After the exploration of 10X, of the second-largest block of screen time during the first three seasons of The Curse of Oak Island had been devoted to the theory that the original work there had been done by the Knights Templar. I’d found the Templar theory thrilling back in 2003, when I’d worked it into my Rolling Stone article. The claims that this ancient order of warrior-monks had conveyed a treasure that might include the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant, or both, from Jerusalem to Scotland to Nova Scotia and buried it on Oak Island added such a rich layer of possibility to the island’s legend that I found it nearly irresistible, even admitting its unlikeliness.
Looking back on what I wrote then, I’m glad I included the disavowals of Dan Blankenship and Fred Nolan. “I can’t entirely dismiss the Templar theory, but I don’t accept it,” Dan had told me. “The Templars were bankers, not miners. And there’s no record of them using slaves. The Spanish, though, were miners, and they had no compunction about using native peoples as slave labor.” I had been prompted to ask Nolan about the Templar theory after Robert Restall’s daughter, Lee Lamb, told me Fred had confided to her that he believed the knights had buried the Holy Grail, along with other treasures, on Oak Island. Nolan would only tell me that “there’s a lot of evidence to support that theory,” but like Dan he was more inclined to believe the Spanish were responsible for the original works on the island. “So many ideas have been put forward that have at least a little plausibility,” Fred had said. “But you have to go with what’s most likely.”
The Templar theory had been introduced early in The Curse of Oak Island’s first season with a question about how the oak trees had gotten there. It had been “long speculated,” the narrator told the audience, that the fourteenth-century Scottish nobleman Henry Sinclair, “whose family took over the mantle of the Knights Templar,” had come to Oak Island in 1398 to hide the Templar treasure and planted the oak trees for the Templars who would come centuries later. Sparating what was true from what was possibly true, likely untrue and definitely false would be a thorny task, however. I started with what was actually known about the order of the Knights Templar.
The knights had been a product of the First Crusade, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 in Clermont, France. The Crusade had initially been directed at the Seljuk Turks, the ferocious horseback warriors whose attacks on Byzantine Christians were threatening Constantinople itself, but it quickly morphed into a mission to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Armies led by European nobles marched toward the Holy Land at the urging of a reformist pope who roused Christianity to make a valiant stand against the various Muslim kingdoms that had conquered Syria, Egypt, and most of North Africa, then taken southern Spain and Catalonia and were, the pope said, preparing to capture the entire Mediterranean Basin. While religious fervor was the primary driver of the Crusade, plundering, pillaging, and simple bloodlust played their parts as well. After laying siege to Nicaea and Antioch, the Crusaders marched on Jerusalem in June 1099 and by the middle of July had conquered the city. The scale of the massacre that followed has been debated among historians but it was certainly considerable. Even the Muslim soldiers who retreated to the Al-Aqsa Mosque were slaughtered, and most of the city’s Jews were killed when the Jerusalem synagogue was burned to the ground.
The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was created by a council held in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the spot where according to legend Jesus Christ had been crucified. During the next several decades, various orders of knights arose to lay claim to assorted powers and jurisdictions. The Knights Templar was one such order. They were the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon at their founding in 1118, a mystical order of warrior-monks who wore white capes decorated with red crosses and proclaimed their dedication to the protection of civilians traveling to the Holy Land. They were famously abstemious, unshaved celibates who were said to dine in silence while listening to prayers.
The earliest legends that grew up around these knights derived from their base of operations in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where, according to tradition, the Temple of Solomon had once stood. Rumors that there were secret chambers beneath the mosque where the greatest and holiest of treasures had been stored in the time of Solomon were the original basis of these legends, for which there is no solid historical evidence. It is a fact, though, that the Knights Templar grew not only wealthy but also powerful. Their power resulted from the admiration they commanded, which grew in part from Templars’ insistence that they were obedient only to the pope himself and would not serve any earthly king, prince, or prelate. Their most illustrious sponsor, the Catholic Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, said of them: “They are milder than lambs, and fiercer than lions. They combine the meekness of monks with the courage of knights so completely that I do not know whether to call them knights or contemplatives.” Paradoxically, the Templars’ wealth was initially produced by the vows of poverty the knights took. Their pledges to sign over all possessions upon entering the order began to swell Templar coffers as the sons of noble families joined them by the dozens.
The Templars remained powerful even after they were forced out of Jerusalem in 1187 by Islamic reconquest of the city by the army of Saladin. The Christian retreat was gradual and the final defeat did not come until 1291, when the coastal stronghold of Acre fell amid a slaughter by the Muslims that was even more terrible than what had taken place in Jerusalem almost two hundred years earlier. The Templars then moved their headquarters to Cyprus, where they swiftly became the first international bank, financing, for a price to be paid in interest, the projects of kings, lords, and other nobles all over Europe. No one fell further in the order’s debt than the profligate King Philip IV of France. In the year 1307 Philip decided to cancel those debts in the most lethal way imaginable. Templar leader Jacques de Molay and about sixty of his knights were invited to Paris for a conclave with the king. But it was to be a capture, not a conclave. On the morning of Friday, October 13 (this may or may not be the beginning of Friday the thirteenth representing bad luck), de Molay and nearly every one of his knights were arrested and imprisoned by Philip’s soldiers. During the following months, they were subjected to gruesome tortures that extracted confessions that they had practiced such things as sodomy, idol worship, and spitting or urinating on crucifixes. Then, despite a commission dispatched to Paris by Pope Clement V that reported there was very little if any evidence to back up the accusations against the Templars, Philip ordered de Molay and fifty-four other knights burned at the stake as heretics. Witnesses later testified that de Molay had gone to his death most bravely, warning King Philip that he would one day pay to God for what he was doing. At least six and perhaps as many as twelve Templar knights had escaped France after the arrest of de Molay and the others. Where they went and what they did is not truly known, but claims about it are what have fueled the Templar legend for the seven centuries since.
