The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail, or Lincoln's Links and Plantard's Plans

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Damsel of the Sanct Grael, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1969, while on holiday in rural France, Henry Lincoln, an actor and writer for British television who had recently penned some scripts for Doctor Who, happened to read a fascinating little memoir in French, half travel guide and half buried treasure mystery, called in translation The Gold of Rennes, or The Cursed Treasure of  Rennes-le-Château, by Gérard de Sède. Thus was he initiated into a mystery that had long fascinated many in France, though few knew of it beyond that country’s borders.

The mystery of Rennes-le-Château, a sleepy little hilltop town in the Languedoc region of southern France between the Cevennes and Pyrenees Mountains, revolves around a priest named Bérenger Saunière, who began in 1885 to serve as the priest of the church at Rennes-le-Château, which was dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Saunière was poor, as was his church, which was in need of repair, but somehow, within twenty years, he managed to come into great wealth and rebuilt the church as well as his own estate in a lavish manner. The mystery, then, was and still remains the source of Bérenger Saunière’s fortune, which has never been satisfactorily explained and thus has spawned many a legend. According to Gérard de Sède’s book, Saunière discovered four parchments in a hollow pillar while restoring his church. Two of these were genealogies, and the other two were ciphers. Saunière took the parchments to Paris, where he had them deciphered and then promptly bought some reproductions of certain paintings from the Louvre, paintings that were somehow important to the secret he possessed: among them The Shepherds of Arcadia by Nicholas Poussin as well as a painting by David Teniers, the Younger, featuring St. Anthony. These elements of the mystery would be much dwelt upon by Henry Lincoln, but what he found truly tantalizing about Gérard de Sède’s book was that the author claimed to have somehow come into possession of Saunière’s parchment ciphers and even reproduced them, and Lincoln managed quite easily to crack the simplest of them, which after its decipherment reads: “To King Dagobert II and to Sion belongs this treasure, and he is dead there.” This corresponded well with the coy intimations de Sède makes throughout his work, involving the Merovingian kings of ancient France, a rather mysterious dynasty claiming descent from ancient Troy, priest-kings with long hair said to be divinely chosen to rule the Franks. Establishing a holy empire in partnership with the Roman Catholic Church, the Merovingian King Clovis on the church’s behalf suppressed the heretical Visigoths who had previously sacked Rome and perhaps carried off the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem, driving them back to their strongholds in the Razés, the region where today stands Rennes-le-Château. According to the narrative de Sède pushed somewhat coquettishly, when the Merovingian King Dagobert II was assassinated, his son Sigisbert IV survived, smuggled to the Languedoc where he would assume a false identity as the Count of Rhedae, called Plantard, a part of the story supposedly supported by a relief sculpture at Rennes-le-Château of a soldier carrying a child on horseback. Thus the decoded cipher—a treasure, the Visigoth booty from Rome, belonging to King Dagobert II—and the further suggestions of dynastic intrigue and the survival of the Merovingian line, along with the unanswered questions—what was the significance of this “Sion” to whom the treasure also belonged? and what could it mean that “he is dead there” when Dagobert II was known to be buried elsewhere?—were enough to draw Henry Lincoln headlong into the rabbit hole.

The small parchment easily decoded by Lincoln, via Rennes-le-Château Research and Resource

