The Blood of Avalon: The Secret History of the Grail Dynasty from King Arthur to Prince William by Adrian Gilbert

Author:Adrian Gilbert [Adrian Gilbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2018-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

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* See Chart 9: The Herbert Earls of Pembroke and the Sidney Family, page 232

CHAPTER 23

The Tree of Jesse

At this point I had no answer to the Rosicrucian question, so I took a few pictures of the tombs and slabs, and then, leaving the Herberts to their eternal slumbers, I crossed over to the north side of the church. Here, there were one or two more tombs, but there was also something else that I later discovered is unique to this church. For lying on one side, his hand around the stump of a tree, was an enormous, wood-carved statue of Jesse, the Father of the biblical King David. The stump was a reference to the way that the family tree of Jesse had been hacked down at the time of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC . The Bible tells us how the Babylonians beheaded the sons of Zedekiah, the last King of Judah, who was then blinded and taken in chains to Babylon. This was, or so it was assumed at the time, the end of the Royal House of David, the ‘stump’ of Jesse representing his felled family tree. *

The statue itself was about eight feet long and it was carved out of one large log. From the church guidebook, I learned that it would originally have had a tree-like stem rising from the side of the stump, and that this would have had other, smaller statues in its branches. These statues would have represented the ancestors of Jesus Christ, the reason for this being a prophecy contained in the Book of Isaiah:

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