A couple of years ago in early Summer of 2005, I got involved in helping a friend from Virginia investigate an old unsolved murder of a teenage girl, which occurred in her hometown of Reston in 1972. When I first began looking into the affair I had only a vague idea about where this town is even located, and knew next to nothing about the area. I was, however, already fairly involved in what can be loosely called "the Quest for the Holy Grail", and was familiar with a certain amount of material on the subject.
Imagine my surprise then, as I started familiarizing myself with the town of Reston, Virginia, when suddenly almost every piece of data in that murder investigation or about that town fitted perfectly into things I knew from before, to become a very pertinent pointer towards the Grail itself. This was a most unexpected turn of events. I ended up following the clues from there to eventually pinpoint what I can only call "the Historical Grail".
I had recently began summarizing my findings about the whole affair, and publishing them in installments on an obscure yahoogroup. The first ten chapters were devoted mostly to the murder investigation, and now I've began describing the actual Grail Quest. The first part of it is a reasonable summary of why I feel this Quest has so much to do with the State of Virginia, and I'm presenting it here for our readership.
The following is basically a reprint with a few paragraphs added, of a message that was posted on August 10, 2007 on a mailing list. This is actually Part 11 of the longer story which I called "The Reston Caper", but it can also stand on its own as Part 1 of the Grail Tale.
The Grail Tale Part I
How to look for the Grail
And now at last I will try to seriously lay my Grail Theory before you. Again, I wish to stress that the whole thing is based on suppositions and wild leaps of imagination, and I have very little "material proof" for any of it. That's what makes it so much fun.
So, we must start by briefly summarizing what do we actually know about the Grail, and also what we have learned about it from our Caper so far. Or rather - what I myself had learned, because this "little journey" is something widely disputed in the field of Grail Research.
We shall have to leave aside for the moment the most important yet highly controversial question of what the Grail actually *is*. This will have to be dealt with later of course, but shall possibly be easier to handle as we discover and agree about other aspects of this concept.
Sifting through the vast amount of Lore and Legend surrounding the Grail - we notice first of all, that a "Grail-like" quest has been recorded in the Myths of many cultures since dim antiquity. The actual term "Grail" came into wide use during the late Middle Ages with the publication of several heroic epics that referenced it as a magical artifact. But many other Seekers before then had reportedly gone looking after "that special something" - whether it was Alexander the Great with his "Spring of Youth", or King Gilgamesh in Ancient Sumer with his Quest for Knowledge and Immortality, or Setne son of Raamses II in Ancient Egypt, who went after the Book of Thoth following in the footsteps of an earlier explorer. (See excellent article from Fillip Coppens, "The Book of Thoth: the original and true Grail?") Even Abraham's journey from Haran south to Canaan as described in the Book of Genesis can be seen as a type of a similar Spiritual Quest.
Several common features of the "Grail Concept" stand out in all these tales. Originally it appears to have involved mostly Knowledge and Enlightenment, spiritual or intellectual (in the past the two were considered the same by most schools of thought.) The knowledge thus gained was to be used in order to better oneself and others, leading to what can be called "progress" and otherwise positive social developments.
Later the element of Morality was added into the story, and one's personal ethics began to be viewed as being very important, represented by making a Choice between several possible roads to follow, both physically and spiritually. These Ethical struggles became possibly the most prominent feature of the Medieval Grail Myth and the Arthurian Legend. This had led the Grail to have become identified in modern times entirely with the struggle of Good against Evil, and there, we must assume, it resides today.
The Grail Quest itself is basically identical to the famous "Hero's journey", widely encountered in all folklore, especially since the Crusades. It is a search for Personal Enlightenment - but the kind that should be used only to help or heal, and generally for the betterment of all mankind, in other words, "others". If instead it is used strictly for selfish purposes of attaining personal power and wealth, then the knowledge gained on this Quest is said to lead to the spiritual downfall or actual physical doom of the hero.
