In Britain the situation was somewhat different. Controversy flared briefly about what we had said about Jesus, then subsided. What remained was a more prolonged and durable interest in other, purely historical aspects of our story—aspects which had been largely ignored in the United States. British interest has concentrated on subjects like the Knights Templar and the Crusades, the Cathar heresy, the Rose-Croix and Freemasonry, as well as on cultural aspects like the significance of Poussin and other artistic figures, or on cryptography, deciphering the codes and ciphers that figured repeatedly in our research. Also, our three BBC films had already created a substantial interest in the mystery of Rennes-le-Château among British television audiences.
Each of these topics could easily furnish sufficient material for an entire book. There is certainly both room and need for books to be written on each of them, and as we repeatedly said in interviews, we regard our own work as nothing more than a prelude. Yet, above and beyond these more specialized spheres remain three pervasive and overriding themes: the mystery of Rennes-le-Château; the bloodline or "Grail Dynasty"; and the Prieuré de Sion, that elusive secret society which, from the Middle Ages to the present, has figured so prominently in our story. We believe our book has shaken a quantity of fruit from the trees of all three themes. During the months since publication we have received innumerable letters, met with a great many people, and obtained much new information that is both relevant and valuable.
Since publication at least one thing has become apparent: Our book was indeed but a prelude, the mere opening of a door. Whether we write further on the subject or not, there is still a great deal more to be said, and the last word is still very far from having been uttered.
Introduction
In 1969, en route for a summer holiday in the Cévennes, I made the casual purchase of a paperback. Le Trésor Maudit by Gérard de Sède was a mystery story—a lightweight, entertaining blend of historical fact, genuine mystery, and conjecture. It might have remained consigned to the postholiday oblivion of all such reading had I not stumbled upon a curious and glaring omission in its pages.
The "accursed treasure" of the title had apparently been found in the 1890s by a village priest through the decipherment of certain cryptic documents unearthed in his church. Although the purported texts of two of these documents were reproduced, the "secret messages" said to be encoded within them were not. The implication was that the deciphered messages had again been lost. And yet, as I found, a cursory study of the documents reproduced in the book reveals at least one concealed message. Surely the author had found it. In working on his book he must have given the documents more than fleeting attention. He was bound, therefore, to have found what I had found. Moreover, the message was exactly the kind of titillating snippet of "proof’ that helps to sell a "pop" paperback. Why had M. de Sède not published it?
During the ensuing months the oddity of the story and the possibility of further discoveries drew me back to it from time to time. The appeal was that of a rather more than usually intriguing cross-word puzzle—with the added curiosity of de Sède’s silence. As I caught tantalizing new glimpses of layers of meaning buried within the text of the documents, I began to wish I could devote more to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château than mere moments snatched from my working life as a writer for television. And so in the late autumn of 1970, I presented the story as a possible documentary subject to the late Paul Johnstone, executive producer of the BBC’s historical and archaeological series Chronicle.
Paul saw the possibilities and I was sent to France to talk to de Sède and explore the prospects for a short film. During Christmas week of 1970 I met de Sède in Paris. At that first meeting I asked the question that had nagged at me for more than a year: "Why didn’t you publish the message hidden in the parchments?" His reply astounded me. "What message’?"
It seemed inconceivable to me that he was unaware of this elementary message. Why was he fencing with me? Suddenly I found myself reluctant to reveal exactly what I had found. We continued a verbal fencing match for a few minutes and it became apparent that we were both aware of the message. I repeated my question, "Why didn’t you publish it?" This time de Sède’s answer was calculated. "Because we thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself.’’
That reply, as cryptic as the priest’s mysterious documents, was the first clear hint that the mystery of Rennes-le-Château was to prove much more than a simple tale of lost treasure.
With my director, Andrew Maxwell-Hyslop, I began to prepare a Chronicle film in the spring of 1971. It was planned as a simple twenty-minute item for a magazine program. But as we worked, de Sède began to feed us further fragments of information. First came the full text of a major encoded message, which spoke of the painters Poussin and Teniers. This was fascinating. The cipher was unbelievably complex. We were told it had been broken by experts of the French Army Cipher Department, using computers. As I studied the convolutions of the code, I became convinced that this explanation was, to say the least, suspect. I checked with cipher experts of British Intelligence. They agreed with me. "The cipher does not present a valid problem for a computer." The code was unbreakable. Someone, somewhere, must have the key.
And then de Sède dropped his second bombshell. A tomb resembling that in Poussin’s famous painting "Les Bergers d’Arcadie" had been found. He would send details as soon as he had them. Some days later the photographs arrived and it was clear that our short film on a small local mystery had begun to assume unexpected dimensions. Paul decided to abandon it and committed us to a full-length Chronicle film. Now there would be more time to research and more screen time to explore the story. Transmission was postponed to the spring of the following year.
