Jason Colavito
2015
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NOTE |
I have been covering the myth of the Holy Bloodline of Jesus and its associated claims about the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, and Henry Sinclair for several years. Because my many blog posts on the subject have grown like kudzu, I have assembled the most important information here in a single digest. The article below is a revised and adapted version of several blog posts that have run on my blog from 2013 to 2015.
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The Templars, the Holy Grail, & Henry Sinclair
The claim that the Knights Templar are the secret guardians of the Holy Grail, identified as the Holy Bloodline formed by the children of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, is of very recent vintage, but due to its promotion in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (2003) and on TV shows like America Unearthed (2012-present), the idea, first proposed in 1982, has become an industry, gradually subsuming other medieval “mysteries” of equally dubious provenance, particularly the claim that a Scottish noble named Henry Sinclair discovered America in 1398. There is not one single authentic medieval document that (a) confirms a Holy Bloodline of Jesus, (b) links Henry Sinclair to the Knights Templar, or (c) documents any voyage by Henry Sinclair to anywhere outside of Europe. How the myth formed is an astonishing story on its own.
The Holy Grail
The Holy Grail originally had nothing whatsoever to do with Christ. In fact, it does not date back far enough to do so. The first appearance of the Holy Grail is in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, written around 1190 CE. There, a “golden serving dish” descends before Perceval in the castle of the Fisher King, but Chrétien does not call it holy or call special attention to it, as opposed to an equally sacred lance. A century later, Wolfram von Eschenbach made it into a stone in his Parzival. Robert de Boron told a different tale in the twelfth century, that Joseph of Arimathea had received the Holy Chalice that caught Christ’s blood and spirited it away to Great Britain and founded a line of knights to guard this sacred vessel. The stories of the Holy Chalice and the magical Grail merged, and suddenly a myth arose that a line of sacred knights guarded the magical cup of Christ called the Holy Grail. Medieval people understood Robert’s poem to be courtly fiction, not a report of actual fact.
The name Holy Grail derives from Old French for Holy Cup, san graal or sangreal, derived via Latin from the Greek krater, or drinking-vessel. Medieval writers, discussing how the Holy Cup held Christ’s royal blood (since he was of the royal line of David), played on a pun, writing san greal as sang real, or Holy Blood. Thus, mystically, the Royal Blood and Holy Grail were one and the same, the cup standing for the divine blood it contained. This is very much in keeping with medieval religious symbolism, and most scholars accept that the magical powers of the holy cup derive from a mixture of Christian symbolism, particularly that of the newly-instituted ritual of communion, and Celtic (more broadly Indo-European) myths of the immortality bestowed by magic cauldrons. Many appear in Celtic lore, though I am more familiar with the cauldron used by the Greek Medea to restore Jason (or Aeson) to youth, another version of the same Indo-European magic cup myth. (The story also is the origin of the witch’s cauldron of fairy tales.)
The trouble is that modern speculators are not content with the idea that medieval people had mystical or religious symbolism that wasn’t tied to facts on the ground. Beginning in the Romantic Era, writers began to see a parallel between the storied Knights Templar and the Grail Knights, part of the increasing respect afforded the pageantry and drama of the Middle Ages in that era. The Knights Templar, officially the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, existed from about 1119 to 1312. They were a practical military order based at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Involved in banking, they became very wealthy, leading a greedy pope and French king to accuse them of idol worship and heresy in 1307 in order to suppress the order and gain their money. They were never famed in their own time for any particular religious piety beyond that of any other crusading group. Since then, writers have tried to imagine any less mundane reason than money for their demise. Often, this effort descended into wild claims about alternative religions, derived from the original accusation of the heretical worship of a demon-idol named Baphomet.
Thomas Wharton, the British poet laureate, wrote in the History of English Poetry (1774-81) that the Grail myth was influenced by “esoteric doctrines” brought from the “heathen” East, though he accused no specific group; but this was simply part of the standard anti-Catholicism of the era, which saw the Catholic Church as too influenced by ritual and ceremony. Wharton specifically accused the “Romish Church” of perpetuating the “heathen temple.”
The first connection between the Templars and the Freemasons came from the German critic Lessing in the 1770s. He was a Freemason and read backward into the Grail Romances the Masonic tradition, on the authority of the Scottish Freemasons, who had adopted the Templars as honorary predecessors as part of their fabricated mythic past. In 1737, Freemason Andrew Michael Ramsey gave a speech in Paris that claimed that the Knights of St. John gave rise to the Masons, in symbolic association, derived from his belief in the One True Religion of which all pagan cults were decadent aspects: “Our Order [was] founded in remote antiquity, and renewed in the Holy Land by our ancestors in order to recall the memory of the most sublime truths among the pleasures of society.” This became confused with the Templars after the speech was adopted into Masonic lore, probably because after 1314 the pope had allowed the ex-Templars to join the Knights of St. John, also called the Hospitallers. (No, the Templars did not move to Scotland to form Masonry.)
By the 1820s, anti-Masonic activists were using the confused Templar connection to paint the Masons as a revival of the idol worshipping pagan Templars. The Austrian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall specifically claimed that the Masons revived the Templar heresy, the worship of the idol Baphomet (probably Muhammad), and that Templar images of Baphomet’s head were cast in the form of a Greek krater, the very origin of the blasphemous Holy Grail.
Claude Charles Fauriel, in 1832, was perhaps the first to confuse the Knights Templar (named for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) with the Grail Knights when he described the Grail as preserved in a temple in the Pyrenees, from which the Knights took their name: “Titurel [the Grail King] instituted for his defense and his guard a militia, a special Order of Chivalry, which is called the Knighthood of the Temple, whose members are called Templiens or Templars. … I have already hinted, and I can say here explicitly, in this religious Grail guard is an obvious allusion to the Order of the Templars” (“Romans Provençeaux,” Reveu des Deux Mondes, 8, 185; my trans.). He had no evidence other than a shared chivalry between the groups and the fact that one Grail romance, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, described the knights as templien, or “temple-guardians,” not Templars as in the Knights of the Temple. But Fauriel was proposing a literary theory—that the Grail Romances symbolized the Templars—not a historical theory that they encoded an actual Holy Grail.
Later scholars, such as Alfred Trübner Nutt, agreed that the Grail stories were intended as political documents, designed to provide a mythic history for the Angevin Kings of France, thus paralleling the Knights Templar; mainstream scholars, however, never thought the Templars had an actual magic cup, or anything else that actually belonged to Christ.
The development of this idea is chiefly the work of the mid-Victorian French scholar E. Aroux, who believed that the Holy Grail must have been the secret doctrine of the Templars, an alternative Gospel, for which they were condemned for heresy. A German, Dr. Simrock—a mythologist prone to seeing ancient connections in every similarity of symbol—took up the story, reporting the work of his predecessor:
The Holy Grail
The Holy Grail originally had nothing whatsoever to do with Christ. In fact, it does not date back far enough to do so. The first appearance of the Holy Grail is in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, written around 1190 CE. There, a “golden serving dish” descends before Perceval in the castle of the Fisher King, but Chrétien does not call it holy or call special attention to it, as opposed to an equally sacred lance. A century later, Wolfram von Eschenbach made it into a stone in his Parzival. Robert de Boron told a different tale in the twelfth century, that Joseph of Arimathea had received the Holy Chalice that caught Christ’s blood and spirited it away to Great Britain and founded a line of knights to guard this sacred vessel. The stories of the Holy Chalice and the magical Grail merged, and suddenly a myth arose that a line of sacred knights guarded the magical cup of Christ called the Holy Grail. Medieval people understood Robert’s poem to be courtly fiction, not a report of actual fact.
The name Holy Grail derives from Old French for Holy Cup, san graal or sangreal, derived via Latin from the Greek krater, or drinking-vessel. Medieval writers, discussing how the Holy Cup held Christ’s royal blood (since he was of the royal line of David), played on a pun, writing san greal as sang real, or Holy Blood. Thus, mystically, the Royal Blood and Holy Grail were one and the same, the cup standing for the divine blood it contained. This is very much in keeping with medieval religious symbolism, and most scholars accept that the magical powers of the holy cup derive from a mixture of Christian symbolism, particularly that of the newly-instituted ritual of communion, and Celtic (more broadly Indo-European) myths of the immortality bestowed by magic cauldrons. Many appear in Celtic lore, though I am more familiar with the cauldron used by the Greek Medea to restore Jason (or Aeson) to youth, another version of the same Indo-European magic cup myth. (The story also is the origin of the witch’s cauldron of fairy tales.)
