The Akbar-Nama of Abu-el-Fazl; translated from Farsi
(ancient Persian) by H. Beveridge, New Delhi: It is well known that Adam was born miraculously with curling white hair, and fair, wheaten-colored skin. He was the world's first great Uriah (teacher) Why would they mention that Adam had white hair? Noah was also born with white hair, and Seth and Ham, and Sarah (Sarasvati to Hindus). If Jesus were fair complexioned, this would appear to be an inherited family trait. Could it be a genetic trait; or a genetic error, Looking at the mummies of Egypt on the Ethiopian page, who were Jesus' grandparents, they look more 'European'. In The British Isles, they were known as Teselphas-Essenes who bore the title Gew-ISSAE (from the Celtic land of Gewissae). It is the writers theory that the family of Jesus had their roots and family ties in the Himalayas, where they were descended from the Tocharians (link below) that once dominated that area.

Rev. Lionel S. Lewis in his book, St. Joseph of Aramathea at Glastonbury states:The pedigree of Jesus' immediate family is startling. Anna, Jesus' grandmother, was mother not only of Mary, but later also of Penardin (a Cornish name) who married King Lear. Regarding Mother Mary's husband Joseph, he was descended from the matriarchal family of Obali (Croazia,Celt-Irish) and was chosen to be the guardian of Mary and Jesus. The family was also directly linked with Helen of Troy. For further reading, please obtain The Holy Land of Scotland by Barry Dunford

In Genesis 14, Abraham is given the pseudonym of Shem-eber king of Zeboiim (Memphis). Shemeber is translated as "Illustrious." However, it is also a compound name comprised of Shem (Sabium) and Eber (Hammurabi). These two ancestors were not only kings, but also masters of the sciences, law and philosophy . Abraham was placed in their company, not only with respect to wisdom, but also in kingship. Zeboiim, that is Memphis, (Avaris) was the ancient seat of kingship and wisdom in Egypt. (Ref: Living in Truth: Archaeology and the Patriarchs by Charles N. Pope)

They were said to have begun with a small group of nine French Knights vowing to protect the Holy Land. They were installed in Baldwin’s palace at the site of Solomon’s Temple. When Baldwin moved to the Tower of David, the Temple quarters were given over entirely to the Templars. They were relatives and members of the ruling families of the time. Deep beneath the Temple were the stables of King Solomon, untouched since ancient times and said to be large enough to hold 2,000 horses. It was also rumored to contain the Ark of the Covenant and the original Ten Commandments. However, what the Templars most wanted were another set of Tablets said to be written by God for Moses, these were said to be engraved with the ‘Table of Testimonies’-The Cosmic Equation, the divine laws of numbers, measures, and weights.

The mystical art of reading the inscriptions was the cryptic system devised called the Cabbala (Kaballah). The Ark itself, plated in gold, was actually thought to be an electrical conductor. One of these duplicates may have been in Jerusalem, the other at Axum, Ethiopia. The origional Ark is believed to be in Egypt under the paw of the Sphinx.

Huge amounts of gold and wealth were also removed by the Templars, as revealed in the Copper Scrolls discovered in 1956. It is important to point out here that the Crusades were not just wantonly begun as mindless aggression against Muslims. The Muslims had been ruthlessly attacking and invading surrounding lands, leaving death and destruction everywhere. It was the few survivors who had cried out for help that led to the crusades. Realizing if they didn’t protect Jerusalem, their ancestral home, then their heritage here too would be destroyed; the first crusades were the very first attempt of the Hebrews and Christians to work together to protect what was always theirs! King David even had the original deed to these lands..

Gondemar and Rosal were Cistercian monks who were now just transferring their allegiance. Many would simply see this transfer as one that took place between the monastic and the military arm of the same order, for the Cistercians and the Knights Templar were so closely linked by ties of blood, patronage and shared objectives that many Templar scholars believe that they were two arms from the same body.

Whether or not Hugh de Champagne was directly involved in the actual founding of the Knights Templar is a decision we will leave to scholars of far greater wisdom than ourselves. Whatever the truth may prove to be, two things are certain. Firstly the count of Champagne was at the very least a prime mover behind the scenes even if he is not to be numbered among the original nine founding knights. Secondly, all those involved in both founding and promoting the Order were linked by a complex web of direct family relationships.

The main reason given for the founding of the Order, to protect the pilgrim routes, does not bear any close examination whatsoever for the first ten or twelve years of the Order's existence. It would have been a physical impossibility for nine middle-aged knights to protect the dangerous route from Jaffa to Jerusalem from all the bandits and marauding infidels who believed that the pilgrims who provided such easy pickings, were a gift from God. The recorded actions of the knights make this an even more incredible scenario, for they did not patrol the dangerous roads of the Holy Land to protect the pilgrims, but spent nine years in the dangerous and demanding task of excavating and mining a series of tunnels under their quarters on the Temple Mount. These arduous tasks were completed with the patronage and support of the King of Jerusalem.