The first story to surface—when is difficult to say, since it did not appear in print until the nineteenth century—was that the surviving knights had loaded the “Templar treasure” on eighteen ships that sailed from the port of La Rochelle in northern France for parts unknown. The Templars certainly were wealthy, but whether they possessed any treasure is no more than speculation based on rumor. Claims have been made that while excavating beneath what was once the Temple of Solomon they had discovered a buried room where the Ark of the Covenant or the Menorah of Moses or the Holy Grail, or all three, were kept. There is, again, absolutely no historical record to support these claims, but they have not only endured but also expanded. What history does tell us is that the Templars kept copious records of their transactions and treaties, and that all of them disappeared in 1307 and have never been found.
The story of the so-called Templar fleet carrying a treasure out of La Rochelle rests entirely on the protocol of the interrogation by Dominican inquisitors of one Jean Chalons, a French count who told it while under the threat of torture. There is no other source. Chalon’s claim was that he had heard (secondhand) that the preceptor of the French Templars, Gérard de Villiers, was warned in advance of his impending arrest and escaped France with fifty horses and eighteen galleys. That tale is undercut by what is actually known about the Templar fleet. The Templars did have ships, but the majority of these were lightweight craft suitable only for skirting the Mediterranean shoreline to carry pilgrims and supplies between Marseilles and Acre and could not have been used to make an ocean voyage. There are references to four larger “galleys” that could presumably have navigated the Atlantic, but the evidence of even that is sketchy. And none of the ships that existed in the early fourteenth century could have crossed the English Channel in October.
Nevertheless, from the tiny, fragile seed planted by Jean Chalon, an entire industry reaching into publishing, film, and television has arisen and from the late twentieth century to the present actually flourished.
The story of how that happened turns on the addition of two additional written records that were first introduced into the narrative in the mid-sixteenth century by a Venetian nobleman named Nicolò Zeno. He was the descendant of a family that had helped build Venice in the eighth century and that in the centuries afterward had become the owners of one of the greatest fleets on the planet. The Zenos remained wealthy and powerful but by the 1500s were in decline.
In 1558, Nicolò Zeno published a book he hoped might not only restore his family to its full status but also possibly support a claim that Venice had discovered the New World a hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Its primary contents were a map and a series of letters that Nicolò claimed to have discovered hidden away in the Zenos’ family home. These had been created, Nicolò wrote, sometime between 1390 and 1404, by two of his ancestors, a previous Nicolò Zeno and his brother, Antonio, and they described the fantastic voyages the two had made across the North Atlantic.
The book produced by the Nicolò Zeno of 1558 employed an unusual style. It was a first-person narrative written by the author that was freely interspersed with quotations from the letters supposedly written by his relatives more than a century and a half earlier. The letters to his brother, Antonio, written by the previous Nicolò Zeno were the main source the author claimed to have relied on. Nicolò began his tale with a description of being shipwrecked on an island he called Frislandia, “much larger than Ireland,” as his letter described it. “By chance, a Prince with an armed following happened to be in the neighborhood,” he continued. The name of that prince was Zichmni, according to Nicolò’s letters. Zichmni was preparing to seize the island of Frislandia from the king of Norway, and he offered to employ Nicolò as a pilot, according to the Zeno narrative. When Nicolò served valiantly in the subsequent victory, Zichmni had made him a noble of the island nation he now ruled.
As the story continued, the fourteenth century Nicolò had written to his brother, Antonio, inviting him to visit Frislandia. Antonio not only came, Nicolò recounted, but he also stayed for fourteen years, becoming Zichmni’s captain and leading his forces in an attack on Iceland. That great island nation was too well defended for his forces to so much as make landfall, let alone penetrate and conquer, so instead Zichmni turned his attention to seven small islands to the east, capturing them one after the other. On one of these islands, called Bres, Zichmni built a fort and placed Nicolò Zeno in charge of it. After Zichmni sailed off, however, the fourteenth-century Nicolò explained, he had set out on his own voyage of discovery, one that would last between four and five years. He returned to Frislandia seriously ill, with just time enough left before his death to send one last letter to Antonio.
Antonio was the source of the narrative as it continued from there, with a story of Zichmni learning that a group of fishermen were telling a tale of having visited island countries called Estotilanda and Drogeo in the far west. In Estotilanda, they had encountered a tribe of cannibals that were persuaded not to eat them by being taught how to catch fish, the fishermen claimed.