Lincoln managed to convince the BBC to produce a series of documentaries on the mystery for the television program Chronicle. As he began to write the first of these programs, The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem (1972), he contacted Gérard de Sède hoping to examine his research materials, including photographs of the parchments to which he had claimed to have access. De Sède obliged, and Lincoln began to suspect the author of harboring some secret knowledge about which he was less than forthcoming. When Lincoln asked why he had not published the solution to the simple cipher in his book, de Sède answered, “We thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself.” Just who the other half of this “we” was remained a mystery, although Lincoln had his first clue when he noticed the name Plantard stamped on the back of certain items among de Sède’s materials. Subsequently, as Lincoln and his team sought further documentation from de Sède and presumably from his secret collaborators, they were directed to the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, where catalogued in a specific place they found a treasure trove of historical documents pertinent to the mystery, collected under the melodramatic title, the Secret Dossier. In the dossier was one work called The Merovingian Treasure at Rennes-le-Château by one Antoine the Hermit, detailing much of the legend of Bérenger Saunière as Gérard de Sède had it. Then there was Engraved Stones of the Languedoc by Joseph Cortauly, which included drawings of tombstones from the Rennes-le-Château churchyard, a work that would prove necessary to decode the larger of the two parchments said to have been found in the pillar by Saunière. And finally, there were the works of Henri Lobineau, one a Merovingian genealogy that traced the royal line all the way to an extant family by the familiar name of Plantard, and specifically to one Pierre Plantard. The other was Lobineau’s “Secret Files,” newspaper cuttings hinting at people being murdered over the secret at Rennes-le-Château, further genealogies and coats of arms, and official looking documents. On the first page of this work appeared a dedication, “To Monsignor the Count of Rhedae, Duke of Razès, the legitimate descendant of Clovis I, King of France, most serene child of the ‘King and Saint’ Dagobert II.”

The cover page of Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau, via Just Some Info

One drawing of a tombstone in Engraved Stones of the Languedoc in particular caught Lincoln’s eye as being unusual in that it seemed composed of both Latin and Greek letters, which upon closer examination appeared to say “Et In Arcadia Ego,” or “Even in Arcadia, I Am There,” a phrase or theme treated by numerous artists having to do with the idea that even in a paradise, death is present—a natural enough inscription for a tombstone. But Lincoln saw a link to Nicolas Poussin, whose painting Et In Arcadia Ego, sometimes called The Shepherds of Arcadia, was already part of the Bérenger Saunière legend, being one of the paintings he bought reproductions of after having the parchments decoded. And further adding to the mystique of the drawing was the fact that the tombstone the drawing depicted had supposedly been chiseled away by Saunière, as though he were trying to destroy an important clue. Luckily for Lincoln and his partners, the inscription had been rendered, along with the inscription of a headstone that was now entirely missing, and preserved for them in the Secret Dossier. The importance of these tombstones was confirmed when, during the filming of his first documentary, Gérard de Sède contacted him and gave him the solution to the  more complex cipher of the two parchments said to have been discovered by Saunière in the pillar. It turned out that the text of the headstone had been the key. The parchment code itself, embedded in the Latin text of a passage from the Gospel of John, was far more complicated than the first code, which even Lincoln described as being as simple as something a schoolboy might have created. This greater parchment code’s decipherment was therefore surpassingly, almost comically complicated. I’ll spare you the tedious details of this convoluted process. Decoded, it read: shepherdess no temptation poussin teniers hold the key peace 681 by the cross and this horse of God I destroy this demon guardian at midday blue apples.

The alleged tombstones said to be the key to the greater parchment cipher, via Rhedesium.

One can only imagine the exhilaration felt by Lincoln, with all signs pointing to him being on the trail of a genuine solution to the mystery. Most of the decoded message seemed meaningless, and even today its meaning remains much debated, but further mention of Poussin and Teniers, the two painters whose works it was said Saunière bought reproductions of after solving the cipher himself, sent Lincoln on a quest to find the hidden meaning in their works. He determined that the phrase “shepherdess no temptation” referred to Teniers’s one painting of St. Anthony that was NOT focused on his temptation, St. Anthony and St. Paul in the Desert, in which can be seen a shepherdess in the background. Frustrated at the lack of significant seeming clues in this painting, though, he instead focused on Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, which did feature a shepherdess, but more importantly featured the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” that had been on the tombstone that served as the key to the parchment code. The painting features a group of shepherds pointing at a tomb where the phrase is inscribed, and according to most art historians, beyond the significance of the phrase as symbolic of death’s ubiquity, the work depicts the legendary invention of painting as one of the shepherds can either be seen as tracing the words or tracing his own shadow with his finger, the act that led to the conception of painting. Lincoln, however, believed there was far more to the painting, and yet again, he was led to believe by Gérard de Sède, who sent him a photograph of and directions to an actual stone landmark in the Languedoc that resembled the tomb in the painting. After tracking down this landmark, Lincoln came to believe that the landscape featured in the painting behind the tomb was in reality a depiction of the view behind this stone box in the neighborhood of Rennes-le-Château, despite historians’ assertions that Poussin had never visited the region. Was the resemblance convincing, or was Lincoln seeing what he wanted to see? Well, Lincoln certainly seems to suffer from confirmation bias. In a textbook example of apophenia, the perception of connections between unrelated things and meaning in the meaningless—another perfect example of which we just explored in our look at the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe—he began to assert there were unusual and symbolically significant geometrical patterns in the painting. While it is true that Poussin’s work is often governed by the artistic and geometrical principle of the golden ratio, as are the works of many painters of his period, Lincoln believed that geometrical patterns matching others that he perceived in the coded parchments were present, eventually leading him to believe that, when extended beyond the borders of the painting, they represented a pentacle, or pentagram, and that this perfect geometrical design could be drawn on a map of the Languedoc region simply by connecting various landmarks. None of this brought him tangibly closer to any solution to the riddles he had begun seeing everywhere, but it did send him in new directions, searching for occult and religious angles on the mystery.