The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem? was screened in February 1972 and provoked a very strong reaction. I knew that I had found a subject of consuming interest not merely to myself but to a very large viewing public. Further research would not be self-indulgence. At some time there would have to be a follow-up film. By 1974 I had a mass of new material and Paul assigned Roy Davies to produce my second Chronicle film, The Priest, the Painter and the Devil. Again the reaction of the public proved how much the story had caught the popular imagination. But by now it had grown so complex, so far-reaching in its ramifications, that I knew the detailed research was rapidly exceeding the capabilities of any one person. There were too many different leads to follow. The more I pursued one line of investigation, the more conscious I became of how much material was being neglected. It was at this juncture that chance, which had first tossed the story so casually into my lap, now made sure that the work would not become bogged down.
In 1975 at a summer school where we were both lecturing on aspects of literature, I had the great good fortune to meet Richard Leigh. Richard is a novelist and short-story writer with postgraduate degrees in comparative literature and a thorough knowledge of history, philosophy, psychology, and esoterica. He had been working for some years as a university lecturer in the United States, Canada, and Britain.
Between our summer-school talks we spent many hours discussing subjects of mutual interest. I mentioned the Knights Templar, who had assumed an important role in the background to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. To my delight I found that this shadowy order of medieval warrior-monks had already awakened Richard’s profound interest, and he had done considerable research into their history. At one stroke months of work I had seen stretching ahead of me became unnecessary. Richard could answer most of my questions, and was as intrigued as I was by some of the apparent anomalies I had unearthed. More important, he, too, saw the fascination and sensed the significance of the whole research project on which I had embarked. He offered to help me with the aspect involving the Templars. And he brought in Michael Baigent, a psychology graduate who had recently abandoned a successful career in photojournalism to devote his time to researching the Templars for a film project he had in mind.
Had I set out to searc
h for them, I could not have found two better qualified and more congenial partners with whom to form a team. After years of solitary labor the impetus brought to the project by two fresh brains was exhilarating. The first tangible result of our collaboration was the third Chronicle film on Rennes-le-Château, The Shadow of the Templars, which was produced by Roy Davies in 1979.
The work we did on that film at last brought us face to face with the underlying foundations upon which the entire mystery of Rennes-le-Château had been built. But the film could only hint at what we were beginning to discern. Beneath the surface was something more startling, more significant, and more immediately relevant than we could have believed possible when we began our work on the "intriguing little mystery" of what a French priest might have found in a mountain village.
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.
HENRY LINCOLN
January 17, 1981
I Frontispiece—the major sites of investigation in France
Part One
THE MYSTERY
1
Village of Mystery
We believed at first that we were dealing with a strictly local mystery—one confined to a village in the south of France. We believed at first that the mystery was of primarily academic interest. We believed that our investigation might help to illuminate certain aspects of Western history, but we never dreamed that it might entail rewriting them. Still less did we dream that whatever we discovered could be of any real contemporary relevance—and explosive contemporary relevance at that.
At the start of our search we did not know precisely what we were looking for—or, for that matter, looking at. We had no theories, no hypotheses, nothing we had set out to prove. On the contrary, we were simply trying to find an answer, an explanation, for a curious little enigma of the late nineteenth century. The conclusions we eventually reached were not postulated in advance. We were led to them, step by step, as if the evidence we accumulated had a mind of its own, was directing us of its own accord.
Our quest began with a more or less straightforward story. At first glance this story was not markedly different from numerous other "treasure stories" or "unsolved mysteries" that abound in the history and folklore of almost every rural region. A version of it had been publicized in France, where it attracted considerable interest but was not—to our knowledge at the time—accorded any inordinate consequence. As we subsequently learned, there were a number of errors in this version. For the moment, however, we should probably recount the tale as it was published during the 1960s and as we first came to know of it. 1
RENNES-LE-CHATEAU AND BÉRENGER SAUNIÈRE
On June 1, 1885, the tiny French village of Rennes-le-Château received a new parish priest. The curé’s name was Bérenger Sauniere. 2 He was a robust, handsome, energetic, and, it would seem, highly intelligent man, aged thirty-three. In seminary school not long before, he had apparently appeared destined for a promising clerical career. Certainly he had appeared destined for something more important than a remote village in the eastern foothills of the Pyrenees. Yet at some point he seems to have incurred the displeasure of his superiors. What precisely he did, if anything, remains unclear, but it soon thwarted all prospects of advancement. And it was perhaps to rid themselves of him that his superiors consigned him to the parish of Rennes-le-Château.
At the time only about two hundred people lived in Rennes-le-Chateau. It was a tiny hamlet perched on a steep mountaintop, approximately twenty-five miles from Carcassonne. To another man, the place might have seemed a veritable exile—a life sentence in a remote provincial backwater far from the civilized amenities of the age, far from any stimulus for an eager and inquiring mind. No doubt it was a blow to Sauniere’s ambition. Nevertheless, there were certain compensations. Saunière was a native of the region, having been born and raised only a few miles distant in the village of Montazels. Whatever its deficiencies, therefore, Rennes-le-Château must have been very like home, with all the comforts of childhood familiarity.