The tunnels mined by the Templars were re-excavated in 1867, by Lieutenant Warren of the Royal Engineers. The access tunnel descends vertically downwards for eighty feet through solid rock before radiating in a series of minor tunnels horizontally under the site of the ancient temple itself. Lieutenant Warren failed to find the hidden treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem, but in the tunnels excavated so laboriously by the Templars, they found a spur, remnants of a lance, a small Templar cross and the major part of a Templar sword. These artefacts are now preserved for posterity by the Templar archivist for Scotland, Robert Brydon of Edinburgh.

Until very recently these legends received short shrift from academic historians, but that situation is undergoing considerable change. One modern archeological discovery tends to support the speculative scenario that the Templars knew where to look and precisely what they were seeking.. The Copper Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Quamran, tends to confirm not only the objective of the Templar excavations but also, albeit indirectly, gives some credence to the bizarre concept of the transmission of knowledge through the generations that led to the Templar's discoveries in Jerusalem. The next page covers the finds they may have made.

The Order of Sion

To the south of Jerusalem looms the 'high hill' of Mount Sion. By 1099 an abbey had been built on the ruins of an old Byzantine basilica at the express command of Godfroi de Buoillon. According to one chronicler, writing in 1172, it was extremely well fortified, with its own walls, towers and battlements. And this structure was called the Abbey of Notre Dame du Mont de Sion.

One foundation story claimed that the Templars’ founder, Hugues de Payens, encountered a Johannite “Order of the East” that retained Jesus teachings-presumably because he took them from his teacher, the Baptist, but ultimately deriving from the mystery schools of Egypt- passed on to his disciple John the Evangelist. Of course this is basically the same as the Priory’s story, except that in theirs Godefroy de Bouillon takes the place of Hugues de Payens.

Although this is very interesting, unfortunately it is impossible follow up. No one knows the origins of the Order of the Temple's story - usually it is assumed that the founder simply made it although at the very least they seem to have woven earlier traditions gether into a coherent narrative. However, the Priory’s second foundation myth is more revealing.

By 19 July 1116, the name of the Ordre de Sion was already appearing on official charters and documents. We (LBL) found another charter, dated 1152 and bearing the seal of King Louis VII of France, which conferred upon the Order it first major seat in Europe, at Orleans. We found a later charter, dated 1178 and bearing the seal of Pope Alexander III, which confirmed certain land holdings of the Order not only in the Holy Land, but in France, Spain and throughout the Italian peninsula - in Sicily, in Naples, in Calabria, In Lombardy.
Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy

Near the end of the thirteenth Century a separate detachment of Templars was sent from the Aragonese province of Rossillon to the Rennes-le-Château area in southern France [the old Cathar stronghold]. This fresh detachment established itself on the summit of the mountain of Bezu, erecting a lookout post and a chapel. Alone of all the Templars in France, they were left unmolested by Philippe le Bel's seneschals on October 13, 1307. On that fateful day the commander of the Templar contingent at Bezu was a Seigneur de Goth. And before taking the name of Pope Clement V, the archbishop of Bordeaux - King Philippe's vacillating pawn - was Bertrand de Goth. Moreover, the new pontiff's mother was Ida de Blanchefort, of the same family as Bertrand de Blanchefort [the fourth Grand Master of the Order of the Temple]. Was the pope then privy to some secret entrusted to the custody of his family?
Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, Holy Blood Holy Grail

In documents dating from 1619, it [the Order of Sion] was stated to have incurred the displeasure of King Louis XIII of France, who evicted them from their seat at Orleans and turned the premises over to the Jesuits. After that, the Prieure de Sion [the Order of Sion] seemed to vanish from the historical record, at least under that name, until 1956, when it appeared again, registered in the French Journal officiel.
Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy

According to the Priory of Sion’s original story, between 1188 and beginning of the fourteenth century, it was known as the Ormus, which is what it called itself exclusively for its first public appearance in 1962. The society was said to have come into being as a result of the mysterious cutting of the elm (orme) ritual at Gisors in 1188. They also said the Rosicrucians emerged from the higher grades of the Ormus.

The name Ormus was actually taken from the lore and tradition an earlier society, the Rite of Memphis, one of the Egyptian Rites Freemasonry. (Some commentators believe that Ormus is a form of name of the Zoroastrian creator-god Ohrmazd, a later version of Ahura Mazda. Perhaps it was originally, but in these traditions the name became associated with Egypt rather than Persia.)

