The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (36 page)

It was true that, as soon as they gained power, these gentle, peace-loving Christians immediately began to quarrel and murder one another. But at least they held the empire together.

Lomas and Knight quote Pope Leo X as saying: “It has served us well, this myth of Christ”.

The Roman Catholic Church had every reason for supporting this new, authoritarian version of Christianity, based on St Paul’s inspired invention, but the older version – of the Nazoreans and Messianists – had not entirely died out. For example, Paul – in the days when he was still a persecutor of Christians – drove a group of Messianists known as Mandaeans – who regarded John the Baptist as the Messiah – to Iraq, where they still continue to flourish.

Lomas and Knight believed that it was this older version of Christianity, with its roots in the Kumran community, that one day became Freemasonry. And it is here that the story touches on the strange history of Rennes-le-Chateau. Henry Lincoln has argued that the order of the Priory of Sion, which was founded at the end of the first Crusade by Hugh de Payen and his knights, actually dates back many centuries, through the dynasty known as the Merovingians. (See Postscript to the article on Rennes-le-Chateau.)

During the twelfth century, the Crusaders lost what ground they had gained in the Holy Land; a second crusade ended in failure, and the Muslims under the leadership of Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. During the next century, seven more crusades failed to restore power to the Christians. The fall of Acre in 1291 completed their defeat, and the Knights Templar had lost their
raison d’etre.

Their wealth – based on exemption from taxes – remained. But the French king Philip the Fair (1265–1314) was eyeing them like a cat watching a mouse. He had reason for feeling hostile, since the Templars were dedicated to the service of the pope, and Philip the Fair was in conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. Philip simply wanted an excuse to pounce on the Templars, and seize their wealth.

After being ejected from the Holy Land, the Templars had moved to Cyprus, but the island was insecure. The ideal solution would have been for the Templars to return to France. None of them was aware how deeply the king – who had once been turned down for membership – detested them.

Boniface VIII died; his successor, Boniface IX, soon followed him – probably poisoned by Philip. At that point – 1305 – Philip succeeded in having his own candidate appointed pope – Archbishop Bertrand de Gotte of Bordeaux. Bertrand and Philip disliked one another, but the prizes were too great to allow this to stand in their way. So Bertrand became Pope Clement V, and the king – now he had the pope in his
pocket – decided to move the papal seat from Rome to Avignon, and to seized the wealth of the Templars.

It was an immense undertaking, since the number of Templars was now enormous, and they were among the most influential men in France. In spite of which, sealed orders went out in mid-September, 1307, ordering a swoop on the Templars on Friday, 13 October 1307. What is so amazing is that the coup actually worked, and most of the Templars fell into the trap. The exception were the Templars of Bezu, near Rennes-le-Chateau, who were almost certainly tipped off by the pope himself – it can hardly be coincidence that the chief Templar of Bezu was called de Gotte.

Philip’s excuse for having the Templars arrested was that they were actually a kind of satanist organization – they were accused of homosexuality, worshipping a demon called Baphomet, and spitting upon the cross. Most of this was almost certainly nonsense – except that the Templars probably did
not
believe in orthodox Christianity. If, as Lomas and Knight believe, they were descendants of the Essenes and the Priory of Sion, then they would certainly have regarded St Paul as a “spouter of lies”, and Pauline Christianity as a gross distortion of the truth.

Most of the Templars were subjected to appalling tortures, so that many confessed to these absurd charges. The Grand Master himself, Jacques de Molay, was among those who confessed, and so was his second-in-command, Geoffrey de Charney. But at their sentencing seven years later – on 18 March 1314 – Molay withdrew his confession, declaring it had been forced on him by torture. The king was so enraged at having his plans thwarted that he immediately ordered Molay and Charney to be roasted alive, over a slow fire. This happened the following day, on an island in the Seine called the Ile de Palais, and it is said that Molay, dying in horrible agony, summoned the king and the pope to meet him before the throne of God within a year. Whether this is true or not, both the king and the pope were dead within the year.

