The Oak Island Mystery (18 page)

Something Older
and Stranger

W
hen
Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis re-opened the mystery of the Money Pit in 1795, the general theory among their friends and acquaintances in the Chester and Mahone Bay area was that pirates — and most probably William Kidd's men — were responsible. Hadn't mysterious lights been seen on that sinister island a few years previously, and hadn't the men who had rowed out to investigate never returned? Wasn't that a strong enough indication that they'd been murdered by pirates who'd wanted to guard the secret of their treasure?

The Onslow Company's work in 1803 and 1804 cast the first shadowy finger of doubt over the simple pirates' buried treasure theory. What did all these layers of oak logs, of putty, of coconut fibre, and of charcoal really signify? Was this the way that lazy, brutal, alcoholic, and notoriously undisciplined buccaneers normally did things? Wasn't a ten-foot hole in the sand a few yards above high watermark more their style? Measure so many paces from a rock landmark and an unusual tree? Scrawl a few compass bearings and the latitude and longitude on a crudely inaccurate sketch-map?

Doubt was also cast on the pirate theory by the discovery of the lettered stone which no one could decipher: that very unusual slab of smooth, flat, red-tinted Egyptian porphyry. What was it doing ninety feet down a pirates' hole off the coast of Nova Scotia? There was also the problem of the insuperable water: if the pit was liable to flood at that depth, how had the pirates succeeded in digging it and burying their treasure there in the first place?

By the time that the Truro Company made its attempts in the mid-nineteenth century, Jotham B. McCully's findings via the pod-auger, and Pitblado's theft of what might have been a gemstone (or something stranger and more valuable?), serious doubts were pushing the pirates' treasure theory towards the sidelines. The discovery of the long and elaborate flood tunnels, the drainage network on the beach and the treasure chamber (or burial chamber?) drastically reduced the likelihood that traditional pirates, or privateers, were responsible. What a well-equipped and well-organized labour force could not retrieve must have been concealed and defended by an even larger and better organized construction team. Who then? British Army Engineers at the time of the War of Independence? Spanish Conquistadors, or Inca refugees trying to escape from them? Drake's hardy Devonshire lads augmented by expert Cornish tin-miners? Or was it Glooscap-Sinclair with the Zeno brothers and their Templar refugees?

Go back earlier still: were they Viking sea-warriors, Romano-Celts from the old Welsh Ogafau goldmine, or George Young's Coptic refugees from Egypt?

Consider the mystery of the massive ancient timbers, submerged below Smith's Cove, still bearing their challenging Roman numerals. Part of a sixteenth-century Basque fishing station? One of their ship repair yards? An early whaling or cod-salting depot? Or the remains of something as old as the proud empire whose distinctive numerals the ancient timbers carry?

The deeper the mystery is plumbed, the stranger the discoveries that are made. There is the further riddle of the inexplicable Cave-in Pit; the labyrinth below Borehole-10X; the boxes of “loose metal” that Fred Blair drilled into in 1897; the amazing television pictures that Blankenship's team studied; the strategically placed drilled boulders and the stone triangle pointing to something of great importance.

When a mystery is as complex as this, the solution must match it in complexity.

There is no swift, simple solution to the mystery of the Oak Island Money Pit because the phenomena being investigated do not have one simple, isolated cause.

In the oldest of the buildings in the mysterious French village of Rennes-les-Bains, Roman stonework overlays Celtic foundations, Visigothic walls hide Roman architecture, Merovingian houses have replaced Visigothic cottages and medieval masons have modified the work of their Merovingian predecessors. Archaeologists can find traces of layer upon layer of occupation and alteration there. So it is with Oak Island. The facts appear to contradict one another simply because there is so much overlapping data. Exactly the same problem arose at Glozel. What appeared to be very ancient remains — things from Palaeolithic or Mesolithic times — were found alongside artifacts from the first century of the Christian era, and other pieces from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. It didn't make sense, said the tradition-bound French archaeologists of the Twenties. They dismissed it all as a hoax. Thermo-luminescent dating in Scottish and Scandinavian universities in the 1970s, however, proved conclusively that the artifacts at Glozel were genuinely old. There was no possible way that they could have been faked by the Fradin family in 1924. The apparent contradiction was absolute: a compromise theory had to be found.

