More Sinclair Diaries Claims; Plus: Freemasons and Templar Worship of Baphomet

​I don’t want to beat a dead horse by continuing to examine the case of the so-called Sinclair journals, but I am rather perplexed by some of the claims that Scott Wolter is making for them, and I shudder with dread at the upcoming discussion of more Templar “secrets” Wolter promises for “the coming days.” On his blog, Wolter replied to questions from the regular reader of this blog who posts under the name “An Anonymous Nerd” with some baffling claims revolving around the question of the Templar interest in Jerusalem vs. their supposed centuries of secret missions to the middle of America:

Of course they went there for a reason, it is clearly stated in the journals which you obviously have not read yet. It is also obvious Earl Henry wrote his entries as it was his obligation that becomes apparent upon reading them. Fugitive Templars that survived after 1307 and fled to Scotland were protected by the dominant clans after serving in Bannockburn. However, since they had been outlawed the order began to evolve into something different. For example, celibacy demanded by the Church was no longer necessary and to continue they had to procreate.
 
I have personally examined some of the originals and am convinced they are copies of older documents. I have also seen the lambskin map which appears to be original. Regardless, we have already found errors in Diana’s translations, but they are minor. The vast majority of her translations appear to be good. The overall story is cohesive and consistent.
 
To even make a claim the Templars didn’t know about North America, or that they couldn’t get there, is pure nonsense. They traveled to the “Western Lands” frequently, they just didn’t tell anyone about it.

​I don’t really want to touch the weird question of membership in the Templar order changing from a voluntary community to a hereditary cult, though it raises awkward problems in terms of explaining just why induction was good enough before 1307 but bloodline membership became necessary thereafter. Given the number of cults in the world, presumably even heretics could recruit.
 
I am more interested in the second paragraph quoted above. Wolter claims to have examined some of the pages of the “original” diaries and to believe them to be copies of medieval documents. This isn’t like when Classical scholars study medieval copies of Greco-Roman originals. As we know from his own introduction to the “translations” of the journals, the documents are allegedly from the nineteenth century, which even taken at face value would provide no evidence for a genuine medieval origin. Nineteenth century paper is easy enough to come by—frequently cut from the blank pages of old books—and it is much easier to forge Victorian documents than fourteenth century ones.
 
How might Wolter have found errors in Diana Muir’s “translations” if the original Latin texts were allegedly disposed of by burial and unavailable for comparison? I am doubly curious since Wolter also does not read Latin even if such pages were to exist. I wonder if these “errors” instead represent a difference between the “translation” and either geographic or historical data.
 
You have to love the last line where he said that the Templars traveled to America frequently but didn’t tell anyone about it. Then, pray tell, how does Wolter know this? He doesn’t seem to recognize how speculation builds upon speculation, nor that inferences based on inferences do not congeal into facts. There is no evidence of any Templar voyage westward from Europe. The only genuine medieval text to refer, even tangentially, to it is a coerced confession that makes no mention of western lands. The speculation about Templar voyages to America began as the fever-dream of the racist Frenchman Eugène Beauvois, who based the claim on fanciful linguistic sleight of hand, bad translations, and an instinctive belief that Mexicans were racially inferior. This claim dates back only to the twentieth century. Such is the stuff dreams are made of.
 
Diana Muir, posting on Wolter’s blog, claims that some of the “later” Sinclair family journals were written in Old English. These were dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth century or later, and I am torn between wondering if Muir and Wolter are unaware that Old English refers to the form of English used before 1150 CE, or if they don’t know how to refer to Middle English and Early Modern English by their proper names.
 
But before I go today, I want to offer this astonishing illustration that appeared on the Ancient Origins website recently as part of an article on the question of whether the Knights Templar worshiped Baphomet, the goat-headed occult deity. The image depicts Freemasons dressed as Knights Templar carrying the Baphomet the Sabbatic Goat in solemn procession:

You will recognize the goat as the image of Baphomet drawn by occultist Éliphas Lévi and which has no real connection whatsoever to the Baphomet the Catholic Church accused the Templars of worshiping. What Ancient Origins left out is that the image appeared in a book by yet another Frenchman, Léo Taxil, which was a spurious exposure of Freemasonry that connected the Masons to devil-worship. The four-volume work was a sensation in fin de siècle Paris, until Taxil confessed the hoax in 1897.
 
Taxil professed to be astonished that anyone took him seriously. In a 1907 interview he said:

“The public made me what I am; the arch-liar of the period,” confessed Taxil, “for when I first commenced to write against the Masons my object was amusement pure and simple. The crimes I laid at their door were so grotesque, so impossible, so widely exaggerated, I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humor. But my readers wouldn't have it so; they accepted my fables as gospel truth, and the more I lied for the purpose of showing that I lied, the more convinced became they that I was a paragon of veracity.
 
“Then it dawned upon me that there was lots of money in being a Munchausen of the right kind…”

The trouble is that the Templar / Mason / goddess claims have nothing more to them than Taxil’s hoax.

But the real question might arise when remember that the Holy Bloodline hoax that underlies so much of this nonsense in its modern form was the work of still another Frenchman. What is it with France and these bizarre conspiracies? And, more importantly, why do they not stay in France?