The trouble is that modern speculators are not content with the idea that medieval people had mystical or religious symbolism that wasn’t tied to facts on the ground. Beginning in the Romantic Era, writers began to see a parallel between the storied Knights Templar and the Grail Knights, part of the increasing respect afforded the pageantry and drama of the Middle Ages in that era. The Knights Templar, officially the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, existed from about 1119 to 1312. They were a practical military order based at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Involved in banking, they became very wealthy, leading a greedy pope and French king to accuse them of idol worship and heresy in 1307 in order to suppress the order and gain their money. They were never famed in their own time for any particular religious piety beyond that of any other crusading group. Since then, writers have tried to imagine any less mundane reason than money for their demise. Often, this effort descended into wild claims about alternative religions, derived from the original accusation of the heretical worship of a demon-idol named Baphomet.
Thomas Wharton, the British poet laureate, wrote in the History of English Poetry (1774-81) that the Grail myth was influenced by “esoteric doctrines” brought from the “heathen” East, though he accused no specific group; but this was simply part of the standard anti-Catholicism of the era, which saw the Catholic Church as too influenced by ritual and ceremony. Wharton specifically accused the “Romish Church” of perpetuating the “heathen temple.”
The first connection between the Templars and the Freemasons came from the German critic Lessing in the 1770s. He was a Freemason and read backward into the Grail Romances the Masonic tradition, on the authority of the Scottish Freemasons, who had adopted the Templars as honorary predecessors as part of their fabricated mythic past. In 1737, Freemason Andrew Michael Ramsey gave a speech in Paris that claimed that the Knights of St. John gave rise to the Masons, in symbolic association, derived from his belief in the One True Religion of which all pagan cults were decadent aspects: “Our Order [was] founded in remote antiquity, and renewed in the Holy Land by our ancestors in order to recall the memory of the most sublime truths among the pleasures of society.” This became confused with the Templars after the speech was adopted into Masonic lore, probably because after 1314 the pope had allowed the ex-Templars to join the Knights of St. John, also called the Hospitallers. (No, the Templars did not move to Scotland to form Masonry.)
By the 1820s, anti-Masonic activists were using the confused Templar connection to paint the Masons as a revival of the idol worshipping pagan Templars. The Austrian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall specifically claimed that the Masons revived the Templar heresy, the worship of the idol Baphomet (probably Muhammad), and that Templar images of Baphomet’s head were cast in the form of a Greek krater, the very origin of the blasphemous Holy Grail.
Claude Charles Fauriel, in 1832, was perhaps the first to confuse the Knights Templar (named for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) with the Grail Knights when he described the Grail as preserved in a temple in the Pyrenees, from which the Knights took their name: “Titurel [the Grail King] instituted for his defense and his guard a militia, a special Order of Chivalry, which is called the Knighthood of the Temple, whose members are called Templiens or Templars. … I have already hinted, and I can say here explicitly, in this religious Grail guard is an obvious allusion to the Order of the Templars” (“Romans Provençeaux,” Reveu des Deux Mondes, 8, 185; my trans.). He had no evidence other than a shared chivalry between the groups and the fact that one Grail romance, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, described the knights as templien, or “temple-guardians,” not Templars as in the Knights of the Temple. But Fauriel was proposing a literary theory—that the Grail Romances symbolized the Templars—not a historical theory that they encoded an actual Holy Grail.
Later scholars, such as Alfred Trübner Nutt, agreed that the Grail stories were intended as political documents, designed to provide a mythic history for the Angevin Kings of France, thus paralleling the Knights Templar; mainstream scholars, however, never thought the Templars had an actual magic cup, or anything else that actually belonged to Christ.
The development of this idea is chiefly the work of the mid-Victorian French scholar E. Aroux, who believed that the Holy Grail must have been the secret doctrine of the Templars, an alternative Gospel, for which they were condemned for heresy. A German, Dr. Simrock—a mythologist prone to seeing ancient connections in every similarity of symbol—took up the story, reporting the work of his predecessor:
Baron von Hammer-Purgestall, who gives the most detail on the connection of the Templars with the Holy Grail, by tracing its history from the identity of hieroglyphs which he found on the old churches and buildings in the Danubian Provinces. He unfortunately is for ever trying to find the most unsavoury interpretation for all the ancient symbolism; with his views we are not concerned, but to the work of research which he carried on with such ability we are profoundly indebted.
By 1900, the idea that the Holy Grail story had symbolically represented the Knights Templar had become a given, and one that became associated with anti-Masonism and Theosophy. The Theosophical writer Isabel Cooper-Oakley produced a book called Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Medieval Mysticism that forever linked the Grail, the Templars, and the Freemasons, in service of the alien-worshipping Theosophists, who believed the Templars were privy to extraterrestrial secrets imparted by the Ascended Masters from other planets. She, in turn, was again drawing on Simrock, who divined (without proof) a secret order that had preserved Templar secrets from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries.
And that’s about where things stood for most of the twentieth century. There was no evidence of any Grail-Templar-Freemason connection outside some disconnected symbolism, some anti-Catholic assumptions, and a confusion between the Templars—suppressed because the pope and the French king wanted their money—and the Cathars, who provided the final pillar of this theory, the worship of the “sacred feminine.” That weird concept derives from the works of the Freemason and Rosicrucian Hargrave Jennings, who believed all religion was penis-worship, and Otto Augustus Wall, whose influential book Sex and Sex Worship claimed that all religion was the worship of sex organs, particularly the penis. The triangle, circle, or lozenge, due to their resemblance to the female pubic region, was in his view symbolic of the woman and thus the feminine counterpart to the true object of universal veneration, his—er, the—penis. It would, however, be modern writers who introduced Wall’s sex-worship theory into the Grail mythos.
Graham Hancock, in The Sign and the Seal (1992), thought that the varied descriptions of the Grail as a vessel and as a stone suggested that it was a symbol of the Ark of Covenant, a vessel containing the stones inscribed with the Ten Commandments. In this reading, the Grail Knights were of course the Knights Templar, who had conducted secret digs on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in search of the Ark. Never mind that the Knights Templar were not British, as Robert de Boron insisted that the Grail Knight must be.
But Hancock was merely piggybacking on the success of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It is impossible to summarize this influential and ridiculous book in a few words, but its central thesis is that in 1099 a secret society called the Priory of Sion formed to guard the “Holy Grail,” which was the bloodline of Mary and Jesus, currently represented by the dethroned Merovingian royal house of France. The Priory created the Knights Templar and continue working today to reestablish Merovingian rule over all Europe, following the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the authors believe was not a hoax but the Priory’s master-plan. It was this book that tied together Theosophy’s Masonic conspiracy, Wall’s “sacred feminine” sex worship, and Fauriel’s literary view of the Templar-Grail connection—all theories for which there was little direct evidence. Compounding speculation upon speculation did not strengthen the results.
The Priory of Sion was a hoax created in 1956 by a delusional French draftsman named Pierre Plantard who fabricated its entire history to support his false claim to be the last descendant of Christ and the rightful universal monarch of the world prophesied by Nostradamus. Despite the exposure of the hoax, Laurence Gardner, the late genealogist to the pretender to the Stuart royal line in Britain, wrote a book called Bloodline of the Holy Grail recapitulating all of this and ascribing the Christian bloodline to his boss, the Stuart pretender. He then wrote a follow-up called Genesis of the Grail Kings where he explained that the secret society guarding the grail originated with Zechariah Sitchin’s aliens from Nibiru, and their alien-hybrid human descendants maintained immortality by consuming refined white gold and human menstrual blood.
