Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  Most readers of The Accursed Treasure, English or French, would have enjoyed the story, lent the book to someone else, and then forgotten about it, but Lincoln was cut from a different cloth. The book contained, he noticed, a “curious and glaring omission”: although it depicted “cryptic documents” supposedly uncovered by the fortunate curé, it never actually bothered to decipher them. Yet, from the reproductions of two of these documents contained in the book, Lincoln himself was able to make a decryption. If he could manage that with a fairly cursory inspection, why hadn’t the author done the same? This incongruity nagged at Lincoln and from time to time motivated him to return to the documents. When he did so, they rendered up to him “tantalizing new glimpses of layers of meaning buried within the text.”

  These “glimpses” were enough to earn Lincoln a remarkable commission to research an item for the BBC’s main historical and archaeological series, Chronicle. Remarkable because Lincoln, as we have seen, was neither a historian nor an archaeologist, nor was his tale based on anything more than photographed documents in an obscure “lightweight” work of French popular history. Nevertheless, the BBC paid for him to travel to France to meet the author of The Accursed Treasure, Gérard de Sède, in Paris in the winter of 1970. There, Lincoln asked de Sède repeatedly why he hadn’t published the decryption of the documents. “This time de Sède’s answer was calculated: ‘Because we thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself.’ ”

  Lincoln was indeed interested, and de Sède began to feed him further fragments of information, including an encoded message that mentioned the painter Poussin. De Sède told Lincoln that a tomb resembling the one depicted in the painter’s famous Shepherds of Arcadia had been found at Pontils close to Rennes-le-Château. When Lincoln saw photographs of the discovered tomb, he realized he was on to something big. “It was clear that our short film on a small local mystery had begun to assume unexpected dimensions.”

  There were eventually to be three Chronicle films on the stories of Rennes-le-Château. The first, in 1972, was The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem? ; the second, The Priest, the Painter and the Devil, appeared two years later. With their emphasis on medieval mysteries and codes hidden within famous paintings, both were popular with British viewers, and little or no criticism of their tenuous historicity surfaced—perhaps the historians were busy on the nights of transmission, and this was before videotape or DVDs. After the second film, Lincoln found himself some important collaborators. At a summer writing course in 1975, he spent some leisure time discussing the Knights Templar with one of his fellow lecturers, the novelist Richard Leigh. Leigh offered to help with the part of Lincoln’s project that involved the knights, and also introduced him to Michael Baigent, in Lincoln’s words, “a psychology graduate who had recently abandoned a successful career in photojournalism to devote his time to researching the Templars.” Together, the trio made for Chronicle the documentary The Shadow of the Templars (1979), thus completing the trilogy of films that, according to Richard Leigh, were “regarded by the BBC as the most successful documentaries they had ever done.”5 “The work we did on [The Shadow of the Templars],” said Lincoln with characteristic suggestiveness, “at last brought us face to face with the underlying foundations upon which the entire mystery of Rennes-le-Château had been built.” It was a mystery that he, Baigent, and Leigh finally revealed in their 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. As Lincoln writes, “In 1972 I closed my first film with the words, ‘Something extraordinary is waiting to be found . . . and in the not too distant future, it will be.’ This book explains what that ‘something’ is—and how extraordinary the discovering has been.”6 People obviously wanted to know. The popularity of the films passed to the book. On the first day of publication in Britain, 43,000 hardcover copies of The Holy Blood were sold. I waited for the paperback.

  The Second-Greatest Story Ever Told

  The 1996 edition of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail comprises 495 pages of dense text plus thirty-six pages of footnotes, a thirteen-page bibliography detailing works in English, French, and German, and twenty-four pages of photographs. It has the cover of a thriller and the interior of a work of popular scholarship, and the story it tells, in essence, is this.

  Jesus and Mary Magdalene are lovers, as suggested in the so-called Gnostic Gospels found in “scrolls” (actually, they were in book form) at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. The Gnostic Gospels also hint that Peter, the first pope, was jealous of the couple’s intimacy. The pair have a child or children, and after the crucifixion Mary takes him/her/them and flees across the Mediterranean to southern Gaul, where she goes into hiding within the local Jewish community.

  Four hundred years or so later, in the early Dark Ages, one of the descendants of Jesus and Mary marries into the aristocratic family then beginning to unite what will become France. This family, known as the Merovingians, therefore becomes both a royal dynasty and the bearer of the authentic bloodline of the Messiah. Appropriately, the Merovingians establish Christianity in France but, alas, King Dagobert II is the last of his line to rule. In the seventh century A.D., France is taken over by the Carolingians, whose most famous member is Charlemagne.

  Ousted, the bearers of the holy genes go underground and metamorphose into the aristocratic House of Lorraine. They only become royal again when the head of the family, Godfrey de Bouillon, joins the First Crusade and somehow manages to get himself crowned first king of Jerusalem. Helping him achieve this satisfying fulfillment of prophecy has been a secret group who now found a priory on Mount Zion and name themselves the Priory of Sion. This group is also behind the establishment of the Knights Templar, and it is through them that the buried Jewish Temple of Solomon is excavated, revealing something that might have been documents, the remains of Jesus, or the Ark of the Covenant.

