The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (27 page)

The history of the Merovingians is one of murder and treachery. Grandsons of Clovis continued their rule by murder, and Merovingian women were not to be outdone by their men in terms of cruelty. Chilperic murdered his first wife to marry a second. Fredegund, the mistress, even tried to kill her own daughter, Rigunth, who constantly irritated her.
¹⁷
The dowager queen Clotild was given a choice, to have her grandsons’ hair cut off or to have them killed. She responded that if their hair was cut off, they could not rule, so they might as well be killed.

Later, rule passed down to Dagobert II, the king mentioned on the
gravestone at Rennes-le-Chateau. As we recall, he married a Celtic princess, and after her death the Visigothic princess Giselle in Rennes-le-Chateau. The brief record of Dagobert’s life tells us that he amassed a large fortune, which aided his efforts to take over the rule of most of France.
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His inheritance of the Visigothic treasure hoard may have been the basis of this war chest, but his rule did not last forever. On a hunting trip near his northern capital at Stenay, he was stabbed with a lance. The area surrounding Stenay is known as Lorraine, and a later duke of Lorraine became the grandfather of Godfrey of Bouillon, who would be the conqueror and king of Jerusalem.

Later Merovingian kings lost their drive, and as the line lost control, power was seized by the mayors of the palace, regents of the kingdom. Instead of remaining pledged to the cause of the Merovingian line, as the Roman Church had done under Clovis, the Church threw its support behind Charlemagne. The rule of the Merovingians came to an end. There was one heir, Sigisbert IV, who survived the hunting trip to Stenay. He inherited the Merovingian throne (in name) after being rescued from the enemies of his father. It is said that he was brought back to safety at Rennes-le-Chateau. With no chance of taking the crown, Sigisbert was given the title of count of Reddis, duke of Razes. He was not the last of the Merovingian kings, but he was a direct descendant. Sigisbert’s progeny took the surname Plantard, which means “ardently flowering shoot.”
¹⁹
Sigisbert himself became the scion of the Merovingian dynasty, as the Levis were the scions of the Davidic kingship.

One branch of the vine descended through Bera VI. Bera came to be called the “Architect,” a name that Freemasons regarded highly. Northern families still went out of their way to marry into the Merovingian line despite the fact that power was no longer theirs. Intermarriage between the house of Lorraine and the Merovingian heirs made sure that Godfrey of Bouillon’s veins flowed together with the sacred bloodline of the French kings. It was the Merovingian heirs who conquered Jerusalem. Had they a secret agenda?

One hypothesis of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
is that the Merovingian dynasty was a continuation of the Davidic line, which flowed through the family of Jesus or even through Jesus himself. The heirs of Jesus living in France intermarried with the Visigoths. Later ruling families of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties would make it a point to marry into the families of the heirs of Jesus. Marie de Negri D’Ables was one of the heirs in the Davidic line. Saunière’s secret might have been much more significant to the world than simply the booty of looted Rome and Jerusalem or other ancient caches of Visigothic treasures. The secret may have been that Jesus’ heirs were alive and well and ready to assume power when the time was auspicious.

Chapter 10

T
HE
C
ONNECTING
T
HREAD

O
ur English word
clue
comes from a much older word,
clewe,
meaning a ball of thread. In the myths of the Greeks, children were carried off each year to Crete, where the evil king Minos had them sacrificed to a monstrous creature, half man and half bull, called the Minotaur. The Minotaur lived underground in a maze of passageways called the Labyrinth. The children, seven boys and seven girls each year, were thrown into the maze, and the Minotaur would kill and devour them. The Greek hero Theseus asked that he be sent to Crete as part of the yearly offering.

In Crete Theseus attracted the eye of the daughter of the king, who fell in love with him. Her love led Ariadne, the princess, to devise a plan to free Theseus from death. She supplied him with a ball of thread, which he could unwind as he traveled through the maze in order to find his way back out.
¹
The word took on a new meaning when the “clewe” provided the “clue” to solving the mystery of the Labyrinth. In the
mystery of Oak Island it is a long thread unwinding through a labyrinth of history that we must follow to find the source of the treasure hidden in the Money Pit. The trail starts in the Jerusalem of Solomon and David.