In 2000, Andrew Sinclair and Timothy Wallace-Murphy connected the imaginary bloodline of Christ to Rosslyn Chapel, the St. Clair family chapel in Scotland. They believed the chapel had been built as a model of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (even though the ground plans do not match in any way) and that the chapel contained Templar and Masonic symbolism, a claim denied by both experts in the Templars and the Masons themselves. (Some Masonic symbols were added later, and others are actual mason’s marks used by stonemasons in building the chapel.) In this reading, the St. Clair family was in fact the Scottish branch of Jesus bloodline, guarded by the Templars, who after their disbanding became Freemasons. (They did not, of course, as mentioned above. Freemasonry did not erupt for more than 400 years after the end of the Templars, too long for any real connection.) Then, to tie it up with a bow, the faker Pierre Plantard once went by the fake name Saint-Clair.
Dan Brown then canonized the entire story by using elements of all these modern versions in The Da Vinci Code (2003). Scott Wolter simply accepted all of these as more or less true in his book The Hooked X, where he sees a mason’s mark at Rosslyn Chapel featuring an X with a line through it as identical to the “hooked X,” an otherwise unattested rune found on the Kensington Rune Stone. They are not morphologically the same.
Thus was the modern idea of a Grail-Templar-Freemason-Bloodline myth born from the accidental asides of a range of earlier ideas, including literary theory, anti-Catholicism, anti-Masonry, Theosophy, sex worship, New Age mysticism, and fraud. Quite the pedigree.
Let’s break it down a little further.
Holy Bloodline
The claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had children descends from a few strands: First is a medieval claim by Peter Vaux of Cernay, who wrote that the Cathars blasphemously held that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ concubine: “they also said in their secret meetings that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem was evil; and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine” (Historia Albigensis 10-11, my trans.). This may or may not draw on the Gnostic tradition embodied in the Gospel of Philip that Jesus loved Mary above all other disciples and kissed her frequently on the mouth (63:34-36). This Gospel was lost to the West until 1945, when it was rediscovered in the Nag Hammadi corpus. Martin Luther and Brigham Young are both said to have concurred with the idea that Jesus and Mary had a sexual relationship, but I have not read the specific texts where they do so.
At another level, the Bloodline myth comes from the Gnostic heresy that Jesus survived the crucifixion (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.4; Second Treatise of the Great Seth), preserved in Islamic tradition and the Qur’an (4:157-158). As Irenaeus put it,
And that’s about where things stood for most of the twentieth century. There was no evidence of any Grail-Templar-Freemason connection outside some disconnected symbolism, some anti-Catholic assumptions, and a confusion between the Templars—suppressed because the pope and the French king wanted their money—and the Cathars, who provided the final pillar of this theory, the worship of the “sacred feminine.” That weird concept derives from the works of the Freemason and Rosicrucian Hargrave Jennings, who believed all religion was penis-worship, and Otto Augustus Wall, whose influential book Sex and Sex Worship claimed that all religion was the worship of sex organs, particularly the penis. The triangle, circle, or lozenge, due to their resemblance to the female pubic region, was in his view symbolic of the woman and thus the feminine counterpart to the true object of universal veneration, his—er, the—penis. It would, however, be modern writers who introduced Wall’s sex-worship theory into the Grail mythos.
Graham Hancock, in The Sign and the Seal (1992), thought that the varied descriptions of the Grail as a vessel and as a stone suggested that it was a symbol of the Ark of Covenant, a vessel containing the stones inscribed with the Ten Commandments. In this reading, the Grail Knights were of course the Knights Templar, who had conducted secret digs on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in search of the Ark. Never mind that the Knights Templar were not British, as Robert de Boron insisted that the Grail Knight must be.
But Hancock was merely piggybacking on the success of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It is impossible to summarize this influential and ridiculous book in a few words, but its central thesis is that in 1099 a secret society called the Priory of Sion formed to guard the “Holy Grail,” which was the bloodline of Mary and Jesus, currently represented by the dethroned Merovingian royal house of France. The Priory created the Knights Templar and continue working today to reestablish Merovingian rule over all Europe, following the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the authors believe was not a hoax but the Priory’s master-plan. It was this book that tied together Theosophy’s Masonic conspiracy, Wall’s “sacred feminine” sex worship, and Fauriel’s literary view of the Templar-Grail connection—all theories for which there was little direct evidence. Compounding speculation upon speculation did not strengthen the results.
The Priory of Sion was a hoax created in 1956 by a delusional French draftsman named Pierre Plantard who fabricated its entire history to support his false claim to be the last descendant of Christ and the rightful universal monarch of the world prophesied by Nostradamus. Despite the exposure of the hoax, Laurence Gardner, the late genealogist to the pretender to the Stuart royal line in Britain, wrote a book called Bloodline of the Holy Grail recapitulating all of this and ascribing the Christian bloodline to his boss, the Stuart pretender. He then wrote a follow-up called Genesis of the Grail Kings where he explained that the secret society guarding the grail originated with Zechariah Sitchin’s aliens from Nibiru, and their alien-hybrid human descendants maintained immortality by consuming refined white gold and human menstrual blood.
In 2000, Andrew Sinclair and Timothy Wallace-Murphy connected the imaginary bloodline of Christ to Rosslyn Chapel, the St. Clair family chapel in Scotland. They believed the chapel had been built as a model of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (even though the ground plans do not match in any way) and that the chapel contained Templar and Masonic symbolism, a claim denied by both experts in the Templars and the Masons themselves. (Some Masonic symbols were added later, and others are actual mason’s marks used by stonemasons in building the chapel.) In this reading, the St. Clair family was in fact the Scottish branch of Jesus bloodline, guarded by the Templars, who after their disbanding became Freemasons. (They did not, of course, as mentioned above. Freemasonry did not erupt for more than 400 years after the end of the Templars, too long for any real connection.) Then, to tie it up with a bow, the faker Pierre Plantard once went by the fake name Saint-Clair.
Dan Brown then canonized the entire story by using elements of all these modern versions in The Da Vinci Code (2003). Scott Wolter simply accepted all of these as more or less true in his book The Hooked X, where he sees a mason’s mark at Rosslyn Chapel featuring an X with a line through it as identical to the “hooked X,” an otherwise unattested rune found on the Kensington Rune Stone. They are not morphologically the same.
Thus was the modern idea of a Grail-Templar-Freemason-Bloodline myth born from the accidental asides of a range of earlier ideas, including literary theory, anti-Catholicism, anti-Masonry, Theosophy, sex worship, New Age mysticism, and fraud. Quite the pedigree.
Let’s break it down a little further.
Holy Bloodline
The claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had children descends from a few strands: First is a medieval claim by Peter Vaux of Cernay, who wrote that the Cathars blasphemously held that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ concubine: “they also said in their secret meetings that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem was evil; and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine” (Historia Albigensis 10-11, my trans.). This may or may not draw on the Gnostic tradition embodied in the Gospel of Philip that Jesus loved Mary above all other disciples and kissed her frequently on the mouth (63:34-36). This Gospel was lost to the West until 1945, when it was rediscovered in the Nag Hammadi corpus. Martin Luther and Brigham Young are both said to have concurred with the idea that Jesus and Mary had a sexual relationship, but I have not read the specific texts where they do so.
At another level, the Bloodline myth comes from the Gnostic heresy that Jesus survived the crucifixion (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.4; Second Treatise of the Great Seth), preserved in Islamic tradition and the Qur’an (4:157-158). As Irenaeus put it,
Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. (trans. Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut)
From such claims the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and Laurence Gardner, author of Bloodline of the Holy Grail, asserted that Jesus survived the crucifixion to lead the Bloodline Dynasty.
These two ideas began to merge only in the 1960s and 1970s, when feminist scholars began investigating the life of Jesus for evidence of matriarchy, goddess worship, and early feminism. In those years, claims emerged that Mary had been an equal disciple with the men, or the best-loved disciple, or even a remnant of a faded goddess figure. These scholars tended to see the “Beloved Disciple” of the Gospel of John as Mary, read in light of recently-translated Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Philip. The journalist William E. Phipps popularized the subject in the 1970 book Was Jesus Married? His evidence was that there was no evidence; specifically, since the New Testament never states Jesus was not married, we must assume he was because all Jews married in those days and Jesus was a Jew, QED.
