The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (34 page)

Chapter 12

O
AK
K
INGS,
S
EVERED
H
EADS, AND THE
S
ECRETS OF THE
A
NCIENTS

D
arkness has fallen, and the light of the bonfire blazes. The entire village surrounds the fire, and the young men take their turns jumping through it. One stumbles and falls, obviously due to the weight of his transgressions throughout the year. Chosen to wear the hide of a cow or goat, he walks at the head of the New Year’s Eve procession through the village. Anything but orderly, the procession goes to each house as the other young men beat on the sinner and on each house while circling it. Three times they march around each house, clockwise, always keeping the house to the right of the “leader.” At each house a strip of meat, still hot from the bonfire, is given to the occupants. The Winter King, the human sacrifice chosen by his failure to leap across the fire, is kept alive until the new year. Then he is given to the fire, and every villager takes part of that fire home to restart their own hearth. Welcome to Hogmanay, the New Year’s Eve of the northern Celts. This festival is still celebrated in Scotland and the offshoreisles, but with a twist—the Winter King is not really beaten or killed.
¹

Remnants of such barbaric customs survive in many of our own. This rite was conducted to ensure that the sun would return and to celebrate the new sun. When the Julian calendar was still in use, the New Year, as well as the corresponding death and rebirth of the sun, was celebrated on December 25. According to the
Golden Bough,
the celebrants would cry, “The Virgin has brought forth.” The goddess had given birth to a new sun.
²

The major religions of the world—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—have all sought to impose their own dogma, myth, and tradition on older beliefs. In this interest, they are not often free to create everything anew. Instead, cathedrals are built over pagan sites, male god trini-ties replace threefold goddesses, and river gods become saints. In the fourth century the Catholic Church decided they had to celebrate the birth of Christ. While they did not known what day of the year it had occurred, assigning it to the pagan birth celebration of the sun seemed fitting. The guardians of the Church chose Christmas, the birth of the Son of God, to be that same day the non-Christians celebrated the birth of the sun. The Roman Church also replaced a Roman state religion called Mithraism. As a result, the holy day of the week came to be “sun” day, instead of the Jewish Sabbath, which was traditionally on Saturday. Those who are in power get to write history.

The Guardians and the Holy Grail

The elite families of France and Scotland, the Prieuré de Sion on the Continent, and the survivors of the Knights Templar in Scotland, changed the world. They also attempted to bring about a major upheaval in religion and government. They attempted to alter the Roman version of Christianity with a style more dominated by the purity and dedication of the earliest Christians. A corrupt state and a corrupt church had allowed religion to be marked by abusive power, harsh taxation, and harsher penalties for those who searched for freedom of thought and expression. With the aim of finding such freedom, the Sinclair family and their European counterparts influenced not only the exploration of
the New World, but also the single greatest body of literature to emerge from the medieval world. What has come down to us as the myth history known as the Grail romances of Arthur and his court is an inspired body of fiction placed on top of true historic events.

Arthur was a minor “king” who fought back the Saxons when all sense of order left England with her Roman overlords. Arthur’s family had been of Roman nobility and Celtic stock. When Rome abandoned England, barbarians sought to conquer the Celtic inhabitants. Ensuing warfare threw England into the Dark Ages.
³
The historian Gildas was the first to write (c.
A.D.
540) of the son of a Romano-Celtic family who stood up to the invaders, but he did not cite Arthur by name. A second text, the Welsh
Gododdin,
mentions the same event and calls the hero a king; again, he is not named. Finally, in
A.D.
800, Nennius identified the king as Arthur. Welsh tales that were passed through generations by storytelling were finally put to parchment in the same century and developed the story of Arthur in the
Annales Cambriae
.
⁴

At this point the Arthurian legend was mostly a realistic tale of a leader battling invading Saxons. Then Geoffrey of Monmouth added magic and mysticism to a story that once took place in northern England and Wales and transported his mythical version to the south of England. While some believe that Geoffrey was true to some sources that were available in his day, and have since been lost, he more likely added a liberal mixture of Welsh and Celtic lore into his “history.” Geoffrey wrote in Oxford, which may be why the story migrated to the south with his retelling.
⁵

In France, in the province of the count of Champagne and the duke of Lorraine—the center of influence of the elite families of the Prieuré de Sion—the highly fictional narratives introduced the knights Lancelot, Gawain, Perceval (or Parsifal), Galahad, Kay, and Malegant.
⁶
The French version of the Arthurian literature played down the role of Arthur himself and added pieces of Celtic myth to the Grail romances commissioned and written there. Marie de France may have been the first to demote Arthur. The king himself was less important; the men and women surrounding Arthur were all important. Her work is entirely fiction, and her critics believe her goal was to praise the ideals of her time. The main
theme of her romances we call “courtly love.” In an age when many marriages were arranged political mergers, women of the court could be as adulterous as the men. While this loose morality was condemned by the Church, it was a natural reaction to the loveless marriages that were commonplace.

The Grail romances also attempted to validate, or invent, a religion born in Jerusalem and carried to the south of France by a contingent of Jesus’ followers.
⁷
One French Grail writer even says that the knight Perceval descended from Joseph of Arimathea. Writing in the twelfth century, Robert de Boron declared that Perceval, a knight of the Round Table, was Jewish.
⁸
If an armed band of Jewish knights were not enough of a surprise, the genealogy of de Boron had another shock. This new blood-line included a certain Laziliez (Lazarus), who was related to Mary Magdalene.

