Twenty-Two

The Templar Speculations

On Saturday, July 18, 1992, four days after my survey of the cross, the Halifax Herald reported a new discovery on Oak Island, based on an interview with Fred Nolan. The article stirred up considerable public interest and Nolan was flooded with telephone calls. Since I had conducted the survey and was in the throes of writing a new book about Oak Island, Nolan referred the callers to me.

Aside from trying to uncover additional information about the cross, the investigators put forth their theories about the cross’s origins. They all seemed to think that the cross, in some mystical way, related to the medieval Order of the Knights Templar or the modern-day Masons.

These same Oak Island observers contacted me a few more times, and in the course of several lengthy conversations I began to learn why they were thinking this way. They were drawing heavily from two recent books, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, and Holy Grail Across the Atlantic by Michael Bradley.

According to these books, the story unfolds.... The Knights Templar was founded in 1118 AD under the name of the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, nineteen years after the capture of the Holy City during the First Christian Crusade. It was a shadowy order of warrior-monks who played a very crucial role in the Christian Crusades, fighting and dying by the thousands. These monks, dressed in white capes with splayed red crosses, were the storm troopers in the siege of the Holy Land. They fought to reclaim the sepulcher of Jesus Christ and the Holy Land from the Muslims.

The Templars had made pledges to obedience, poverty, and chastity, and their sole allegiance was to the Pope. They were thus totally independent of the rule of any king, prince, or prelate. Admission to the order required that the new recruit sign over all possessions. The Templars’ holdings proliferated as the sons of noble families throughout Europe flocked to the order. As well, wealthy Crusade supporters donated vast amounts of money, goods, and land. While the order welcomed all the donations and gifts with open arms, it disposed of nothing. The order’s constitution disallowed any form of divestiture even for noble causes such as to ransom a leader.

A Templar: keepers of the Holy Grail?

It was the Templars who established the institution of modern banking, and this industrious order became the bankers for every throne in Europe by lending large sums to destitute monarchs. They came to own their own seaports, shipyards, and fleet.

As well as amassing great wealth, the Templars became a powerful organization with strong international influences, acting often as mediators between nobles and monarchs throughout the Western world and the Holy Land. But their wealth, influence, and independence were to be short-lived.

By 1306, the Crusades were over and the Holy Land had fallen almost entirely under Muslim control. The Templars had lost their raison d’etre and King Philip IV of France was determined to rid his country of the order. They had a military force much stronger than his; they were arrogant and unruly; they were firmly established throughout his country; and, perhaps above all, he owed them a lot of money. With the Pope’s support, King Philip compiled a list of charges, which were in part derived from information provided by the king’s spies who had infiltrated the order. Armed with sufficient accusations to deliver his blow, the king issued secret orders to his agents throughout the country stipulating a simultaneous arrest of all the Templars in France at dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307. Furthermore, all of their estates and goods were to be confiscated for the Crown. Even though a number of knights escaped the dragnet, the arrest was largely successful. But Philip failed in his main objective: to acquire the Templars’ immense wealth. The Templars’ treasure had mysteriously disappeared.

According to rumour, the order had received advance warning of the planned arrest, and they arranged to have the treasure smuggled by night from Parisian estates and transported by wagons to the coast and finally to the Templars’ naval base at LaRochelle. There, the fortune was loaded onto eighteen galleys and shipped off to sea—never to be heard from again.

Sketch of the Sinclair Arms. Henry Sinclair, thought to have been a Templar, may have built a castle at New Ross, N.S., in 1398.

The curious folks who had phoned me about the cross speculated that the treasure might have ended up buried on Oak Island. But that is only one of many versions of the story connecting the Knights Templar to the treasure hunt.

Although the Pope officially dissolved the Knights Templar in 1312 under pressure by the king, the order wasn’t completely wiped out. A number of knights remained at large—either by acquittal or through escape—and the order went underground. Philip’s attempts to persuade his fellow European monarchs to help eliminate the order were unsuccessful. While some Templars were arrested in England, most received only light sentences such as a few years of penance in an abbey or monastery.

