Holy Blood, Holy Grail

by Baigent, Michael

  This revelation cast a significant new light on the Crusades. We could now perceive the Crusades from a new perspective and discern in them something more than the symbolic gesture of reclaiming Christ’s sepulchre from the Saracens.

  In his own eyes, as well as those of his supporters, Godfroi would have been more than duke of Lorraine. He would, in fact, have been a rightful king—a legitimate claimant of the dynasty deposed with Dagobert II in 679. But if Godfroi was a rightful king, he was also a king without a kingdom; and the Capetian dynasty in France, supported by the Roman Church, was by then too well entrenched to be dethroned.

  What can one do if one is a king without a kingdom? Perhaps find a kingdom. Or create a kingdom. The most precious kingdom in the entire world—Palestine, the Holy Land, the soil trodden by Jesus himself. Would not the ruler of such a kingdom be comparable to any in Europe? And would he not, in presiding over that most sacred of earthly sites, obtain a sweet revenge on the Church that betrayed his ancestors four centuries before?

  THE ELUSIVE MYSTERY

  Gradually certain pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. If Godfroi was of Merovingian blood, a number of seemingly disconnected fragments ceased to be disconnected and assumed a coherent continuity. We could thus explain the emphasis accorded such apparently disparate elements as the Merovingian dynasty and the Crusades, Dagobert II and Godfroi, Rennes-le-Château, the Knights Templar, the house of Lorraine, the Prieuré de Sion. We could even trace the Merovingian bloodline up to the present day—to Alain Poher, to Henri de Montpézat (consort of the queen of Denmark), to Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, to Otto von Hapsburg, titular duke of Lorraine and king of Jerusalem.

  And yet the really crucial question continued to elude us. We still could not see why the Merovingian bloodline should be so inexplica- bly important today. We still could not see why its claim should be in any way relevant to contemporary affairs, or why it should command the allegiance of so many distinguished men through the centuries. We still could not see why a modern Merovingian monarchy, however technically legitimate it might be, warranted such urgent endorsement. Quite clearly, we were overlooking something.

  10

  The Exiled Tribe

  Could there be something special about the Merovingian bloodline— something more than an academic, technical legitimacy? Could there really be something that, in some way, might genuinely matter to people today? Could there be something that might affect, perhaps even alter, existing social, political, or religious institutions? These questions continued to nag at us. As yet, however, there appeared to be no answer to them.

  Once again we sifted through the compilation of "Prieuré documents" and especially the all-important Dossiers secrets. We reread passages that had meant nothing to us before. Now they made sense, but they did not serve to explain the mystery or to answer what had now become the critical questions. On the other hand, there were other passages whose relevance was still unclear to us. These passages by no means resolved the enigma, but if nothing else, they set us thinking along certain lines—lines that eventually proved to be of paramount significance.

  As we had already discovered, the Merovingians themselves, according to their own chroniclers, claimed descent from ancient Troy. But according to certain of the "Prieuré documents" the Merovingian pedigree was older than the siege of Troy. According to certain of the "Prieuré documents’’ the Merovingian pedigree could in fact be traced back to the Old Testament.

  Among the genealogies in the Dossiers secrets, for example, there were numerous footnotes and annotations. Many of these referred specifically to one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel, the Tribe of Benjamin. One such reference cites, and emphasizes, three biblical passages-Deuteronomy 33, Joshua 18 and Judges 20 and 21.

  Deuteronomy 33 contains the blessing pronounced by Moses on the patriarchs of each of the twelve tribes. Of Benjamin Moses says, "The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by him; and the Lord shall cover him all the day long, and he shall dwell between his shoulders." (33:12) In other words Benjamin and his descendants were singled out for a very special and exalted blessing. That much, at any rate, was clear. We were, of course, puzzled by the promise of the Lord dwelling "between Benjamin’s shoulders." Should we associate it with the legendary Merovingian birthmark—the red cross between the shoulders? The connection seemed somewhat far-fetched. On the other hand, there were other, clearer similarities between Benjamin in the Old Testament and the subject of our investigation. According to Robert Graves, for example, the day sacred to Benjamin was December 231 — Dagobert’s feast day. Among the three clans that comprised the Tribe of Benjamin there was the clan of Ahiram-which might in some obscure way pertain to Hiram, builder of the Temple of Solomon and central figure in Masonic tradition. Hiram’s most devoted disciple, moreover, was named Benoni; and Benoni, interestingly enough, was the name originally conferred upon the infant Benjamin by his mother, Rachel, before she died.

