Holy Blood, Holy Grail (61 page)

When the Church colluded in Dagobert’s assassination, and the subsequent betrayal of the Merovingian bloodline, it rendered itself guilty of a crime that could neither be rationalised nor expunged. It could only be suppressed. It would have had to be suppressed for a disclosure of the

Merovingians’ real identity would hardly have strengthened Rome’s

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position against her enemies. Despite all efforts to eradicate it, Jesus’s bloodline or, at any rate, the Merovingian bloodline survived.

It survived in part through the

Carolingians, who clearly felt more guilty about their usurpation than did

Rome, and sought to legitimi se themselves by dynastic alliances with Merovingian princesses. But more significantly it survived through Dagobert’s son, Sigisbert, whose descendants included Guillem de Gellone, ruler of the Jewish kingdom of Septimania, and eventually Godfroi de

Bouillon. With Godfroi’s capture of Jerusalem in 1099, Jesus’s lineage would have regained its rightful heritage the heritage conferred upon it in Old Testament times.

It is doubtful that Godfroi’s true pedigree during the time of the Crusades was as secret as Rome would have wished it to be. Given the Church’s hegemony, there could not, of course, have been an overt disclosure. But it is probable that rumours, traditions and legends were rife; and these would seem to have found their most prominent expression in such tales as that of

Lohengrin, for example, Godfroi’s mythical ancestor and, naturally, in the romances of the Holy Grail.

If our hypothesis is correct, the Holy Grail would have been at least two things simultaneously. On the one hand it would have been Jesus’s bloodline and descendants -the “Sang Raal’, the “Real’ or “Royal’ blood of which the

Templars, created by the Prieure de Sion, were appointed guardians. At the same time the Holy Grail would have been, quite literally, the receptacle, or vessel, which received and contained Jesus’s blood. In other words it would have been the womb of the Magdalene and, by extension, the

Magdalene herself. From this the cult of the Magdalene, as it was promulgated during the Middle Ages, would have arisen and been confused with the cult of the Virgin. It can be proved, for instance, that many of the famous “Black Virgins’ or “Black Madonnas’ early in the Christian era were shrines not to the Virgin but to the Magdalene and they depict a mother and child. It has also been argued that the Gothic cathedrals those majestic stone replicas of the womb dedicated to “Notre Dame’ were also, as Le Serpent rouge states, shrines to Jesus’s consort, rather than to his mother.

The Holy Grail, then, would have symbolised both Jesus’s bloodline and the

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Magdalene, from whose womb that bloodline issued. But it may have been something else as well. In A.D. 70, during the great revolt in Judaea, Roman legions under Titus sacked the

Temple of Jerusalem. The pillaged treasure of the Temple is said to have found its way eventually to the Pyrenees; and M. Plantard, in his conversation with us, stated that this treasure was in the hands of the

Prieure de Sion today. But the Temple of Jerusalem may have contained more than the treasure plundered by Titus’s centurions. In ancient Judaism religion and politics were inseparable. The Messiah was to be a priest-king, whose authority encompassed spiritual and secular domains alike. It is thus likely, indeed probable, that the Temple housed official records pertaining to Israel’s royal line the equivalents of the birth certificates, marriage licences and other relevant data concerning any modern royal or aristocratic family. If Jesus was indeed “King of the Jews’ the Temple is almost certain to have contained copious information relating to him. It may even have contained his body or at least his tomb, once his body was removed from the temporary tomb of the Gospels.

There is no indication that Titus, when he plundered the Temple in A.D. 70, obtained anything in any way relevant to Jesus. Such material, if it existed, might of course have been destroyed. On the other hand it might also have been hidden; and Titus’s soldiers, interested only in booty, might not have bothered to look for it. For any priest in the Temple at the time, there would have been one obvious course of action. Seeing a phalanx of centurions advancing upon him, he would have left them the gold, the jewels, the material treasure they expected to find. And he would have hidden, perhaps beneath the Temple, the items that were of greater consequence items relating to the rightful king of Israel, the acknowledged Messiah and the royal family.

By 1100 Jesus’s descendants would have risen to prominence in Europe and, through Godfroi de Bouillon, in Palestine as well. They themselves would have known their pedigree and ancestry. But they might not have been able to prove their identity to the world at large; and such proof may well have been deemed necessary for their subsequent designs. If it were known that such proof existed, or even possibly

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existed, in the precincts of the Temple, no effort would have been spared to find it. This would explain the role of the Knights Templar who, under a cloak of secrecy, undertook excavations beneath the Temple, in the so-called Stables of Solomon.

On the basis of the evidence we examined, there would seem to be little question that the Knights Templar were in fact sent to the Holy Land with the express purpose of finding or obtaining something. And on the basis of the evidence we examined, they would seem to have accomplished their mission.

They would seem to have found what they were sent to find, and to have brought it back to Europe. What became of it then remains a mystery.

But there seems little question that, under the auspices of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, something was concealed in the vicinity of Rennes-leChateau for which a contingent of

German miners was imported, under the most stringent security, to excavate and construct a hiding-place. One can only speculate about what might have been concealed there. It may have been Jesus’s mummified body. It may have been the equivalent, so to speak, of Jesus’s marriage licence, and/or the birth certificates of his children. It may have been something of comparably explosive import. Any or all of these items might have been referred to as the Holy Grail. Any or all of these items might, by accident or design, have passed to the Cathar heretics and comprised part of the mysterious treasure of Montsegur.

