Review of Scott Wolter's Akhenaten to the Founding Fathers (Part 3)

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Do you remember the old Tootsie Roll jingle? Whatever it is I think I see / Becomes a Tootsie Roll to me. It seems that Scott Wolter has revised this somewhat: Whatever it is I think I see / Becomes a Templar conspiracy. At least that’s the lesson I’m taking away from Akhenaten to the Founding Fathers: Mysteries of the Hooked X®. The only other lesson I’ve gleaned so far comes from Wolter’s discussion of stone clitorises, buildings which symbolically orgasm, sunlight as divine penis, speculation on the Virgin Mary’s sex life, contemplation of trans-Atlantic couplings, and of course the “Hooked X®” as depicting the actual act of impregnation of Mary Magdalene. The man has sex on the brain and seems to have invented an entire Gnostic-Dualist sacred feminine ancient cult to justify his ideas about sexual liberation.

As we enter the third part of this review, we turn to Native Americans, who, for the first time, come in for the full Wolter treatment. Because this chapter has the greatest concentration of new material, I will devote today’s entire review to it.

Chapter 7: Native Americans
This chapter opens with Wolter complaining that academics don’t give enough respect and credit to Native Americans “as a resource of knowledge.” This comes from a man who systematically refused to engage Native American perspectives in America Unearthed, who reassigns their history and heritage to outside cultures, and who engaged not a whit with contemporary scholarship on Native American history and beliefs. His most recent academic source on Native culture in this book is from 1950, with all but one of his other academic sources on Native people coming from the nineteenth century. I know because I read the bibliography of the book first.

But mostly he likes to cite Wikipedia. Oh, and he also cites “Google Books” as a source for several points, rather than the texts linked via Google Books—with whole strings of Google Books URL paths pasted into the notes. This shouldn’t surprise me; he sources several photographs to that well-known photographer, “Internet,” whose work is second in popularity only to that most widely-cited of ancient authors, “Ibid,” of whom H. P. Lovecraft wrote the definitive biography.

(Note to Scott Wolter: The preceding sentence is a joke lest you start citing Ibid’s definitive contribution to Templar literature.)

Enough digression; on to the chapter. The chapter starts off badly with Wolter asserting that Manifest Destiny was a government policy, which it was not—it was a media-driven propaganda line. He claims Manifest Destiny was used to cover up pre-Columbian white colonies by cleansing the country of archaeological anomalies while exterminating Native Americans. Wolter assures us that he has met Native Americans and that they confided to him in secret that they know the truth about “early visitors,” that these visitors were white, and that prophecies “compel them” to tell everyone the truth about white visitation. I, too, have known Native Americans (I went to school with some Senecas, and one of my archaeology professors worked closely with the Cayugas, whose elders I have spoken with at length in the past), and they would have told me if they had secret prophecies. Apparently northeastern tribes must not be privy to these amazing Templar prophecies. No, those are conveniently local to Minnesota, where Wolter lives.

Wolter then introduces us to William Mann, who claims unrecognized Algonquin ancestry. He is also a Freemason and writes novels about the Templar-Native American connection. He tells Wolter that his novels are all true but he pretends they are fiction so that an unnamed cabal, presumably the Masons, won’t retaliate against him for revealing that the Templars discovered how to measure longitude and therefore mapped America. Mann claims that the Templars controlled the seas down to 1450 as the “most advanced” navy in the world. Remember, the Templars had been disbanded for nearly 150 years at that point and never had an ocean-going fleet. Mann claims that the Algonquin symbol of a white eagle with a red leather strip is Templar because the Templar colors are white and red. Do you know what else is white and red? The flag of Austria, Santa Claus, peppermint candy canes, the Red Cross flag, Switzerland’s flag, Japan’s flag, Canada’s flag, non-Templar crusaders’ clothes, San Francisco’s Red and White Fleet, the Cat in the Hat’s hat, the Cardinals baseball team, etc. etc. etc. Are they all conspirators, too? Wait... later in the book Wolter in fact does say that Canada adopted its flag due to Templar color coding.

Mann’s novel contains material derived nearly verbatim from Frederick J. Pohl’s Henry Sinclair claims from the 1950s and 1960s—particularly the 1398 date and the alleged (and demonstrably falsified) similarities to the Mi’kmaq god Glooscap—and it’s therefore not an independent source of Native truth. To this Mann adds Laurence Gardner’s speculation about the “Jewish” origins of the ruling houses of Europe, designed to tie them to the Bloodline of Christ, though he leaves out the menstrual blood-drinking aliens Gardner favored.