  The Priory remains secret, but the Templars are highly visible until, in 1307, at the command of the king of France, the order is suppressed, supposedly for heresy, and many of its members tortured and killed. So now the Priory of Sion is left to bear the great truth, and maintain the bloodline, in secret, which it does, though not without yielding to the temptation to scatter clues about its existence and mission around medieval and Renaissance Europe. One such is the story of the Grail, usually rendered as the San Graal (the cup of tradition) but really signifying the Sang Real—the Royal Blood.

  Over the next 650 years of clandestine existence, the Priory passes the secret on from generation to generation and from grand master to grand master. Some of these are from the sacred House of Lorraine itself; some are men who dabble in alchemy; some are great scientists; some are great artists. Holders of the office, according to a list later helpfully deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, include Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, Jean Cocteau, and of course, Leonardo da Vinci.

  Obscure hints of what is going on are left in such works of art as the French painter Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, in which some rustics are seen by a tomb on which the words Et in Arcadia Ego are inscribed. However, this habit of scattering clues catches up with the Priory when, in 1885, the priest of Rennes-le-Château, Bérenger Saunière, discovers some parchments inside a hollow Visigothic pillar. Saunière, with the help of a local bishop, cracks one of the codes hidden therein and discovers that it reads: “To Dagobert II king and to Sion belongs this treasure and he is there dead.” Somehow Saunière works out that this refers to the bloodline of Jesus and blackmails the Church authorities (who presumably realize too, otherwise they wouldn’t have minded), thus accounting for his sudden richesse.

  And there this ancient mystery would have rested, had not Gérard de Sède published his book, had not Henry Lincoln read it and wondered at it, had not the BBC commissioned no less than three historical documentaries from him, had not someone deposited a lot of documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale, had not the Priory of Sion been publicly registered by its own most recent gra
nd master in 1956, and had not Michael Baigent, with his strong opinions on the bloodline of Christ, been brought aboard to write The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

  So it was that Lincoln and company eventually met Pierre Plantard de St. Clair, then extant grand master of the Priory of Sion, by direct descent Merovingian claimant to the throne, and therefore—disconcertingly, given his resemblance to the incompetent Irish builder in Fawlty Towers— the descendant of Jesus. Plantard, they concluded, was now breaking cover because he was intending to launch a political movement of extraordinary importance, though they didn’t know what it was.

  The Greatest Royalties Ever Earned

  Surprisingly, the book was not immediately dismissed. While the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, was unimpressed and told the authors so in the course of a TV discussion on the day before the book’s official publication, and although the Times Literary Supplement thought the book “worthless” and “rather silly,” other reviewers were quite friendly. The Times Educational Supplement allowed that it was “compulsive reading”; the Oxford Times, read by many a don, attested to its “well-documented and often sinister facts.” The reviewer in the conservative Sunday Telegraph speculated, “no doubt this one will infuriate many ecclesiastical authorities,” then continued sunnily, “but the authors may still be proved right.” On the other side of the world, the Los Angeles Times agreed there was enough “to seriously challenge many traditional Christian beliefs, if not alter them.” In a large number of bookshops, The Holy Blood was elevated from the unrespectable realms of “New Age” or “Spiritual” (i.e., analytically worthless) books, and placed in either “History” or “Archaeology.” It leapfrogged over the alien abductions, the anal probes, and Atlantis exotica, to land in the world of scholarship. Where it sold in the hundreds of thousands.

  As ever, like seagulls behind a trawler, in its wake flew an army of sequels. The authors themselves released The Messianic Legacy (or HBHG 2) within three years. Baigent and Leigh, alone or together, produced The Temple and the Lodge, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, The Elixir and the Stone, and The Jesus Papers. Henry Lincoln has specialized for over twenty years in Rennes-le-Château penumbra: guides, videos, DVDs, lectures, maps, and so on. And there have been many other cashers-in. The last twenty years have seen the publication of dozens of Rennes-le-Château books, Mary Magdalene books, Templar books, Grail books, Poussin books, Leonardo books, sacred geometry books, decoded painting books, and Jesus bloodline books. Like those far-left groups whose names offer reluctant proletarians every permutation of the words “worker,” “socialist,” “revolutionary,” “party,” and “group,” post-Templar titles seem almost invariably to include one or more of the following key terms: hidden, secret, mystery, treasure, revelation, discovery, conspiracy, scroll, lost, Jesus, goddess, knights, quest, Messiah, unlocking, and legacy. You can make up your own. Several writers in the genre have managed to achieve publishing success that very few novelists and almost no historian has enjoyed. They have sold books in the tens of thousands, have marketed follow-up audiotapes, videos, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. They have joined the lecture circuit, have appeared as apparent authorities on dozens of radio and TV shows, and have even been rewarded with the ultimate industry salute of having their original books republished in special deluxe or updated anniversary editions.