The newly-important position of Mary Magdalene allowed the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to plausibly (or seemingly so) argue that Jesus had in fact married Mary.
Yet another strand of the story is a medieval French legend, from the eleventh century (first attested in the twelfth but best known from Petrus de Natalibus in the fifteenth century), that claimed that Mary Magdalene and Lazarus took up residence in Provence, where they converted all the people to Christianity and reigned over them with Lazarus as governing bishop—obviously untrue since Provence remained pagan and under Roman control for centuries after Mary Magdalene. This legend, scholars note, was used primarily to promote the idea that Vézelay held the relics of Mary Magdalene, the profits from which made it one of the richest abbeys in France. (In fact, by 1283 three different abbeys in France each claimed to have the corpse of Mary.) In the earliest recorded, form, that of Sigebert of Gembloux in the Chronicon sive Chronographia (entry for 745) the story goes like this:
These two ideas began to merge only in the 1960s and 1970s, when feminist scholars began investigating the life of Jesus for evidence of matriarchy, goddess worship, and early feminism. In those years, claims emerged that Mary had been an equal disciple with the men, or the best-loved disciple, or even a remnant of a faded goddess figure. These scholars tended to see the “Beloved Disciple” of the Gospel of John as Mary, read in light of recently-translated Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Philip. The journalist William E. Phipps popularized the subject in the 1970 book Was Jesus Married? His evidence was that there was no evidence; specifically, since the New Testament never states Jesus was not married, we must assume he was because all Jews married in those days and Jesus was a Jew, QED.
The newly-important position of Mary Magdalene allowed the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to plausibly (or seemingly so) argue that Jesus had in fact married Mary.
Yet another strand of the story is a medieval French legend, from the eleventh century (first attested in the twelfth but best known from Petrus de Natalibus in the fifteenth century), that claimed that Mary Magdalene and Lazarus took up residence in Provence, where they converted all the people to Christianity and reigned over them with Lazarus as governing bishop—obviously untrue since Provence remained pagan and under Roman control for centuries after Mary Magdalene. This legend, scholars note, was used primarily to promote the idea that Vézelay held the relics of Mary Magdalene, the profits from which made it one of the richest abbeys in France. (In fact, by 1283 three different abbeys in France each claimed to have the corpse of Mary.) In the earliest recorded, form, that of Sigebert of Gembloux in the Chronicon sive Chronographia (entry for 745) the story goes like this:
A persecution having arisen after the stoning of Stephen proto-martyr, Maximinus, one of the seventy disciples of Christ, crossing to Gaul, took Mary Magdalene with him. Furthermore, he buried her body in the city of Aix, over which he presided. Verily, the city of Aix was despoiled by the Saracens, so the body of Mary herself was transferred by Gerard, count of Burgundy, to the monastery of Vézelay, which had been constructed by him. And yet some people write that this woman rests in Ephesus, having no covering over her. (my trans.)
This, however, was merely a localized translation—conveniently right around the time of the Crusades—of the story from Modestus (Photius, Biblioteca 275) alluded to in Gregory of Tours (In gloria martyrum 1.30) in the sixth century that Mary Magdalene had gone to Ephesus to join St. John. Her tomb supposedly could be seen in Ephesus, in the hands of those perfidious Greeks, where Gregory weirdly said it lacked a cover. A Western tomb would be better, and medieval Church officials solemnly asserted that bones dug from French soil were in fact those of Mary.
But none of these legends speak of children, and thus not of any Holy Bloodline. There is, so far as my literature search uncovered, no published account of any two-thousand-year Holy Bloodline prior to 1982.
The Knights Templar and the Sinclairs
As you might guess, these threads only came together with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982. The authors of that book, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, pulled all this together and spun the story that the children of Jesus and Mary took up residence in France and became the ancestors of the Merovingian kings. In a few brief references, they tie this indirectly to the Sinclairs and the Knights Templar via the Priory of Sion, the fictitious organization invented by a delusional Frenchman in 1956. Here is how the authors summarize their findings, as derived primarily from Plantard:
But none of these legends speak of children, and thus not of any Holy Bloodline. There is, so far as my literature search uncovered, no published account of any two-thousand-year Holy Bloodline prior to 1982.
The Knights Templar and the Sinclairs
As you might guess, these threads only came together with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982. The authors of that book, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, pulled all this together and spun the story that the children of Jesus and Mary took up residence in France and became the ancestors of the Merovingian kings. In a few brief references, they tie this indirectly to the Sinclairs and the Knights Templar via the Priory of Sion, the fictitious organization invented by a delusional Frenchman in 1956. Here is how the authors summarize their findings, as derived primarily from Plantard:
1) There was a secret order behind the Knights Templar, which created the Templars as its military and administrative arm. This order, which has functioned under a variety of names, is most frequently known as the Prieure de Sion ("Priory of Sion"). 2) The Prieure de Sion has been directed by a sequence of Grand Masters whose names are among the most illustrious in Western history and culture. 3) Although the Knights Templar were destroyed and dissolved between 1307 and 1314, the Prieure de Sion remained unscathed. Although itself periodically torn by internecine and factional strife, it has continued to function through the centuries. Acting in the shadows, behind the scenes, it has orchestrated certain of the critical events in Western history. 4) The Prieure de Sion exists today and is still operative. It is influential and plays a role in high-level international affairs, as well as in the domestic affairs of certain European countries. To some significant extent it is responsible for the body of information disseminated since 1956. 5) The avowed and declared objective of the Prieure de Sion is the restoration of the Merovingian dynasty and bloodline to the throne not only of France, but to the thrones of other European nations as well. 6) The restoration of the Merovingian dynasty is sanctioned and justifiable, both legally and morally. Although deposed in the eighth century, the Merovingian bloodline did not become extinct. On the contrary it perpetuated itself in a direct line from Dagobert II and his son, Sigisbert IV. By dint of dynastic alliances and intermarriages, this line came to include Godfroi de Bouillon, who captured Jerusalem in 1099, and various other noble and royal families, past and present Blanchefort, Gisors, Saint Clair (Sinclair in England), Montesquieu, Montpezat, Poher, Luisignan, Plantard and Habsburg-Lorraine. At present, the Merovingian bloodline enjoys a legitimate claim to its rightful heritage.
The self-aggrandizing French faker who invented the Priory, Pierre Plantard, not only claimed to be the Great Monarch predicted by Nostradamus, but he also took the name “de Saint-Clair” in honor of his claims to Merovingian legitimacy, sparking claims of St. Clair/Sinclair special right to priority over the Habsburgs and other royal houses. But note: Plantard did not specify that the Sinclair family was any more or less holy than the other descendants of Dagobert.
However, it was Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that tied this Templar-Merovingian conspiracy to the Jesus Bloodline by introducing the claim that this medieval ménage descended from Jesus’ children; thus, “the Sinclair family in Britain is also allied to the bloodline.” This was somewhat indirect, of course, since Plantard wanted the French St. Clair family to be the more direct recipients of the Merovingian inheritance. To connect the Scottish Sinclairs, the authors looked at alleged evidence at Rosslyn Chapel, which, being built by a Sinclair, thus reinforced the idea of a Sinclair connection to the Holy Bloodline.
I can find no published claim of a Sinclair relationship to the Holy Bloodline prior to 1982.
Note that the Holy Bloodline authors didn’t say anything about discovering America.
Henry Sinclair and America
Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, became tied to an imaginary voyage to America in a complex but rather linear process. The Sinclair family originated as the lords of Saint-Clair, and they came from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066. Two members of the family are listed in William’s famous Domesday Book. In 1068, William of Saint-Clair moved to Scotland and became the baron of Roslin (hence, later, Rosslyn Chapel). In the thirteenth-century Scottish-Norwegian War, the Saint-Clairs, now called the Sinclairs, helped repel the Norwegian invasion. A century afterward, in 1379, Sir Henry Sinclair, Admiral of Scotland, was made Earl of Orkney by the King of Norway. The family lost the Orkney earldom under James III of Scotland, but picked up one in Caithness. Sir Henry Sinclair’s grandson was the William Sinclair who built Rosslyn Chapel. But these facts are largely irrelevant to the myth that grew up around him from a completely and totally unrelated source.