The final two sections of the Zeno narrative describe (through Antonio’s letters) Zichmni’s voyage west with Antonio to find Estotilanda and Drogeo, a voyage that would seem to have taken place in 1397 or 1398. Zichmni would never locate those two fabled island nations, according to Antonio’s letters. What he did instead was land on a previously undiscovered promontory of land that he called the Cape of Trin, later giving the name Trin also to the “excellent harbor” it enclosed. Spotting plumes of smoke rising from someplace in the interior of the great island beyond Trin, Zichmni dispatched a company of his men to seek the source. Eight days later they returned exhausted and reported that they had found the cause of the smoke, a great natural fire that burned at the bottom of a hill where there was a spring that flowed with a black, pitch-like substance. The stream coursed all the way to the sea the men said. They had also encountered a large group of natives, the men told Zichmni, according to the Antonio letters, who were small in stature and so timid they hid in caves upon seeing white men for the first time.
Zichmni was delighted by the location, the climate, and the soil of Trin, the Antonio letters went on, and he announced that he would build a town there. Zichmni’s men were not so enamored, however, and their grumbling turned from insistent to threatening. Finally, Zichmni sent them off with Antonio to return home but chose to remain in Trin himself and said he would explore the entire coast on foot, alone. And there the Zeno narrative ends.
The book produced by Nicolò Zeno in 1558 was an enormous sensation at the time of its publication, widely accepted as both historically and geographically accurate for the next three centuries. In the immediate aftermath of the book’s appearance, at least three explorers mounted Arctic expeditions. Gerardus Mercator, in creating his 1569 world map, which would endure as the primary chart for more than a century, had relied on the Zeno map to place Trin as an outcropping of land on the southernmost point of Greenland. But no one proposed to have any real idea who the great prince Zichmni had been. That would not change until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the famous naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster began to study the Zeno narrative.
Forster was best known as the naturalist who had accompanied Captain James Cook on his second Pacific voyage; his work in that capacity would become a significant basis of the development of anthropology and ethnology. So it is not surprising that Forster commanded attention and regard with his announcement that he had identified Prince Zichmni as one Henry Sinclair, a Scotsman who in the latter half of the fourteenth century had held the title of Earl of Orkney under the auspices of the Norwegian crown, which then held the island.
It was an astonishing claim, given that up to this time Henry Sinclair was not known for having done much of anything beyond managing his domain and collecting its rents. Henry had been the son and heir of William Sinclair, Lord of Roslin, and in 1358 had succeeded his father to that title. Twenty-one years later, on August 2, 1379, Haakon VI, the king of Norway, had invested Henry as the Earl of Orkney in exchange for a pledge by Sinclair that he would pay a fee of one thousand nobles, and, when called upon, serve the king militarily with one hundred armed men for no less than three months. Henry Sinclair was again in Norway in 1389 to hail the new king, Eric, and to pledge an oath of fealty. That, essentially, is the historical record of Henry Sinclair.
Johann Reinhold Forster’s reputation was such, however, that the claim that Henry Sinclair had been the famous Prince Zichmni from the Zeno narrative immediately caught hold. This belief really took off in 1873, when Richard Henry Major produced a translation of the Zeno narrative that included not only the claim that Henry Sinclair had been Prince Zichmni, but also that he had been the leader of the Knights Templar after the order reconstituted itself in Scotland following the horrific events in Paris under King Philip.
Like Forster, Major was a man widely admired, an author and geographer who at the time was serving as curator of the British Museum’s map collection. So the claim that Henry Sinclair was Prince Zichmni seemed to have been confirmed when Major said so. His translation of the Zeno narrative inspired a member of one branch of the Sinclair family, Thomas Sinclair, to interrupt the 1893 Chicago celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s great voyage west to read aloud a paper in which he contended (and was apparently the first to do so) that the journey Zichmni/Henry Sinclair described in the Zeno narrative had not ended in Greenland as had been previously supposed but rather in North America. His illustrious ancestor, Thomas Sinclair proclaimed, was “the one and only discoverer of America.”
IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1950 that all these threads were woven together by a college professor named Frederick J. Pohl, who that year began a life’s work dedicated to connecting the Zeno narrative not only to Henry Sinclair but also to North America—and to Nova Scotia in particular. Pohl’s starting point was the passage in the Zeno narrative about the discovery by Zichmni’s men of the fire that burned in a stream at the base of a hill where the water ran black, filled with some sort of pitch-like substance.
Intrigued by the claim of an American geologist named William Hobbs that he had found such a natural feature in the mining region of Stellarton, just south of Pictou, Nova Scotia, where open seams of coal regularly caught fire and burned for days, Professor Pohl decided in the summer of 1950 to investigate for himself. The result was his 1959 booklet A Nova Scotia Project in which he placed the burning stream from the Zeno narrative at Stellarton. It would be the first of many future instances in which Pohl, over a twenty-year period, produced works where the omissions were more meaningful than the inclusions. In this case, what Pohl had failed to mention was that the “burning seam” was not a constant feature of the Stellarton landscape. More significantly, Pohl left out the fact that while it had caught fire on and off since 1830 when mining began in the Stellarton region, there was not a shred of evidence to suggest it had ever burned before or that even a single coal fire had been caused by anything other than mining activity.
