The Atlantis Blueprint (33 page)

The Habsburgs were also members of the House of Lorraine, and therefore prime candidates for membership of the Priory of Sion, which sheds further light on the facts that one of Saunière’s guests was Johann von Habsburg and that Saunière received money from Austria. It sounds as if his visit to St Sulpice introduced him to people who were willing to share their secret and give him generous financial support as the present incumbent of Dagobert’s ancient stronghold…

This complex and fascinating story has another twist. Lincoln learned from the retired clergyman that the ‘real treasure’ was the knowledge that Jesus did not die on the cross, and this knowledge came from St Sulpice. If St Sulpice was the Paris headquarters of the Priory of Sion, then it may well be
that Saunière’s secret – the secret that shocked the priest who attended his deathbed – was that Jesus had not died on the cross, and therefore the Christian Church had been built on foundations of sand, since it was based on the notion that Jesus died to save man from the burden of original sin.

When Lincoln was working on the BBC programme
The Shadow of the Templars,
he was suddenly struck by a startling thought. He and two researchers, Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, were joking about a legend that the mother of King Merovec, the founder of the Merovingian line, had been impregnated by a sea creature, and one of them joked that the story sounded ‘fishy’. Suddenly Lincoln and Leigh looked at one another as they were seized with the same suspicion. Fish – the symbol of Christianity. Could the legend mean that the lady had been impregnated by… a symbol of Christianity, a direct descendant of Jesus?

The Merovingian kings claimed that they reigned ‘by right of blood’ – royal blood – not by being anointed by the Church. Was the bloodline that they were so proud of that of Jesus himself? In which case, who was Jesus’s wife? In the village of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, a yearly ceremony celebrates the arrival of Mary Magdalen in France, bearing the True Cross and the Holy Grail. The church in Rennes-le-Château is dedicated to her and has two statues of her carrying the cross and the Grail. Saunière built a library called the Tour Magdala – the Magdalen Tower. Mystics of the Middle Ages identified her with the planet Venus – the goddess of love.

Lincoln and Leigh were led to speculate that Jesus and Mary Magdalen had come to France and founded the bloodline of the Merovingians. Perhaps the tomb that Poussin painted was, in fact, the tomb of Jesus? It was this extraordinary speculation – and Lincoln insists that it is merely a speculation – that made
The Holy Blood and the Grail
(1982)10 by Lincoln, Leigh and Baigent an instant bestseller.

By now Lincoln had learned, through the detective work of a BBC researcher, that the most important living member of
the Priory of Sion was a man called Pierre Plantard. Plantard was indeed the name of a noble family of the Merovingian line. A meeting was arranged, and Lincoln invited Plantard to view the second Rennes-le-Château film,
The Priest, the Painter and the Devil.
He proved to be a kindly and courteous gentleman – born in 1920 – and a group of his followers were present. The closest seemed to be a marquis named Philip de Cherisey. Lincoln was to learn that de Cherisey was responsible for much of the
Secret Dossier
deposited in the Louvre.

Sitting behind them, Lincoln was pleased to observe that they became suddenly attentive when the film showed an image of one of the parchments, in which Lincoln had detected the form of a pentagram, a figure made by joining the points of a five-pointed star.

The pentagram is, of course, one of the most ancient magical symbols. I was once advised to draw one (mentally) on my gatepost if I wanted to deter unwelcome visitors – it had to be upside-down. Upright it is supposed to keep evil at bay; upside-down (like a man standing on his head) it is supposed to attract sinister forces.

What is its origin? No one is sure, although it played an important part in the geometry of Pythagoras. One of the most convincing explanations involves the planet Venus. If we imagine the earth as the centre of the solar system (as the ancients believed), it becomes obvious that there will be moments when every planet will be ‘eclipsed’ by the sun as it comes between the planet and the earth. Mercury, for example, is ‘eclipsed’ three times a year, and if we draw lines between these three points in the heavens they form an irregular triangle. Mars is ‘eclipsed’ four times, and the figure is an irregular rectangle. In fact, all the planets make irregular figures, except Venus, which makes a regular pentacle. If, as we have argued in this book, the ancients were studying the heavens much earlier than anyone supposed, it seems probable that Venus was associated with the pentagram at a very early date.
¹¹

In addition to the hidden pentagram (which was not a
regular one) in one of the parchments, Lincoln also noticed something odd about the geometry of Poussin’s
Les Bergers d’Arcadie.
Looking for the ‘secret’ that seems to have alarmed Louis XIV, he noticed that the staff of the shepherd on the right is neatly cut in two by the shepherd’s arm, and the distance from the top of the staff to the shepherd’s pointed finger is precisely this same ‘half measure’. He soon noticed other ‘half measures’ throughout the painting. The picture had obviously been designed geometrically. He showed the painting to Professor Christopher Cornford, of the Royal College of Art, who found something even more fascinating.