Many knights found refuge in Scotland, which was at war with England at the time. According to legend, the order maintained itself as a coherent body in Scotland for another four hundred years. In the Lorraine section of Germany, the order was supported by the duke of the principality, while in Portugal, the order simply modified its name to “Kings of Christ” and continued on well into the 1500s.

Although the connection between Oak Island and the Templars may seem tenuous, the folks who phoned me that day to discuss the cross had done their homework. They point out that Henry Sinclair of Scotland (who they believe was a Templar) visited Nova Scotia in 1398, a date established by the American historian and author Frederick Pohl. They figure that Sinclair arrived to either conceal or recover the treasure of the Templars. After several months of exploration, he built a refuge castle at New Ross, about seventeen miles from Oak Island, in the watershed area of the Gold River. And he proceeded to plant the oaks on Oak Island to serve as a beacon for future refugees in search of his castle. Since it would be the only island bearing oak trees, all the refugee had to do was to find it and then follow Gold River, which emptied into the bay only two miles to the north. As for the Money Pit, it was to serve as a temporary repository for the treasure that was to be transported to the island refuge. Alternatively, the Money Pit was deemed to be a vault to hold the gold that was panned from Gold River, destined for European markets.

Iconography of the Masons, descendents of the Templars.

Others speculate that the Oak Island oaks were planted hundreds of years before Sinclair’s visit, and that the castle had been built at that same time. According to this version of the tale, Sinclair knew of the whereabouts of the oak-treed island and the river that ran down from a refuge castle. When he arrived, he found the castle in ruins but proceeded to build a new one on its foundation.

The idea that there was a castle at New Ross is not without some support. In 1979, I received a letter from a lady in New Ross who said that she and her husband had bought a house in that village in 1972 that “stands on a castle mound [the ruins of a castle].” She was unable to find anyone to authenticate her discovery. The lady and her husband have since moved away and this fragment of history has yet to be pursued.

After offering their speculations on the Knights Templar and Henry Sinclair and his castle, the investigators brought up the subject of the modern-day Masons. They astutely noted that several high-ranking Masons of the twentieth century have been associated with Oak Island, which brought to mind names like Frederick Blair, Gilbert Hedden, George W. Grimm, Jr. (Hedden’s New Jersey lawyer), Mel Chappell, and Reginald V. Harris—all members of the Masonic Lodge. Did they have a secret connection with the medieval Knights Templar and its vast treasure? The authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail assert that some Masonic lodges have added the level of “Templar” to rituals and appellations said to have been passed down from the original Order of the Knights Templar. They also note that at least three contemporary organizations call themselves Templars. In a letter to George W. Grimm, Jr. dated November 5, 1963, Reginald V. Harris makes mention of a Templar Order. Harris writes: “I got away for a few days to the Knights Templar Assembly at Montreal, in August....”

The investigators feel that the cross of Oak Island may have a religious meaning connected with secrets held by the Masons, and that if there is a treasure on Oak Island, it is likely to contain religious material of untold significance for future generations.

Indeed, the Templars are believed to have been the custodians of some great treasure as well as holders of a momentous secret from the Christian tradition. Indeed, we know that Templar-inspired secret societies endure to the present day.

The authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail attempt to unravel the great secret that has been protected by the Templars. Rather than being the cup or platter used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper and by Joseph of Arimathea to collect drops of Jesus’s blood at the crucifixion, they believe that the Holy Grail is a lineage, pedigree, or bloodline of people. Jesus Christ was part of that bloodline, either from birth or through marriage. He fathered children, thus making the bloodline “holy.” His wife Mary Magdalene and offspring fled the Holy Land, found a refuge in southern France, and preserved their lineage in a Jewish community. Rather than being a physical object, the Holy Grail is a symbol of Jesus’s bloodline and his wife’s womb from which the bloodline came forth.

Group of triangles making up the cross, showing ratios of height to base.

By 1100, Jesus’s descendents had risen to a state of great prominence in Europe and also in Palestine. They knew their pedigree and ancestry, but it became necessary for them to prove their bloodline to Jesus. And that proof lay buried beneath the Temple of Solomon. The Knights Templars’ original mission was to find it.