The main thrust of Pohl’s work was his effort to prove that linguistic differences between the language spoken and written by fourteenth-century Scots and fourteenth-century Italians had resulted in the mistranslation of “Orkney” into “Zichmni.” The Z in “Zichmni” could easily have resulted from a misreading of the d’O in “d’Orkney,” Pohl contended. Also, since Italian does not use the letters k or y, they needed to be represented by other letters; for instance ch is a hard k sound in Italian, Pohl pointed out.
By the time Pohl was ready to deliver what he regarded as the capstone of his work, the book Prince Henry Sinclair: His Expedition to the New World in 1398, he was arguing that Sinclair had been Glooskap, the mythical, magical being who had taught the native Mi’kmaq people of Nova Scotia how to hunt and fish with nets and how to gather plants and herbs for food and medicine. Pohl made much use of the work of Silas Tertius Rand, a nineteenth-century missionary and linguist who had lived among the Mi’kmaq and who had been first to put the legend of Glooskap in writing. Rand also made recordings of tribal songs. Those songs, Pohl wrote, sounded eerily similar to Scottish sea shanties.
The most remarkable thing about Pohl’s claims is how widely they spread. In 1996, at Chebucto Bay, in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, the Prince Henry Sinclair Society erected a fifteen-ton monument bearing a black granite narrative plaque that described the erstwhile Zichmni’s landing there in 1398 and his career as Glooskap. Twenty years after that, the Sinclair/Glooskap story had become a recurring meme on The Curse of Oak Island.
What makes this so confounding is that by the time Pohl was writing his books and booklets, the Zeno narrative on which the entire project was based had been almost totally discredited. That process had begun as early as 1898, when a geographer named Fred W. Lucas produced a work that meticulously linked various passages in the Zeno narrative to literary works that had been created well before Nicolò Zeno’s book was published. In his deconstruction of the section in the narrative in which the Frislandia fishermen described their voyages to Estotilanda and Drogeo, Lucas was particularly devastating, showing how various passages corresponded closely to the letters of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, among various other works. Lucas was also able to show how the Zeno map had borrowed from various other maps created by sixteenth-century cartographers, the Carta marina map of the north by Olaus Magnus, the Caerte van oostland by Cornelis Anthonisz and the multiple maps of the north made by Claudius Clavus. He convincingly demonstrated as well how many of the islands on the Zeno map, including Frislandia, Estotilanda, and Drogeo, simply did not exist.
Then in 1933, an Italian genealogist named Andrea Da Mosto authored an article titled “The Voyage of Nicolò and Antonio Zeno” that was based on hundreds of previously unpublished records from the Venetian archives. Da Mosto was able to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the Nicolò Zeno who had purportedly visited Frislandia in the 1380s and 1390s was a real person, a prominent navigator and public official in Venice in the period between 1360 and 1400 whose career was well documented. In May 1389, Nicolò had taken command of a squadron of naval galleys in the Gulf of Venice. The following year, he had been elected military governor of the cities of Corone and Modone in southern Greece. By the end of 1392 he had returned to Venice and in August of that year he had set sail for Corfu, where he served as bailiff and captain. These four years were, according to the Zeno narrative, the period when Nicolò Zeno had been fighting battles alongside Zichmni in the North Sea.
It may have been fortunate for Frederick Pohl, and it certainly was for Richard Henry Major, that they were dead by the time Brian Smith put the nails in the coffin of the Zeno narrative. Smith, the archivist at the Shetland Museum and Archives, and a historian of Shetland and Orkney, began by declaring the once-admired Major as “the villain of this story,” then presented a painstaking description of the myriad ways in which Major had altered—actually rewritten in numerous instances—the Zeno narrative in his translation. Major began by changing the dates of not only the Zeno narrative but of the documents he would claim supported it, Smith demonstrated. Major then proceeded to change the locations of islands that appeared on the Zeno map and were described in the narrative, moving Grislanda, for instance, from the south coast of Iceland to the North Sea just above Scotland, in the vicinity of Orkney. “Major’s treatment of Shetland is even more outrageous,” Smith charged. In the original narrative, Zichmni makes a failed assault on Estlanda (assumed to be Shetland) before retreating north to the seven mythical islands on the east side of Iceland. Major, though, has Zichmni attack Shetland, then retreat to Orkney, then return to Shetland, where he places Zichmni’s fort at Bres, when the original Zeno narrative had placed Bres in Iceland. Major’s work was a “shocking piece of deception,” Smith wrote. “But it was very successful, because of the man’s scholarly reputation,” and “most readers swallowed his distortions whole.” Major’s falsified narrative was especially welcome among some members of the Sinclair family, one of whom would begin calling his largely undistinguished distant ancestor Henry the Holy.
Smith did not spare Pohl, noting that the professor most certainly was aware of Da Mosto’s genealogical work, since he had listed it in his bibliography, but had omitted the overwhelming evidence it offered that the Zeno narrative was a fraud.
