The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (39 page)

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 America.

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.
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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 eighty 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.”
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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.

The Catholic Church, however, has no monopoly on secret societies. From the American Order of Rosicrucians to black magic occult groups like A. W. Waite’s Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley’s Order of New Templars, there are also a wide range of goals. All boast secrets that are meant never to be revealed to the uninitiated and have goals that can affect politics. Many have ritualistic initiations. Such groups have always been both active and present in spiritual and governmental affairs. The Prieuré de Sion is just one more such “elite” group, with its own goals and its own history, real or contrived.

The Prieuré de Sion has played a very important role in the mystery of Oak Island. They were the secret core of the Templars, instrumental in bringing wealth and organization to this military order. But the religious wars that tore apart families and governments in Europe may also have served to divide the organization into two. The Sinclairs, once an all important family in the Prieuré, became the guardian family for the Templars. It is under the guardianship of the Scottish contingent that the treasure was brought to the new Scotland. And it would be a Sinclair who held the key to the treasure.

Epilogue

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