The Oak Island Mystery (16 page)
Read The Oak Island Mystery Online
Authors: Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe
It is not only the mysterious porch carvings which make Chartres Cathedral such an interesting field for historical research. The whole design, structure, and layout of this arcane building is a mathematical miracle. One viable explanation is that part of what the Templars found hidden beneath what they believed to be Solomon's Temple were a number of ancient and esoteric building and design secrets. These were duly made available to the Chartres builders. For the Ethiopian secrets contained in the
Kebra Nagast
to have reached Chartres as well, there must also have been Templar representatives at the Ethiopian Court of the monarch who had inherited the mantle of “Prester John.” This would seem to have been King Lalibela, whose early infancy provides yet another mysterious link with Rennes-le-Château and the Arcadian Treasure. A prodigious swarm of bees surrounded his cradle and his mother called out “Lalibela!” which meant literally that the bees recognized his supremacy.
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The bee was also a vitally important Merovingian symbol, and the Merovingians are inextricably intertwined with the Arcadian Treasure of Rennes. King Childeric's burial place, for example, held a “swarm” of 300 golden bees surrounding the royal body.
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How does all of this now begin to come together? In the Ethiopian tradition, Solomon's son by Sheba is Menelik, founder of the dynasty. He makes a secret expedition to Israel, where his royal father recognizes and honours him. When he returns to Ethiopia, the Ark of the Covenant and its precious contents are with him. He also has loyal Jewish companions who follow him partly because he is Solomon's son, and partly to serve as guardians of the Ark. Did they become the founders of the Ethiopian Jewish community, the Falashas?
That there were various sharply divided political factions in Israel at that time is made clear in Biblical history by the account of the rebellion led by Jeroboam son of Nebat, a revolutionary who had strong links with Egypt.
[13]
It has already been demonstrated that the Ethiopian
tabots
are tablets, or flattish cuboids, rather than boxes or containers. In Parzival the Grail is described as a stone, rather than a drinking vessel.
[14]
The statue of the mighty and mysterious Melchizedek at Chartres shows him holding a cup which contains a stone.
So a new scenario begins. Suppose that something of that shape, something of immense power and value, once made its way from ancient Egypt to Israel and eventually at least part of it went from Solomon's Temple to Ethiopia, the “Kingdom of Prester John.” Knowledge of that priceless mystery reached the ears of the Templars. Wolfram encoded some of its secret history in Parzival. Informed by the Templars, the builders at Chartres encoded more of it in stone. The Templars took possession of it, or, perhaps that part of it which complements something which is preserved so carefully at Axum. Did the Templars remove the priceless contents from the Ark, while leaving the Ark itself in Ethiopia?
Then came the Templar tragedy. Philip IV of France betrayed the Order and did his best to destroy it in 1307. He did not quite succeed. The noble Sinclairs of Orkney sheltered and protected the Templar refugees, who were by no means ungrateful to their valiant hosts. With Sinclair support and Zeno navigational skill, a party of Templars crossed the North Atlantic and reached Nova Scotia. Did they carry the Grail Stones, or Tablets, with them?
The knowledge of engineering design that built Chartres Cathedral would have been more than enough to plan and excavate the Oak Island Money Pit and the labyrinth beneath. Andrew Sinclair's scrupulously researched and systematically constructed study of the Templars' movements after 1307
[15]
lends massive weight to Mike Bradley's excellent earlier study.
[16]
Crooker and Nolan's fascinating discoveries on Oak Island, described in detail in
Oak Island Gold
,
[17]
also point inescapably to Templar involvement. We were also privileged to see a preliminary draft manuscript of Bill Mann's volume
The Knights Templar in the New World: How Henry Sinclair Brought the Grail to Acadia
(on which he sought our advice). His
excellent research and exciting conclusions make this a highly significant work, one that sheds light on the Rennes-le-Château mystery and powerfully reinforces Sinclair and Bradley's intriguing Templar theories.
[18]
When a secret is as important as that which the Templars found and protected, two vital criteria arise: first, it must be guarded as strongly as possible against unwelcome intruders; secondly, it must never be lost. There is a dilemma and a paradox here. “Spare keys” must be kept, but they must also be so carefully concealed that they cannot be found accidentally by the “wrong” people.
Were those keys to be found in Poussin's paintings? Are vital clues preserved in the carvings outside Shugborough Hall? In the curious manuscripts which Bérenger Saunière found at Rennes-le-Château? In the weird alphabet that young Fradin dug up at Glozel near Vichy in 1924? Part of the solution to the Oak Island mystery may still lie concealed in a Merovingian mausoleum below the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château, where the enigmatic Father Saunière was once parish priest.