EXCELLENT AND AUTHORITATIVE as Smith’s work was, it had been published in the rather obscure New Orkney Antiquarian Journal and made little impression on a public imagination that had been inflamed during the 1980s by a pair of works that became the pillars of an “alternative history” that reverberates through the culture to this day in manifestations that have ranged from Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code to The Curse of Oak Island. The first, published in 1982, was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, authored by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The second, which appeared in print seven years later, was The Temple and the Lodge, authored by just Baigent and Leigh. The two books, the former in particular, conflated historical fragments, fraudulent documents, and “facts” drawn from poems and novels into a vitriolic condemnation of the Catholic Church, all of it imaginatively packaged into a thrilling narrative, but one that did not hold up to any scrutiny.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail incorporated many of the Knights Templar myths and tales, including the “lost fleet” that sailed from La Rochelle to carry the Templar treasure “to the New World by following old Viking routes.” The Sinclair legend was introduced with the alleged transport of the Holy Grail to the family’s Scottish domain. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, however, began its story even before the Templar order was established early in the twelfth century, starting at the time of Christ. Both the daring and the transgression of the book were rooted in its claim of a deeper secret society, the so-called Priory of Sion, which, it was claimed, had created the Knights Templar as its military and financial operatives. This was one piece of a centuries-long plan to install the Merovingian dynasty (which did exist and had ruled the Franks from 457 to 751) on the throne of the entire European continent. It was further claimed that the Merovingians descended from Jesus of Nazareth and his bride, Mary Magdalene, and that the Catholic Church was dedicated to killing off the entire bloodline in order to preserve the claim of apostolic succession that had started with Peter.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail had many antecedents beyond the ones I’ve described. The authors drew, for instance, on the 1835 claims of a French scientist named Claude Thory, who wrote that Robert the Bruce had created what he called the Order of St. Andrew in Scotland for Freemasons who had supported him at the Battle of Bannockburn; this had been taken up in 1837 by James Burnes, who asserted that it was the Templars themselves who had brought Freemasonry to Scotland. One of Burnes’s sources was the 1820 novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, in which the villain was a Templar Knight. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail also borrowed from an obscure 1773 book called The Jesus Scroll that was the first to claim that Mary Magdalene had given birth to the child of her husband, Jesus.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail was a huge bestseller, in spite of its reliance on such spectacularly dubious sources as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a foundational text of modern anti-Semitism that emerged from Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that Protocols was exposed as a forgery as early as 1921 and after that was published only to aid assorted fascist movements, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail made use of it, claiming that what the Protocols actually described were the master plan of the Priory of Sion. The main source cited for the Priory of Sion story, though, was a work titled Dossiers Secrets that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had found at the National Library of France in Paris. Somehow it had escaped their attention that Dossiers Secrets was also a forgery, one created by the notorious con man/lunatic Pierre Plantard, who along with his partner had physically planted it in the National Library. Plantard was a former collaborator with the Vichy government of France in World War II, who following the war had recast himself and his group, the Alpha Galates, as a cell of the Resistance. After a series of bizarre scams and a career as a “clairvoyant” named Chyren, Plantard had in the 1960s become a public figure by teaming up with author Gérard de Sède to announce the existence of the Priory of Sion, its relationship to the Merovingians, and through them to the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. To this he added the claim that he himself was part of the bloodline, a direct descendant of the Merovingian king Dagobert II.
Plantard actually outed himself in 1982, in an apparent fit of pique at how successfully the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had incorporated his hoax into their work; he went on French radio to reveal that the Priory of Sion documents on which the authors had relied were fakes—his fakes. Yet it was not until 1996 that the fallacies that were the foundation of Holy Blood, Holy Grail were truly publicly exposed in a documentary that aired on the British Broadcasting Company (which was in a way responsible for the book ever coming into existence, having in the 1970s broadcast the series of documentaries produced by Henry Lincoln that were based on Plantard’s “work”).
In spite of the fact that Holy Blood, Holy Grail was more fiction than fact, the book continued to sell and to spawn literally dozens of offshoots and spinoffs. Up until 2003, the most successful of all of these was Baigent and Leigh’s The Temple and the Lodge, which more deeply “explored” how the Templar order came to Scotland, survived though Jacobite Freemasonry, and made its way to America. The first and most successful attempt to connect all of this to Oak Island had come in 1988, when Michael Bradley’s Holy Grail across the Atlantic was published. Bradley’s breathless book had the Templars concealing the Holy Grail at the Cathar fortress of Montségur until the castle was sacked by the forces of the Inquisition in 1244. The Templars had protected the Grail, Bradley suggested, by transporting it to Scotland, where Henry Sinclair (of course) eventually took possession and transported it to Nova Scotia, where the Money Pit on Oak Island was dug as a hiding place, before the Grail was eventually hidden in Montreal by a mysterious secret society.