  The second biblical reference in the Dossiers secrets, to Joshua 18, is rather more clear. It deals with the arrival of Moses’ people in the Promised Land and the apportionment to each of the twelve tribes of particular tracts of territory. According to this apportionment the territory of the Tribe of Benjamin included what subsequently became the sacred city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, in other words, even before it became the capital of David and Solomon, was the allocated birthright of the Tribe of Benjamin. According to Joshua 18:28 the birthright of the Benjamites encompassed "Zelah, Eleph and Jebusi, which is Jerusalem, Gibeath and Kirjath; fourteen cities with their villages. This is the inheritance of the children of Benjamin according to their families."

  The third biblical passage cited by the Dossiers secrets involves a fairly complex sequence of events. A Levite, traveling through Benjamite territory, is assaulted, and his concubine ravished, by worshipers of Belial—a variant of the Sumerian mother goddess, known as Ishtar by the Babylonians and Astarte by the Phoenicians. Calling representatives of the twelve tribes to witness, the Levite demands vengeance for the atrocity; and at a council, the Benjamites are instructed to deliver the malefactors to justice. One might expect the Benjamites to comply readily. For some reason, however, they do not and undertake, by force of arms, to protect the "sons of Belial. " The result is a bitter and bloody war between the Benjamites and the remaining eleven tribes. In the course of hostilities a curse is pronounced by the latter on any man who gives his daughter to a Benjamite. When the war is over, however, and the Benjamites virtually exterminated, the victorious Israelites repent of their malediction—which, however, cannot be retracted:

  Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife. And the people came to the house of God, and abode there still even before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore; And said, O Lord God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be today one tribe lacking in Israel? (Judges 21:1-3)

  A few verses later the lament is repeated:

  And the children of Israel repented them for Benjamin their brother, and said, There is one tribe cut off from Israel this day. How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing we have sworn by the Lord that we will not give them of our daughters to wives? (Judges 21:6-7)

  And yet again:

  And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? And they said, There must be an inheritance for them that be escaped out of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed out of Israel. Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters; for the children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin. (Judges 21:15-18)

  Confronted by the possible extinction of an entire tribe, the elders quickly devise a solution. At Shiloh, in Bethel, there is to be a festival shortly; and the wom
en of Shiloh—whose menfolk had remained neutral in the war—are to be considered fair game. The surviving Benjamites are instructed to go to Shiloh and wait in ambush in the vineyards. When the women of the town congregate to dance in the forthcoming festival, the Benjamites are to pounce upon them and take them to wife.

  It is not at all clear why the Dossiers secrets insist on calling attention to this passage. But whatever the reason, the Benjamites, so far as biblical history is concerned, are clearly important. Despite the devastation of the war they quickly recover in prestige, if not in numbers. Indeed, they recover so well that in 1 Samuel they furnish Israel with her first king, Saul.

  Whatever recovery the Benjamites may have made, however, the Dossiers secrets imply that the war over the followers of Belial was a crucial turning point. It would seem that in the wake of this conflict many, if not most, Benjamites went into exile. Thus, there is a portentous note in the Dossiers secrets, in capital letters:

  ONE DAY THE DESCENDANTS OF BENJAMIN LEFT THEIR COUNTRY; CERTAIN REMAINED; TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER GODFROI VI [DE BOUILLON] BECAME KING OF JERUSALEM AND FOUNDED THE ORDRE DE SION.2

  At first this appeared to be a series of simple non sequiturs. When we assembled the diverse and fragmentary references in the Dossiers secrets, however, a coherent story began to emerge. According to this account most Benjamites did go into exile. Their exile supposedly took them to Greece, to the central Pelopponesus—to Arcadia, in short, where they supposedly became aligned with the Arcadian royal line. Toward the advent of the Christian era they are then said to have migrated up the Danube and the Rhine, intermarrying with certain Teutonic tribes and eventually engendering the Sicambrian Franks—the immediate forebears of the Merovingians.