Wolter then compares Masonic ceremonies to the Mide’win (or Mide’) ceremonies, which Mann explained to Wolter in 2012. I have dealt with these already at great length. Derived from 1920s-era Masonic speculation, the claim is faulty because the Mide’win ritual is devoted to training initiates in the use of healing plants, something absent from Masonic practice. Further, Mide’ has four degrees to Masonry’s traditional three, and Mide’ accepts both women and men, unlike Masonry. Mann asserts that Blue Lodge Masonry originally had four degrees, but I can find no support for this in the published literature, only in occult and conspiracy books. When Wolter claims that both Mide’win and Freemasons require the initiate to pay fees to advance to the next degree, this is also false; most Masonic lodges have a one-time initiation fee payable before the first degree, not at every degree along the way (that’s Scientology).

Using old ethnographic accounts of exogamy whereby the Native tribes of Minnesota intermarried (a necessity to avoid inbreeding found in tribal cultures around the world), Wolter and Mann extrapolate to claim this makes “plausible” that the tribes also married off their women to the all-powerful Templars.

Wolter and Mann conclude that because the Templars and Natives were so interconnected that the Templars must have buried the Kensington Rune Stone with the participation of the Native Americans in a Masonic ceremony. Wolter wonders why no Templar-Natives “exercised” the “land claim” to all of the Mississippi watershed, and he concludes that there is a second half to the Kensington Rune Stone that is buried elsewhere, claiming still more land in secret code.

Based on Wikipedia entries (seriously), Wolter claims that the Templars brought the Cross of Lorraine with them to America after being awarded the cross by Baldwin II in 1099. Not even the Wikipedia page cited claims that. The Templars were not founded until 1120 and endorsed by the Church in 1129; Wolter has misread the historical background on the Wikipedia page, which talks about the First Crusade of 1099 capturing Jerusalem, which set up the conditions that eventually required defenders for the conquered territory. The Templars adopted a red cross in 1147, but the papal bull authorizing it does not describe the cross; most historians believe that several different crosses were used, but the exclusive or primary use of the patriarchal cross (later called the Cross of Lorraine) is a historical fiction from the modern Masonic Templarism, adopted by conspiracy theorists as truth. The claim originates in a mistake made by the French writer André Favin, and the Masonic Templars adopted it from that source. Wolter takes it over from there, accepting the Masonic history as legitimate despite two centuries of scholarship to the contrary. Wolter then babbles on about Jesus conspiracies based on his own misreading of Wikipedia as stating Baldwin II granted the Lorraine Cross to the Templars two decades before their founding (which, of course, as a temporal ruler he could not do for a papal order, never mind that he died 16 years before the Templars started using cross symbols).

One would think that if the Templars were the heart and soul of your theory, you’d at least try to learn something about them from sources other than Wikipedia.

So to bring this ’round to Native Americans, Wolter notes that many tribes use crosses with two crossbars; he calls all of these crosses of Lorraine and attributes them to early contact with Knights Templar, whom he has not shown to have actually used said cross. Nevertheless, this cross is a sacred symbol of the Jesus Bloodline (but wasn’t that the Hooked X® and the AVM—they have so many symbols for a secret cult!) in which the tiny extra bar is Jesus’ kid or something. Based on the name of the cross, Wolter assigns it to the House of Lorraine (represented today by the last surviving Habsburgs), tracing the family’s origins to the seventh century, and thus “proving” that they sponsored the expedition to deposit lead artifacts with proto-Templar codes in Tucson, Arizona.

Not to spoil the fun, but the Cross of Lorraine only gained its name and association with Lorraine in 1477, when adopted by Rene II; it had previously been the Cross of Anjou and it is shared by more than 160 noble families—quite the conspiracy! They all got it from the East during the Crusades. It is not older than that in the West.

Wolter then asserts that Nabisco, the American Cancer Society, and Exxon use the Cross of Lorraine and are therefore part of the Jesus-Habsburg-Templar conspiracy. I suppose we should add the entire Greek Orthodox Church, whose cross this also is. He repeats the America Unearthed claim that Exxon’s logo represents the Atlantic Ocean with its blue stripe and a westward Templar journey in its double cross leaning to the left as formed by the two X’s.

