It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the Merovingian bloodline probably came closest to the realization of its objectives. By virtue of its intermarriage with the Hapsburgs, the house of Lorraine had actually acquired the throne of Austria, the Holy Roman Empire. When Marie Antoinette, daughter of François de Lorraine, became queen of France, the throne of France, too, was only a generation or so away. Had not the French Revolution intervened, the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine might well, by the early 1800s, have been on its way to establishing dominion over all Europe.
It would seem clear that the French Revolution was a devastating blow to Merovingian hopes and aspirations. In a single shattering cataclysm the carefully laid and implemented designs of a century and a half were suddenly reduced to rubble. From references in the "Prieuré documents," moreover, it would seem that Sion, during the turmoil of the revolution, lost many of its most precious records— and possibly other items as well. This might explain the shift in the order’s grand mastership—to specifically French cultural figures who, like Nodier, had access to otherwise unobtainable material. It might also explain the role of Saunière. Saunière’s predecessor, Antoine Bigou, had concealed, and possibly composed, the coded parchments on the very eve of the Revolution—and then fled to Spain, where, shortly after, he died. It is thus possible that Sion, for a time at any rate, did not know precisely where the parchments were. But even if they were known to have been in the church at Rennes-le-Château, they could not easily have been retrieved without a sympathetic priest on the spot—a man who would do Sion’s bidding, refrain from embarrassing questions, keep silence, and not interfere with the order’s interests and activities. If the parchments, moreover, referred to something else—something concealed in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château—such a man would have been all the more essential.
Saunière died without divulging his secret. So did his housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud. During the ensuing years there have been many excavations in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château, but none of them has yielded anything. If, as we assume, certain explosive items were once concealed in the environs, they would certainly have been removed when Saunière’s story began to attract attention and treasure hunters—unless these items were concealed in some depository immune to treasure hunters, in an underground crypt, for example, under a manmade pool on private property. Such a crypt would ensure safety and be proof against any unauthorized excavations. No such excavations would be possible unless the pool were first drained, and this could hardly be done clandestinely—especially by trespassers on private land. In fact, a manmade pool does exist near Rennes-le-Château—near a site called, appropriately enough, Lavaldieu (the Valley or Vale of God). This pool might well have been constructed over an underground crypt—which, in turn, might easily lead via a subterranean passageway to any of the myriad caves honeycombing the surrounding mountains.
As for the parchments found by Saunière, two of them—or, at any rate, purported facsimiles of two of them—have been reproduced, published, and widely circulated. The other two, in contrast, have been kept scrupulously secret. In his conversation with us M. Plantard stated that they are currently in a safe deposit box in a Lloyds’ bank in London. Further than that we have been unable to trace them.
And Saunière’s money? We know that some of it seems to have been obtained through a financial transaction involving the Archduke Johann von Hapsburg. We also know that substantial sums were made available not only to Saunière, but also to the bishop of Carcassonne, by the Abbé Henri Boudet, cure of Rennes-les-Bains. There is reason to conclude that the bulk of Saunière’s revenue was paid to him by Boudet, through the intermediary Marie Denarnaud, Saunière’s housekeeper. Where Boudet—a poor parish priest himself— obtained such resources remains, of course, a mystery. He would clearly seem to have been a representative of the Prieuré de Sion, but whether the money issued directly from Sion remains an unanswered question. It might equally well have issued from the treasury of the Hapsburgs. Or it might have issued from the Vatican, which might have been subjected to high-level political blackmail by both Sion and the Hapsburgs. In any case, the question of the money or a treasure that engendered it became, for us, increasingly incidental when measured against our subsequent discoveries. Its chief function, in retrospect, had been to draw our attention to the mystery. After that it paled to relative insignificance.
We have formulated a hypothesis of a bloodline, descended from Jesus, which has continued up to the present day. We cannot, of course, be certain that our hypothesis is correct in every detail. But even if specific details here and there are subject to modification, we are convinced that the essential outlines of our hypothesis are accurate. We may perhaps have misconstrued the meaning of, say, a particular grand master’s activities, or an alliance in the power struggles and political machinations of eighteenth-century politics. But our researches have persuaded us that the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau does involve a serious attempt by influential people to reestablish a Merovingian monarchy in France, if not indeed in the whole of Europe—and that the claim to legitimacy of such a monarchy rests on a Merovingian descent from Jesus.