The first of the Egyptian rites was the Rite of Misrairn (Hebrew “Egyptians”), created in Italy in the 1780s before spreading to Egypt and then being taken to France in 1813 by the three Bédarride brothers (Joseph, Marc, and Michel). However, as it was denounced by the Grand Orient as a danger to state security, attracting the unwanted attention the police, it wound itself up in January 1823, and most of its leaders joined Scottish Rite Freemasonry. After keeping a low profile for a few years started up again in the early 1830s.

The Rite of Memphis was originally a lodge within Misraim, having been established in Montauban in 1815 by Freemasons who had previ­ously belonged to the French Mission to Egypt and who claimed to have been initiated into a Coptic Rosicrucian tradition in Cairo. (This is probably true, except that the society they were initiated into seems to have been a recent import from Italy.) One of this hand was Gabriel Mathieu Marconis de Negre-from the same family as the last Dame of Rennes-le-Château-who was elected Grand Master of the Rite of Misraim in 1816.

However, the Rite of Memphis was established as a separate system in 1838 or ‘39 by Gabriel’s son, Jacques Etienne Marconis de Negre, after he had been expelled twice from Misraim (once under the name Marconis and once as de Nègre). He gave the Rite its own structure, exporting it to the United States and elsewhere. (Inevitably, being so similar, the two Rites were later united into the single Rite of Memphis-­Misraim, the main figure behind this being no less than the hero of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi. The rites had, and still have, a large following in Italy. In 1908 Papus became the Grand Master of Memphis-Misraim in France, a position he held until his death eight years later.)

Jacques-Etienne Marconis de Nègre associated his order with the Philadelphes of Narbonne, created by the Marquis de Chefdebien d’Armissan, which was in turn very closely connected to - basically an offshoot of the ubiquitous Rectified Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

Not unexpectedly, Marconis de Negre presented an elaborate foundation myth for his society, probably to be understood only as a metaphorical description of its esoteric, spiritual, and philosophical streams of thought. According to de Negre, the movement began with an Egyptian priest of Serapis (a later Hellenistic repackaging of the dying -and-rising god Osiris) named Ormus, who was converted to Christianity by the apostle Mark and founded the Brothers of Ormus to perpetuate this hybrid form of the Egyptian mysteries and Christianity. Soon afterward, a third stream, a Jewish school of ”Solomonic science,” formed from various sects, including the Essenes, joined the Brothers of Ormus. The Brothers of Ormus were also known as the Rosicrucians of the East (Rose-Croix d’Orient), so Ormus and Rosicrucians are linked - just as in the Priory of Sion’s version. The secret Brotherhood continued in the Middle East until the time of the Crusades, when its priests were encountered by the leaders of the Templars, who took doctrines back to Europe: this was the secret “heresy” of the Templars. It was from this stream that the Rite of Memphis claimed descent.

Of course this is essentially the same scenario as in the Priory's Church of John foundation story (and the revived Order of the Temple “Johannites of the East”), although the details are a little different. In Memphis version there is no overt Johannitism, and in the Priory version Godefroy de Bouillon takes the role of all the Templar leaders.

According to The Ritual of the A. & A. Egyptian Rite of Memphis in the I880s, the eighteenth degree of the Rite of Memphis, or “Rose Cross,” “was founded in 1188, in Palestine by the Egyptian Priest Comesius, who had been converted to Christianity,” making another parallel with Priory lore. Although the details are different-it takes place in the Middle East, not northern France. Certain major associations are present. Key concepts in the Priory’s mythos - link between Ormus, the Rosicrucians, and the year 1188 - were there in “traditions” of the Rite of Memphis long before the Dossiers Secrets. However, the Ormus tale was not even original to Marconis de Neg who borrowed it from the German Order of the Gold and Rose Cross. (Gold and Rosenkreutz)

Interestingly, while rejecting allegations that the Priory of Sion is a Masonic system or is affiliated with the Freemasons, Gino Sandri knowledges that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Priory was behind the creation of certain forms of Freemasonry that were to act as its “exterior circle” (although he says the Priory later cast them loose to follow their own paths), specifically naming the Rite of Memphis. Sandri explains that the Priory created Memphis and, by implication, the other orders connected with it, as fronts. But in fact the Priory borrowed the myth of Ormus from Memphis, not the other way round. The evidence strongly suggests that Sandri’s whole statement is also a reversal: these Orders created the Priory as a front.
The Sion Revelation - Lynn Picknett Clive Prince

"Godfroi was, by legend, a member of the Grail Family, and by lineage a Merovingian and apparently, rightful King of Jerusalem by his descent from David. It is clear that he was aware of this. When he left for the first crusade, he sold all of his property. He intended to stay in Jerusalem. Godfroi was close to de Payen and the count of Champagne, and Baudoin [his brother] was integral to the founding of the Templars."
J.J. Collins, "Sangraal, The Mystery of the Holy Grail"