He next moves on to everyone’s favorite tribe, the Mandan, whom Wolter does not actually go to meet even though they are still alive. Instead, he relies on George Catlin’s Victorian-era traveler’s tales (he was a painter, not an ethnologist) to claim that the Mandans were Gnostic dualists because Catlin identified a Good Spirit and Evil Spirit in their religion. Catlin was wrong; the “Evil Spirit” was rather the “Lone Man,” creator of civilization, and the “Good Spirit” the “First Creator” who made the physical world. Wolter, who on America Unearthed declared the Mandan Welsh, now concurs with Catlin that the Mandan are a remnant white population of wandering Hebrews, which he supports with Atlantis-believing lawyer Henrietta Mertz’s claims that the Mandan Okipa ceremony exactly parallels the Biblical story of Moses on Mt. Sinai. Amazingly, I don’t remember Exodus featuring groups of young men impaled on wooden skewers and suspended with heavy weights from the lodge roof until they passed out from pain. Of course Wolter doesn’t know anything about Okipa that Mertz and Catlin didn’t tell him, and both of them, operating under the belief that the Mandans were Hebrews, skewed their interpretation to support parallels. Wolter, citing Wikipedia, asserts that “some” say the Mandan were intentionally eradicated with smallpox-laced blankets, implying this was done to hide their connection to the now Egyptian-Hebrew-Gnostic-Habsburg-Templar-Freemason-US Government-Exxon-REMAX-Nabisco conspiracy. The “some” is actually one person: Ward Churchill, the controversial non-historian whose work his own university has declared fraudulent myths. No mainstream historian accepts the smallpox blanket story, which Churchill imported to the Mandan smallpox outbreak of 1837 from the 1763 Siege of Fort Pitt, where there is more evidence for their use. Wolter knows this, of course, because it’s on the Wikipedia page, and he chose to fudge it anyway.

Next Wolter discusses Native American “alliances” with Templars and Freemasons. In a maddeningly obscure bit of writing, Wolter’s own inability to craft a clear sentence has made it impossible to determine the origin of what he claims is an Ojibwa prophecy. It sounds to me like it was told in person to Wolter within the past twelve months, which means that it is worthless as a historical record since it is clearly contaminated with alternative history claims from the internet:

Their people were to leave the cities and go into the wilderness, because the Christians were coming and it wasn’t going to be good. The Templars warned them of the impending arrival, but they already knew about the Spanish incursions to the south and it was only a matter of time before they brought their oppressive religion to the rest of the continent.

Remember: Just pages ago Wolter was arguing that Native people couldn’t tell Aryans from pagan gods and we are to read nebulous lore about “white” people as Templars; but now they are called by name. Obviously, this prophecy has been rewritten by modern hands.

Wolter says this story is confirmed by an Assiniboine elder who repeated the Templar warning and said that this occurred in the time “that the Masonic United Grand Lodge in England underwent significant changes” to add Native American rituals from the Mide’win. We are to believe that the same Native people who did not know of Masonry in the ethnographic reports Wolter just cited as proof of a connection to ancient Masonry somehow were apprised of internal organizational changes in the English lodges? Or is Wolter so poor an author that he meant that Wolter connected these ideas but his sentences simply lack meaning?

I note that these “prophecies” fail to support Wolter’s radio claims that they describe a Templar invasion of Cahokia.

Wolter just drops these nuggets as steaming lumps with no explanation or explication—in fact he never actually says that the two Native Americans actually spoke to him. Then he moves on to Panama to discuss the “White Indians” of Darien—a favorite topic of Mormons, Neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. Wolter here relies on the work of R. O. Marsh, who in the 1930s declared them Caucasians, yet earlier reports from the 1800s very clearly state that “Their skins are not of such a white as those of fair people among Europeans, with some tincture of blush or sanguine complexion; neither yet is their complexion like that of our (British) paler people, but it is rather a milk-white, lighter than the color of any Europeans, and much like that of a milk-horse.” They were so recognized from the 1600s. The writer of the above also witnessed births of these white children to dark-colored women and confirmed that no European had been present to father the child. Their skins were so sensitive that they avoided sunlight and were active mainly at night. In short, most thought they were albinos, and no one thought they were European until the racial theorists of the 1920 tried to fit them on a chart where value correlated with the paleness of one’s skin. It was the height of scientific racism.

Wolter dismisses albinism as impossible because two light-skinned Darien natives brought back to the U.S. in 1925 by Marsh were not traditional albinos but blonde-haired white people with green eyes. Albinos’ eyes are red. Wolter similarly states that there is no scientific evidence that they are genetic abnormalities, but Wolter here is ignorant of the literature; geneticist Reginald G. Harris studied them and determined that the “white” Indians were identical to other Natives in every respect except the skin and hair color. Later studies confirmed that a dominant genetic mutation associated with incomplete albinism was responsible, as Margot Lynn Iverson reported in her 2007 dissertation Blood Types: A History of Genetic Studies of Native Americans, 1920-1955. Wolter is ignorant of or ignores this material because he wants these Natives to be spontaneously-regenerating Europeans who somehow pop magically from Native wombs or else are the world’s most inbred people, having maintained their white skins for five centuries or more with barely a few dozen individuals.

Wolter claims, on Marsh’s authority, that the Natives of Panama speak a language that is “Aryan” and not “Mongoloid,” which relies on outdate linguistic ideas discredited many decades ago as well as a willingness to assume that any coincidence of sounds in a language is proof of its identity, in this case somehow both Sanskrit in structure and Norse in vocabulary.

Incidentally, the academics Wolter accuses of conspiracy and of suppressing Marsh’s work actually did no such thing, as an article in the 1926 American Journal of Physical Anthropology shows. The journal reported that the American Association for the Advancement of Science called for the U.S. government to demand Panama (then under de facto U.S. control) establish a reservation for the “white” Indians of Darien in order to preserve their unique genetics from “destructive infusions of low-caste mixed white and negro blood.” Ah, the 1920s, when the only question was how racist can you be! The only dispute was whether the uniquely white Indians were special for being Aryan pioneers or a spontaneously generating white race—hardly the conspiracy to suppress the truth Wolter claims.

Wolter discusses Panamanian pottery with a red and blue cross that he claims is identical to the Templar red cross and therefore proves, because it was allegedly discovered on the Pacific coast (which cannot be confirmed since Wolter saw it in a treasure hunter’s house) that the Templars therefore circumnavigated the Americas. That the cross is an incredibly simple and nearly universal human symbol is apparently less important than the conspiracy that can be woven from it.

I nearly threw the book across the room when I read that Wolter assigned Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, to his Cistercian-Templar cult and learned of Quetzalcoatl not from Aztec mythology or even from Spanish documents or from anthropological sources but instead from Manley P. Hall, the occultist who believed he was one of a race of immortal cultists who secretly control history. Hall, writing in 1928, adopted the demonstrably false Spanish claims that Quetzalcoatl was a white man, something that the Spanish imposed on Aztec beliefs for propaganda purposes and which cannot be demonstrated from Aztec documents or pre-Conquest art. Wolter, of course, also fails to understand the differences between the Maya and the Aztecs and declares Quetzalcoatl Mayan when he is in fact Aztec; Kukulkan was the Mayan equivalent.

He doesn’t stop there but decides that the appearance of a serpent on the forehead of a tumbaga mask pendant makes it an Egyptian uraeus and thus proves contact between the two cultures. On another he finds a two-headed bird that tells him that the statue must be connected to the double-headed eagle of Freemasonry. I guess that would also mean that the imperial governments of Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire were in on it, along with the modern governments of Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and more. (They all use or used double-headed eagles.) The symbol only entered Masonry when Frederick the Great bestowed it on Masons in Prussia; he did so because it was on his own personal coat of arms, given him by the Habsburgs as an imperial vassal, and he was the head of Prussian Masonry. The symbol is found as far back as the Hittites and flew on the banners of the Saracens whom the Knights Templar fought. Are the Saracens part of the conspiracy, too?

The Colombian example, if genuine, is older than Masonry’s; if I had to guess, I’d say that, like other double eagles found in South America, it’s post-Conquest and is the Habsburg bird. I can’t say though since I have no way of dating the statue from a photograph.

Wolter sees a Colombian sculpture (consistently misspelled as Columbian) depicting some sort of Native ritual, and he declares it identical to the Mide’win ritual based on the appearance of an owl and four poles, which he says also appear in Mide’win ritual based on a single 1833 drawing. I hate to break it to him, but the bird in the Colombian sculpture is not an owl. It’s a parrot as is obvious from the oversized beak and wing stripes not found in owls.

Wolter asserts that ancient Colombian human figure statues are so anatomically correct that he can determine that they represent circumcised males in the Egyptian style. Not to get too technical, but when fully erect, the uncircumcised penis’s foreskin does not hang over the penis head as Wolter seems to think; the stylized Colombian sculpture is not detailed enough to depict the differences between circumcised and uncircumcised erect penises; at this level of detail, the differences would only be noticeable in a flaccid penis. I’d post pictures, but I trust that readers have all seen a penis (their own or others’) at some point in life.

He then declares a relatively recent statue of a Colombian human-crocodile hybrid god a depiction of the hippopotamus-headed Egyptian goddess Tawaret because he cannot tell the difference between a crocodile and a hippopotamus.

He concludes the chapter by declaring (in softer words) that Native peoples were not smart enough to learn how to work with precious metals and therefore must have been taught by white people from Egypt or Europe. His evidence is that some objects have twelve points or twelve animals or some other connection to twelve, which is “likely” the zodiac’s twelve constellations—even though Native peoples do not follow Greco-Babylonian astrology.

Next time: We’ll finish the book with the Great Oreo Cookie Conspiracy!

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