Poussin's The Shepherds of Arcadia, with a photo of the stone tomb near Arques that Lincoln believed was depicted in it and a diagram of the geometric patterns he believes are present in the painting. 

Among the secret files of Henri Lobineau in the Bibliotèque Nationale was a table purporting to be a list of the leaders of an organization and the years during which they served. The organization was called the Priory of Sion, or the Order of the True Rose-Cross, and it served as the explanation of many cryptic mentions of the word Sion and the initials P and S in the documents Lincoln had been studying. The names of its grand masters or “helmsmen” included a veritable who’s who of storied alchemists and famous artists: Nicolas Flamel, Leonardo Da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, and Jean Cocteau. Lincoln himself admits this Dramatis Personae is too fanciful to be believed, but instead of doubting it, he insists on keeping an open mind and investigating the Priory’s existence further. And indeed, he did find a document from the 12th century showing the existence of an organization with a similar name, the Order of Sion. Then he made something of a precipitous leap in reasoning. This sounded like a secret society, and many secret societies were rumored to have been associated with the Knights Templar, and some of the names on the list were said to have been Templars. Therefore, the Priory of Sion was the secret society that originated the Templars, and the lost treasure of the Templars may actually be the treasure secreted somewhere around Rennes-le-Château, as twelve Templars were said to have escaped their order’s destruction and taken refuge in nearby Château de Bézu. Now the unsupported connections he makes here are typical of Lincoln and his work; he makes an interesting and seemingly feasible speculation, but then without seeking confirmation or evidence, he then takes the premise as a given and uses it as a stepping stone to reach his next conclusion. For example, at one point in his documentaries, he makes reference to a memorial cross at Rennes-le-Château and its  inscription of “Christus A.O.M.P.S. Defendit,” stating categorically that it can only mean “Christus Antiquus Ordo Mysticusque Prioratus Sionis Defendit, or “Christ defends the ancient mystical order of the Priory of Sion.” In point of fact, however, this inscription is actually a relatively common one, meaning “Christus Ab Omni Malo Plebem Suam Defendat” or “Christ defends his people against every evil.” This pretty much sums up the historical rigor of Henry Lincoln’s work, so it’s no surprise that he ended up tapping into the common conspiracy view of history, in which there is a long tradition of belief that the Templars persisted after their suppression, hiding among other secret societies like the Freemasons. It all makes for a wild and sprawling tale, to be certain, and it expands the lore of Rennes-le-Château to epic proportions… but it’s not historical research so much as it is unfettered conjecture.