  The accolade of most ubiquitous writer across conspiracy genres has been earned by an American, the “award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author” Jim Marrs, whose 2001 contribution to Templariana was titled Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. Marrs is also the author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a number of books on UFOs, and more recently, The Terror Conspiracy, about how the attacks of September 11, 2001, were probably an inside job, and The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America. Here is a man who must think very deeply before taking a decision about whether to cross the road.

  The New Scholarship of Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh

  Viewers of Henry Lincoln’s three Chronicle programs and those who bought The Holy Blood largely because of what they’d seen on the television will have assumed, probably without thinking about it, that these were products of something like the usual scholarly process, just particularly exciting ones. They would not have doubted that the authors had used standard techniques of inquiry and research to establish the known facts, had weighed probabilities, had created hypotheses, and, as far as possible, tested these hypotheses. If Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh had turned up such wonderful discoveries, it was due to luck or the particular quality of their explorations.

  Of course, it was noticeable that the areas the trio delved into seemed more diverse than in more orthodox chronological or thematic histories. They were looking at aspects of the Bible, the early Church, Christian heresies, Freemasonry, anthropology, alchemy, Renaissance art, Middle Ages politics, and myths and legends. But as long as the authors held to the same general standards as other historians, this capacity to think widely was admirable.

  The trouble is that the trio weren’t holding themselves to those standards, or anything like them. Not only did Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh claim to have discovered the Grail, they also claimed to have discovered a new form of historiography. Note a paragraph that appears early in the first chapter:

  It was necessary for us to synthesize in a coherent pattern data extending from the . . . Gospels and Grail romances to accounts of current affairs in modern newspapers . . . For such an undertaking the techniques of academic scholarship were sorely inadequate. To make the requisite connections between radically diverse bodies of subject matter we were obliged to adopt a more comprehensive approach, based on synthesis rather than conventional analysis.7

  It is easy to miss the significance of these lines on a first reading. You skim the passage perhaps, marking only key words (academic, techniques, analysis, scholarship) and pass on happily to treasure and Merovingians. Look at it again, however, with the attention Henry Lincoln gave to decoding de Sède’s parchments. What do these sentences actually mean? Why exactly would the techniques of scholarship be inadequate? If the evidence was present to be able to make a decent hypothesis, then where was the problem?

  The interesting word here, the one that stands out like Dagobert in a Sion document, is “requisite.” Presumably, what made any particular connection “between radically diverse” subjects “requisite” can only have been the needs of the hypothesis; it was the authors’ theories that required links to be made that normal standards of analysis weren’t going to permit. So to provide these hookups, the authors abandoned scholarly methods of analysis, describing—with considerable chutzpah—their alternative method as “a more comprehensive approach.”

  This rationalization of an act of anti-scholarship was to be partly justified by the subject matter itself, since “much of what we were exploring lay in spheres deemed academically suspect.” This is a tricksy psychological inversion of meaning, since the authors are really wanting to convey that potential critics are (in their word) “conventional.” The implied image is of one type of narrow learning, belonging to fusty old academics or college pedants, versus another, far more exhilarating form of erudition. In this battle, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh are the new boys, the rebels. Like buccaneers they range wide, sailing free on the limitless seas of the past, unconstrained by the crabbed island existences of other scholars. They are cool, boasting, as they do, the historian’s inquiring mind but, more important, the novelist’s imaginative capacities. The novelist, they explain, is superior to the historian even when trespassing on the latter’s field, because “he recognizes that history is not confined to the recorded facts, but often lies in more intangible domains . . . in the psychic lives of both individuals and entire peoples.”8

  Novelists have another obvious advantage over historians: facts don’t really matter that much. Th
ey are imaginatively free. So The Holy Blood authors liberate themselves, where it is “requisite,” from fact, but without ever quite admitting it. And their connecting technique is evident throughout every one of their books. Take this passage chosen, in a way that should surely please them, entirely at random—my copy of the book fell open at this page because it was next to the photos. We are near the beginning of chapter 13, “The Secret the Church Forbade.” Speculation about Jesus, the authors are claiming, is necessary because there is a vacuum of real information. They continue:

  If Jesus was a legitimate claimant to the throne, it is probable that he was supported, at least initially, by a relatively small percentage of the population—his immediate family from Galilee, certain other members of his own aristocratic social class, and a few strategically placed representatives in Judea and the capital city, Jerusalem. Such a following, albeit distinguished, would hardly have been sufficient to ensure the realization of his objectives—the success of his bid for the throne. In consequence he would have been obliged to recruit a more substantial following from other classes—in the same way that Bonnie Prince Charlie, to pursue a previous analogy, did in 1745.9

  One must admire that first “If,” which is the keystone holding up what follows. Then we have “it is probable.” Why is it “probable”? Why is he of the “aristocratic” class? Why a few “strategically placed” representatives? Why not many? Why not none? If it was many, then why not enough to realize his objectives? If. Probable. Would. Would. Each possibility is banked, turning into a probability upon which the next mini-hypothesis rests. The whole thing is like this, built brick by unreliable brick.