The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (38 page)

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.
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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.
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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
.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Dr. Fludd was a Rosicrucian.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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It was Amherst, wishing to increase the population, who divided the territory and created the document known as the Shoreham Grant, one year later.
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Oak Island for the first time officially had an owner.