Robert de Boron wrote of the “three Worthies” of the west: Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. Arthur was named because he was the inspiration for all of the Grail stories and Charlemagne because, through marriage to a Merovingian princess, he was an heir in the royal bloodline. The third “Worthy” was Godfrey, who not only was a direct descendant in the Merovingian line, but also became the king of Jerusalem as a result of the Crusades. While the genealogies of Charlemagne and Godfrey could be traced to the Merovingians, Arthur fit in as a link to the survival of Celtic knowledge and legend that had been superimposed on the Roman Church. If the secret Prieuré de Sion manufactured a body of literature from its base in Champagne and Lorraine to represent the survival of a Jewish-Christian religion, it was not meant to be consistent with the mainstream Jewish religion.

The Jewish-Christian blend of thought preserved the ancient knowledge and myths that the modern Roman institution, the Church, had tried desperately to erase. While the Church had built its edifices over Celtic sacred sites, so had many stories of God, the family of Jesus, and the numerous saints likewise been conceived to disguise the ancient pan-European Celtic myths. The myths themselves are meant to convey knowlege on various levels. On one level a religious story can embody a moral lesson, while to an initiate it may be a device to pass on esoteric
knowledge. In one form or another almost all civilizations have an annual ritual of death and rebirth. This most important mystery pervaded all of life. Why did crops grow in the spring and die in the fall? Why are babies born, and why do the old die? Each day the rising and setting of the sun signals a birth and a death and then a cycle of rebirth. Each night the moon follows the course the sun takes during the day.
⁹

From very early on, humans recognized that the moon had a cycle of twenty-eight days—a life that lasted for a month. First there was the white new moon, then the red full moon, and finally a dark, dying moon. Humans also understood the connection between the cycle of the moon and female fertility. The sun provided heat, while the moon controlled the tides of the sea, the female menstrual cycle. The theme that was played out daily and regularly in the heavens was also was played out on Earth, and humans recognized this mystical similarity. The seasons of the year marked birth, fertility, and death.

The Church of Rome had never been sure of the dates of the events in the life of Jesus. They were, however, waging a campaign to fit the old religions into the new. The Resurrection of Jesus, possibly the most important date in the Church year, was fixed by the spring solstice—and then named for a Celtic pagan feast day that the Church wished to eradicate.
¹⁰
Easter was named for Eostre, goddess of the east, the spring, and of course, fertility. She was depicted with a rabbit.

Christmas, also imposed over a pagan celebration, kept the trappings of the old way. Holly, sacred to the goddess worshipers; mistletoe, flowering from the oak and particularly favored by the Druids; and the Yule log, as well as Christmas tree, all were retained—although their functions changed to reflect the new beliefs.”
¹¹
The Christian Church then attempted to accomplish what the Jewish religion had tried a thousand years earlier, the assimilation of the old into the new. The Jewish religion came to fruition at a time when goddess cults were prevalent everywhere. The moon goddess was called Sin. Her name exists today in the Sinai Peninsula, which separates Israel from Egypt. The Hebrew faith first made Sin a male lunar god and then dropped all such multiple gods. “Sin” came to signify something evil.

To ensure the rebirth of the sun, primitive humans, and possibly
even primitive peoples in modern times, conducted the ritual of choosing a king annually. He ruled with his queen for a year, as did the sun in its cycle. The rite was symbolic of the Earth as female married to the male sun. Each year both king and queen were picked anew. The king would have every benefit that came with being king, for twelve months only.
¹²
The annual ritual in Greece started with a celebration that is preserved in part by the myths. A race was run by fifty contestants; the fastest of the fifty was chosen to be the high priestess, representative of the Earth Goddess. She became the queen and mate of the king for the year.

The new king would be chosen by the priestess for his virility. The mating of the high priestess and her chosen king was a joyous one if received well by the goddess, and the reward was a fertile Earth. The summer king, who had reigned during the previous year, would not be so joyful—his rule was over, and his fate was death. This would become the chief celebration of the Celtic year, and it occurred on June 24, Midsummer Day.
¹³
We find this date celebrated from Asia to Ireland. The Celts began to migrate in 2000
B.C.
, and they ranged from India to Ireland, but the practice of the annual choosing of a king might have been even older.

With the Bronze Age, more modern man discovered that he was at least as important as the female in the continuity of life and fertility. The sun (male) cults took ascendance over the moon (female) cults, but the change was not abrupt. The Achaean peoples of early Greece had had a female-dominated culture that survived in the Olympic Games. The old king, often called Hercules (from his devotion to Hera, the Mother Goddess), was put to death. The new king, “Green Zeus,” mated with the winner of the footrace. The death of the old king (not necessarily an old man) was a sacrifice to the goddess and was meant to preserve the fertility cycle.
¹⁴

As the celebration was further modernized, the king sacrificed his first-born son instead of himself. The biblical representation of Abraham and Isaac suggests a break with the lunar cults of ancient Judaism, which demanded that a son of the king be murdered. God (now decidedly a male) stopped Abraham at the last moment and said he no longer required
such a ritual. In the more “civilized” world, an animal sacrifice was made in place of the ritual murder of a living person. The animal would placate the god or goddess, dying in expiation for the people’s sins. The scapegoat was put to death for the faults of every person.
¹⁵