Between 1885 and 1891 Sauniere’s income averaged, in francs, the equivalent of six pounds sterling per year—hardly opulence, but pretty much what one would expect for a rural cure in late nineteenth-century France. Together with gratuities provided by his parishioners it appears to have been sufficient—for survival if not for any extravagance. During those six years Saunière seems to have led a quiet and pleasant life. He hunted and fished in the mountains and streams of his boyhood. He read voraciously, perfected his Latin, learned Greek, embarked on the study of Hebrew. He employed, as housekeeper and servant, an eighteen-year-old peasant girl named Marie Denarnaud, who was to be his lifelong companion and confidante. He paid frequent visits to his friend the Abbé Henri Boudet, cure of the neighboring village of Rennes-les-Bains. And under Boudet’s tutelage, he immersed himself in the turbulent history of the region—a history whose residues were constantly present around him.
A few miles to the southeast of Rennes-le-Château, for example, looms another peak called Bézu, surmounted by the ruins of a medieval fortress that was once a preceptory of the Knights Templar. On a third peak a mile or so east of Rennes-le-Château stand the ruins of the château of Blanchefort, ancestral home of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth grand master of the Knights Templar, who presided over that famous order in the mid-twelfth century. Rennes-le-Château and its environs had been on the ancient pilgrim route, which ran from northern Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. And the entire region was steeped in evocative legends, in echoes of a rich, dramatic, and often blood-soaked past.
For some time Saunière had wanted to restore the village church of Rennes-le-Château. Consecrated to the Magdalen in 1059, this dilapidated edifice stood on the foundations of a still older Visigoth structure dating from the sixth century. By the late nineteenth century it was (not surprisingly) in a state of almost hopeless disrepair.
In 1891, encouraged by his friend Boudet, Saunière embarked on a modest restoration, borrowing a small sum from the village funds. In the course of his endeavors he removed the altar stone, which rested on two archaic Visigoth columns. One of these columns proved to be hollow. Inside the cure found four parchments preserved in sealed wooden tubes. Two of these parchments are said to have comprised genealogies, one dating from 1244, the other from 1644. The two remaining documents had apparently been composed in the 1780s by one of Saunière’s predecessors as cure of Rennes-le-Chateau, the Abbé Antoine Bigou. During his tenure in the village Bigou had also been personal chaplain to the noble Blanchefort family, who, on the eve of the French Revolution, were still among the most prominent local landowners.
The two parchments from Bigou’s time would appear to be pious Latin texts, excerpts from the New Testament. At least ostensibly. But on one of the parchments the words are run incoherently together, with no space between them, and a number of utterly superfluous letters have been inserted. And on the second parchment lines are indiscriminately truncated—unevenly, sometimes in the middle of a word—while certain letters are conspicuously raised above the others. In reality these parchments comprise a sequence of ingenious ciphers or codes. Some of them are fantastically complex, defying even a computer, and insoluble without the requisite key. The resulting following decipherment has appeared in French works devoted to Rennes-le-Château and in two of our films on the subject made for the BBC:
BERGERE PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GARDENT LA CLEF; PAC DCLXXXI PAR LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU J’ACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN A MIDI POMMES BLEUES (SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY; PEACE 681 BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE [OR DESTROY] THIS DAEMON OF THE GUARDIAN AT NOON BLUE APPLES)
But if some of the ciphers are daunting in their complexity, others are patently, even flagrantly, obvious and vi
rtually leap at one from the page. In the second parchment, for instance, the raised letters, taken in sequence, spell out a coherent message:
A DAGOBERT II ROI ET A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LÀ MORT.
(TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD)
Although this particular message must have been discernible to Saunière, it is doubtful that he could decipher the more intricate codes. Nevertheless, he realized he had stumbled upon something of consequence and, with the consent of the village mayor, brought his discovery to his superior, the bishop of Carcassonne. How much the bishop understood is unclear. But Saunière was immediately sent to Paris—at the bishop’s expense—with instructions to present himself and the parchments to certain important ecclesiastical authorities. Chief among these were the Abbé Bieil, director general of the seminary of Saint Sulpice, and Bieil’s nephew, Émile Hoffet. At the time Hoffet was training for the priesthood. Although still in his early twenties he had already established an impressive reputation for scholarship, especially in linguistics, cryptography, and paleography. Despite his pastoral vocation he was known to be immersed in esoteric thought and maintained cordial relations with the various occult-oriented groups, sects, and secret societies that were proliferating in the French capital. This had brought him into contact with an illustrious cultural circle that included such literary figures as Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as the composer Claude Debussy. He also met Emma Calve, who, at the time of Saunière’s appearance, had just returned from triumphant performances in London and Windsor. As a diva, Emma Calve was the Maria Callas of her age. At the same time she was a high priestess of Parisian esoteric subculture and sustained amorous liaisons with a number of influential occultists.
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