In fact, Philip’s main purpose in destroying the Templars was thwarted. The knights of Bezu and other Templars sailed out of La Rochelle in eighteen ships on the day before the arrest of the Templars, and they vanished from history. So Philip’s coffers were not replenished after all.

At least one of the Templar ships escaped to Scotland, and it was there that a knight named William St Clair built a chapel called Rosslyn, not far from Edinburgh, which is full of evidence that St Clair was a Templar.

The chapel of Rosslyn is certainly amazing enough. To begin with, it seems to be built on the plan of Solomon’s Temple. Second, some of its decorations show cobs of sweet corn, which at that time was only found in the New World, which would not be discovered for another half century – St Clair began to build Rosslyn in 1440. The decorations also include aloes, another American plant. It is difficult not to agree with Lomas and Knight that some of the eighteen missing Templar ships sailed to America. But would they take a voyage as dangerous as that if they had no idea of what lay across the Atlantic? The highly plausible suggestion made by Lomas and Knight is that the “treasure” found by the first Templars in Solomon’s Temple included maps which showed America. And this presupposes that the Templars had access to some ancient maps like the “maps of the ancient sea kings” discussed elsewhere in this book (p 91).

Now Lomas and Knight discovered a four-inch tableau hidden away at the top of a pillar in Rosslyn chapel showing a headless figure holding up a piece of cloth, on which there is the face of a bearded man. The head has obviously been cut off to prevent recognition. But none of the other figures has a missing head. Moreover, the faces are highly distinctive, as if they were portraits of living people. So it seems likely that the figure with the missing head may have had the face of William St Clair himself, or possibly of a member of the de Charney family, who now owned the Holy Shroud. Lomas and Knight are convinced that the cloth being held by the figure
is
the Holy Shroud.

They also argue strongly that the image on the Holy Shroud is Jacques de Molay, the Master of the Templars.

The argument they put forward in their book
The Second Messiah
– the sequel to
The Hiram Key
– is that it was, in fact, Jacques de Molay whose outline is still preserved on the Holy Shroud.

Now de Molay had not been tortured in the chamber of the Inquisition, but in the Paris headquarters of the Templars. The rack and suspension chains would not have been available in the headquarters. Lomas and Knight argue that de Molay was, in fact, tortured by being crucified, and that this was carried out by nailing him to a door in a chamber at the Paris headquarters. The inquisitor William Imbert a devout Catholic, would certainly have been horrified to learn that the Templars denied that Christ was the Son of God, and would have felt that it was highly appropriate to torture de Molay by nailing him to a door.

After Molay had confessed to whatever the inquisitors accused him of, he was taken down and wrapped in a piece of cloth which was
probably there in the Paris Temple. He was laid on his bed in this “shroud”, his body streaming with perspiration, and with blood (with a high lactic acid content) and the authors introduce some interesting evidence to the effect that this mixture would have “photographed” de Molay’s image on the cloth of the shroud. (In an appendix to
The Second Messiah
, they introduce the evidence of Dr Alan Mills, a photographic expert, on the chemistry of this process.)

This cloth, they think, was returned to the home of Geoffrey de Charney, either before or after the two men were roasted to death. Less than forty years later, the shroud was put on display in a church at Lirey, near the home of Geoffrey de Charney’s grandson, who had the same name.

Thousands of people regarded Jacques de Molay as a martyr – hence the title of the book
The Second Messiah
. Four and a half centuries later, when Louis XVI was guillotined during the French Revolution, someone in the crowd shouted: “Jacques Molay is avenged”!

Lomas and Knight’s theory of the origin of the Holy Shroud is certainly one of the most controversial so far. It is, of course, supported by the carbon-dating of the Shroud. And the notion that the Shroud is a fake, propounded by Picknett and Prince, seems to have been disproved by the fact that chemical tests have shown that the Shroud was genuinely soaked with blood and perspiration.