Through Godfroi and Baudouin de Bouillon, a “royal tradition’ is said to have existed which, because it was “founded on the Rock of Sion’, equalled in status the foremost dynasties of Europe. If as the New Testament and later Freemasonry maintain the “Rock of Sion’ is synonymous with Jesus, that assertion would suddenly make sense. Indeed it would be, if anything, an understatement.

Once installed on the throne of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the Merovingian dynasty could sanction and even encourage hints about its true ancestry.

This would explain why the Grail romances appeared precisely when and where they did, and why they were so explicitly associated with the Knights

Templar. In time, once its position in Palestine was consolidated, the

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”royal tradition’ descended from Godfroi and Baudouin would probably have divulged its origins. The king of Jerusalem would then have taken precedence over all the monarchs of Europe, and the patriarch of Jerusalem would have supplanted the pope. Displacing Rome, Jerusalem would then have become the true capital of Christendom, and perhaps of much more than Christendom. For if Jesus were acknowledged as a mortal prophet, as a priest-king and legitimate ruler of the line of David, he might well have become acceptable to both Muslims and Jews. As king of Jerusalem, his lineal descendant would then have been in a position to implement one of the primary tenets of Templar policy the

reconciliation of Christianity with

Judaism and Islam.

Historical circumstances, of course, never allowed matters to reach this point. The Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem never consolidated its position.

Beleaguered on every side by Muslim armies, unstable in its own government and administration, it never attained the strength and internal security it needed to survive still less to assert its supremacy over the crowns of

Europe and the Church of Rome. The grandiose design foundered; and with the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 it collapsed completely. The Merovingians were once again without a crown. And the Knights Templar were not only redundant but also expendable.

In the centuries that followed, the Merovingians aided and/or directed and/or protected by the Prieure de Sion -made repeated attempts to regain their heritage, but these attempts were confined to Europe.

They seem to have involved at least three interrelated but essentially distinct programmes. One was the creation of a psychological atmosphere, a clandestine tradition intended to erode the spiritual esoteric thought, in the

Rosicrucian manifestos and similar writings, in certain rites of Freemasonry and, of course, in the symbols of Arcadia and the underground stream. A second programme entailed political machination, intrigue and, if feasible, an overt seizure of power the techniques employed by the Guise and Lorraine families in the sixteenth century, and by the architects of the Fronde in the seventeenth. A third

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programme by which the Merovingians sought to regain their heritage was dynastic intermarriage.

On first consideration it might seem that such Byzantine procedures would have been unnecessary; it might seem that the Merovingians if they were indeed descended from Jesus would have had no trouble establishing their supremacy. They needed only to disclose and establish their real identity, and the world would acknowledge them.

In fact, however, things would not have been so simple. Jesus himself was not recognised by the Romans. When it was expedient to do so, the Church had no compunction in sanctioning the murder of Dagobert and the overthrow of his bloodline. A premature disclosure of their pedigree would not have guaranteed success for the

Merovingians. On the contrary, it would have been much more likely to misfire to engender factional strife, precipitate a crisis in faith, and provoke challenges from both the Church and other secular potentates.

Unless they were well entrenched in positions of power, the Merovingians could not have withstood such repercussions and the secret of their identity, their trump card, as it were, would have been played and lost for ever. Given the realities of both history and politics, this trump card could not have been used as a stepping stone to power. It could only be played when power had already been acquired played, in other words, from a position of strength.

In order to re-establish themselves, therefore, the Merovingians were obliged to resort to more conventional procedures the accepted procedures of the particular age in question. On at least four occasions these procedures came frustratingly close to success, and were thwarted only by miscalculation, by force of circumstance or by the totally unforeseen. In the sixteenth century, for example, the house of Guise very nearly managed to seize the French throne. In the seventeenth century the Fronde very nearly succeeded in keeping Louis XIV from the throne and supplanting him with a representative of the house of Lorraine. In the late nineteenth century blueprints were laid for a species of revived Holy League, which would have unified Catholic Europe Austria, France, Italy and Spain under the Habsburgs. These

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plans were thwarted by the erratic and aggressive behaviour of both Germany and Russia who provoked a constant shift of alliances among the major powers and eventually precipitated a war which toppled all the continental dynasties.

It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the Merovingian bloodline probably came closest to the realisation of its objectives.

By virtue of its intermarriage with the Habsburgs, the house of Lorraine had actually acquired the throne of Austria, the Holy Roman Empire. When Marie

Antoinette, daughter of Frano~ois 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 Habsburg-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 “Prieure 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 Sauniere. Sauniere’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-leChateau, 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-leChateau, such a man would have been all the more essential.

Sauniere died without divulging his secret. So did his housekeeper, Marie

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Denarnaud. During the ensuing years there have been many excavations in the vicinity of Rennes-leChateau, 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 Sauniere’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 man-made pool on private property. Such a crypt would ensure safety and be proof against any un authorised 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-leChateau 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 honey combing the surrounding mountains.