In the pre-dawn hours of Friday, the 13th of October, 1307, King Phillip "the Fair" of France, with the full knowledge and blessing of his lackey in Rome, Pope Clement V, attempted to round up and exterminate the then 200-year-old chivalric order of warrior monks known as the Knights Templar. The barbarity of the methods subsequently used to extract confessions to such charges as heresy, blasphemy, sorcery and sodomy, has become the stuff of legend, and Friday the 13th has been considered unlucky ever since. Continue reading Reader of the Lost Stone-->

Perhaps no battle in history has been written about more passionately and at greater length than the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn. Without that great battle Scotland may never have managed to shake off the yoke of English domination, may therefore never have established a true national identity, and so would never have birthed the stirring Declaration of Arbroath which was, in the opinion of many, the model for America’s own Declaration of Independence. Continue reading The Mystery of Bannockburn-->

My “Mystery of Bannockburn” article, published in Atlantis Rising issue 31, proposed that the great 1314 battle for Scottish independence had been stage-managed by a clandestine brotherhood that stood on both sides of the battleline, and had been forever fixed in time as an event of great symbolic significance by uncannily mirroring a simultaneous encounter in the heavens above. Continue reading The Star-Spangled Banner-->

Egyptian tycoon Mohamed al Fayed, owner of Harrods and father to Dodi, Princess Diana’s companion in their fatal 1997 car crash, has listed his ten favorite books on the Manchester Guardian’s website. One of them is “The Scotichronicon: A History Book for Scots,” described simply as “Scotland’s debt to Egypt revealed at last.” Continue reading The Pyramids of Scotland-->

Rosslyn Chapel sits just six miles south of Edinburgh, Scotland's ancient capital city. Built in the 15th century by Earl William St. Clair of Rosslyn, the chapel has become one of the most mysterious and controversial buildings on Earth. Recent years have seen the controversy reach fever pitch as an adversarial band of alternate-history researchers, freemasonic "seekers of light," and treasure hunters vie to unlock the secrets they feel are hidden within the chapel walls. Continue reading Secrets of Rosslyn Chapel-->

On May 30, 1431, a young girl was burned alive for heresy and witchcraft in Rouen, France. According to one account of the day, when she had succumbed to the flames the fire “was raked back, and her naked body shown to all the people, and all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubts from people’s minds. When they had stared long enough at her dead body bound to the stake, the executioner got a big fire going again round her poor carcass, which was soon burned, both flesh and bone reduced to ashes.” Continue reading Joan of Arc Revealed-->

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has done what many "alternative history" researchers wish they'd done: written a blockbuster mystery which presents to an enormous audience theories that fly in the face of mainstream history—and made a great deal of money doing it, dammit! Continue reading A Crack in The Da Vinci Code-->

France’s Mary of Guise liked a good joke. When England’s King Henry VIII proposed marriage, Mary quipped that her neck was too slender—a cutting reference to the beheading of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. Mary married Scotland’s James V, instead, and in 1542 gave birth to that nation’s best-known monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, just a week before James died. And in 1546, during her daughter’s minority reign, Mary made a curious “bond” with Sir William St. Clair of Rosslyn. Continue reading Rosslyn Chapel Revisited-->

Anytime I find myself back in Scotland I try to spend at least one day in North Berwick, a picturesque coastal town about 20 miles to the east of Edinburgh. The views of the offshore islands are glorious. The gulls cry, the waves lap, and it's a great place to sample some of the fine local seafood. It is also one of the strangest places on the face of the planet. Continue reading Incident at North Berwick-->

I paid my annual visit to Scotland's Rosslyn Chapel on March 22, and while I fully expected it to be a bit busier than it should have been at that early date, nothing prepared me for the sight that met my eyes as I drove near. Every space in front of the visitor's center was taken, and the small auxiliary parking lot was close to full. Continue reading Rosslyn Chapel's Guardian Angels-->

Numbered among The New York Times' top-ten books of 2005, Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting describes the search for an Italian Baroque masterpiece by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio that had been missing for centuries. The search for Caravaggio's "The Taking of Christ" is a fascinating journey through the little-known worlds of art historians, collectors, dealers, curators, and restorers, which alone make Harr's excellent book well worth the read. But there are other, darker worlds left undiscovered in the book. This article is about those worlds. Continue reading Beyond the Lost Caravaggio-->

In "Return to Rosslyn Chapel," published in Atlantis Rising #48, I revealed my discovery of a Lorraine Cross encoded in Rosslyn's five-course vaulted ceiling. Wayne Herschel, author of 2003's "The Hidden Records," has now added another layer to the mystery by claiming that a Vitruvian Man, a symbol made much of in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," is also encoded there. His claim has led me to Rosslyn’s darkest secret. Continue reading Rosslyn Chapel’s Darkest Secret-->

On April 30, 2007, Scotland’s newspaper of record, The Scotsman, published a short article headlined “Musical Secret Uncovered in Chapel Carvings,” about a father-and-son team of Edinburgh musicians, Tommy and Stuart Mitchell, who claimed to have “found a secret piece of music hidden in carvings at Rosslyn Chapel.” It was, Stuart said, like finding a “compact disc from the 15th century.” Continue reading The Rosslyn Motet: Rosslyn Chapel's Music Code-->

The Internet has become the long and investigative arm of Everyman, and in no field of inquiry is this more apparent than in genealogy. The new breed of genealogical cybersleuth has shown that ordinary people share an abiding interest in their past, where they came from, and how they got where they are today. Continue reading The Pyramids of Scotland Revisited-->