By the third documentary in his series, Shadow of the Templars (1979), after exhausting nearly all the avenues of inquiry he had taken from the Secret Dossier and concluding that the Priory of Sion existed even to present day and was dedicated to preserving the Merovingian dynasty and restoring it to power, Lincoln interviewed the mysterious man behind some of Gérard de Sède’s sources, Pierre Plantard, who appeared to be a member of the Priory and the true descendant of the Merovingian line. Plantard was coy but revealing in his interview, indicating that the Priory of Sion did exist, and confirming that it existed to protect and promote the Merovingian bloodline as the true rulers of France. Moreover, he hinted playfully that the true treasure of Rennes-le-Château may not have been gold but rather this powerful secret, knowledge of which earned Saunière a fortune in hush money: that pure-blooded Merovingians still survived, prepared to revive their claim to a throne that no longer existed. The notion of the real treasure being a secret jibed well with Lincoln’s idea that the surviving Templars had carried the treasure to the Languedoc after their escape, for a few men could not possibly have carried vast stores of gold but could easily carry a secret. So Lincoln took this notion and ran with it. The problem was that he rightly didn’t believe the secret Plantard offered was really that explosive. So what if the Merovingians had survived? They were one dynasty among many, none of which would be granted any power in modern-day democratic France regardless of how dramatically they revealed themselves. Therefore, there had to be some deeper secret to the bloodline of the Merovingians, he reasoned, something warranting their continuous preservation through the centuries by a powerful secret society. What he settled on would serve as the basis of his 1982 bestseller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov's Appearance of Jesus Christ to Maria Magdalena, a depiction of Christ telling the Magdalene not to touch him after his resurrection, via Wikimedia Commons

The theory advanced by Henry Lincoln and his co-authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh completely turned the story of the life of Jesus Christ and the Easter story on its head. They hypothesized that the appellation “Christ” actually indicated that Jesus was a literal king of the house of David, making the sign King of the Jews atop the cross rather more a literal designation than a mockery of him. And they further suggested that Mary Magdalene, his “beloved disciple,” who tradition tells us was a reformed prostitute, was actually his wife and mother of his children. Their theory goes on to propose that his crucifixion was a sham, and thus his resurrection was just a matter of him revealing himself after his death had been faked. As they reimagined things, Mary Magdalene, either alone or with Jesus, took the offspring of Christ to ancient Gaul, before it became France, where she might find refuge with the Jews already in exile there. This accorded well with Mary Magadelene’s place in the Grail Romances as the figure who brought the Holy Grail to Europe, and indeed rewrote the whole idea of what the Holy Grail, the cup that caught the blood of Christ, actually was, suggesting that the original word in the earliest iterations of the tale, “sangraal,” had been erroneously divided into “san graal,” or holy grail, when it should have been divided as “sang raal,” or blood royal. Thus Mary Magdalene had smuggled the bloodline of Jesus into ancient France, where his descendants established themselves as the holy long-haired priest-kings of the Merovingian dynasty, a paradigm shifting secret guarded ever since the Middle Ages by the Priory of Sion and the Templars and discovered by Bérenger Saunière at Rennes-le-Château, where the church had been dedicated to Mary Magdalene.

Now even disregarding the fact that no concrete evidence is offered to support this alternative reading of biblical and European history, there are both logical and historical objections to the wild assertions it relies on. For example, there is no historical consensus on the identity of Mary Magdalene. Lincoln et al. would have you believe that she was the victim of a smear campaign to rewrite her character as a fallen woman when actually she was Jesus’s longsuffering wife, again an assertion with little support. Meanwhile other historians, namely Robert Sheaffer, have suggested that there never was a Mary Magdalene. Citing Roman philosopher Celsus’s accusations that Jesus had propagated the myth of his immaculate conception to cover for the fact that his mother, Mary, had been impregnated by a Roman soldier and thus driven away by her carpenter husband as an adulteress to bear her child in shame, he raises the possibility that the name Mary Magdalene was a corruption of Miriam m’qadella, referring to Mary by her occupation as a dresser of women’s hair, making the accusations of Mary Magdalene’s harlotry rather more a condemnation of Mother Mary’s sexual dalliances. And true historians could go on refuting almost every element of Lincoln’s mammoth pseudo-history, pointing out such simple omissions as the fact that no signs of the activities of the Priory of Sion or their grand masters’ involvement in it has ever been turned up, even though many of them were remarkably famous figures, their lives studied and written about extensively. Or the facts that Bérenger Saunière likely never found any mysterious parchments, as the recess in the hollow pillar preserved at Rennes-le-Château was not large enough to hold them, and that he could not have bought reproductions of a Poussin or any other paintings from the Louvre, which didn’t sell such things at the time. The thing is, historians don’t need to do this, because even before Henry Lincoln ever read about the mystery and began his decades long freefall down its rabbit hole, it had been revealed to be a hoax.