It has been alleged that Hughes de Payens, first Grand Master of the Knights Templar, had been inducted into the Johannites, a sect which chose John the Baptist as their prophet. According to the Dossiers Secrets, each of the alleged Grand Masters of the Prieure de Sion took the name Jean in succession (supposedly influencing the name chosen by Pope John XXIII). One of the Grand Masters on the list, Leonardo da Vinci, displayed a strong interest in John the Baptist. Another, Sir Isaac Newton, became preoccupied with the writings of the Apocalypse, then attributed to John the Evangelist.

What intrigues us most is that these writings are attributed to being that of 'the disciple that Jesus loved'. Is this disciple actually Mary Magdalene? We explain this in our Jesus series.

As the Magdalene story goes; After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70A.D., there were Nazarene priests that fled to Greece and from there they scattered throughout Europe. We have two directions of travel, at the least when we are dealing with the Merovingians. One up through the Danube route, to Switzerland, to the Rhineland, to Flanders. The other, across the Mediterranean, to Southern France.

Mary Magdelene's tomb is indeed in France and we cover that in our 'Jesus' series.

Hughes de Payens, also from Champagne, was a member of a cadet branch of the Counts of Troyes.

To elaborate on this; They themselves claimed descent from Noah whom they regarded, even more than Moses, as the source of all biblical wisdom—an interesting position, which surfaced again thousands years later in European Freemasonry. The Merovingians also claimed direct descent from ancient Troy — which, whether true or not, would serve to explain the occurrence in France of Trojan names like Troyes and Paris. More contemporary writers—including the authors of the Prieurd documents’ ‘— have endeavored to trace the Merovingians to ancient Greece, and specifically to the region known as Arcadia. According to these documents the ancestors the Merovingians were connected with Arcadia’s royal house. At some unspecified date toward the advent of the Christian era they supposedly migrated up the Danube, then up the Rhine, and established themselves in what is now western Germany.

Whether the Merovingians derived ultimately from Troy or from Arcadia would now seem to be academic, and there is not necessily a conflict between the two claims. According to Homer a substantial contingent of Arcadians was present at the siege of Troy. According to early Greek histories Troy was in fact founded settlers from Arcadia. It is also worth noting in passing that the bear, in ancient Arcadia, was a sacred animal—a totem on mystery cults were based and to which ritual sacrifice was made Indeed, the very name Arcadia derives from “Arkades,” which means “People of the Bear.” The ancient Arcadians claimed descent from Arkades, the patron deity of the land, whose name means “bear.” According to Greek myth, Arkas was the son Callisto, a nymph connected with Artemis the huntress. To the modern mind Callisto is most familiar as the constellation Ursa Major—the Great Bear.

For the Sicambrian Franks, from whom the Merovingians issued, the bear enjoyed a similar exalted status. Like the ancient Arcadians they worshiped the bear in the form of Artemis—or, more specifically, the form of her Gallic equivalent, Arduina, patron goddess the Ardennes. The mystery cult of Arduina persisted well into Middle Ages, one center of it being the town of Lunéville, not far from two other sites recurring repeatedly in our investigation—Sten and Orval. As late as 1304 statutes were still being promulgated the Church forbidding worship of the heathen goddess.

Given the magical, mythic, and totemic status of the bear in Merovingian heartland of the Ardennes, it is not surprising that name “Ursus”—Latin for “bear”—should be associated in 'Prieure documents" with the Merovingian royal line.
Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh Holy Blood Holy Grail pb p238

The Merovingian dynasty issued from the Sicambrians, a tribe of the German people collectively known as the Franks. Between the fifth and seventh centuries the Merovingians ruled large parts of what are now France and Germany. The period of their ascendancy coinsides with the period of King Author - a period that constitutes the setting for the romances of the Holy Grail. It is probabably the most impenetrable period of what are now called the Dark Ages. Holy Blood Holy Grail

Further investigation produced the Merovee who was a chieftian, alive in 417, who fought under the Romans and died in 438. It has been suggested by at least one modern expert on the period that this Merovee actually visited Rome and caused something of a sensation. There is certainly a record of a visit by an imposing Frankish leader conspicious for his flowing yellow hair. In 448 the son of this first Merovee, bearing the same name as his father, was proclaimed king of the Franks at Tournai and reigned until his death ten years later. He may have been the first official king of the Franks as a united people. By virtue of this, perhaps, or of whatever was symbolized by his fabulous dual birth, the dynasty that suceeded him has since been called Merovingian.
Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh Holy Blood Holy Grail p240