Obviously as we embark on this Quest, we first of all have to agree that there IS, in fact, such a thing as "The Grail". Let's say that we accept this, although as noted, there are probably as many "Grails" out there as there are researchers looking for them.
The next thing we absolutely must postulate, is that regardless of what the Grail is or may have become in Modern Times - there simply must exist some type of a "secret society" intent on keeping the Grail and its secrets safe since antiquity. Without the existence of such a group, all our findings in this regard are strictly coincidental and don't really mean much. "Somebody" would have had to have moved the Grail to all these different locations, somebody must've safeguarded it through generations, somebody left those clues for us to follow, and so on. To continue from here the way I propose, we have to agree that such a group does, in fact, exist, and it matters not what they may actually be called (if anything.)
Whether all such "secret groups" throughout history knew where or what the Grail is or not - is also immaterial. All such groups were primarily concerned with perpetuating a tradition of Ancient Mystical Knowledge, in the face of many attempts by various surrounding forces to suppress or destroy this knowledge. As such, all these groups were initially supposed to be following the "Grail Path", whether with the "actual" Grail itself, or merely with the idea of their own "Grail".
Most of these organizations had been professional guilds (like priests, architects, and stone-masons) who kept their professional secrets hidden from laymen for many reasons. For example, they did not want competition from would-be contenders, or for their knowledge to fall into hands of people who would misuse it. And most if not all of these groups were created with the expressed purpose of bringing Spiritual Enlightenment and Progress to the world in various forms.
Such societies have been in existence since the earliest times, and they usually became particularly popular during periods when local political regimes became oppressive or destructive - notably in Europe after the Middle Ages. In recent years it has become popular to link most groups of this kind with involvement in various types of sinister conspiracies. But the fact is that they have been demonized beyond all proportion by the very people whom they had opposed, and are not all deserving of such stigmatization. Because originally, they were all concerned in preserving Knowledge and its free and unobstructed exchange in the face of religious and popular persecution.
Regardless of what they may have eventually turned into, nearly all the known modern Secret Societies, from the Freemasons to the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale University, and even many "regular" college fraternities, go back to such origins. A similar society was also involved in safeguarding the Grail itself through the ages, and for want of a better name, I shall call them the "Grail Brotherhood" in our story.
And now, having agreed on all of the above, our search for the actual Grail will begin by accepting the theory put forward in recent times by the writers Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh in their 1982 non-fiction bestseller "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (HBHG). Their postulate was strongly supported by other notable Grail specialists like Laurence Gardner, and in 2003 was incorporated almost in its entirety into Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" (DVC). Two of the authors of HBHG even tried suing Brown for plagiarism - but his book was adjudged as "fiction", and thus exempt from such a charge.
According to the premise expounded by these researchers, the Grail is "something", which the Knights Templar had brought to Europe from Palestine sometime in mid 12th century CE. And this "something" afterwards suddenly made these Knights become for two hundred years the most powerful organization Europe has ever known, rivaled only by the modern European Union. The Templar wealth and power in its day superseded that of the Vatican, which understandingly felt very threatened by this, and with the help of the French King Philip IV eventually managed to destroy the Templar Order in the year 1307, in a surprise all-out attack.
But it appears that most of the Knights were never caught at that time, and they had basically vanished into thin air - along with the entire (and reportedly formidably large) Templar Fleet, and along with their fabled "Templar Treasure", none of which was ever found. In my opinion, HBHG *proves* that these "missing Knights" had found refuge in Scotland, and their treasure was buried in the place which later became the famed Roslyn Chapel.
So we shall basically be looking for the old "Templar Grail" in our tale. At this point, however, we shall part from Dan Brown's version of the story, and I only mention it because this is the most popular representation of this affair today. You'll recall that according to his theory as presented in the DVC, the Grail was later removed from Roslyn, and brought back to France, where it now reposes under the glass pyramid in the Louvre in Paris.
This conclusion just doesn't seem reasonable to me, based on what we know about the Grail. After the demise of the Templars in France, nobody in his right mind within the Grail Brotherhood would think of going back there, even three hundred years later.
The Myth of the Grail demands, that if this "object" be moved anywhere at all - it should be moved Forward to a Better Place, and not Back, to the Bad Place from which it had already had to be removed. One can go back to an old place only if some Major Change occurs there to overturn the old regime, which had persecuted you in the past.
This actually did happen in France during the Revolution of 1789 - but it was too late by then. As we shall elaborate in a moment, the Grail had to be moved from its location in Roslyn a century and a half before that, just when France was ruled by the tyrannical Louis XIV, famous for claiming that he himself is identical with the State which he governs.
But what made it necessary to move the Grail from Roslyn Chapel at all? The answer to that becomes obvious as we examine what had happened in its host countries of Scotland and England during the relevant period.
The above authors and others had named the Scottish royal dynasty of Stewart/Stuart as the "hereditary heads" of our Grail Brotherhood during its stay in Scotland. ("Stuart" is the French spelling of the name, which came into usage when Mary Stewart Queen of Scots was hiding in France from Queen Elizabeth I of England, in mid 16th century.) Accepting that this is so, the fate of the Stuart dynasty would be deeply intertwined with the Grail Story.
As it happens, a most prominent member of this dynasty, namely King Charles I, was the only King of England *ever* to be publicly executed while in office. This significant historical exception regarding such an important personage for the Grail, means that his execution must have been a MOST crucial turning point in the fate of the Grail. It occurred in January of 1649.
Something like the public beheading of their Chief by what can be termed a "Popular Revolutionary Government", would have certainly sent the rest of the Grail Fraternity into ;;a frenzy. It must have seemed to them just like the stories of the days when the Templars were being routed in France and their leader Jacques de Molay brutally murdered by the Inquisition three hundred and forty years earlier.
As has often been noted, a time of Revolution in one's country is a time when one simply does not know whom to trust. It is always a war of brother against brother, and when kinsmen fight among themselves - one's best friend can suddenly turn against you and go over to "the other side" one day. Charles I himself was the best example of this trend, when fleeing from Cromwell's forces he surrendered to the Scottish Parliament, hoping to get help from his old comrades. Instead they handed him right back to Cromwell on a platter, to be tried and executed.
It seems plainly obvious to me that the surviving lieutenants of Charles I from the Brotherhood had to have realized at that time, that the Grail simply cannot remain in its former hiding place in Roslyn. In fact I believe that they had realized this and first moved it even earlier, around 1646 or 7, when it was already painfully apparent that Cromwell is staging an Armed Rebellion, while the Scottish Presbyterian Parliament is likely to turn against the Catholic Stuarts.
France at that time was ruled by the opulent Bourbon Kings, who were particularly known for "oppressing the people" and abusing the right of "royal prerogative". Their behavior led to "The Fronde" popular revolts during the time of Louis XIV, and a century later to the French Revolution.
What primarily precluded the Grail from being moved back to France during the critical years of Cromwell's Revolution in England circa 1647-51, aside from the unyielding royal ambitions of Louis XIV, was the internal strife that this country was experiencing then. This is exactly when the First Fronde insurrections were taking place in France, and something like the Grail would never have been put in jeopardy again in a country with another Civil War, involving a great deal of nasty political intrigue (as aptly described by Alexander Dumas in the excellent "The Three Musketeers" with the wicked Cardinal Richelieu, which takes place around then.)
17th Century France was still very far from being the bastion of Intellectual Freedom that it became two hundred years later. Religious persecution and intolerance were the mainstay there - just like in England and Scotland, from which the Grail was being removed because of that. There can be no question that France did not "deserve" the Grail at that time - so it was never brought back there, not then, and probably not afterwards.
But if the Grail hadn't gone back to France, where was it taken? To understand what most likely happened then, I used my "Holistic Detection" method and combined two completely unrelated sources, which nonetheless both deal with the two King Charles's. The first was an Arthur Conan Doyle's short story called "The Musgrave Ritual", which deals with the crown of Charles I that was buried by "supporters of Charles II" and never found - as outlined in my old article on the subject.
One of the most curious aspects of that story, is that a woman whom Holmes set out to find in the beginning still remained missing at the end - something which very rarely happened to Sherlock Holmes. He never finds out what became of her, and the story ends with Holmes dreamily musing that she must have carried her secret to some "land beyond the seas". And it's a very good guess that he was talking about America - the land to which so many Englishmen had carried their dreams and secrets for several centuries.
Due to the Stuart connection and other blatantly "Masonic" features of "The Musgrave Ritual", it became apparent to me that this ostensibly innocuous detective mystery is describing nothing less than the actual fate of the Grail itself during the period of the succession transition between the beheaded Charles I and his son Charles II. Doyle was basically telling us here that the Grail was transported to the new colonies in America, when the troubling events of the English Revolution were taking place on the Isles.
The "Grail in America" theory is by no means new today, nor was it in Doyle's time (though certainly much less known then.) Its most famous proponent in the past century has been the well-known mystic philosopher Manly Hall. He offered many scholarly arguments in his "Secret Destiny of America" (1958), that the whole concept of the United States of America was created by members of the "Grail Brotherhood" who sought to build a Modern Utopia in a new, "virgin" territory. The existing "utopian" writings of noted 16th and 17th Century English mystical philosophers like John Dee and Francis Bacon greatly strengthen Hall's arguments in that regard.
There is of course also all the hype surrounding the "Oak Island Templar Treasure" in Nova Scotia, Canada. The trove was supposedly buried there by a member of the Sinclair (St. Clair) family, whose ancestor had built the Roslyn Chapel. This Scottish clan is connected with the "missing Templars" and especially their missing fleet, as has been aptly summarized in the excellent sequel by the authors of HBHG, "The Temple and the Lodge" from 1989. More pertinently, the Sinclairs have been recently named in the DVC as the actual hereditary descendants of Jesus himself no less, modern carriers of the "sacred royal blood", which that book identifies as the Holy Grail.
We shall largely leave that controversial issue aside in this work, as I feel that it makes little difference to our story whether they "really" are such, or are not. Because what clinched the "Grail in America" theory for me, was of course that curious reference in the history books of the State of Virginia. Which history books all say that the territory known as the Northern Neck in northern Virginia, was granted by Charles II to his loyal Seven Barons in the year 1649. The crucial year in English history, the year in which everybody knows that Charles II was not the King at all, and had no authority to make land grants.
I summarized my ideas about this matter in a later article called "Yes Virginia, there is a Sanity Clause". The bottom line there is what you have heard me repeat many times: Based on all the "Grail in America" theories and my findings from the "Musgrave Ritual", I had decided that the mentioned very strange reference in the history books, was the Big Hint which these people had purposely (or maybe even subconsciously) left for future researchers like myself, who still want to know whatever happened to "the Grail". This Hint was supposed to tell us that during Cromwell's Revolution the Grail was indeed taken to America, and hidden somewhere in Virginia.
To get a better idea of exactly where this may have been, I began studying the history and geography of Virginia and the surrounding region, trying to look for the type of "strange anomalies" which would ordinarily point the way to something as elusive and mysterious as our quarry. I learned that the land holdings of the Seven Barons were soon all bought out by the Culpeper family, and in early 18th Century were eventually inherited through marriage by one Thomas Fairfax, the Sixth Baron of Cameron. This man must therefore be considered to be at least something like the "local head" of the Grail Brotherhood, who would likely be at the very least "in the know" about where the Grail was hidden in Virginia.