David and Solomon

Undeniably one of the holiest places in the world, Jerusalem is claimed as the center and birthplace of three distinctly different religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Together these religions encompass the majority of the population of the planet—billions of people believe Jerusalem is their cradle. Ironically, this holy city started as a pagan site of worship before these major world religions laid claim to it. The area surrounding Jerusalem had been home to the Canaanites and other peoples who might have settled the area from the sea.
²
The Canaanite religion included many gods—their god of prosperity, Salem, was worshiped in Jerusalem.

David, king of one of Israel’s twelve tribes, had understood that by having one fortified city as a base he could unite the twelve tribes into a nation. He chose Jerusalem to be that unifying capital.
³
The young king was experienced in war, having learned the art of war as an ally to enemies of Israel called the Philistines. He understood that the siege of an established, walled fortress like Jerusalem could take years, but through spies he discovered that the water supply of the city came from a spring called Gihon. The designers of the city had planned ahead for a siege that might hinder their ability to obtain water from outside wells. They built a large tunnel underneath the city and connected it to a vertical well. David used their strategy against them and sent his men through the underground water tunnel and up the well shaft. The city surrendered.
⁴

David then had himself anointed king of Israel. He was the savior of his people; he was the messiah. The Hebrew people called him the “Shepherd.” The title was not descriptive, since David was a warrior and a king, but it had been a custom from as far back as the time of the Sumerians to designate kings as “shepherds.”
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God, too, was a shepherd,
and Christians pray to Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

Monotheistic beliefs were just starting to take precedence over religions with literally hundreds of gods. David was part of the trend; he tried to push his own flock in this direction and to wean them from such customs as idol worship, which was characteristic of premonotheistic religion, and having more than one wife. For himself, he did not wish to change too fast. He kept many wives.
⁶
His most important wife was Bathsheba, a Jebusite woman, to whom a son was born. The relationship started as an adulterous affair. David promised Bethsheba that her son would rule over the sons whom David had fathered earlier, with his other wives. They named their son “Solomon.” Standard translation tells us the name means “peace,” but a truer rendering is “Sun God of On.”
^I
Worship was not standardized, as it is now and such sanitized versions of the names of religious figures, with little reference to their more pagan forms of worship, would come much later.

With such a great importance placed on bloodline and genealogy, it is odd that the son in whom David placed the kingship of the Israelite people was half Jewish and half Jebusite. The Jebusites were of the groups of peoples that had started settling the area hundreds of years before as invaders. These “sea peoples,” as Egyptian texts call them, included tribes like the Shardan and the Peleset. “Peleset” became corrupted as “Philistine”; the Jebusites were a related subset of this larger family of sea kings. The invading sea kings were the downfall of the Hittite Empire, one of the strongest in the region. They might have brought down Egypt, too, if the pharaohs had not wisely hired them as mercenaries.
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The bloodline of Solomon, therefore, was a combination of the king-ship line of the Hebrews and of another strain extending from a people that came by sea. The bloodline of Jesus was derived from the priestly caste of Aaron and the kingship caste of David. The quality of a priest was often determined by his ability to perform magic. The priest-kings from the east who visited the birthplace of Jesus were called “magi,” since magic was indeed the priestly art. Similarly, the heirs of the blood-line of the Merovingian dynasty were born after a queen was first impregnated by the king and then by a mysterious creature from the sea—an “other world” father and an earthly father.

Members of the Blair Syndicate circa 1909, including a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt (third from right).

Cross section of hole originally drilled in 1845. During this drilling several platforms of wood and metal were hit before striking what they thought to be a treasure trove. (Photo by Terry Sora)

Memorial to Prince Henry, first Sinclair of Orkney. (Photo by Terry Sora)