lay in historical events involving both nations, which would have occurred long before Solomon built the Temple. According to the Book of Genesis, the Jews came into existence after Jacob had wrestled with the angel and his name was changed to Israel. His twelve sons gave their names to the twelve tribes of Israel. The date seems to have been some time in the middle of the sixteenth century BC.
The Jewish historian Josephus had identified the so-called Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, with the Hebrews of the Old Testament. The Hyksos were, in fact, a mixed group of
Semitics and Asiatics who moved into Egypt around 1,750 BC – not as warriors, but as refugees from drought. They seized power around 1,630 BC and ruled until they were thrown out 108 years later, as a result of a revolt that began at Thebes (now Luxor). Although modern scholars do not feel that Josephus was completely accurate, there seems little doubt that the ancestry of the Jews includes the Hyksos. The Hyksos kings ruled northern Egypt (Lower Egypt), but Thebes was ruled by a traditional pharaoh, Sequenenre, whose eldest son inaugurated the revolt.
Lomas and Knight were inclined to wonder: was there an Egyptian pharaoh to whom the story of Hiram Abif might apply?
Indeed, there was – and only one. It was Sequenenre himself. It seemed that the Hyksos pharaoh of this time was called Apophis or Apopi. Knight remembered a book of Egyptian liturgies called The Book of Overthrowing Apopi, which is full of magic spells to get rid of him. Moreover, the Hyksos kings increased their unpopularity by worshipping the storm god Set, whom most Egyptians regarded as the god of evil.
When a pharaoh ascended the throne, he went through a ceremony whose purpose was to make him into a god – specifically, into Horus, son of Osiris. When he died, he became Osiris, and there was an important ceremony called ‘the Opening of the Mouth’, when his mouth was levered open with an adze so that his soul could rejoin his fellow gods in heaven and take on the task of interceding for his people. Apopi would have wanted to know the secret ceremony because after two centuries the Hyksos had been thoroughly ‘Egyptianised’; they believed that the ritual would turn the pharaoh into a god. They saw themselves as upstarts, but they wanted to become truly Egyptian, and the pharaoh Apopi naturally wanted to become a god.
Sequenenre was murdered with blows on the head; we know that from his mummy. Lomas and Knight include a gruesome photograph of it with gashes on the skull and one eye missing.
The person with the most obvious motive for murdering him would be the Hyksos pharaoh Apopi.
If Sequenenre was the original of Hiram Abif, then the secret that the three murderers tried to force from him would be the ritual to make a newly crowned pharaoh into Horus.
In the scenario of Lomas and Knight – based on Masonic ritual – Sequenenre was approached by three men, called Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, whose task was to make him divulge the secret ritual. He refused, probably with some angry and contemptuous words – kings do not like being threatened – whereupon the three ruffians went beyond their instructions and killed him with three blows. (This is also a basic part of the Masonic tradition – they were not instructed to kill Hiram Abif, but only to force the secret from him.)
Lomas and Knight even add the fascinating speculation – based on Sequenenre’s dates – that Apopi’s ‘grand vizier’, who was behind the plot to force Sequenenre to divulge the secret ritual, was Joseph, son of Jacob, whose brothers sold him into slavery. They go further and speculate that two of the murderers were Joseph’s brothers Simeon and Levi. The third murderer, they believe, was a young priest of Sequenenre’s temple, dragged into the plot with the threat that Apopi meant to destroy Thebes and that the only way of averting this would be to divulge the ‘god-making’ ritual.
Lomas and Knight discovered some extraordinary physical evidence to support their theory. As well as the proof of violent blows on the mummified head of Sequenenre, entombed beside the pharaoh was another mummy whose state had baffled Egyptologists. Although the flesh had been mummified by the dry air of the tomb, the inner organs had not – as was usual – been embalmed. He had been castrated, and his face bore an expression of agony. He had clearly been wrapped in bandages while still alive, and died of suffocation.
There could be little doubt that this was one of the murderers of the pharaoh. The fact that he was killed so horribly and buried beside Sequenenre suggested that he was not a Hyksos but some member of the pharaoh’s entourage who was being punished for treachery. The other two murderers – foreigners – would simply have been executed.
But why the castration? Because when the god Horus avenged the murder of his father Osiris in a battle with Set, Horus lost an eye and Set lost his testicles. So to punish a treacherous priest in this way would be oddly appropriate, particularly since Sequenenre had lost his eye.
Sequenenre’s son Kamose avenged his father’s murder by fomenting the rebellion that drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. Kamose became the founder of a new Egyptian dynasty, and the ritual of the murder and resurrection of Osiris, which would be used at his coronation, would be enriched by a new level of meaning – the death and resurrection of Sequenenre.
If Lomas and Knight are correct in believing that the pharaoh who made Joseph the governor of Egypt was Apopi – and the dates seem to support it – then the murder of Sequenenre was of even deeper significance, for Joseph’s father Jacob became Israel, the founder of the Jewish people. If Joseph and his family were among the Hyksos who were driven out of Egypt, then the murder of Sequenenre also led to the creation of the Jewish nation, which would help to explain why it was regarded as so important by the Jews that it was transformed into the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon’s Temple.
In researching the history of Freemasonry, Lomas and Knight seem to have made a string of extraordinary discoveries. The claim that Freemasonry originated in Egypt would seem to have a sound factual foundation. With the murder of Hiram Abif six centuries later, Egyptian mythology was metamorphosed int
o Jewish mythology, implying that some form of Freemasonry had survived from the time of Sequenenre and involved a ritual death and resurrection. Lomas and Knight produce compelling evidence to suggest that the ritual was one of the secrets of the Essenes that was hidden beneath the Temple after the crucifixion of Jesus, in whose story resurrection also plays a central part. The Essenes, who guarded the secret, were wiped out by Titus, and the Temple was destroyed. Lomas writes of a ritual of Freemasonry that ‘has a retrospect that tells of the fall of the Nasoreans in AD 70, and how the progenitors of Freemasonry left Jerusalem at that time to spread across Europe’. He also says that these survivors ‘believed they were preserving the bloodlines of the two Messiahs of David and Aaron, who would one day arrive and establish the kingdom of God on earth’. Jesus, whom the Baptist Mandaeans (descendants of the Essenes) regard as an impostor, was raised to the status of a god by St Paul, and when Constantine used Christianity to bind his collapsing empire together, the resurrection became the Church’s most powerful claim to supernatural authority.
As to the Templars, we can make one of two assumptions: either the nine original Templars were among the descendants of the ‘progenitors’ who left Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple and went back with the specific intention of finding the Essene documents, or they were looking for treasure and found instead the Essene scrolls.
Lomas and Knight have no doubt that the former is the correct version of events. In fact, they believe that the First Crusade was deliberately planned to retake Jerusalem so that the knights could undertake the search for the Essene scrolls. When they were found, the illustration of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, identified by the old scholar, Lambert of St Omer, revealed that the knights had found what they were looking for, and the scrolls became the foundation of the power and wealth of the Knights Templar. Somehow, though, the Church and the King of France learned the Templars’ most carefully guarded secret – they were not Christians, in that they believed Jesus to be a man, not the son of God. This served Philip the Fair as an excuse to arrest the Templars and seize their wealth. But he failed because someone – probably Pope Clement – tipped off his relative at Blanchefort, and the