In 1558, a Venetian named Nicolò Zeno published a book and an accompanying map claiming that his ancestors, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, brothers of the naval hero Carlo Zeno, had made voyages of equal importance to Columbus, and a century earlier to boot, earning Venice a place at the pre-Columbian table and a triumph over its rival Genoa, home to Columbus. The book supposedly summarizes the correspondence of the two brothers about their adventures—correspondence which was conveniently destroyed before scholars could examine it when the younger Nicolò Zeno tore the original manuscripts to pieces. Oddly, the book freely mixes supposed quotations from the letters and first person narration by the later author, all cast in the same first-person voice, as though one writer took on three personalities.
The Zeni narrative as presented in 1558 is a hoax. The real Nicolò Zeno (the elder) had been a military governor in Greece from 1390-1392 and was on trial in Venice in 1394 for embezzlement. He lived until at least 1402, despite having “died” in Frisland in 1394. In 1898 Frederic W. Lucas (1842-1932) published a “criticism and indictment” on the Zeno Narrative that revealed the hoax’s literary sources and documented in extensive detail how the younger Zeno had built the narrative from Renaissance-era travel books and geographies.
According to the younger Nicolò’s book, one of the Zeno bothers (also called the Zen or Zeni), Nicolò, sailed to England in 1380 (which is true) and became stranded on an island called Frisland (which is not true), a non-existent North Atlantic island larger than Ireland. In the book, the elder Nicolò claims to have been rescued by Zichmi, a prince of Frisland. Fortunately for him, everyone he meets speaks Latin. Nicolò invites his brother Antonio to join him in Frisland, which he does for fourteen years (Nicolò dying four years in), while Zichmi attacks the fictitious islands of Bres, Talas, Broas, Iscant, Trans, Mimant, and Dambercas well as the Estlanda (Shetland) Islands and Iceland.
Later, after Nicolò had died in 1394, an expedition lost for twenty-six years arrives and reports having lived in a strange unknown land filled with ritual cannibals, whom they taught to fish. In fact, rival island groups fought a war in order to gain access to the travelers and learn the art of fishing. Worse, despite being the arctic “they all go naked, and suffer cruelly from the cold, nor have they the sense to clothe themselves with the skins of the animals which they take in hunting.” Antonio Zeno is still there and joins Zichmi on a voyage to the west in search of these strange lands. They encounter a large island called Icharia, whose residents’ speech Zichmi understands. Finally, they travel to Greenland, where Zichmi remains with a colony while Antonio returns to Frisland.
The Zeno narrative, if taken at face value, describes Zichmni’s voyage to Greenland and founding of a colony there, not in America. Worse, the text says Zichmni stayed in Greenland, but the real Sinclair was in Norway in 1379, Orkney in 1380, and back in Norway in 1389.
The voyage of the Zeni to America was also recorded in the Venetian nobleman Marco Barbaro’s Genealogie patrizie, an undated manuscript that records the family histories of the Venetian noble houses. Here’s what he said, speaking of Antonio Zeno:
However, it was Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that tied this Templar-Merovingian conspiracy to the Jesus Bloodline by introducing the claim that this medieval ménage descended from Jesus’ children; thus, “the Sinclair family in Britain is also allied to the bloodline.” This was somewhat indirect, of course, since Plantard wanted the French St. Clair family to be the more direct recipients of the Merovingian inheritance. To connect the Scottish Sinclairs, the authors looked at alleged evidence at Rosslyn Chapel, which, being built by a Sinclair, thus reinforced the idea of a Sinclair connection to the Holy Bloodline.
I can find no published claim of a Sinclair relationship to the Holy Bloodline prior to 1982.
Note that the Holy Bloodline authors didn’t say anything about discovering America.
Henry Sinclair and America
Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, became tied to an imaginary voyage to America in a complex but rather linear process. The Sinclair family originated as the lords of Saint-Clair, and they came from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066. Two members of the family are listed in William’s famous Domesday Book. In 1068, William of Saint-Clair moved to Scotland and became the baron of Roslin (hence, later, Rosslyn Chapel). In the thirteenth-century Scottish-Norwegian War, the Saint-Clairs, now called the Sinclairs, helped repel the Norwegian invasion. A century afterward, in 1379, Sir Henry Sinclair, Admiral of Scotland, was made Earl of Orkney by the King of Norway. The family lost the Orkney earldom under James III of Scotland, but picked up one in Caithness. Sir Henry Sinclair’s grandson was the William Sinclair who built Rosslyn Chapel. But these facts are largely irrelevant to the myth that grew up around him from a completely and totally unrelated source.
In 1558, a Venetian named Nicolò Zeno published a book and an accompanying map claiming that his ancestors, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, brothers of the naval hero Carlo Zeno, had made voyages of equal importance to Columbus, and a century earlier to boot, earning Venice a place at the pre-Columbian table and a triumph over its rival Genoa, home to Columbus. The book supposedly summarizes the correspondence of the two brothers about their adventures—correspondence which was conveniently destroyed before scholars could examine it when the younger Nicolò Zeno tore the original manuscripts to pieces. Oddly, the book freely mixes supposed quotations from the letters and first person narration by the later author, all cast in the same first-person voice, as though one writer took on three personalities.
The Zeni narrative as presented in 1558 is a hoax. The real Nicolò Zeno (the elder) had been a military governor in Greece from 1390-1392 and was on trial in Venice in 1394 for embezzlement. He lived until at least 1402, despite having “died” in Frisland in 1394. In 1898 Frederic W. Lucas (1842-1932) published a “criticism and indictment” on the Zeno Narrative that revealed the hoax’s literary sources and documented in extensive detail how the younger Zeno had built the narrative from Renaissance-era travel books and geographies.
According to the younger Nicolò’s book, one of the Zeno bothers (also called the Zen or Zeni), Nicolò, sailed to England in 1380 (which is true) and became stranded on an island called Frisland (which is not true), a non-existent North Atlantic island larger than Ireland. In the book, the elder Nicolò claims to have been rescued by Zichmi, a prince of Frisland. Fortunately for him, everyone he meets speaks Latin. Nicolò invites his brother Antonio to join him in Frisland, which he does for fourteen years (Nicolò dying four years in), while Zichmi attacks the fictitious islands of Bres, Talas, Broas, Iscant, Trans, Mimant, and Dambercas well as the Estlanda (Shetland) Islands and Iceland.
Later, after Nicolò had died in 1394, an expedition lost for twenty-six years arrives and reports having lived in a strange unknown land filled with ritual cannibals, whom they taught to fish. In fact, rival island groups fought a war in order to gain access to the travelers and learn the art of fishing. Worse, despite being the arctic “they all go naked, and suffer cruelly from the cold, nor have they the sense to clothe themselves with the skins of the animals which they take in hunting.” Antonio Zeno is still there and joins Zichmi on a voyage to the west in search of these strange lands. They encounter a large island called Icharia, whose residents’ speech Zichmi understands. Finally, they travel to Greenland, where Zichmi remains with a colony while Antonio returns to Frisland.
The Zeno narrative, if taken at face value, describes Zichmni’s voyage to Greenland and founding of a colony there, not in America. Worse, the text says Zichmni stayed in Greenland, but the real Sinclair was in Norway in 1379, Orkney in 1380, and back in Norway in 1389.
The voyage of the Zeni to America was also recorded in the Venetian nobleman Marco Barbaro’s Genealogie patrizie, an undated manuscript that records the family histories of the Venetian noble houses. Here’s what he said, speaking of Antonio Zeno:
He wrote with his brother, Nicolò the Cavalier, the voyages of the islands under the Arctic Pole, and of those discoveries of 1390, and that by order of Zicno, King of Frisland, he went to the continent of Estotiland in North America. He dwelt fourteen years in Frisland, four with his brother Nicolò, and ten alone. (trans. Richard Henry Major)
Templar-Holy Bloodline-Sinclair speculators assert that this manuscript was written in 1536, which proves, they say, that the Zeno story could not have been fabricated by Nicolò Zeno the younger, the author of the 1558 book, but must have been a genuine tradition reported by the younger Nicolò and Marco Barbaro.
