Holy Blood, Holy Grail (62 page)

As for the parchments found by Sauniere, two of them -or, at any rate, 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 Sauniere’s money? We know that some of it seems to have been obtained through a financial transaction involving the Archduke Johann von Habsburg.

We also know that substantial sums were made available not only to Sauniere, but also to the bishop of Carcassonne, by the Abbe Henri Boudet, cure of Rennes-les-Bains. There is reason to conclude that the bulk of

Sauniere’s revenue was paid to him by Boudet, through the

intermediary

Marie Denarnaud, Sauniere’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 Prieure 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

Habsburgs. Or it might have issued from the Vatican, which might have been subjected to high-level political blackmail by both Sion and the

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Habsburgs. 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 an 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 RennesleChateau does involve a serious attempt, by influential people, to re-establish 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 the Tribe of Jews who by the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the

Gauls; or the symbolic Grail cup of Rene d’Anjou, which vouchsafed, to the man who quaffed it at a single draught, a vision of both God and the

Magdalene; 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

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meaningless or irrelevant. Now, however, they, too, make sense. Thus it would now seem clear why Louis XI regarded the Magdalene as a source of the French royal line a belief which, even in the context of the fifteenth century, at first appeared absurd.” It would also be apparent why the crown of Charlemagne a replica of which is now part of the imperial Habsburg regalia is said to have borne the inscription

“Rex Salomon’.z And it would be apparent why the

Protocols of the Elders of Sion speak of a new king “of the holy seed of

David’.”

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

Rene 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 Prieure 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 Prieure de Sion like M. Plantard. But it is interesting that, nearly thirty years before, the Cross of Lorraine figured provocatively in a poem by Charles Peguy.

Not long before his death at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, Peguy - a close friend of Maurice

Barres, author of La Colline inspiree composed the following lines: Les ames de Jesus c’est la croix de Lorraine,

Et le sang dans 1’art ere et le sang dans la veine,

Et la source de grace et la Claire fontaine;

Les ames de Satan c’est la croix de Lorraine,

Et c’est la meme art ere 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;

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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, an historian and antiquarian in Nancy, wrote a history of Sion in Lorraine. He also wrote another work, entitled The True History of Saint Sigisbert, which also contains an account of the life of Dagobert 11.5 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 accoutrements which comprise their superstructure. And while we could accord respect to almost every creed, we could not accord to any of them a monopoly on 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. In so far as “objectivity’ is possible, we were able to approach Jesus “objectively’ as an 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 Saviour, 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?

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

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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’s 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 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 symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children.

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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’s 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 Habsburg-Lorraine (present titular dukes of Lorraine and kings of Jerusalem), Plantard, Luxembourg Montpezat,

Montesquieu and various others. According to the “Prieure documents’, the

Sinclair family in Britain is also allied to the bloodline, as are the various branches of the Stuarts. And the Devonshire family, among others, would seem to have been privy to the secret. Most 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’s 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 Prieure 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 Prieure de Sion’s elaborate designs -unless those designs are in some crucial way linked with politics. Whatever the theological repercussions of our

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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 Prieure 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 Prieure de Sion.

During the nineteenth century the Prieure de Sion, working through Freemasonry and the Hieron 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 Habsburgs 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 Hieron 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