A cheeky-looking Pierre Plantard, via La Roche Aux Loups

As it turns out, Gérard de Sède hadn’t written his influential book so much as edited and punched up a manuscript by the supposedly Merovingian pretender Pierre Plantard. And in 1967, during a dispute over the royalties for de Sède’s book, Plantard revealed that the parchments he’d provided had been forgeries, their ciphers designed by his partner Philippe de Chérisey. The two of them had become intrigued by the mystery of Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château and had dreamed up a scheme that today might be called an alternate reality game. Indeed, Plantard had forged all of the documents in the so-called Secret Dossier and planted them in the Bibliotèque Nationale, where there is no official record of the documents’ registration. Why de Sède continued to play along with Plantard’s game while feeding the clues to Lincoln, I don’t really understand, unless at some point, once Plantard had learned of this new potential promulgator of his lies, he had begun writing directly to Lincoln as Gérard de Sède. It would not be a stretch considering his history of composing forgeries under pseudonyms.

The dubious character of Pierre Plantard is plain to see. At 17 years old, in 1937, Plantard became involved in right-wing politics, attempting to form an anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic organization whose goal was to purify France in response to the rise of a socialist and Jewish prime minister, Léon Blum. His endeavors resulted in the formation of the group Alpha Galates, some of the publications of which indicate his interest in the occult, especially in the ideas of Paul Le Cour, who promoted a spiritual tradition supposedly originating in Atlantis, which looked forward to a coming Age of Aquarius. Some symbols from Le Cour’s work, notably the octopus, would later appear in some drawings among Plantard’s forgeries. Demonstrating his anti-Semitism, in 1940, Plantard wrote to the head of the Nazi puppet regime at Vichy to warn of Jewish-Masonic conspiracies, and in the 1950s, he served a couple of prison terms totaling 18 months for misappropriation of property and corrupting minors. After the longer of his prison terms, in 1956, again still much influenced by the writings of Le Cour, he registered a new organization called the Priory of Sion with statutes very similar to those of Alpha Galates. It was sometime after this that he and his friend the artist Philippe de Chérisey became enamored with the mystery of  Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château, visited the village and eventually forged and planted false documents in the Bibliotèque Nationale intended to document and therefore legitimize Pierre Plantard’s little right-wing society, the Priory of Sion, as well as his descent from the Merovingian kings and claim as the rightful ruler of France, all of which has been proven to be meticulously orchestrated hogwash. It appears to be nothing but an ironic twist that Henry Lincoln veered off the trail Plantard had prepared for him and asserted that Plantard was actually of the bloodline of Christ, suggesting this anti-Semite was actually a Jew.

So the matter appeared to have been settled. It was all a hoax. Perhaps the greatest modern hoax since Leo Taxil’s publications about devil-worshipping Palladian Freemasons, but a hoax nonetheless. Yet as we have seen before, in the anti-Semitic myths of the blood libel and the Protocols of Zion, as well as in such articles of religious faith as the Shroud of Turin, even when historical and scientific evidence demonstrate the falseness of something, that won’t necessarily dissuade true believers. And just so, there remain today many treasure hunters skulking about Rennes-le-Château as well as pseudo-historians who believe Christ himself might be buried somewhere near Bérenger Saunière’s church. And most still rely on Lincoln’s geometry in Poussin’s paintings and other clues originating from Plantard’s forged documents, rationalizing that though he may have faked them all, perhaps he was an initiate with access to secret truth after all. But one can doubt or believe anything based on such logic. As Umberto Eco puts it in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which many believe was inspired at least in part by Henry Lincoln’s conspiracy addled views of history, “…the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”