The Barbaro manuscript is undated. It is currently held at a library in Vienna, and so far as I am aware has never been translated. The Venetian dialect original was transcribed and published in 1887, but I don’t have access to this edition. Because it is undated, different books give a range of dates for the text. I’ve seen different scholars write that it was composed in 1526, 1536, 1566, “the sixteenth century,” and “midcentury.” This does not inspire confidence.
So, where did the 1536 date come from? As far as I can tell, those books that do give a source for the date are almost all mid-nineteenth century volumes, and they all cite an editor’s footnote in an 1818 Italian book on Marco Polo. I haven’t seen that volume, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems like this is one possible source for the 1536 date—especially given what I learned next. Richard Henry Major repeated the date in his influential preface to his translation of the Zeno Narrative, and all later Templar-Sinclair-Jesus speculators took their information directly from him. Major, in turn, took the date from Capt. C. C. Zahrtmann’s skeptical account of the Zeno narrative from 1835, which gives the 1536 date and attempts to puzzle out how it was possible. Zahrtmann proposed that Nicolò the younger inserted the lines into the Barbaro manuscript as the two families were related and they were of similar ages (21 and 25) in 1536. Zahrtmann never says where he in turn got it from, but he cites Cardinal Placido Zurla’s Di Marco Polo e degli altri Viaggiatori Veneziani più, the same book cited elsewhere as the source for the 1536 date, as well as Zurla’s book on the Zeni, Dissertazione Intorno ai Viaggi e Scoperti Settentrionali di Nicolò et Antonio, Fratelli Zeni. Zurla, in his two books on the Zeno Narrative, apparently asserted that Barbaro had begun his genealogy of the Zeno family in 1536. In his Dissertazione, Zurla merely asserted that
The Barbaro manuscript is undated. It is currently held at a library in Vienna, and so far as I am aware has never been translated. The Venetian dialect original was transcribed and published in 1887, but I don’t have access to this edition. Because it is undated, different books give a range of dates for the text. I’ve seen different scholars write that it was composed in 1526, 1536, 1566, “the sixteenth century,” and “midcentury.” This does not inspire confidence.
So, where did the 1536 date come from? As far as I can tell, those books that do give a source for the date are almost all mid-nineteenth century volumes, and they all cite an editor’s footnote in an 1818 Italian book on Marco Polo. I haven’t seen that volume, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems like this is one possible source for the 1536 date—especially given what I learned next. Richard Henry Major repeated the date in his influential preface to his translation of the Zeno Narrative, and all later Templar-Sinclair-Jesus speculators took their information directly from him. Major, in turn, took the date from Capt. C. C. Zahrtmann’s skeptical account of the Zeno narrative from 1835, which gives the 1536 date and attempts to puzzle out how it was possible. Zahrtmann proposed that Nicolò the younger inserted the lines into the Barbaro manuscript as the two families were related and they were of similar ages (21 and 25) in 1536. Zahrtmann never says where he in turn got it from, but he cites Cardinal Placido Zurla’s Di Marco Polo e degli altri Viaggiatori Veneziani più, the same book cited elsewhere as the source for the 1536 date, as well as Zurla’s book on the Zeni, Dissertazione Intorno ai Viaggi e Scoperti Settentrionali di Nicolò et Antonio, Fratelli Zeni. Zurla, in his two books on the Zeno Narrative, apparently asserted that Barbaro had begun his genealogy of the Zeno family in 1536. In his Dissertazione, Zurla merely asserted that
…the family tree of the Zeni family was drawn up by the Venetian patrician Marco Barbaro and inserted into T. VII of his MS. work, Discendente patrizie, a copy of which is owned by the eminent Venetian nobleman Lorenzo Antonio da Ponte… Barbaro worked on writing this until 1536, i.e. before Nicolò Zeno the younger compiled his History, which was in 1557, as we saw; and moreover, Barbaro is supremely renowned for his assiduous studies and his accuracy in such matters. (pp. 29-30, my trans.)
Zurla notes that this was before the younger Zeno’s Narrative was published, but Zurla gives no information about how he derived the 1536 date, one that is belied by the dates given in Barbaro’s text. It is also unlikely that a 25-year-old was composing a monumental genealogy, or had been working on it for many years. I’m thinking Zurla was just wrong, perhaps (at the risk of sounding too much like Major) misreading bad handwriting in recording the wrong date. This is perhaps more likely since Zurla said he was working from a copy, not the autograph original.
For many centuries, this hoax was accepted as true (and may have a very loose connection to a real North Sea voyage to Scotland of the 1380s) and led to claims by Venetian partisans that the Zeno family had navigated the Atlantic before Columbus, of rival Genoa, when advocates tried to identify Zeno’s Greenland with Norse settlements in Vinland and other North American locations. According to Vicenzo Formaleone in 1783, “Cosi l’ardito F’iorentino, Americo Vespucci, rapi al Colombo la gloria di dare il nome al Mondo nuovo: gloria per altro nom sua; poiche rapita anch’essa ai nostri Zeni” (“So the bold Florentine, Americo Vespucci, seized from Columbus the glory of giving his name to the New World: glory meant for another name, since it was seized from our Zeni.”)
In 1784 the debt-ridden Johann Reinhold Forster, a German from a dispossessed Scottish noble family, identified Henry Sinclair as Prince Zichmni, a fictional character in the Renaissance-era hoax narrative of the Zeno Brothers’ voyage into the Atlantic in the years around 1380. His claim, obviously, had an emotional pull, especially since it served to show up the German-descended royal family of England, who had brought Scotland into political union with England in 1707, not to mention England in general, the ancient enemy of Scotland who were responsible for dispossessing Forster's lordly forebears. Forster saw specific place names in the Zeno narrative as being similar enough to place names in and around Orkney to justify identifying the fictional island of Zichmni with Orkney, and the word “Zichmni” as a corruption of “Sinclair.” Here’s how he explained it in a footnote:
For many centuries, this hoax was accepted as true (and may have a very loose connection to a real North Sea voyage to Scotland of the 1380s) and led to claims by Venetian partisans that the Zeno family had navigated the Atlantic before Columbus, of rival Genoa, when advocates tried to identify Zeno’s Greenland with Norse settlements in Vinland and other North American locations. According to Vicenzo Formaleone in 1783, “Cosi l’ardito F’iorentino, Americo Vespucci, rapi al Colombo la gloria di dare il nome al Mondo nuovo: gloria per altro nom sua; poiche rapita anch’essa ai nostri Zeni” (“So the bold Florentine, Americo Vespucci, seized from Columbus the glory of giving his name to the New World: glory meant for another name, since it was seized from our Zeni.”)
In 1784 the debt-ridden Johann Reinhold Forster, a German from a dispossessed Scottish noble family, identified Henry Sinclair as Prince Zichmni, a fictional character in the Renaissance-era hoax narrative of the Zeno Brothers’ voyage into the Atlantic in the years around 1380. His claim, obviously, had an emotional pull, especially since it served to show up the German-descended royal family of England, who had brought Scotland into political union with England in 1707, not to mention England in general, the ancient enemy of Scotland who were responsible for dispossessing Forster's lordly forebears. Forster saw specific place names in the Zeno narrative as being similar enough to place names in and around Orkney to justify identifying the fictional island of Zichmni with Orkney, and the word “Zichmni” as a corruption of “Sinclair.” Here’s how he explained it in a footnote:
Though this Friesland, together with Porland and Sorany, appear to be countries which have been swallowed up by the sea in consequence of earthquakes and other great revolutions in the above-mentioned element, yet I cannot help communicating in this place a conjecture, which has struck me whilst I was employed on this subject. Precisely in this same year 1379, Hakon, King of Norway, invested with the Orkneys, a person of the name of Henry Sinclair, who was one of the descendants in the female line from the ancient Earls of Orkney. This name of Sinclair appears to me to be expressed by the word Zichmni. The appellation of Faira, North Fara, South Fara, or Fara’s Land, have probably given rise to that of Friesland. Porland must be the Fara Islands (the Far-ver, or Farland) and Sorany is the Soderoe, or Soreona; i. e. the western islands. Add to this, that the names of the Shetland Islands correspond with many of those conquered by Zichmni in Estland: Bras is indubitably Brassa Sound, Talas appears to be Yell, or Zeal, Broas is Brassa, Iscant is Uuft, Trans is probably Trondra, and still more similitudes of this kind affording yet greater foundation for these conjectures. Nay, the amazing quantity of fish that was caught yearly off the Orkneys, or, according to Zeno’s account, off Friesland, and with which Flanders, Britania, England, Scotland, Norway, and Denmark were supplied, and the inhabitants of Friesland greatly enriched, relates doubtless to the herrings that are caught here every year in great abundance. Iceland was too powerful for Sinclair (or Zichmni) to conquer. Nicolo Zeno visited likewise East Greenland. But Estatiland and Drogio, which were discovered afterwards, appear to be some country that lies to the southward of Old Greenland. Perhaps Newfoundland, or Winland, where some Normans had settled previous to this, who likewise, in all probability, had brought with them from Europe the Latin books which were at this time in the King’s library there.