When Cornford reported to Henry Lincoln on
Les Bergers d’Arcadie,
he explained that he began by looking for one of two ‘systems’ in constant use by classical painters. One is a number system, based on Plato’s
Timaeus
(a dialogue about the creation of the universe), which became highly influential in the Renaissance. The other is a far older system, a geometry based on the Golden Section. Cornford expected to find the
Timaeus
system in Poussin’s painting, because the Golden Section system was then regarded as extremely old-fashioned, and in fact he did find traces of it. But the basic system used in
Les Bergers dArcadie
is the Golden Section. The painting is also full of pentagonal geometry.

Consider the following pentagram drawn in a circle:

A pentagram is the quintessential golden section geometric figure. In the diagram EF is a phi ratio of EB, and CF is a phi ratio of CA.

When Cornford looked more closely, he could draw a pentagram that
went outside
the painting

In short, the pentacle was encoded into Poussin’s painting.

That led Cornford to make an interesting suggestion. Could the phrase ‘Poussin holds the key…’ be anything to do with the landscape around Rennes-le-Château, which is where Saunière searched for the treasure? This led Lincoln to one of his most important discoveries. When he looked at a map of the Rennes-le-Château region, one thing was immediately obvious: three of its key sites
—
Rennes-le-Château, the Templar château of Bezu and the Blanchefort château
—
were three points of a triangle. And all were on hilltops.

When Lincoln drew the triangle on his map, and proceeded to measure its lines, he received a surprise. It was a precise isosceles triangle, that is, with two sides
exactly equal.
With Bezu at the apex of the triangle, the lines from Bezu to Blanchefort and from Bezu to Rennes-le-Château were equal.

This could not have been an accident. At some point in time, it seemed that someone had observed that the three hilltops made a precise triangle and, in due course, they had been chosen as part of a secret pattern.

Lincoln found himself wondering if, by any remote chance, there were two more hilltops that would form the rest of a pentagram. Of course, he felt, that would be asking too much… yet when he studied the map, he was staggered to find that there
were
two such hilltops, in precisely the right places. The eastern one was called La Soulane, and the western one Serre de Lauzet. When the five hilltops were joined up, they formed an exact pentacle.

There was one more surprise to come. When Lincoln looked for the centre of the map, he found that it was marked by another hill, called La Pique. Although its summit looked on the map like the dead centre, it was actually 250 yards to the south-east of centre, but that was to be expected – after all, this was not a man-made landscape.

So this was the basic secret of Rennes-la-Château: that it was part of a sacred landscape. Perhaps this is why Rennes-le-Château was chosen by Dagobert as his home and why his son Sigisbert fled there after his father’s murder. The royal blood of the Merovingians was associated with a
magic landscape.

Rand had first become intrigued by Rennes after reading
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
It states that a few miles east of Rennes-le-Château lie the ruins of the Château of Blanchefort, ancestral home of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who presided over the order in the mid-twelfth century.

It seems that Blanchefort ‘commissioned certain mysterious excavations’ in the mountain where his château stood, all under conditions of the greatest secrecy. In 1156 a contingent of German miners arrived to work the mountain, apparently for gold, but there couldn’t possibly have been any gold left in the mountain of Blanchefort, as the Romans had exhausted the mines centuries earlier.
¹²
And they were ‘forbidden to fraternise in any way with the local population and were kept strictly segregated from the surrounding community’. Lincoln hints that something else in the area had attracted the Grand

Master. Rand naturally wondered if it might have anything to do with his blueprint of sacred sites.

He wrote: I agree with Lincoln’s conclusion that the complexity of Rennes-le-Château is evidence that “… the ancient surveyors… have left us the empirical reality of their amazing labours. They have left us the evidence of their skills and knowledge which, through many long centuries, has been lost and forgotten.”13 This dovetails with everything we’ve discovered about the Atlantis Blueprint.’

Lincoln also notes the importance of the Golden Section in the whole Rennes complex and links it to the planet Venus. He argues that the reason Venus is so widely worshipped in world mythology is because its orbit appears pentagonal to us on earth. The pentagon is the geometric figure that most conclusively registers the Golden Section. 100,000 years ago, during the Yukon Pole, Rennes was located at a Golden Section division of a line drawn from pole to pole.

It was not alone. Nanking, China, also fits this pattern exactly. The surprising fact is that both linkages occur only during the Yukon Pole. Nor is this the only connection between ancient Celts and China. In
Uriel’s Machine,
Lomas and Knight examine the research of archaeologist Dr Elizabeth Wayland Barber, whose book
The Mummies of Urumchi
is a study of the mummified remains of several Caucasians found in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Barber discovered plaid material with the mummies. She wrote: ‘Not only does this woollen plaid look like Scottish tartans but it also has the same weight, feel and initial thickness as a kilt cloth.’
¹⁴

Lomas and Knight comment:

In
The New View Over Atlantis,
John Michell also makes the connection between the ancient Celts and China: