The Prophecy Becomes Truth
There was a widespread belief, known as ‘Bereshit Rabbati’, that the power of prophecy would return to Israel in AD 1210, and that soon after, the Messiah would appear out of hiding in the Great Sea of Rome.
In 1244 an infant was form to a family of minor nobles in eastern France; his name was Jacques de Molay. He joined the Knights Templar at the earliest possible age – twenty-one. He rose to be Master of the Temple in England before being made Grand Marshal. When Tibald Gaudin, the Grand Master of the Templars died in 1292, Jacques de Molay was elected to this, the highest office.
Molay was a powerful man controlling a huge number of estates across Europe as well as a fine army, a substantial battle fleet and an international trading and banking syndicate. From humble beginnings, the Order had become the most powerful force in Christendom surpassing the Vatican itself. The speed of development of their wealth and influence seems too remarkable to be the simple result of organic growth.
Molay reimposed the full observance of all rules and maintained absolute discipline throughout the Order. A total illiterate himself, he forbade other knights from wasting their time by reading.
The Templars reported to the Pope directly but they were a French-speaking Order. At the time France had a particularly self-important and ambitious king in Philip IV, known as ‘Philip the Fair’, who sought to manipulate the Pope to his won ends, but Boniface VIII was not an easy man to push around. The Pope refused to allow Philip to levy taxes against6 the Church, and in 1302 Boniface declared that ’the spiritual was greater than the temporal’ and that ‘to oppose the Pope was to oppose God’. Philip announced that Boniface was unfit to sit upon ‘the throne of Peter’, accusing the pontiff of every crime imaginable including blasphemy, heresy, murder and even sodomy. He leveled the charge that Boniface had had a secret sexual relationship with a demon who lived in the Pope’s ring. The Pope responded by imposing the highest level of excommunication on Philip personally, rather than on his kingdom. However, the king managed to gain substantial support throughout France and Boniface responded by threatening to proclaim that the country was to be placed in a state of ‘interdiction’. For as long as an ‘interdiction’ was in place, the people of France would not be baptized, attend communion, receive absolution or even be buried with full Christian rites.
Philip sent his henchmen. On 8 September 1303 Guillaume de Nogaret and his team entered the palace at Anagni in Italy and seized the aged Pope, abusing him and threatening him with great damage. Philip’s men were unable to escape with the Pope. Boniface died five weeks later because of the stress of the attack.
The new Pope, Benedict XI, started out friendly towards Philip, but as the French king started to increase his demands the relationship soured. The Pope publicly accused Philip of ordering the attack on Boniface at Anagni. Soon Benedict was dead by poison. The king chose his replacement – one Bernard de Goth, archbishop of Bordeaux. Suddenly the King of France had control of the Vicar of Christ and Western Christendom. Philip immediately levied a ten per cent tax on the gross revenue of the French clergy. The puppet Pope transferred the seat of power from the Vatican to Avignon.
With the appointment of a controllable Pope in Clement V, Philip now had the power he wanted but now he needed money. Guillaume de Nogaret, still the king’s henchman conducted an act of grand theft on the king’s behalf. The king’s troops, on the morning of 22 July 1306, arrested every Jew in the country. The Jews were sent into exile – naturally without their property, which was immediately transferred to the crown.
This greedy king next turned his attention to the Templar Master, Jacques de Molay and all the wealth of the Paris Temple, and its estates and business interests across the land.
The very secrecy of their procedures provided an excellent reason for false charges to seem credible. A plan was put together by Guillaume de Nogaret. He had spies planted within the Order, reporting back to him on the nature of the secret rituals of the Templars. To compensate for the absence of sufficiently damning evidence, de Nogaret simply arranged for the ‘discovery’ of new information. False witnesses leaked the stories of foul deeds, and in due course King Philip felt ‘obliged’ to inform the Pope of the grievous situation.
The king knew that rivalry between the Templars and the Hospitals was deep. He suggested to Pope Clement that he write to the Grand Master of both ,inviting them to a meeting to discuss a plan for the support of the kings of Armenia and Cyprus. The Pope had ideas of merging the Knights of the Temple of Solomon and the Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem into a single order to be called ‘the Knights of Jerusalem’, and de Molay believed that this was the true agenda. Such a merger was out of the question for him. The Pope had declared his preference for the Hospitallers to take the senior role. Meanwhile, King Philip failed to convince anyone that his plan to make himself the leader of the joint Order was the best solution.
William de Villaret, the Grand Master of the Hospitallers was unable to attend. De Molay collected sixty knights together, packed 150,000 gold florins and set sail for Marseilles. De Molay expected a magnificent welcome from King Philip as the Templars had loaned the king the money he required for the dowry of his daughter, the Princess Isabella, and the Paris Temple had provided a refuge for the king for several days when a public uprising got out of hand. The Grand Master felt the king was a true friend as he had asked de Molay to be the godfather to his son, Robert.
De Molay had taken the precaution of having a document drafted entitled, De Unione Templi et Hospitalis Ordinum ad Clementum Papam Jacobi de Molayo Relentio, and the document was presented to the Pope at Poitiers. As soon as de Molay arrived he was greeted with honors by the king, but the Grand Master became worried when he started to hear rumours spreading about the ‘misdeeds’ of the Templars.
The secret plan drawn up by de Nogaret was to take the entire Templar force into custody simultaneously. There were some fifteen thousand Templars in France a that time, but de Nogaret had experience from the previous year when he had seized the entire Jewish community. The date of arr4est for the Templars was set for Friday 13 October 1307. Sealed orders were sent out to the royal seneschals three weeks beforehand with strict instructions that they must not be opened before Thursday 12 October. The orders started with a powerfully written, lengthy sentence designed to overcome any reluctance:
’A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to think of and terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable evil deed, an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing wholly inhuman, foreign to all humanity, has ,thanks to the reports of several persons worthy of faith, reached our ears, not without striking us with great astonishment and causing us to tremble with violent horror, and, as we consider its gravity an immense pain rises in us, all the more cruelly because there is no doubt that the enormity of the crime overflows to the point of being an offence to the divine majesty, a shame for humanity, a pernicious example of evil and a universal scandal.’
The main charges from the testimony of an ex-Templar, Squin de Flexian, were:
’All Templars upon admission swore never to leave the Order and to further its interests by any means, right or wrong.
That the leaders of the Order are in secret alliance with the Saracens and they have more of Mohammedan infidelity than Christian faith, every novice being required to spit and trample upon the cross.
The leaders of the Order are heretical, cruel and sacrilegious men who kill or imprison any novice, who upon discovering the iniquity of the Order, tries to leave it. That furthermore they teach women who are pregnant by them how to procure an abortion and secretly murder new-born children.
That they are infected with the errors of the Fratecelli; they despise the Pope and the authority of the church and scorn the sacraments, especially those of penance and confession.
That they are addicted to the most infamous excesses of debauchery. If anyone expresses his repugnance he is punished by perpetual captivity.
Templar houses are receptacles of every crime and abomination that can be committed.
That the Master is installed in secret and few of the younger brethren are present and that he repudiates his Christian father by doing something contrary to right.
The arrest of some fifteen thousand Templars including de Molay was completed within the morning of Friday 13th. The principal false witness was de Flexian who had been expelled on the grounds of heresy and other offences. Together with a Florentine called Noffo Dei, he gave evidence against the Order in return for a pardon and release from prison. The Inquisition was given orders to extract confessions and that no torture should be spared in the furtherance of this objective. These skilled torturers were expert at inflicting maximum pain without actually killing their subject; only thirty-six Templars died in the Paris area during the early stages of questioning. With the huge influx of prisoners, the Inquisition had to make special arrangements as there were insufficient dungeons and instruments of torture to go around. They quickly came up with inventive ideas for extracting confessions. A good example of this was ‘the foot oven’, which required a platform to strap the subject to. A little oil for his feet and a brazier. This easy-to-make device proved highly effective at convincing Templars to tell the Inquisition the ‘truth’. One man was carried into court to confess, holding a box which contained the blackened bones that had dropped out of his feet as they roasted.
Despite the efforts of the Inquisition the confessions were slow in coming ,but enough were available to horrify the public. They were told the Templars admitted they denied God, Christ and the Virgin Mary, and during their initiation they bestowed the Osculum Infame, the ‘kiss of shame’, which involved kissing the initiator on the mouth, navel, penis and buttocks.
Many countries were slow in persecuting the Templars, despite orders from the Pope. Portugal, Ireland, Scotland and England were not happy to carry out this instruction. In England, King Edward II eventually agreed but his torturers were not successful, not receiving even on ‘confession’. The Paris Inquisition offered to help them. In June of 1311, the English Inquisition came across interesting information from a Templar by the name of Stephen de Strpelbrugge, who admitted that he was told in his initiation that Jesus was a man and not a god. Another Templar by the name of John de Stoke state that Jacques de Molay had instructed that he should know that Jesus was but a man, and he should believe in ‘the great omnipotent God, who was the architect of heaven and earth, and not the crucifixion’. These views attributed to the Grand Master ring true; they do not reject Jesus – they merely remind people that there is only one God, one supreme being. The cross for the Templars was a mark of martyrdom rather than the source of magic that the ‘crucifixion’ cult of Paul believed it to be.
The Templars wee, throughout their entire existence, a faithful Catholic Order. The Knights Templar were betrayed by a Church and a Pope and a King they had served well.
The Crucifixion
Jacques de Molay was horribly tortured because this powerful warrior broke down and confessed to crimes he did not commit, although he did retract them shortly before being burned at the stake seven years later. We found evidence in a Scottish Templar building.
The Grand Inquisitor of France, Guillaume Imbert, had taken a personal interest in the confession to be extracted from the greatest heretic of them all: Jacques de Molay. As a priest torturing a priest, Imbert would normally have avoided the spilling of blood – burning, crushing and stretching imaginatively applied were usually highly effective alternatives. In this instance though, Imbert must have been outraged by the evil ‘Anti-Christ’ activities of this once senior man of God. He visited the Paris Temple and wandered around the splendid building looking for evidence of wrong-doing. Upstairs he finds a large door. In the windowless inner Temple it was all so terribly pagan, with markedly anti-Christian ornamentation: pyramids with eyes in their centre, a star-studded roof, and the square and compasses. His prisoner must be the most evil heretic ever to walk the earth. Looking down he sees a simple wooden box which he finds contains a white shroud some fourteen feet long, a human skull and two thigh bones. This must be the shroud that he has heard tell from his spies was used to ‘resurrect’ the dead. The Grand Inquisitor is horrified that it is clearly true that de Molay has indeed mocked the suffering and holiness of the passion of Jesus Christ by performing resurrection ceremonies with Templar initiates.
That night in the cells beneath the Paris Temple, with de Molay stripped of his mantle and naked beneath the rough smock of an accused heretic, complete with running noose about his neck, Imbert informs de Molay that he will admit to his crimes in due course, so why not save himself some pain and make a full confession? Much to the relief of the outraged Imbert, the Grand Master refuses. Imbert starts to quote from the Gospels.
’Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.’
De Molay’s arms were pinioned high on the wall and the rough smock thrown forward over his head. His naked back is scourged by two assistants using horsewhips tipped with twin metal balls. The torturer on the right, being taller, causes injury to the legs as well as the back but not the upper arms.
’And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head.’
A crown of intertwined thorns is thrust squarely onto de Molay’s head, drawing blood from the scalp and forehead.
But they cried, saying, Crucify him, crucify him.’
The Grand Master is affixed to a roughly assembled cross; square section nails are driven through the wrists. The violence of the nail’s impact on the internal structure of de Molay’s right hand causes his thumb to swing across the palm so violently that the joint dislocates and his thumb nail embeds itself into the flesh of his palm. The sole of his left foot is pressed against the upright of the cross, known as the ‘stipes’, and a lengthy nail smashed through exactly in between the second and third metatarsal. As soon as the nail appears at the other side of the foot the torturers place his left foot upon the right so that the same nail can be driven through both feet. Thus de Molay’s body is suspended on just three points of searing pain. Blood loss is minimal and he remains fully conscious.
His body-weight works against him, causing him to sag downwards, producing traumatic tension in the muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest wall. The ribcage is drawn upwards so that his chest is held in a position preventing exhalation, and in order to avoid asphyxiation the Grand Master has no alternative but to push down on the wounds of his nailed feet to raise his body, so that his lungs can blow out and gasp in one more chestful of air. The panic of not breathing is exchanged momentarily for the massive pain of standing upon impaled flesh. The overall effect of this repeated vile dilemma is increased anoxia (shortage of oxygen), leading to agonizing cramps and a dramatically raised metabolic rate.
Imbert follows his Biblical role model and offers de Molay a rag soaked in vinegar to ‘quench’ his terrible thirst:
’And one ran and filled a sponge full of vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink, saying, Let alone; let us see whether Elias will come to take him down.’
De Molay asks Imbert what he needs to say.
’But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.’
Imbert thrusts a knife into Molay’s side, not deep enough to cause life-threatening damage but sufficient to complete the deliberate re-enactment of the suffering of the ‘son of God’.
Jacques de Molay confesses on the cross. He is lifted down.
The massive trauma to de Molay’s body has caused the production of large amounts of lactic acid in his bloodstream, leading to what is called ‘metabolic acidosis’; his muscles have become frozen in permanent cramp, blood pressure has plummeted and his heart is pounding. He is lifted down moments away from the sweet relief of death.
Guillaume Imbert has de Molay placed on the very burial shroud that Molay used to mock the Messiah. The torturers laid him face upwards on the cloth and the excess section is lifted over his head to cover the front of his body.
’And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth.’
Patting the shroud around the desperately damaged body, Imbert suggests that the barely conscious man might care to raise himself, if he feels as important as the true Christ!
The Inquisition was under strict orders not to kill the Grand Master. De Molay had no family in the area to look after him but Geoffrey de Charney, the preceptor of Normandy who was also under interrogation, did. De Charney’s family was called in and told to care for both men, who were destined to die together seven years later, when they both publicly retracted their confessions and were slowly roasted over charcoal for their relapse into ‘heresy’.
The Physical Evidence
The Qumranian/Masonic style shroud traveled with de Molay to the home of Geoffrey de Charney, where it was washed ,folded up and placed in a drawer. Exactly fifty years later, in 1357,this fourteen-foot-long piece of linen was taken out of store and put on public display at Livey.
De Molay’s steaming body had been lifted down from his cross and left in a cold, damp underground dungeon where the injured man’s morbid fluids – sweat mingled with blood high in lactic acid – had run freely around his body, staining the cloth where contact was firmest. The trauma of the crucifixion caused Jacques de Molay’s body to ‘paint’ the image of his suffering onto his own ‘Masonic’ shroud.
The de Charney family had removed the shroud and dressed the wounds and must have spent many months bringing de Molay back to something approaching reasonable health.
The image on the shroud was remarkable clear. The features of de Molay’s body were etched onto the cloth by the lactic acid from the free-flowing blood, reacting with the frankincense used as a whitening agent, which was rich in calcium carbonate. The long nose, the hair beyond shoulder length with a center parting, the full beard that forked at its base and the fit-looking six-foot frame all perfectly matched the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar.
The first people to view the shroud thought that they were looking at the fact of Jesus, and that length of cloth is today called the Shroud of Turin.
The image that the Christian world has learned to love as the face of God is in fact the face of a man tortured and murdered in God’s name, not by the Romans but by a money-grabbing French king with the support of the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1988 the Vatican allowed scientific tests to be carried out at three separate carbon-dating establishments; these showed conclusively that the linen of the Shroud could not date any earlier than AD 1260.
Very strangely, the findings of the carbon daters were published on 13 October, the same day of the year that de Molay had been arrested and crucified! The Vatican has always denied that the Shroud is a holy relic, because the Church knows its origins: Rome thought it fitting to prove the point on the very anniversary of the Shroud’s creation! In 1988!
The political power of the Roman Empire was maintained through Constantine, who had a complex web of superstition woven to wrap up the minds of the masses to keep them in their place. Their reward for their sad, ignorant little lives was the promise of their own personal resurrection and a wonderful afterlife. The Church of Rome positioned blind faith as a virtue and labeled Christian literature referring to knowledge for the individual as ‘Gnostic’ (knowledge), and this they called evil. It is no coincidence that the period popularly referred to as the Dark Ages corresponds with time between the rise of the Roman Church and the crucifixion of Jacques de Molay!
The Message Breaks Out
Whilst the Grand Master was being crucified, many Templars had slipped the net. A large part of the Templar fleet had been in harbour at the Atlantic sea port of La Rochelle and they must have been tipped off or picked up some rumours, for as the sun rose on the morning of Friday 13 October, the would-be arresting guards could see only water where the fleet had been tied up the night before. The shops of the Order were never seen again, but their battle flag, the skull and crossbones, was.