  According to the "Prieuré documents," then, the Merovingians were descended, via Arcadia, from the Tribe of Benjamin. In other words, the Merovingians, as well as their subsequent descendants— the bloodlines of Plantard and Lorraine, for example—were ultimately of Semitic or Israelite origin. And if Jerusalem was indeed the hereditary birthright of the Benjamites, Godfroi de Bouillon, in marching on the Holy City, would in fact have been reclaiming his ancient and rightful heritage. Again it is significant that Godfroi, alone among the august western princes who embarked on the First Crusade, disposed of all his property before his departure—implying thereby that he did not intend to return to Europe.

  Needless to say, we had no way of ascertaining whether the Merovingians were of Benjamite origin or not. The information in the "Prieuré documents,’’ such as it was, related to too remote, too obscure a past, for which no confirmation, no records of any sort could be obtained. But the assertions were neither particularly unique nor particularly new. On the contrary, they had been around in the form of vague rumors and nebulous traditions for a long time. To cite but one instance, Proust draws upon them in his opus; and more recently the novelist Jean d’Ormesson suggests a Judaic origin for certain noble French families. And in 1965 Roger Peyrefitte, who seems to like scandalizing his countrymen, did so with resounding éclat in a novel affirming all French and most European nobility to be ultimately Judaic.

  In fact the argument, although unprovable, is not altogether implausible; nor are the exile and migration ascribed to the Tribe of Benjamin in the "Prieuré documents." The Tribe of Benjamin took up arms on behalf of the followers of Belial—a form of the mother goddess often associated with images of a bull or calf. There is reason to believe that the Benjamites themselves revered the same deity. Indeed, it is possible that the worship of the golden calf in Exodus—the subject, significantly enough, of one of Poussin’s most famous paintings—may have been a specifically Benjamite ritual.

  Following their war against the other eleven tribes of Israel, Benjamites fleeing into exile would, of necessity, have had to flee westward, toward the Phoenician coast. The Phoenicians possessed ships capable of transporting large numbers of refugees. And they would have been obvious allies for fugitive Benjamites—for they, too, worshiped the mother goddess in the form of Astarte, Queen of Heaven.

  If there was actually an exodus of Benjamites from Palestine, one might hope to find some vestigial record of it. In Greek myth one does: in the legend of the son of King Belus, one Danaus, who arrives in Greece with his daughters, by ship. His daughters are said to have introduced the cult of the mother goddess, which became the established cult of the Arcadians. According to Robert Graves the Danaus myth records the arrival in the Peloponnesus of "colonists from Palestine."3 Graves states that King Belus is in fact Baal, or Bel—or perhaps Belial from the Old Testament. It is also worthy of note that one of the clans of the Tribe of Benjamin was the clan of Bela.

  In Arcadia the cult of the mother goddess not only prospered but survived longer than in any other part of Greece. It became associated with worship of Demeter, then of Diana, or Artemis. Known regionally as Arduina, Artemis became tutelary deity of the Ardennes; and it was from the Ardennes that the Sicambrian Franks first issued into what is now France. The totem of Artemis was the she-bear—Callisto, whose son was Areas, the bear-child and patron of Arcadia. And Callisto, transported to the heavens by Artemis,

  13 Judaea, showing the only avenue of escape for the tribe of Benjamin

  became the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. There might thus be something more than coincidence in the appellation "Ursus," applied repeatedly to the Merovingian bloodline.