The capstone of the whole Templar treasure/Henry Sinclair/Priory of Sion/Merovingian dynasty fantasy was, of course, The Da Vinci Code, which became an enormous international bestseller when it was published in 2003. In 2005, Baigent and Leigh sued author Dan Brown and his publisher for plagiarizing Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The result was a rare but delicious instance of true justice in which the High Court of Justice in London ruled that since Baigent and Leigh had attempted to pass off their fiction as history, they could not sue an author who had actually produced a work of fiction based on it. The court also noted that the success of The Da Vinci Code had only resulted in increased sales for Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which has continued to be a moneymaker for the authors and their publisher, despite the fact that imitators publish at least one new iteration of their false narrative every year.
One of these derivative authors, Kathleen McGowan, presented the Sinclair/Priory of Sion/Merovingian theory in season two of The Curse of Oak Island. A former public-relations copywriter, McGowan initially self-published her 1989 novel The Expected One, which became a million-copy bestseller when it was republished by Simon and Schuster immediately after the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code. The reissue was a blatant piggyback on Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, but McGowan offered a special wrinkle, declaring herself to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. She had turned that success into a series of novels featuring her alter ego’s investigation of historical events that didn’t exist anywhere outside the pages of Holy Blood, Holy Grail or Holy Grail across the Atlantic, featuring, of course, a main character named Sinclair. She had also become the principal in a “Holy France” tour business that was itself quite successful.
Marty Lagina and his twenty-nine-year-old son Alex (also an engineer) had made the first leg of The Curse of Oak Island’s European excursion to meet McGowan in the south of France. They rendezvoused at Montségur, the citadel castle where the author began the tour by presenting an ostensible history of the Cathar heresy’s rise and fall. “There is an idea that the Cathars had all the most sacred treasures in human history right here in this place,” McGowan told the Laginas. Those treasures of course included the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. It had been for the purpose of stealing these holy objects that Pope Innocent VIII (who is also regularly credited with initiating the Inquisition) had launched his crusade against the Cathars, McGowan explained, a campaign of slaughter that came to a climax right here at the mountain fortress of Montségur. Only by negotiating a two-week truce were the Cathars able to send four of their number out under cover of darkness to lower the Grail, the Ark, and the rest of their treasure down the side of the mountain by a system of pulleys that delivered it to the waiting Knights Templar, who would carry it out of France to Scotland, and then, of course, to Oak Island.
As it happened, I knew a good deal about the Cathari (as they’re properly called), because I had researched them for two prior books. They were a final flowering of what had been since the first century the primary heresy of Judeo-Christian faith, gnosticism. The Persian sages Zoroaster and Mani were the early drivers of gnosticism, which made its way to Europe during the tenth century with the Bogomil movement in the Balkans. The great heresy of the Bogomils, as with the gnostic movements that preceded them, was a dualism that essentially elevated the Devil to the same stature as God, envisioning the world as a struggle between darkness and light that had been ongoing since men were created. The Council of Constantinople suppressed the Bogomils by sentencing all the heretics to be burned alive. Rome, on the other hand, insisted on an attempt to “reconvert” the Bogomils, killing only those who refused salvation. The urgency of the church’s mission increased dramatically when the gnostic revival spread from the Balkans into Italy, then into the Swiss Alps, and finally into the Languedoc region of southern France, where the Cathari arose. The Cathari, disgusted with the corruption and indulgence of the Catholic clergy (more than three centuries before Martin Luther), recognized no priests, instead dividing themselves into two categories, the Believers and the Perfects. The Perfects were required to surrender all worldly goods to the larger community, to vest themselves in simple corded black or blue robes, and to serve as mendicant monks who devoted their lives to prayer, preaching, and charitable work. Even the Believers were expected to eat a vegetarian diet and refrain from procreation, which would only serve to increase the power of Rex Mundi, the name they had given to the devil. Escape from a realm of materiality where Rex Mundi ruled into a realm of pure spirit where the God of Light dwelled was the ultimate goal of all Cathari. The church, naturally, had a problem with the fact that the Cathari’s dismissal of the visible world required them to spurn the symbol of the cross. The Cathari likewise rejected the concepts of salvation and damnation, embracing instead a belief in reincarnation that had been imported from the East.
Innocent VIII found this no less abhorrent than had his predecessors and after a failed attempt to corral Count Raymond VI (ruler of the Languedoc) in January 1208, immediately called for a Crusade against them, strengthening the incentive by decreeing that all lands owned by the Cathari and their supporters were to be confiscated. Charged with devil worship, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and incest, among other iniquities, the Cathari were slaughtered by the thousands. During an early battle, Arnaud, the abbot-knight leading the Crusade, was asked by his men who among the heretics should be put to the sword. He answered with a line that is refrained among military men to this day: “Kill them all. God will know His own.”
The Cathari movement suffered its final defeat in March 1244, at Montségur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where more than two hundred heretic priests were massacred. Based on my research, the suggestion that the Cathars had been an extension of the Merovingian dynasty, dedicated to protecting the Jesus Christ–Mary Magdalene bloodline, however, was likely false. What had most offended Innocent VIII was that the Cathari, like the Docetists ten centuries earlier, insisted that Jesus’s body had been an illusion and that therefore His crucifixion and resurrection were illusions also. Obviously, an illusion could never have fathered a child with Mary Magdalene. Equally impossible was the story of the Cathari passing their holy treasure to the Knights Templar. First, there is no evidence the Cathari possessed any such treasure; the idea did not even exist until Holy Blood, Holy Grail. McGowan’s story conflated the persecution of the Templars by King Philip with Innocent VIII’s campaign against the Cathari. But Philip’s roundup of the Templars in Paris took place in 1309, sixty-five years after the Cathar surrender at Montségur. In 1244 the Templars were still headquartered at Acre. There were a few Templars in France during the campaign against the Cathari, but every one of them had fought with the Catholic army against the heretics. The Templars were devout Catholics loyal to the pope.