Viewed from this perspective, a number of the anomalies, enigmas, and unanswered questions raised by our researches become explicable. So do a great many of the seemingly trivial but equally baffling fragments: the title of the book associated with Nicolas Flamel, for example—The Sacred Book of Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher to that Tribe of Jews who by the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the Gauls; or the symbolic Grail cup of René d’Anjou, which vouchsafed, to the man who quaffed it at a single draught, a vision of both God and the Magdalen; or Andrea’s Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, which speaks of a mysterious girl-child of royal blood, washed ashore in a boat, whose rightful heritage has fallen into Islamic hands; or the secret to which Poussin was privy—as well as the secret said to "lie at the heart" of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement.
During the course of our research we had encountered a number of other fragments as well. At the time they had seemed either totally meaningless or irrelevant. Now, however, they, too, make sense. Thus, it would now seem clear why Louis XI regarded the Magdalen as a source of the French royal line—a belief that, even in the context of the fifteenth century, at first appeared absurd.1 It would also be apparent why the crown of Charlemagne—a replica of which is now part of the imperial Hapsburg regalia—is said to have borne the inscription "Rex Salomon." 2 And it would be apparent why the Protocols of the Elders of Sion speak of a new king "of the holy seed of David."3
During the Second World War, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, the Cross of Lorraine became the symbol of the forces of Free France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. In itself this is somewhat curious. Why should the Cross of Lorraine— the device of René d’Anjou—have been equated with France? Lorraine was never the heartland of France. For most of her history, in fact, Lorraine was an independent duchy, a Germanic state comprising part of the old Holy Roman Empire.
In part the Cross of Lorraine may have been adopted because of the important role the Prieuré de Sion seems to have played in the French Resistance. In part it may have been adopted because of General de Gaulle’s association with members of the Prieuré de Sion—including M. Plantard. But it is interesting that nearly thirty years earlier the Cross of Lorraine figured provocatively in a poem by Charles Péguy. Not long before his death at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, Peguy—a close friend of Maurice Barrès, author of La Colline Inspirée—composed the following lines:
Les armes de Jésus c’est la croix de Lorraine,
Et le sang dans l’artère et le sang dans la veine,
Et la source de grace et la claire fontaine;
Les armes de Satan c’est la croix de Lorraine,
Et c’est la meme artère et c’est la meme veine
Et c’est le meme sang et la trouble fontaine ...
(The arms of Jesus are the Cross of Lorraine,
Both the blood in the artery and the blood in the vein,
Both the source of grace and the clear fountain;
The arms of Satan are the Cross of Lorraine,
And the same artery and the same vein,
And the same blood and the troubled fountain ...)4
In the late seventeenth century the Reverend Father Vincent, a historian and antiquarian in Nancy, wrote a history of Sion in Lorraine. He also wrote another work, entitled The True History of Saint Sigisbert, 5 which also contains an account of the life of Dagobert. On the title page of this latter work there is an epigraph, a quotation from the Fourth Gospel, "He is among you and you do not know Him."
Even before we began our research, we ourselves were agnostic, neither pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. By virtue of our background and study of comparative religions we were sympathetic to the core of validity inherent in most of the world’s major faiths and indifferent to the dogma, the theology, the accouterments that make up their superstructures. And while we could accord respect to almost every creed, we could not accord to any of them a monopoly of truth.
Thus, when our research led us to Jesus, we could approach him with what we hoped was a sense of balance and perspective. We had no prejudices or preconceptions one way or the other, no vested interests of any kind, nothing to be gained by either proving or disproving anything. Insofar as "objectivity" is possible, we were able to approach Jesus objectively—as a historian would be expected to approach Alexander, for example, or Caesar. And the conclusions that forced themselves upon us, though certainly startling, were not shattering. They did not necessitate a reappraisal of our personal convictions or shake our personal hierarchies of values.
But what of other people? What of the millions of individuals across the world for whom Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior, the Redeemer? To what extent does the historical Jesus, the priest-king who emerged from our research, threaten their faith? To what extent have we violated what constitutes for many people their most cherished understanding of the sacred? To what extent have we committed an act of desecration?
We are well aware, of course, that our research has led us to conclusions that, in many respects, are inimical to certain basic tenets of modern Christianity—conclusions that are heretical, perhaps even blasphemous. From the standpoint of certain established dogma we are no doubt guilty of such transgressions. But we do not believe that we have desecrated, or even diminished, Jesus in the eyes of those who do genuinely revere him. And while we ourselves cannot subscribe to Jesus’ divinity, our conclusions do not preclude others from doing so. Quite simply there is no reason why Jesus could not have married and fathered children while still retaining his divinity. There is no reason whatever why his divinity should be dependent on sexual chastity. Even if he were the Son of God, there is no reason why he should not have wed and sired a family.