That this is a very important player in the overall story becomes evident from the fact that Thomas Fairfax went on to become the patron of such notable Americans as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, whom he employed as land surveyors. He can thus be seen as nothing less than one of the leading forces behind the eventual establishment of the United States. Our town of Reston is of course located in Fairfax County, emphasizing the significance of this name and person in this overall story. And Fairfax County is of course located right outside the District of Columbia, the very Heart of America.
It is well known to anybody who has read stories of treasure hunters and hunts, that whenever an actual "treasure" is buried anywhere, many stories about buried treasure arise in the vicinity. This happens because something like that is very hard to keep completely under wraps - even the people most sworn to secrecy are liable to get really drunk one day and inadvertently mention something. The larger the trove and the more people involved in burying it, the bigger the chance of serious rumors being spread.
During the time of the Parliamentary Wars in England, there were several stories of buried treasure going around the general region of Worcester, where many Charles I supporters lived and Charles II himself hid during his ill-fated attempt to win the crown back from Cromwell. The "Musgrave Ritual" takes place around that area as well, which greatly strengthens my theory about the Grail actually being kept hidden there at the time. Because prior to its transport to America, it was first necessary to get it out of Presbyterian Scotland and out of harms way there.
There are also many notable treasure stories from Virginia - going as far back as the buried treasure of the Spaniards and the hidden cache of Captain Francis Drake. (And actually even earlier, to the local Indian tribes.) Then there is the famous "Lost Vaults of Francis Bacon", which a group known as "Sages of the Seventh Seal" is convinced is buried under the Bruton Church in Williamsburg. This was believed to be true even by such people as Manly Hall and his wife Marie. Later there is the well-known "Beale Treasure". Still later from the Civil War period, there is the story of the "lost treasure from Seven Corners".
Such a large abundance of treasure stories leaves little doubt that "something big" was definitely buried in that area, and possibly moved once or twice afterwards. Exactly where it was hidden is another story, which we shall have to leave for another chapter.
Before parting however, there is one other marked possibility which should also be taken into account, as there is a lot of supporting evidence for it, and it very likely also forms an important part of the Grail's adventures in modern times.
I thought about how one might go about hiding something as important as the Grail during a time when Trust was a big issue. It seemed reasonable that the best possible way to do it would be to split it into parts, and send them all in different directions, so that one part doesn't know about the others at all (with perhaps just clues left to connect them all together.)
Assuming that "our Grail" is a type of "something" which indeed CAN be split in parts, there is a good possibility that one such "part" actually *did* go back to France - though most likely not during the time of the Bourbons, for reasons listed above. It likely remained hidden somewhere in England for a while, and went back to France a century and some later, during the French Revolution.
According to the general "Grail Theory", the country or place where the Grail reposes becomes a location of great importance and power, spawning Great Ideas which change Humanity. France certainly experienced such a period during the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which followed it. These events basically put an end to the Religious Hegemony in Europe, and spawned most of the philosophies of "Enlightened Rationalism" by which our world is governed today. They've had a most far-reaching influence and in fact changed all our lives forever - so there's a good possibility that there really was "a Grail" in France at that time.
This "French Grail" would've been the one discovered by Abbe Berenger Sauniere in late 19th Century in Rennes le Chateau, the one that the writers of HBHG based all their theories on. So they probably got that part of it right as well - seeing as I've basically decided they got everything else right.
The French Direction would be another fascinating avenue to pursue. But if "a Grail" indeed did go to France as supposed, then subsequent world events of the 20th Century would seem to be telling us for certain that it's no longer there. France began rapidly losing its global importance soon after World War I, and was relatively easily subdued by Germany during World War II. The Grail certainly couldn't have been in France during the Vichy Regime!
The very marked decline in France's global power and influence most likely serves to show that "their part" of the Grail was removed from there sometime in early 20th Century, and was instead brought over to another European country, which suddenly started gaining overwhelming and unprecedented importance during that time - Russia.
But I myself followed the Grail in the exact opposite direction - America.