  In any case there is other evidence, apart from mythology, suggesting a Judaic migration to Arcadia. In classical times the region known as Arcadia was ruled by the powerful, militaristic state of Sparta. The Spartans absorbed much of the older Arcadian culture; and indeed, the legendary Arcadian Lycaeus may in fact be identified with Lycurgus, who codified Spartan law. On reaching manhood the Spartans, like the Merovingians, ascribed a special, magical significance to their hair—which, like the Merovingians, they wore long. According to one authority, "the length of their hair denoted their physical vigour and became a sacred symbol."4 What is more, both books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha stress the link between Spartans and Jews. Maccabees 2 speaks of certain Jews "having embarked to go to the Lacedaemonians, in hope of finding protection there because of their kinship."5 And Maccabees 1 states explicitly, "It has been found in writing concerning the Spartans and the Jews that they are brethren and are of the family of Abraham."6

  We could thus acknowledge at least the possibility of a Judaic migration to Arcadia—so that the "Prieuré documents," if they could not be proved correct, could not be dismissed either. As for a Semitic influence on Frankish culture, there was solid archaeological evidence. Phoenician or Semitic trade routes traversed the whole of southern France, from Bordeaux to Marseilles and Narbonne. They also extended up the Rhone. As early as 700-600 B.C., there were Phoenician settlements not only along the French coast but inland as well, at such sites as Carcassonne and Toulouse. Among the artifacts found at these sites were many of Semitic origin. This is hardly surprising. In the ninth century B.C. the Phoenician kings of Tyre had intermarried with the kings of Israel and Judah, thus establishing a dynastic alliance that would have engendered a close contact between their respective peoples.

  The sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the destruction of the temple prompted a massive exodus of Jews from the Holy Land. Thus, the city of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A. D. 79, included a Jewish community. Certain cities in southern France— Aries, for example, Lunel, and Narbonne—provided a haven for Jewish refugees around the same time. And yet the influx of Judaic peoples into Europe, and especially France, predated the fall of Jerusalem in the first century. In fact it had been in progress from before the Christian era. Between 106 and 48 B.C. a Jewish colony was established in Rome. Not long after, another such colony was founded far up the Rhine, at Cologne. Certain Roman legions included contingents of Jewish slaves, who accompanied their masters all over Europe. Many of these slaves eventually won, purchased, or in some other fashion obtained their freed
om and formed communities.

  In consequence there are many specifically Semitic place names scattered about France. Some of them are situated squarely in the old Merovingian heartland. A few kilometers from Stenay, for example, on the fringe of the Forest of Woëvres where Dagobert was assassinated, there is a village called Baalon. Between Stenay and Orval there is a town called Avioth. And the mountain of Sion in Lorraine— "la colline inspirée"—was originally called Mount Semita.7

  Again, while we could not prove the claims in the "Prieuré documents," we could not discount them either. Certainly there was enough evidence to render them at least plausible. We were compelled to acknowledge that the "Prieuré documents" might be correct-that the Merovingians and the various noble families descended from them might have stemmed from Semitic sources.

  But could this, we wondered, really be all there was to the story? Could this really be the portentous secret that had engendered so much fuss and intrigue, so much machination and mystery, so much controversy and conflict through the centuries? Merely another lost tribe legend? And even if it were not legend but true, could it really explain the motivation of the Prieuré de Sion and the claim of the Merovingian dynasty? Could it really explain the adherence of men like Leonardo and Newton or the activities of the houses of Guise and Lorraine, the covert endeavors of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, the elusive secrets of Scottish Rite Freemasonry? Obviously not. Why should descent from the Tribe of Benjamin constitute so explosive a secret? And perhaps most crucially, why should descent from the Tribe of Benjamin matter today? How could it possibly clarify the Prieuré de Sion’s present-day activities and objectives?

  If our inquiry involved vested interests that were specifically Semitic or Judaic, moreover, why did it involve so many components of a specifically, even fervently Christian character? The pact between Clovis and the Roman Church, for example; the avowed Christianity of Godfroi de Bouillon; the conquest of Jerusalem; the heretical, perhaps, but none-the-less Christian thought of the Cathars and Knights Templar; pious institutions like the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement; a Freemasonry that was ’Hermetic, aristocratic, and Christian"; and the implication of so many Christian ecclesiastics, from high-ranking princes of the Church to local village cures like Boudet and Saunière?