Saunière's painting of St. Mary Magdalene.
Interior of the ruined Château Hautpoul at Rennes-le- Château.
The French Connection: Rennes and Glozel
R
ennes
-le-Château has deservedly been described as one of the most mysterious places on earth and a “gateway to the invisible.” This remote hilltop village certainly has a strange air of unreality, a unique atmosphere which is redolent of the arcane and the esoteric.
Its chequered history extends over several millennia. The ancient artifacts Monsieur Fatin, the sculptor, showed us in the storerooms of his crumbling Château Hautpoul, go right back to the Stone Age. He found them all in and around Rennes. Celtic Tectosages once settled here, a tribe whose very name meant “The Wise Builders.” The Romans were here, and very much in evidence at Rennes-les-Bains, that secretive and scholarly old Father Boudet studied the ancient Celtic language and the timeless cromlechs near his village. At neighbouring Coustaussa, the tapering stone fingers of another ruined
château
point enigmatically to the silent sky. Most curious of all is the nearby site of the Tomb of Arques. This amazing place once held vital clues to the Arcadian Treasure. The authors visited the tomb in 1975, heaved up its cracked stone lid and photographed the dark mystery below. The tomb as it stood then was a perfect replica of the tomb Poussin had depicted on his canvas of the Arcadian Shepherds.
Rennes and its area are surrounded by other mysteries as well as the Arcadian tomb, many of them sinister and tragic. Old Father Gélis of Coustaussa was brutally murdered with an axe a century ago. His killer was never caught. There were many mysterious aspects to the crime. The suspicious old man would open the door of his presbytery to no one but his niece when she brought him his meals and clean linen. He insisted that she remain on the doorstep until he had re-bolted the door after taking in the supplies she had brought him. Despite all these elaborate precautions, someone, or something, got into the house and battered the old man to death. The brutal savagery of the killing left bloodstains everywhere, yet there was no trace of the murderer's foot or handprint.
M. Fatin the sculptor, owner of Château Hautpoul.
Stone-age artefacts from M. Fatin's collection.
The village of Coustaussa viewed from the cemetery where Father Gélis lies.
Patricia Fanthorpe in the doorway of mysterious old Father Boudet's church in Rennes-les-Bains.
Bérenger Saunière was born in Couiza Montazels, just across the valley from Rennes-le-Château. Those who knew him best as a child said that while other children played their normal games, young Bérenger would lead his adventurous boyhood companions into the woods and rocky valleys around Rennes and say: “Let us go and search for the lost treasure.”
He grew up strong and athletic, a powerful, independent, ambitious man, who hardly seemed cut out for the priesthood. Yet he endured long, boring years of seminary deprivation and discipline in order to complete his rigorous theological and pastoral training. Did Bérenger Saunière have a genuine vocation? God alone can judge a question as significant as that: no human arbiter should ever presume to do so. The possibility remains, however, that he put up with it all simply to gain access to Rennes-le-Château and its ancient Church of St. Mary Magdalene.
Just imagine that from his earliest youth, someone knowledgeable and influential during his vital formative years had convinced young Saunière that there was an ancient treasure â the fabulous Arcadian Treasure â hidden at Rennes. He was a determined character, and a shrewd one. What better vantage point than the Presbytery of Rennes? What better local authority than that of the village priest? Was that why Saunière did it? But there may have been still more to it than that: the Saunière family of Couiza-Montazels went back a long way. That area of southwestern France had once been the territory of the independent Counts of Razes. It had strong Merovingian connections. It had once been Cathar and Templar heartland. Pedigrees went back for centuries, and local families were proud of their ancient lineages. The noble Hautpoul family had once owned the
château
which gave Rennes-le-Château its name. The ruined Château Blanchefort nearby was once said to have been a Templar stronghold, and there was another legendary Templar citadel at Bézu.
What if the impressionable young Saunière had been led to believe (rightly or wrongly) that he had Merovingian blood in his veins, that he was descended from the same Dagobert II who featured in the legend of the Arcadian Treasure, or from the Counts of Razes â that he was, in fact, as far as anyone could be in the nineteenth century, the rightful and legitimate heir of those who had concealed the Arcadian Treasure at Rennes so many centuries ago?
A picture begins to emerge. Saunière obtains the living of Rennes-le-Château. Within a matter of months he is indisputably one of the wealthiest men in the south of France. He spends money like water until his death â in suspicious circumstances â in 1917. What was the source of his sudden wealth?
Once again, the trail goes back to Solomon, and earlier still. Saunière is said in one account of the mystery to have had access to certain secret documents, which were found in his church. When these were decoded they alluded to a treasure that had once been in Sion (Jerusalem), and had eventually passed from there to the Merovingian King Dagobert II.
