Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

Leonardo was allegedly a member of the Priory of Sion and knew the secret of the Grail. In The Last Supper the figure seated on Christ's right is not a man, but a woman, his wife Mary Magdalene. Most reproductions of the work are supposedly from a later alteration that obscured her obvious female characteristics.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The androgyny of the Mona Lisa reflects the sacred union of male and female implied in the holy union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Such parity between the cosmic forces of masculine and feminine has long been a deep threat to the established power of the Church.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The name Mona Lisa is actually an anagram for "Amon L'Isa", referring to the father and mother gods of Ancient Egyptian religion.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The novel was much criticized for its historical inaccuracies and distortions, and Brown had to contend with lawsuits from various parties who claimed he’d used their ideas.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In The Sign and the Seal, Graham Hancock goes further still, and asserts that the Grail story is a coded description of the Ark of the Covenant itself.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The book narrates the endeavors of the writer in searching for the Ark of the Covenant and proposes the theory that the ark was removed from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem by temple priests around 650 BC.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

This was during the reign of the evil King Manasseh of Judah, who worshiped false idols.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

According to Hancock it then spent about 200 years in a purpose-built temple in Elephantine, Egypt before it was removed around 470 BC to Ethiopia via tributaries to the Nile River, where it was kept on the sacred island of Tana Qirqos in Lake Tana for about eight hundred more years as the center of a strong Jewish community there.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

It finally came into the hands of the young Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the 5th century, who took it to their capital of Axum, and it supposedly remains there until today in the tiny Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Ethiopian Church believes that the Ark is indeed held today in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, but as opposed to the book, they believe that it was brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I,

 

[Flex Mentallo]

after it was stolen from Solomon's Temple during the reign of King Solomon himself, some 200 years earlier than the events proposed by the book.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The book also claims that the Knights Templar searched for the lost Ark of the Covenant at the site of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in the 13th century.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Until they apparently figured out that the Ark was in Ethiopia, so they then sent a contingent there supposedly with the goal of acquiring it.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Ethiopian Church, fearful of losing the Ark to the Knights Templar, sent emissaries in 1306 to Pope Clement V; the Catholic Church's fear of the Knights Templar acquiring the power of the Ark of the Covenant, the book claims, is one of the reasons why Pope Clement V began prosecution and arrest of the Knights Templar in 1307.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

It is said that Jacques de Molay 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, cursed King Philip IV of France and the pope from his execution pyre. Both were dead within the year.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Other stories claim that the Grail lies deep in the spring at Glastonbury Tor.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Or that it was hidden by the Templars in Oak Island, Nova Scotia's famous "Money Pit".

 

[Flex Mentallo]

While local folklore in Accokeek, Maryland says that it was brought to the town by a closeted priest aboard Captain John Smith's ship.

 

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[Flex Mentallo]

It was the adventurer Smith who helped found Jamestown and was allegedly saved from death by Pocahontas not long after.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Turn of the century accounts state that Irish partisans of the Clan Dhuir transported the Grail to the United States during the 19th Century and the Grail was kept by their descendants in secrecy in a small abbey in the upper-Northwest (now believed to be Southern Minnesota).