FROM MONTSÉGUR, McGowan led Marty and his son Alex to Rennes-le-Château. Rennes-le-Château was where the story that Jesus had not died on the cross but instead fathered the child who founded the Merovingian dynasty had actually begun. It all started with a priest who had presided over the village church dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Father Berenger Saunière had supervised a remarkable degree of construction in the poor parish, not only achieving the restoration of the church (including the presbytery and cemetery) but also building a spectacular personal library called the Tour Magdala on the edge of the village, featuring a circular turret connected to a tower with a promenade that led to his villa, perhaps the loveliest home in Rennes-le-Château. Questions about how all of this work had been financed eventually led to Saunière being convicted of trafficking in masses at an ecclesiastical trial and suspended from the priesthood.
The scandal came to the attention of a Belgian journalist who visited Rennes in 1948. He reported the sordid story of Saunière but also declared the church he had built was an architectural masterpiece, admiring even its most unusual feature, the stoup (basin for holy water) at the entrance to the chapel that was held by a horned devil with cloven hooves. A local named Corbu, who had opened a restaurant in Sauniere’s former villa, read the article and began promoting Rennes as a place of mystery and enchantment. It was Corbu who first produced the story that Father Saunière had discovered “parchments” during the renovation of the church that led him to the treasure of Blanche of Castile, what remained of 28,500,500 gold pieces that the French crown had assembled to ransom Saint Louis from the infidels. Corbu’s tale got picked up by an author named Charroux who wrote a book that captured the imagination of Pierre Plantard, who adapted it to the mythological story of the Priory of Sion, then collaborated with Gérard de Sède on the book L’Or de Rennes, the precursor to Dossiers Secrets. Henry Lincoln read L’Or de Rennes, which inspired him to produce the BBC documentaries that led to Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the presumed descent of the Merovingian fantasy to Kathleen McGowan.
What McGowan told Marty and Alex Lagina was that Rennes was where the Cathari-affiliated Templars had first taken the Grail and the Ark and the rest of the holy treasures. For proof she led father and son to a cottage with an iron Templar cross hanging over the front door. It was the home of McGowan’s Holy Tour associate Tobi Dobler, who now identified himself as a member of the Knights Templar of the New Order, whose members claimed to be descended from the original Templars.
The group soon headed off to Scotland, there to meet up with Rick Lagina, Charles Barkhouse, Dave Blankenship, and the rest of the team to hear the story of the Templars’ eighteen-ship fleet that had escaped from La Rochelle to the protection of Robert the Bruce and the Sinclair family. In claiming the Templars were connected to the British Isles via an actual historical person, the English Lord Ralph de Sudeley, McGowan was most likely drawing on the work of Graham Phillips, an author whose histories verged even further into invention than Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In one of his works, Phillips described how de Sudeley, as a Crusader, found the Ark of the Covenant with the Maccabean treasure at Jebel al-Madhbah, then carried it back to Britain for safekeeping.
Various elisions helped McGowan connect the Knights Templar, the Cathari, and Henry Sinclair to the team’s ultimate destination, Rosslyn Chapel, where the climactic scenes of The Da Vinci Code film had been shot. The chapel had been built and commissioned by William Sinclair more than half a century after Henry the Holy’s death. Rosslyn is a small chapel that was never completed, but its interior is rich with stone carvings. Eight Nordic dragons ring the base of one particularly ornate pillar, while 110 carvings of the pagan sylvan deity known as the Green Man peer through the carved foliage that grows all around them, as well as through their ears, mouths, and noses. One arch is covered with a fantastically detailed danse macabre in which men and women dance with their future skeletons.
Queen Victoria had visited Rosslyn in 1862, more than four hundred years after its construction, to find it abandoned and in disrepair, yet she was so impressed by what she saw through the weeds and vines covering the building that she urged it be restored. It was, and it was rededicated in 1862. The strangeness of Rosslyn had sprouted legends even before the advent of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, especially about what was inside the stone crypt that had been sealed shut for centuries. Stories that the Holy Grail, sacred scrolls from the time of Christ, a large fragment of the cross, or even the actual mummified head of Jesus were entombed in the crypt had gained currency over the years, especially after The Da Vinci Code.
Because they encouraged such stories despite knowing how false they were, the Sinclair family had been accused by the historian Louise Yeoman, curator of manuscripts at the Museum of Scotland, among others in the country, of “cashing in” on the chapel’s appearance in The Da Vinci Code. More than a hundred thousand tourists were showing up every year at the chapel, paying customers all, and the Sinclairs benefited while doing nothing to discourage belief in the legend of Henry the Holy, which at least a couple of Sinclairs (Andrew Sinclair, most notably) had promoted in books and articles.