Source: Johann Reinhold Forster, History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North (London: 1786), 181.
The English translator of the Zeno narrative, Richard Henry Major, picked up Forster’s suggestion and made it the centerpiece of his explanatory essay prefacing his influential translation. (In fact, the preface is five times the length of the translation, making the book rather a pseudo-historical argument with an appended translation.) He claimed that Zichmni’s Porlanda must have been the Pentland Firth astride Orkney, conflated with the land by ignorant Italians (who nevertheless correctly named every other island). His claim was that the Italians had such poor handwriting that confusion over spelling yielded all the variant names in the text. He also pleaded that the Zeno narrative had been significantly rewritten by its later editor, thus accounting for the otherwise unbridgeable differences between the life of Henry Sinclair and Prince Zichmni—special pleading that also sapped away any reason to accept any part of the Zeno narrative as real.
From this, Thomas Sinclair, a descendant of Henry, claimed in 1892 that his ancestor had discovered America before that upstart Italian Columbus, against whose Italian kinsmen he wanted the United States to discriminate to support white supremacy. This claim was systematically refuted by Fred W. Lucas in 1898, but to little notice. Based on Forster’s conjecture that Zichmni reached Vinland, later writers took this to mean that Henry Sinclair must have visited America in 1389. Because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Vinland was assumed to have been New England, the secondary literature began referring to Henry Sinclair as having traveled to New England in 1389.
Writers like Christopher Knight claimed that Henry Sinclair was a member of the Knights Templar, an order disbanded half a century before Sinclair’s birth. Worse, the Sinclair family is on record as having testified against the Templars at their trial in 1309, clear evidence they were not of the order. The only actual connection is that the Scotland’s first Grand Master of Masons, William St. Clair, shared a name with the noble Sinclairs. He was made Grand Master in 1736, having been a freemason for less than one year. An apocryphal history was concocted from spare parts by mythologizing masons retroactively making the Sinclair family the “protector” of masons since the 1440s, but this rested on nothing more than Sir David Brewster’s assertion in Lawless’s History of Freemasonry (1804) that it was so, which even in the nineteenth century was recognized to be a fabrication.
From this, in a series of works from the 1950s to the 1970s Frederick J. Pohl began to identify the Zeno narrative’s Greenland with Nova Scotia in Canada by mistakenly tying a description of Icelandic volcanoes that Zeno had transferred to Greenland to a modern mining area in Nova Scotia, tying now fully-developed myth of Henry Sinclair to a specific location in North America, prompting claims of a Sinclair relationship to Oak Island, alleged “medieval” ruins in the area, and so on. One of the most important pieces of evidence was supposedly near a monastery in Greenland “a spring from which issued a certain matter like pitch, which ran into the sea.” Pohl explains it thus in his 1959 journal article “A Nova Scotia Project”: “In the Pictou region of Nova Scotia, at Stellarton, an open coal seam burned at the bottom of a hill, from the top of which pitch flowed down in what is now called ‘Coal Brook’ and crossed the burning seam.” Pohl fails to note that this is not a continuous feature. The coal seam at Stellarton, called the Foord Seam, was reported to have caught fire more than once in historic times, including a stretch from 1870 to 1901, but I can find no evidence that the seam was actively burning prior to the start of coal mining in the area in the 1830s, when mining activity sparked several fires. In fact, according to the 1901 Annual Report of the Geologic Survey of Canada (“Coal Field of Pictou County, Nova Scotia,” p. 35), the fires actually occurred within the mines, not in the open air, and were driven by natural gas released from mining activities. As noted as long ago as 1899 (in anonymous article in The Spectator), the burning pitch has a clear antecedent in Olaus Magnus’ description of Iceland from his 1555 History of the Northern Peoples, published in Italy just three years before the Zeno Narrative, and one of its key sources. There, he describes a monastery at the foot of one volcano, and he elsewhere talks about burning waters. Zeno simply removed this description to Greenland, and Pohl sent it on its way to Nova Scotia.
Pohl also claimed that Zichmni was Sinclair because Italians had bad handwriting and the words looked similar if you squint. Based on this acceptance, he then identified seventeen “parallel details” between his version of Henry Sinclair and the Wabanaki culture hero Glooscap, the gigantic creator god of several indigenous mythologies in the area around Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, Pohl misunderstood the 1894 book The Legends of the Micmacs by Silas Rand as a book about Glooscap instead of one that occasionally mentions him, so his analysis was deeply flawed, confusing unrelated myths, taking the author’s introductory notes for Mi’kmaq legends, and fancifully reinterpreting the text to suit his needs. In a few cases, he simply lied, as when he falsely claimed Henry Sinclair and Glooscap both had three daughters. Henry Sinclair had two daughters and three sons, according to the Sinclair Diploma, the only record of his issue; and Burke’s Peerage similarly asserts that Henry Sinclair had multiple sons.
And thus did Henry Sinclair end up on Oak Island, folded into the saga of the infamous Money Pit, to which he was now rumored to have contributed the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.
Henry Sinclair and the Templars
Now that Sinclair had been placed in America (on the strength of a hoax and some extrapolations from it), he could easily become conflated with parallel claims made for the Newport Tower, a colonial windmill in Rhode Island which since 1839 had been claimed as a piece of medieval European architecture. Because it had similarities (perceived, anyway) to Cistercian architecture (specifically Mellifont Abbey in Ireland), advocates of the Knights Templar claimed on the basis of one dubious piece of coerced testimony from a former Templar that some Templars fled from French forces by ship that a Cistercian-Templar conspiracy resulted in the windmill’s construction. This is based entirely on a single sentence from the testimony of one Templar, Jean de Châlons, extracted under torture, in 1308 at a papal inquiry at Portiers following the French raids on the Templars on October 13, 1307:
From this, Thomas Sinclair, a descendant of Henry, claimed in 1892 that his ancestor had discovered America before that upstart Italian Columbus, against whose Italian kinsmen he wanted the United States to discriminate to support white supremacy. This claim was systematically refuted by Fred W. Lucas in 1898, but to little notice. Based on Forster’s conjecture that Zichmni reached Vinland, later writers took this to mean that Henry Sinclair must have visited America in 1389. Because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Vinland was assumed to have been New England, the secondary literature began referring to Henry Sinclair as having traveled to New England in 1389.
Writers like Christopher Knight claimed that Henry Sinclair was a member of the Knights Templar, an order disbanded half a century before Sinclair’s birth. Worse, the Sinclair family is on record as having testified against the Templars at their trial in 1309, clear evidence they were not of the order. The only actual connection is that the Scotland’s first Grand Master of Masons, William St. Clair, shared a name with the noble Sinclairs. He was made Grand Master in 1736, having been a freemason for less than one year. An apocryphal history was concocted from spare parts by mythologizing masons retroactively making the Sinclair family the “protector” of masons since the 1440s, but this rested on nothing more than Sir David Brewster’s assertion in Lawless’s History of Freemasonry (1804) that it was so, which even in the nineteenth century was recognized to be a fabrication.
