sepoy notes: It is beyond doubt that the Glorious Lord will send farangi to hell for punning Gloria Dei. It is also beyond doubt that I have been giggling like a, um, girl about it ever since.
III. A 500 Year Old Argument Over Money
The controversy between Catholics and the Enlightenment is a deep one, and is primarily due to the Enlightenment’s humanist, secular, and sometimes libertine ideals, which are overtly, and often explicitly, hostile to Catholicism. Yet the Church itself has weathered greater threats to its authority, and this leaves one to wonder why the Church considers the Enlightenment, the Occult—and Freemasonry in particular—worthy enough opponents to issue pronouncements, some ex cathedra, against it.
Though many believe a connection between the Templars and Freemasons is dubious, it cannot be denied that the Masons themselves believe they are carrying DeMolay’s Great Work, and this adoptive connection must be given credence. What does it matter, after all, if the Templars actually handed a baton to the earliest Masons, if the Masons themselves believe it, and act on that presumption?
What’s more, the narrative gaps in the story of the Templars’ demise suggest tantalizing conclusions that lend credence to the historicity of a Masonic-Templar connection. Much of this evidence is located in Scotland, which would have been a logical and very un-Papish place for the Templar navy to port. Indeed, Scotland’s early-modern always-war of self-defense against England, then a loyal Catholic country, might have made easy bedfellows between a covertly pagan Scottish elite, and a newly excommunicated group of commandos.
Braveheart-era Scotland, under Robert the Bruce, was a tumultuous place, but its course seemed to have been steadied by the effects of a Templar influx. Contemporary accounts record a Templar presence in the Scottish ranks during the Battle of Balantrodoch—they kept their “red cross” mantles hidden by cloak, and ripped off their cloaks at the last second, which reportedly scared the crap out of the English troops—imagine, you’re a loyal but lowly paid English soldier, thinking you’re about to face off against some barefoot Celts, when suddenly you realize the big, bearded guys on the other side are actually the 14th Century’s Delta Force. This may have been a particularly effective bit of costuming, but we cannot know for sure.
Rosslyn Chapel, built in 1445, is a queer artifact on the noble Sinclair family’s estate—in addition to being actual human beings, and Scots aristocrats, the Sinclairs figure prominently in the Merovingian mythos, and, indeed, The DaVinci Code—is the proof-point many rely upon when making a Templar-Masonry connection. Along with the Abbey at Rennes-Le-Chateau, Rosslyn Chapel is to architecture what the Templars are to history. Curious, crazy, attractive, wholly mad, and considered by most historians better left alone; however, its decor contains references to the important symbols of Freemasonry, many of the trappings of Templarism, as well as cheeky nods to Continental fellow travelers like the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, whomever they were.
By the 17th century, Masonry came from the closet, and England’s Grand Lodge opened for business. It was not an order of stonecutters, nor a beneficial society. It was clearly an Occult organization. Consider that this 17th century poem published in Edinburgh, called Muses' Threnodie, by H. Adamson, gives us the lines: "For what we do presage is riot in grosse, for we are brethren of the Rosie Crosse; we have the Mason Word and second sight, Things for to come we can foretell aright." Scottish “Rosicrucians”, using the Masonic “Word,” which is one of the most highly guarded secrets in Masonry (never spoken above a whisper, and only given in proxy before the latest degrees) were bragging about their clairvoyant abilities.
IV. Sionist Plots
The United States was founded in large part by Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom had received the highest degrees in Masonry, and who traveled, as Franklin and Jefferson did, among the Continent’s Occult circles. Burgo’s History of Orgies describes Franklin, a devoted Mason who developed his own American Masonic organizations, as an 18th century porn-star who frequented the dark rites of England’s Hellfire Clubs—often shocking his hosts with degenerate colonial excess. Washington never missed an opportunity to wear his Masonic regalia, and no American Lodge is complete without his portrait, just so, on the wall. The Scottish Rite’s palatial Washington Temple occupies some of the best real estate in the city, and appears to have been the inspiration for the Temple of Zuul from Ghostbusters.
Whereas America’s dominant form of Masonry is ostensibly Christian-friendly, Europe’s Occult subculture, made the stuff of carnival in the 19th and 20th centuries by the delightful and depraved Aliester Crowley, is more overtly pagan. It has more Voltaire than Santayana. The UK is rife with pre-Christian retro-faith, like Druidism, and new-age Egyptophiliacs who enjoy suspect recreations of ancient ritual. France’s Grand Orient Lodge is adamantly agnostic. Because of the Lodges’ rules of decorum and secrecy, radicals have been known to join Lodges in order to discuss sedition without fear of discovery.
This is one of the reasons despots persecute Freemasonry quickly, along with the other usual suspects. And lest you think this is the stuff of history, we should mention The DaVinci Code’s ominous outing of Francois Mitterrand, as well as a European Commission’s 1999 corruption scandal which—ultimately revealed to be a family spat between the Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Orient, played out in the press, and in EU bureaucracies, by proxy.
Dan Brown’s pedantic sock-puppet, Leigh Teabing, suggests Masonic, and other Occult organizations, exist subordinate to one Occult super-organization called the Priory of Sion, which is the real heir to the Knights Templar, and act as bodyguards to the Merovingian Christ family until they can be installed as the world’s rulers.
Most commentators believe the “Priory” is likely the work of a Dadaist hanger-on named Pierre Plantard, who crafted the Christ family tree, and, wonderfully, inserted himself in it. Chutzpah? I guess. Brown also suggests that the Church’s historical persecution of the Magdalene led the early followers of the tradition to merge the adoration of the sacred feminine—essentially a Western form of left-hand Tantra—into the memorial rites of Occult traditions.
I’m not sure I buy this, even as a fictional premise. One of the few consolations of eternal damnation is that you can spend your evenings engaging in acrobatic monkey-sex. One needn’t blame that on a grudge with Rome.
Brown’s premises, and large swaths of The DaVinci Code’s text, were outlined in 1983’s pseudohistory—really a bunch of tantalizing loose ends paired with leading questions—titled Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln. In this bestseller, the authors compiled amateur art criticism (The Last Supper, Et In Arcadia Ego), the elemental Templar legends, and Pierre Plantard’s masterpiece family-tree to argue that the “Holy Grail” of European legend was actually Mary Magdalene. They portray the Church’s antipathy to this notion as one of history’s greatest crimes, and one of history’s greatest conspiracies. Moreover, the purported Priory’s counter-conspiracy is equally complex and imperative: there is an Ultimate Royal Family, and a group of hooded mystical Ultimate Courtiers, waiting in the wings to assume the leadership of mankind.
Whether or not this is true, and I am very doubtful that it is, is completely irrelevant to the ultimate point. All of these organizations I have discussed to now exist, even Plantard’s shadowy Priory. If not legitimate, it exists because he made it up. The organizations are composed of actual people who have to get up out of beds, get dressed, and do things in the organizations’ names. This absolutely amazes me.
I am concerned, as far as small-c conspiracies go, with why Plantard and his Dada buddies would go to all the trouble to insinuate themselves into a long buried Templar legend about Jesus’ love life, if that’s what they did. Other than obvious profit motives, I am concerned with why Baigent and Leigh and Lincoln looked up Plantard and spun their beautiful bloody blasphemous yarn around his tale. Why, twenty years on, did America’s arguably shittiest writer essentially wrap a characterological frame around Holy Blood, Holy Grail? Why, five years from that, are we now talking about Plantard’s thesis by way of Howard and Granger? And why, at the end of it, are people so horny for this thing?
To be Continued.