“Christian, Jewish, Egyptian, Masonic, Pagan,” the character played by Tom Hanks had ticked off the influences he saw in the carvings inside Rosslyn Chapel in the film version of The Da Vinci Code. The idea that the Sinclairs were the founders of Freemasonry (intent on creating a disguise for the Templar order after it was dissolved by the pope in 1312) had become part of what, in the popular imagination, was encoded in the chapel’s carvings. This despite the fact that the Masons had not come into existence until more than a century after Rosslyn Chapel was built. The blending of history and myth so annoyed the curator of Scotland’s Grand Lodge, Robert L. D. Cooper, that he had written a book called Rosslyn Hoax? to attack at length and in detail the claims that The Da Vinci Code drew on.
At Rosslyn, the chapel’s “keeper” regaled the Laginas and company with the legend that Scottish knights went to the Americas long before Columbus and that their leader could have been Henry Sinclair. Nova Scotia was Latin for “New Scotland,” the keeper noted, then pointed out carvings of plants that were “said to be” shucked corn and trillium blossoms and aloe cactus, all species native to North America, and recounted the legend that these had been drawn by Henry Sinclair in North America and brought back to Scotland. At least a few botanists, however, had argued that the carvings at Rosslyn were of plants native to the country. The “corn,” for instance, was actually bundled wheat, they said.
Alan Butler also made his first appearance on the show in connection to the team’s visit to Rosslyn Chapel. Butler and his podcast partner Janet Wolter based their work on goddess worship and gnosticism, especially the book of Enoch, an allegedly suppressed book of the Bible that told the story of the “Watcher” angels referenced briefly in the book of Daniel and, perhaps, in Genesis 6:2: “The sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose.” In the book of Enoch version the Watchers, sent to Earth by God to watch over mankind, instead procreated among them, illicitly instructing humans in making weapons, cosmetics, and mirrors and practicing sorcery; the Great Flood had happened in order to cleanse the Earth of the Watchers’ offspring, the Nephilim. Butler and Wolter transformed the Watchers and their offspring from the villains of the story to its protagonists and incorporated the Roman cult of Venus, the symbolism of Freemasonry, and of course the entire Merovingian meme in which the Jesus Christ–Mary Magdalene bloodline was destined to rise again to power in the Kingdom of God on Earth forecast by the book of Revelations. The two had also made much of what they called the Tariot Tomb Conspiracy that claimed the bones of Jesus had been hidden by the early Christians in Jerusalem, that the Templars had discovered this tomb, and that the skull and crossbones flag that most people associated with pirates was really a reference to Christ’s rotting corpse.
Butler did not mention most of this, but he did explain on camera that the flagstones found in the mouth of the Money Pit were actually a “threshing floor” like the one the Templars and their gnostic compatriots (again, the Templars were not gnostic) had used to mark spiritually significant sites. From this Butler had transitioned to the book of Enoch, the Masonic Royal Arch of Enoch, and a calculation based on various obscure texts that there was a second treasure vault on Oak Island, 996 feet due west of the Money Pit. Some broad humor erupted when Marty Lagina discovered that this would put them right in the middle of the “stinky swamp” he so despised.
In the same Newsweek article from the Rosslyn Chapel visit, Rick Lagina asked, “Has there been a find on Oak Island that we can say is a definitive tie-in to the Templars? No, but are there curious facts and bits of discovery that indicate the possibility? Yes.”
The main example Rick cited was the similarity between the flag of the Mi’kmaq and the Templar battle flag that supposedly had been flown from the ship Henry Sinclair steered to North America in 1397 or 1398. This claim had been presented in an earlier episode of the show, when viewers were shown the two flags, one atop the other, in order to see that they were virtually identical, both white with red markings, a horizontal cross with two symbols on opposite sides of the vertical post, one a star and one a crescent. The only difference was that the crescent was on the top of the Templar flag while it was on the bottom on the Mi’kmaq flag.
This discovery had been presented on The Curse of Oak Island through one J. Hutton Pulitzer—he preferred to be called Treasure Force Commander J. Hutton Pulitzer—a theorist who had appeared in a few episodes of the show during season two. Pulitzer (born Jovan Philyaw) was outfitted in a getup of khaki pants tucked into knee-high boots and a safari shirt worn with a shoulder holster like a villain in a campy remake of King Solomon’s Mines. Pulitzer’s earliest appearances had centered on some petroglyphs that were found on an outcropping of rock at Bedford Barrens, Nova Scotia, about fifty miles northeast of Oak Island. The eight-pointed star inside a circle was a link to the ancient Middle East and, ultimately, to the sacking of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar around 597 BC, as Pulitzer had it. From this, the show had pivoted to the similarities between the Templar/Sinclair and Mi’kmaq flags.
Historians who made the counter argument relied on a 1610 book by Marc Lescarbot titled The Conversion of the Savages, which described how the tribe was introduced to the symbol of the cross by a Catholic missionary named Jesse Fleche (more than two hundred years after the supposed voyage of Henry Sinclair) and had begun to use it to decorate various cloths and ornaments, resulting ultimately in the creation of the flag.