A mid-twelfth-century pilgrim to the Holy Land, Johann von Wuzburg, reportedly saw stables beneath the temple large enough to accommodate two thousand horses. As it turned out, the Knights Templar quartered their horses in these stables. It is theorized that these stables were built following a huge excavation by the Templars, in which they found what they were looking for and brought it back to Europe for concealment. About what was concealed, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail write, “It may have been Jesus’ mummified body. It may have been the equivalent, so to speak, of Jesus’ marriage licence, and/or the birth certificates of his children. It may have been something of comparable explosive import. Any or all of these items might have been referred to as the Holy Grail.” What happened to the Templars’ find remains a mystery.

Those investigators who questioned me on the Oak Island cross believe that the answer to the Holy Grail mystery is buried deep in the Money Pit or elsewhere on the island.

The fact that a few Oak Island treasure hunters and a couple of their lawyers were Masons is hardly evidence to support such a grandiose scheme. Nor is Henry Sinclair’s visit to Nova Scotia and reconstruction of his possible castle at New Ross any firmer evidence of clandestine activity initiated by the Knights Templar.

But what about the cross? Those who have contacted me about the discovery are adamant that the cross must be connected with a religious organization. They ask, who else but a Templar or a Masonic order would construct a Christian cross? But they may be missing something.

Perhaps the group of cone-shaped rocks and the Head Stone were not laid out to represent a cross. Nolan dubbed the rock configuration the “Christian cross,” and I simply call it the “cross,” but these designations may have led us down the wrong path. If the stones at the ends of the cross’s arms are connected by straight lines to stone “A” at the apex and to one of the stones on the bottom stem, say stone “E,” we have four right-angled triangles with ratios that may have been significant to those who placed them (see sketch). Within two and one-half feet, the two identical triangles on the top arms of the cross have bases that are two and one-half times their height, and within two feet, the two identical triangles below the arms have bases that are twice the height. The point common to all four triangles is marked by a stone dissimilar to the others. Instead of being a cone-shaped granite boulder, it is a human head–shaped sandstone. This dissimilarity would have been significant to anyone with a map of the configuration who was about to apply the triangles to locating the deposit. On finding the Head Stone, they would know exactly where they were positioned in relation to the group of triangles.

I have wondered from the outset, when I first saw Nolan’s plot plan of his “Christian cross,” why there are two stones on the bottom stem. It then occurred to me that I might be looking at a group of triangles and that either the “D” or “E” cone may only have a geometric or arithmetic significance.

If I was asked to risk money on whether the configuration of stones represent a cross or a group of triangles, I would bet on the latter. However, that bet only makes sense if the configuration doesn’t serve a dual purpose.

As well as being a group of triangles, the configuration of stones may utilize the ancient symbol as an instruction in a secret communication. The message may be: Look for a large, acorn-shaped granite boulder on the beach at the northern centre of the island. That boulder forms the northwestern end of the arm of a large Latin cross marked by similarly shaped stones. Having found it, strike a course in a southeasterly direction for 360 feet and search for a human skull–shaped sandstone that marks the intersection of the arms and the stem of the cross. The searcher is then able to easily find the balance of the cone-shaped boulders, continuing from that stage to apply the geometry of the triangles, which correlates with much smaller markers that pinpoint the exact location of one or more deposits.

Some people will not be pleased to hear this theory of what the cross represents. It is natural to choose a line of speculation in accordance with what we want to believe. The investigators who contacted me want very much to discover an astounding religious revelation on Oak Island. Rather than recognizing a system of markers that takes advantage of the cross motif, they would prefer to see the cross as a Templar stamp, seal, or brand—an indication that a treasure had been deposited by an order famous for its white mantle emblazoned with a bright red cross.

Collectively, the disappearance of the Templar treasure in 1307, Masons digging on Oak Island, Henry Sinclair’s visit to Nova Scotia, and the presence of stones laid in a crucifix pattern provide what the investigators say is circumstantial evidence that Oak Island hides a religious treasure of enormous value.

Like these souls who carefully constructed their Holy Grail version of the Oak Island whodunit, I too would like to believe that a profound and life-enlightening treasure will ultimately be uncovered. But I am too much of a pragmatist to build a theory on such a weak foundation of circumstantial evidence. And so I continue along a less grandiose path...