It is true that the one weak point of the theory of Lomas and Knight is that there is no positive evidence that Jacques de Molay was tortured by being crucified. But if the man on the Shroud was not de Molay, then who was he?

23

Homer and the Fall of Troy

Are They Both a Myth?

Although Shakespeare is acknowledged to be England’s greatest poet, serious doubts have been expressed about whether he wrote any of the works attributed to him. In the case of Homer – the first great poet of Western civilization – many schoolars have gone even further and raised doubts as to whether he actually existed. A children’s book entitled
How Much Do You Know
? carries the following entry under the question: “Who Was Homer”?:

How could a famous poet be nonexistent? One widely held opinion is that various Greek bards (or
rhapsodes
) invented poems about the Trojan War and its aftermath and that these various accounts were later stitched together into the poems we know as the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. We can add to this question about the existence of Homer the question of whether the Trojan War really took place or whether – as many scholars have suggested – it was a purely mythical event, like the wars of the gods. However, no one who has actually read straight through these two poems can believe that they were written by a committee.

There is one very sound reason for believing that Homer really existed. By studying the language of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, scholars
have dated the poems to some time between 750 and 650
BC
. Now this is a mere two or three centuries before the Golden Age of Athens, the age of Plato and Aristotle and Euripides. In other words, it was closer to the age of Plato than Shakespeare is to our own period at the time of this writing. Moreover, the Greek bards learned their poetry by heart and could recite many thousands of lines from memory – as their modern descendants still can today. So there was no question of Homer being lost in the dim mists of antiquity, in the days before there were any historical records. The memories of the bards themselves were the historical records. And it is impossible to believe that they simply invented a poet named Homer and attributed various poems to him – as unlikely as believing that Sir Isaac Newton was the invention of a group of seventeenth-century scientists, who also wrote his
Principia.

What seems to emerge from the available evidence is that Homer was a blind poet who was born some time around 750
BC
in Asia Minor (now Turkey) and who spent much of his life in poverty, wandering from place to place, until he found a measure of fame on the island of Chios. Many fragmentary biographies of him exist among the works of the classical writers, the longest and best of which is attributed to the historian Herodotus (known as the Father of History), who was also born in Asia Minor about two and a half centuries later.

Herodotus’s story is as follows. Homer’s mother was a poor orphan girl named Critheis who became pregnant out of wedlock, as a result of which she moved from Asia Minor to a place near the river Meles in Greece (Boeotia) and gave birth to a son, whom she named Melesigenes (pronounced Mellis-igenees), after the river. He was to acquire the nickname Homer (which means “blind man”
⁶
) many years later. She then returned to Smyrna (now called Izmir) and became housekeeper to a teacher of literature and music named Phemius, who fell in love with her and married her. So Homer acquired a stepfather who knew all about poetry and music.

The young Homer distinguished himself at school. When his stepfather died – followed shortly by his mother – he took over the school with brilliant success and became something of a celebrity among his fellow citizens. He became friendly with a traveler named Mentes, from the island of Leucadia (now called Leukas) in western Greece, who persuaded Homer to accompany him on his travels and offered to pay all Homer’s expenses. Unable to resist this offer to see the world, Homer
set off with Mentes and traveled by land to what is now called Italy. Full of curiosity, he asked questions everywhere he went. But in the course of his travels, he picked up an eye infection, and by the time he reached Ithaca – just south of Leucadia – it had become so serious that Mentes left him behind with a doctor named Mentor. It was Mentor who taught Homer about the legends of Odysseus (whom the Romans would call Ulysses
⁷
) and the story of his epic voyage home from the Trojan War. When he came to compose the
Odyssey
, Homer gave the name Mentor to the teacher of Ulysses’s son Telemachus, and the name has become synonymous with “teacher”. But Mentor was unable to cure Homer’s eye problems. Homer decided to try to get back home, but in Colophon, in Asia Minor, he finally became blind.