What if the so-called medieval “glass factory” at Glozel had also been the lair of “witch” or “wizard”? Someone who had collected the ancient artifacts because he, or she, believed that they possessed “magical” qualities? That would have accounted both for the archaeological incompatibility of the excavated objects, and for their genuine antiquity.

Where and when did the Oak Island Money pit mystery really begin? What forms the first detectable layer of this intricately laminated puzzle?

It began a long way from Nova Scotia, and a long time before 1795. The legends of the ancient, anthropomorphic “gods” and “goddesses” (beings credited with great longevity and superior powers to those of normal humanity) must have had some foundation other than wishful thinking and a strong desire to emulate their advantages. Just as palaeontology and anthropology record the differences between
Ramapithecus, Australopithecus, Homo habilis
of the Olduvai Gorge, Heidelberg, Peking, Cro-Magnon, and Neanderthal humanity, so there may well have existed other species and sub-species, families and genuses differing as much from us as from one another, or from the Yeti and the Sasquatch. What was J.R.R. Tolkien really hinting at when he situated his super-human Númenoreans in a western kingdom known as Atalantë in the Quenya language?
[1]

The very knowledgeable C.S. Lewis (a close friend of Tolkien) hinted in
That Hideous Strength
that Merlin the Magician, famed in the Arthurian legends, was one of the last survivors of this ancient and immensely powerful Númenorean race.
[2]

Von Däniken, by contrast, would argue that such beings came originally from a strange, faraway planet. Atlantis, Lemuria, or the Belt of Orion — whether they eventually turn out to be terrestrial humanity's closest, or most distant, cousins — their origin is shrouded in prehistoric myth and mystery. One name stands out boldly from that vast ancient plurality of gods and goddesses, nature spirits and demons, djinns and elementals, demi-gods and magicians: that name is Thoth, teacher and scribe of the Egyptian gods; Thoth, who is otherwise known as Hermes Trismegistus, and very probably as Melchizedek; Thoth who is always on the side of light, of wisdom, of truth and of goodness. It is Thoth, the great lore-master, who dares to challenge and thwart the dark designs of Set, the sinister, evil entity of Egyptian mythology.

The power and wisdom of Thoth are said to reside in his mysterious Emerald Tablets. Exactly what those tablets are, or what they are able to achieve, only a very few of the most avant-garde thinkers would dare to speculate, but they are said to be truly awesome, ranking alongside the energy which generated the controversial Philadelphia Experiment and allegedly blew the
Eldridge
through hyperspace in 1943.
[3]
Their power may also be compared with the energy involved in the alarming Montauk Project on Long Island, New York.
[4]
It has been conjectured that there is a power within the Emerald Tablets capable of warping time and space themselves, of opening the science fiction writers' so-called “gates” between “probability tracks” and “parallel universes,” of determining which probability track shall cease to be hypothetical and become a concrete, experiential “reality.”

In summary then, Hermes Trismegistus (alias Thoth, alias Melchizedek?) clearly stands in the front rank of those ancient beings whose origin is unknown but who were apparently capable of exercising vast and mysterious powers not available to their normal, human contemporaries. When Abram returned from the Jordanian war during which he rescued his kinsman, Lot, he encountered Melchizedek, priest-king of Salem, and gave him a tenth of the spoils captured in the war. Psalm 76 verse 2 equates Salem with Sion and Jerusalem. Psalm 110 — usually regarded as a Messianic Psalm — refers to Melchizedek's endless life. In the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 7, the writer describes Melchizedek as being “… without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God …”

Ancient Egyptian legend and mythology, augmented by later Greek scholarship at Alexandria, credited Thoth (Melchizedek?) with the authorship of many books of wisdom dealing with such diverse fields of knowledge as astronomy, astrology, mathematics, history, geography, and medicine. He is also said to have been the author of the
Book of the Dead
, whose earliest versions go back at least as far as 4000 B.C.E.
[5]

Two assumptions may now reasonably be made: that a very wise, powerful, and mysterious being known variously in ancient times as Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, and Melchizedek was a genuine historical character, and that this same being was the possessor of certain devices, often described as the Emerald Tablets, by the use of which some of his enormous super-human powers were exercised.