Much further back in the mists of time, Melchizedek was priest-king of Salem (Jerusalem?) when he met Abraham the Patriarch.
[1]
The concept of a priest-king is an inescapable reminder of the title of the elusive Prester John and his connection with Solomon's lineage.
Suppose that the ancient Arcadian Treasure (whatever it actually was) had been known both to the ancient Egyptian Pharoahs as well as to Melchizedek, and that it had travelled as a unit, or perhaps in instalments, from Egypt to Salem â or even in the reverse direction. Ancient Jewish legends tell of Sarah (Abraham's sister-wife) encountering the sleeping Hermes Trismegistus (alias Thoth? alias Melchizedek?) in a cavern during the long journeys which she and Abraham undertook. The legend says that she disturbed the fabulous Emerald Tablets and that the sleeper began to stir. Sarah fled from the cave without them.
Long years pass. The Israelites have gone to Egypt as honoured guests â the family of Joseph, saviour of starving Egypt. They have left centuries later as runaway slaves under the protecting hand of Yahweh and the guidance of his servant Moses. Pharaoh does something that is tantamount to military insanity: he hurls the best of his charioteers in reckless pursuit of the Israelites across a very dangerous stretch of temporarily dry land â until very recently the bed of the Red Sea. The waters rush back. The cream of Pharaoh's horsemen are destroyed. The triumphant Israelites escape. So why did Pharaoh do it? What motivated this particular piece of tactical lunacy, the Egyptian equivalent of the suicidal “Charge of the Light Brigade” in the Crimean War as immortalized in the poem by Tennyson (first published in
The Examiner
on December 9, 1854)?
When the Israelites left Egypt, they did not leave empty-handed. Were part of the treasures they carried with them the priceless Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus, and did those fabulous Emerald Tablets eventually form the core of the legendary Arcadian Treasure associated with Rennes-le-Château?
Rennes-le-Château was deep in Cathar country, barely half-a-day's ride from the great Cathar fortress of Montségur. When the four fearless Cathar mountaineers escaped from that last fatal siege in 1244 carrying
“pecuniam infinitam”
and “the treasure of their faith,” did the Emerald Tablets go with them? Was it the indomitable Templars who took over where the defeated Cathars left off? Did part of that Arcadian Treasure make its way to a secret repository in a hidden Merovingian mausoleum deep beneath the ancient Church of St. Mary Magdalene at Rennes? When the Templars themselves went down in 1307, did the Arcadian Treasure leave an ungrateful European mainland and find safety with the noble House of Sinclair in the Orkneys? Did some, at least, of the Emerald Tablets go from Rennes to Oak Island with the Templar refugees and the Zeno navigators?
And what of Nicholas Poussin's place in the strange tale of Rennes and the Arcadian Treasure? How does he provide a link connecting Admiral Anson of Shugborough Hall, the shepherds and shepherdess at the Tomb of Arques and the coded parchments which Bérenger Saunière was said to have discovered in his church?
During the heyday of the opulent Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King of France (1638â1715), Nicholas Fouquet, his minister of finance, had a younger brother who acted as one of his espionage agents. This younger Fouquet met Poussin, the painter, in Italy. Vitally important secret information passed between them. Fouquet junior wrote a very excited letter home to Nicholas, his elder brother, the massive power-behind-the-throne, often referred to by historians as “the real king of France.” Amazingly that letter has survived in French archives:
I have given to Monsieur Poussin the letter that you were kind enough to write to him; he displayed overwhelming joy on receiving it. You wouldn't believe, sir, the trouble that he takes to be of service to you, or the affection with which he goes about this, or the affection with which he goes about this, or the talent and integrity that he displays at all times.
He and I have planned certain things of which in a little while I shall be able to inform you fully; things which will give you, through M. Poussin, advantages which kings would have great difficulty in obtaining from him, and which, according to what he says, no one in the world will ever retrieve in the centuries to come ⦠and they are matters so difficult to enquire into that nothing on earth at the present time could bring a greater fortune nor, perhaps, ever its equal.
[2]
Shortly afterwards, Fouquet senior fell from power, and has long been one of the leading candidates proposed by research historians for the unenviable role of the Man in the Iron Mask. This unfortunate character was held at various prisons in top security conditions, and ended his days in the Bastille itself. No one except St. Mars, the governor and totally trusted agent of Louis XIV, was ever allowed to communicate with the mysterious masked prisoner. When he finally died, all furniture from his cell was destroyed, and the walls themselves were stripped and re-plastered.