Central to many recent theories about secret societies, the Sinclairs are a Scottish aristocratic family of Norman extraction – their name was originally St Clair – with a historical connection to Scottish stonemasonry. In the Middle Ages, certain noble families had the right to supervise and judge disputes among members of particular professions; thus, for example, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, had supervision of all minstrels in England at the end of the fourteenth century, and the Dutton family had similar rights over all minstrels in the county of Chester in the sixteenth. The Sinclairs apparently had the same authority over stonemasons in late medieval lowland Scotland. Their position was not unique – the Coplands of Udoch had supervision over stonemasons in the shires of Aberdeen, Banff, and Kincardine, for example – but it was well enough established in tradition in the early seventeenth century that one branch of the Sinclair family was able to gain the backing of Scottish stonemasons’ lodges in two attempts to re-establish their rights over the craft. The Sinclairs were also patrons of one of the masterpieces of Scottish medieval architecture, the famous Rosslyn Chapel. See lodge; Rosslyn Chapel.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the family reached its zenith, as three successive Sinclairs became Earls of Orkney and may have had connections through the north Atlantic fishing trade with early transatlantic voyages. According to a near-contemporary account the second of them, Henry Sinclair, crossed the Atlantic to what is now New England in 1398. This may explain the apparent presence of New World plants in the decorations of Rosslyn Chapel, commissioned by Henry Sinclair’s son less than 50 years later. See America, discovery of.
The hereditary rights of the Sinclairs over Scottish masons lapsed with the transformation of Scottish stonemasons’ lodges into modern Freemasonry in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1736, at the establishment of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, William Sinclair of Roslin formally relinquished all rights over Masonry. In return, the members of Grand Lodge made him Scotland’s first elected Grand Master for a term of one year. See Freemasonry; grand lodge.
The retrospective transformation of the Sinclairs from a minor family of Scottish nobility to a focus of contemporary secret society literature began in the early 1960s, when Pierre Plantard wove their position in early Scottish Freemasonry into the tapestry of disinformation he created for his own secret society, the Priory of Sion. Plantard claimed to be descended from the Merovingian kings of early medieval France, and presented the Priory, which he had founded in 1956, as an ancient secret society that lay behind the Knights Templar and Freemasons. As part of his campaign, he added “de St Clair” to his name and claimed the Sinclairs as one branch of his imaginary Merovingian connection. Along with the rest of Plantard’s inventions, this material was picked up by Henry Lincoln and his co-authors and included in their bestselling book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). See Disinformation; Priory of Sion.
Once launched into the world of contemporary conspiracy literature, the Sinclairs quickly found themselves bedecked retrospectively with historically questionable honors and titles. One popular account, for example, insists that the Sinclairs had been the hereditary masters of all Scottish craft guilds, and traces their ancestry back to an imaginary group of 24 hereditary High Priests of the Temple of Jerusalem. Fundamentalist conspiracy-hunters, for their part, eagerly assigned the Sinclairs to the Satanic “black nobility” who figure prominently in current speculations about the New World Order. See New World Order; Rex Deus.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006