It is equally safe to assume that those who coveted such powers would have gone to any lengths to acquire the Emerald Tablets, and that he who possessed them would have taken great care to ensure that they never fell into the wrong hands — especially into the hands of those who followed Set, the personification of evil in ancient Egypt.

Here then, millennia before the Christian era, is the earliest and faintest dawning of the Arcadian Treasure quest. Rennes-le-Château has its dark and terrible secrets right enough, but they are not even remotely connected with Jesus, with Mary Magdalene, with the totally imaginary “bloodline” hypothesized by Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh,
[6]
with Joseph of Arimathea, or with the Holy Grail as the sacred vessel from which Christ shared wine with His disciples at the Last Supper. That priceless sacred vessel may well have been miraculously preserved somewhere, but its quest and its saga are a totally different story. They follow a different route entirely from the trail of the Emerald Tablets at the heart of the Arcadian Treasure.

That the far, far older Grailstone tradition may have been given a Christian veneer by early evangelists and missionaries (as many other ancient pagan festivals and mysteries were given) is highly likely. That the medieval knightly romance of the quest for the Holy Grail, in the form of Christ's Cup, may have become confused in the telling with the hunt for the Grailstone, Grail Tablet, or Hermetic Crystals is also highly likely, and would account for much of the confusion surrounding the Grail saga today. The theory that the “secret” of Rennes-le-Château has anything to do with some sensational “revelation” contradicting the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is totally false. The Christ revealed to us in the Gospels and the Apostles' Creed is a physical, historical, and spiritual fact. The real Arcadian Treasure mystery which links Rennes, Glozel, and Oak Island, presents no challenge at all to the great central truths of Christianity.

As Wolfram makes plain in his apparently deeply coded epic,
Parzival
, the Grail of antiquity was a stone of some sort, a crystal, perhaps, or a gemstone tablet, rather than a drinking vessel.

In their earliest days the Emerald Tablets moved from ancient Egypt to Salem and back again more than once: it was as if some great psychic tug-of-war was going on between Hermes Trismegistus and Set. Perhaps word of them reached Ur of the Chaldees at about the time that Abram began his long journeyings. Was there a vestige of truth in the ancient Jewish legend that Sarah, Abram's sister-wife, came across them by accident in the cavern where Hermes rested (in much the same way that Christian Rosencreutz later rested in his heptagonal tomb)? Perhaps it was when the Emerald Tablets left Egypt with Moses that an evil Pharoah (a follower of Set?) hurled his doomed charioteers in suicidal pursuit of them across the bed of the Red Sea.

Did the tablets next find centuries of safety inside the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies — a place so vibrant with sacred power that Set's agents dared not approach it directly? What happened shortly before Solomon died? Did Menelik, Son of the Wise Man, succeed in taking the Ark to his beautiful mother's distant Kingdom of Ethiopia, and, if so, did he gain possession of all the Emerald Tablets, or only some of them? What do the Ethiopian Holy Men guard so zealously at Axum today? The empty Ark?

A thin line of ancient Gnostic tradition links unusual early religious groups such as the Paulicians, the Manicheans, the Bogomils, and the Cathars: far more discernible bonds connect the Cathars to the Templars and the Templars to modern Freemasonry. Suppose that Gnosticism, which had a dualistic view of the universe, and which percolated strongly through the Cathar beliefs, also guarded some of the secret knowledge of the Arcadian Treasure and the Emerald Tablets which formed its priceless and powerful core. Gnostic dualism would readily embrace the concept of a holy war between Hermes Trismegistus, representing Goodness and Light, and Set, representing Evil and Darkness. The very early Coptic fragment in the British Museum, the
Pistis Sophia
, is a piece of Gnostic teaching. George Young believed (with sound logic to back him) that Coptic refugees found their way to Oak Island. The riddle carved into the ancient red porphyry slab in the Money Pit may also have been inscribed in some variant Coptic dialect, if Professor Barry Fell is correct.