From this, in a series of works from the 1950s to the 1970s Frederick J. Pohl began to identify the Zeno narrative’s Greenland with Nova Scotia in Canada by mistakenly tying a description of Icelandic volcanoes that Zeno had transferred to Greenland to a modern mining area in Nova Scotia, tying now fully-developed myth of Henry Sinclair to a specific location in North America, prompting claims of a Sinclair relationship to Oak Island, alleged “medieval” ruins in the area, and so on. One of the most important pieces of evidence was supposedly near a monastery in Greenland “a spring from which issued a certain matter like pitch, which ran into the sea.” Pohl explains it thus in his 1959 journal article “A Nova Scotia Project”: “In the Pictou region of Nova Scotia, at Stellarton, an open coal seam burned at the bottom of a hill, from the top of which pitch flowed down in what is now called ‘Coal Brook’ and crossed the burning seam.” Pohl fails to note that this is not a continuous feature. The coal seam at Stellarton, called the Foord Seam, was reported to have caught fire more than once in historic times, including a stretch from 1870 to 1901, but I can find no evidence that the seam was actively burning prior to the start of coal mining in the area in the 1830s, when mining activity sparked several fires. In fact, according to the 1901 Annual Report of the Geologic Survey of Canada (“Coal Field of Pictou County, Nova Scotia,” p. 35), the fires actually occurred within the mines, not in the open air, and were driven by natural gas released from mining activities. As noted as long ago as 1899 (in anonymous article in The Spectator), the burning pitch has a clear antecedent in Olaus Magnus’ description of Iceland from his 1555 History of the Northern Peoples, published in Italy just three years before the Zeno Narrative, and one of its key sources. There, he describes a monastery at the foot of one volcano, and he elsewhere talks about burning waters. Zeno simply removed this description to Greenland, and Pohl sent it on its way to Nova Scotia.
Pohl also claimed that Zichmni was Sinclair because Italians had bad handwriting and the words looked similar if you squint. Based on this acceptance, he then identified seventeen “parallel details” between his version of Henry Sinclair and the Wabanaki culture hero Glooscap, the gigantic creator god of several indigenous mythologies in the area around Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, Pohl misunderstood the 1894 book The Legends of the Micmacs by Silas Rand as a book about Glooscap instead of one that occasionally mentions him, so his analysis was deeply flawed, confusing unrelated myths, taking the author’s introductory notes for Mi’kmaq legends, and fancifully reinterpreting the text to suit his needs. In a few cases, he simply lied, as when he falsely claimed Henry Sinclair and Glooscap both had three daughters. Henry Sinclair had two daughters and three sons, according to the Sinclair Diploma, the only record of his issue; and Burke’s Peerage similarly asserts that Henry Sinclair had multiple sons.
And thus did Henry Sinclair end up on Oak Island, folded into the saga of the infamous Money Pit, to which he was now rumored to have contributed the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.
Henry Sinclair and the Templars
Now that Sinclair had been placed in America (on the strength of a hoax and some extrapolations from it), he could easily become conflated with parallel claims made for the Newport Tower, a colonial windmill in Rhode Island which since 1839 had been claimed as a piece of medieval European architecture. Because it had similarities (perceived, anyway) to Cistercian architecture (specifically Mellifont Abbey in Ireland), advocates of the Knights Templar claimed on the basis of one dubious piece of coerced testimony from a former Templar that some Templars fled from French forces by ship that a Cistercian-Templar conspiracy resulted in the windmill’s construction. This is based entirely on a single sentence from the testimony of one Templar, Jean de Châlons, extracted under torture, in 1308 at a papal inquiry at Portiers following the French raids on the Templars on October 13, 1307:
Then he said that, learning beforehand about this trouble, the leaders of the Order fled, and he himself met Brother Gerard de Villiers leading fifty horses; and he heard it said that he set out to sea with eighteen galleys and that Brother Hugues de Châlons fled with the whole treasure of Brother Hugues de Pairaud. When asked how he was able to keep this fact secret for so long, he responded that no one would have dared reveal it for anything, if the Pope and the King had not opened the way, for if it were known in the Order that anyone had spoken, he would at once be killed. (Vatican Secret Archives, Registra Avenionensia 48, f450r; my trans.)
The word translated above as “galley” is galea, a borrowing from the Byzantine Greek, meaning a single-decked oared warship; they were not oceangoing vessels but meant to hug the coasts. But this brief sentence, almost never cited in the original, launched a thousand fringe claims.
Similarly, the alleged Westford Knight—a rough carving in Massachusetts first attributed to Native Americans and then Vikings—was later claimed as a depiction of a Sinclair companion, of a Templar, or both. In 2001, Christopher Knight simply asserted that Sinclair was himself a secret Templar, many decades after the order was suppressed.
This came about only because conspiracy theorists had already tied the Sinclairs to a Freemason conspiracy via alleged Masonic symbolism in Rosslyn Chapel and the participation of Sinclairs at the origins of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. (A man named William St. Clair was the first Grand Master, but this was in 1736, many centuries too late for our purposes; claims of earlier involvement dating to the 1400s were invented in the 1800s out of thin air.) By the transitive property of pseudoscience, the Victorian allegation (no older than the nineteenth century) that the Knights Templar gave rise to Freemasonry retroactively made the Sinclair family not just Masons but also Templars—even though trial records show that Sinclair family members testified against the Templars at their trial. The Templar-Freemason connection, in turn, sprang from Andrew Michael Ramsay, who in 1737 claimed that the Masons descended from the Knights of St. John and had built Solomon’s Temple. In the 1800s, the Templars were swapped in for the Knights of St. John to better harmonize with Solomon’s Temple, and two of the Holy Blood authors developed the Freemasons as an essential part of the Holy Bloodline conspiracy in The Temple and the Lodge (1989), after having introduced the topic in Holy Blood.
Putting It Together
All of this comes together with Andrew Sinclair, whose 1992 book The Sword and the Grail: The Story of the Grail, the Templars and the True Discovery of America put all these various threads into one giant stew and bequeathed the modern myth of Henry I Sinclair as a Templar of the Holy Bloodline who discovered America to hide the Holy Grail. This “ancient” myth is only a few decades old. Prior to Andrew Sinclair, the various parts were not connected. Since not a single one of these parts has any evidence in its favor, the composite story is consequently even more false than any of its component parts.
Similarly, the alleged Westford Knight—a rough carving in Massachusetts first attributed to Native Americans and then Vikings—was later claimed as a depiction of a Sinclair companion, of a Templar, or both. In 2001, Christopher Knight simply asserted that Sinclair was himself a secret Templar, many decades after the order was suppressed.
This came about only because conspiracy theorists had already tied the Sinclairs to a Freemason conspiracy via alleged Masonic symbolism in Rosslyn Chapel and the participation of Sinclairs at the origins of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. (A man named William St. Clair was the first Grand Master, but this was in 1736, many centuries too late for our purposes; claims of earlier involvement dating to the 1400s were invented in the 1800s out of thin air.) By the transitive property of pseudoscience, the Victorian allegation (no older than the nineteenth century) that the Knights Templar gave rise to Freemasonry retroactively made the Sinclair family not just Masons but also Templars—even though trial records show that Sinclair family members testified against the Templars at their trial. The Templar-Freemason connection, in turn, sprang from Andrew Michael Ramsay, who in 1737 claimed that the Masons descended from the Knights of St. John and had built Solomon’s Temple. In the 1800s, the Templars were swapped in for the Knights of St. John to better harmonize with Solomon’s Temple, and two of the Holy Blood authors developed the Freemasons as an essential part of the Holy Bloodline conspiracy in The Temple and the Lodge (1989), after having introduced the topic in Holy Blood.
Putting It Together
All of this comes together with Andrew Sinclair, whose 1992 book The Sword and the Grail: The Story of the Grail, the Templars and the True Discovery of America put all these various threads into one giant stew and bequeathed the modern myth of Henry I Sinclair as a Templar of the Holy Bloodline who discovered America to hide the Holy Grail. This “ancient” myth is only a few decades old. Prior to Andrew Sinclair, the various parts were not connected. Since not a single one of these parts has any evidence in its favor, the composite story is consequently even more false than any of its component parts.