Underlying most Christian theology is the assumption that Jesus is God incarnate. In other words, God, taking pity on His creation, incarnated Himself in that creation and assumed human form. By doing so He would be able to acquaint Himself at first hand, so to speak, with the human condition. He would experience at first hand the vicissitudes of human existence. He would come to understand, in the most profound sense, what it means to be a man—to confront from a human standpoint the loneliness, the anguish, the helplessness, the tragic mortality that the status of manhood entails. By dint of becoming man God would come to know man in a way that the Old Testament does not allow. Renouncing His Olympian aloofness and remoteness, He would partake directly of man’s lot. By doing so He would redeem man’s lot—would validate and justify it by partaking of it, suffering from it, and eventually being sacrificed by it.
The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience—exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity?
We do not think so. In fact, we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolizes what it is intended to symbolize unless Jesus was married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels and of established Christianity is ultimately incomplete—a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our research enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.
On the whole, then, we do not think we have compromised or belittled Jesus. We do not think he has suffered from the conclusions to which our research led us. From our investigations emerges a living and plausible Jesus—a Jesus whose life is both meaningful and comprehensible to modern man.
We cannot point to one man and assert that he is Jesus’ lineal descendant. Family trees bifurcate, subdivide, and in the course of centuries multiply into veritable forests. There are at least a dozen families in Britain and Europe today—with numerous collateral branches—who are of Merovingian lineage. These include the houses of Hapsburg-Lorraine (present titular dukes of Lorraine and kings of Jerusalem), Plantard, Luxembourg, Montpézat, Montesquiou, and various others. According to the "Prieuré documents," the Sinclair family in Britain is also allied to the bloodline, as are various branches of the Stuarts. And the Devonshire family, among others, would seem to have been privy to the secret. All of these houses could presumably claim a pedigree from Jesus; and if one man, at some point in the future, is to be put forward as a new priest-king, we do not know who he is.
But several things, at any rate, are clear. So far as we personally are concerned Jesus’ lineal descendant would not be any more divine, any more intrinsically miraculous, than the rest of us. This attitude would undoubtedly be shared by a great many people today. We suspect it is shared by the Prieuré de Sion as well. Moreover the revelation of an individual, or group of individuals, descended from Jesus would not shake the world in the way it might have done as recently as a century or two ago. Even if there were "incontrovertible proof" of such a lineage, many people would simply shrug and ask, "So what?" As a result there would seem to be little point in the Prieuré de Sion’s elaborate designs—unless those designs are in some crucial way linked with politics. Whatever the theological repercussions of our conclusions, there would seem, quite clearly, to be other repercussions as well—political repercussions with a potentially enormous impact, affecting the thinking, the values, the institutions of the contemporary world in which we live.
Certainly in the past the various families of Merovingian descent were thoroughly steeped in politics and their objectives included political power. This would also seem to have been true of the Prieuré de Sion and a number of its grand masters. There is no reason to assume that politics should not be equally important to both Sion and the bloodline today. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that Sion thinks in terms of a unity between what used to be called Church and state—a unity of secular and spiritual, sacred and profane, politics and religion. In many of its documents Sion asserts that the new king, in accordance with Merovingian tradition, would "rule but not govern." In other words he would be a priest-king who functions primarily in a ritual and symbolic capacity; and the actual business of governing would be handled by someone else— conceivably by the Prieuré de Sion.
During the nineteenth century the Prieuré de Sion, working through Freemasonry and the Hiéron du Val d’Or, attempted to establish a revived and "updated" Holy Roman Empire—a kind of theocratic United States of Europe, ruled simultaneously by the Hapsburgs and by a radically reformed Church. This enterprise was thwarted by the First World War and the fall of Europe’s reigning dynasties. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that Sion’s present objectives are basically similar—at least in their general outlines—to those of the Hiér
on du Val d’Or.
Needless to say, our understanding of those objectives can only be speculative. But they would seem to include a theocratic United States of Europe—a trans- or pan-European confederation assembled into a modern empire and ruled by a dynasty descended from Jesus. This dynasty would not only occupy a throne of political or secular power, but quite conceivably the throne of Saint Peter as well. Under that supreme authority there might then be an interlocking network of kingdoms or principalities, connected by dynastic alliance and intermarriage—a kind of twentieth-century feudal system, but without the abuses usually associated with that term. And the actual process of governing would presumably reside with the Prieuré de Sion—which might take the form of, say, a European parliament endowed with executive and/or legislative powers.
A Europe of this sort would constitute a new and unified political force in international affairs—an entity whose status would ultimately be comparable to that of the Soviet Union or the United States. Indeed, it might well emerge stronger than either, because it would rest on deep-rooted spiritual and emotional foundations rather than on abstract theoretical or ideological ones. It would appeal not only to man’s head but to his heart as well. It would draw its strength from tapping the collective psyche of western Europe, awakening the fundamental religious impulse.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail Page 47