Their presence can be detected in two places soon after the escape: Scotland and America.
They set said on what is now the forty-second parallel in search of the land marked by the star called Merica, which these French knights referred to as ‘la Merica’, a name that later became simply America. They landed in the Cape Cod or Rhode Island area of New England in the early weeks of 1308, setting foot on the New World nearly a century and a half before Christopher Columbus was even born.
In the small town of Westford, Massachusetts, there is an image of a knight carved as a series of punched holes into a slab of rock. The now-famous knight can been seen to be wearing a helmet and the habit of a military order and the sword shown in the weathered carving that has been identified as having a pommelled hilt of the style of a European knight of the fourteenth century. The most fascinating feature is the shield which ahs a clear and simple design upon it; it depicts a single masted medieval vessel sailing west … toward a star.
At Newport, Rhode Island, there is a second European monument – a puzzling tower constructed in the style of Templar round churches. Its dating puts this strange tower right into the century that saw the Templar fleet disappear. The building is extremely old, because on a map of 1524 recording the European discovery of this coastline, Italian navigator Giovanni da Verazano marked the location of the Newport Tower as an existing ‘Norman Villa’.
Rosslyn Chapel took forty years to build and was completed in the early 1480’s by Oliver St Clair, which predates Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America by several years. Columbus made his first New World landing on the morning of 12 October 1492 on an island in the Bahamas, which Columbus named San Salvador; his first mainland landing was not made until 1 August 1498 when he arrived in South America.
The archways and ceiling of Rosslyn Chapel have corn cobs (Indian maize) and aloes carved into them –two plants that the Scots had no right to know about. According to official history, seen grains of Indian Maize were first brought to Europe and Africa by sixteenth-century explorers. The men that instructed the masons of Rosslyn Chapel must have visited America at least a quarter of a century before Columbus.
In light of such evidence the Westford knight and the Newport Tower are Templar remains in what is today the United States of America.
the Land of the Star called La’ Merika
The standard historical line for the origin of the name comes entirely from a silly misunderstanding by an obscure clergyman who never ventured more than a few miles from the monastery of St Deodatus in the Vosges Mountains in the Duchy of Lorraine on the French/German border. He gave himself the pseudonym of ‘Hylacomylus’, which translated to his native German family name of Waldseemuller. This man produced and printed a 103-page volume in April 1507 called Cosmographiae Introductio. It was the source of a mistake that would make an amateur navigator famous for all time. Waldseemuller had found a number of references by various sailors to the general landmass of the great continent to the west, describing it as ‘America’, and he also found a glowing account of the travels of an Italian explorer by the name of Amerigo Vespucci. Her erroneously married the two pieces of unconnected information and wrote:
’Now, these part of the earth (Europe, Africa, Asia) have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be described in what follows). Insomuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige (from the Greek “ge” meaning ”land of”), i.e. the land of Amerigo, or America after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.’
Waldseemuller printed his book and a giant map with the new continent marked as ‘America’ and it has always been assumed that he was the originator because it was the first printed reference. The words of the monk show that he was simply musing over why the existing name ‘America’ is so appropriate. It was a name that in his opinion could have been perhaps better as ‘Amerige’, but he could quite understand why ‘America’ was an acceptably meaningful construction. It seems silly to assume that nobody had given this continent a name before this German monk.
After he had written these words, he realized his great mistake and publicly retracted his assertion that Amerigo Vespucci was t he discoverer of the New World. It was a classic case of history (to paraphrase Henry Ford) becoming ‘bunk’.
Once a convention is accepted it takes intellectual dynamite to shift it. The accidental myth of Vespucci is cultural folklore in the American education system.
CONCLUSION
In reconstructing the crucifixion of Jacques de Molay and tracking the flight of his knights, we found the final link with Freemasonry.
The attack on the Templar Order by a greedy and unimportant French king proved to be the first vital step in the long process of releasing the Christian world from the prevailing principle of intellectual castration, exercised by the Vatican. This drive from autocracy to democracy in government and aristocracy to meritocracy in social structure, within a framework of theological tolerance, has nowhere been so conspicuously sought, and in part achieved, than in the United States of America.
