The Grand Masters and the Underground Stream

In the Dossiers secrets, the following individuals are listed as successive Grand Masters of the Prieure de Sion or, to use the official term, “Nautonnier”, an old French word which means ’navigator’ or ‘helmsman’:

Jean de Gisors 1188-1220 Marie de Saint-Clair 1220-66 Guillaume de Gisors 1266-1307 Edouard de Bar 1307-36 Jeanne de Bar 1336-51 Jean de Saint-Clair 1351-66 Blanche d’Evreux 1366-98 Nicolas Flamel 1398-1418 Rene d’Anjou 1418-80 Iolande de Bar 1480-83 Sandro Filipepi 1483-1510 Leonard de Vinci 1510-19 Connetable de Bourbon 1519-27 Ferdinand de Gonzague 1527-75 Louis de Nevers 1575-95 Robert Fludd 1595-1637 J. Valentin Andrea 1637-54 Robert Boyle 1654-91 Isaac Newton 1691-1727 Charles Radclyffe 1727-46 Charles de Lorraine 1746-80 Maximilian de Lorraine 1780-1801 Charles Nodier 1801-44 Victor Hugo 1844-85 Claude Debussy 1885-1918 Jean Cocteau 1918-63

When we first saw this list, it immediately provoked our scepticism. On the one hand it includes a number of names which one would automatically expect to find on such a list—names of famous individuals associated with the ‘occult’ and ’esoteric’. On the other hand it includes a number of illustrious and improbable names—individuals whom, in certain cases, we could not imagine presiding over a secret society. At the same time, many of these latter names are precisely the kind that twentieth-century organisations have often attempted to appropriate for themselves, thus establishing a species of spurious ‘pedigree’.

There are, for example, lists published by AMORC, the modern “Rosicrucians” based in California, which include virtually every important figure in Western history and culture whose values, even if only tangentially, happened to coincide with the Order’s own. An often haphazard overlap or convergence of attitudes is deliberately misconstrued as something tantamount to ‘initiated membership’. And thus one is told that Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and innumerable others were “Rosicrucians”—implying that they were card-carrying members who paid their dues regularly.

Our initial attitude towards the above list was equally cynical. Again, there are the predictable names—names associated with the ‘occult’ and ’esoteric’. Nicolas Flamel, for instance, is perhaps the most famous and well documented of medieval alchemists. Robert Fludd, seventeenth-century philosopher, was an exponent of Hermetic thought and other arcane subjects. Johann Valentin Andrea, German contemporary of Fludd, composed, among other things, some of the works which spawned the myth of the fabulous Christian Rosenkreuz. And there are also names like Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Filipepi, who is better known as Botticelli. There are names of distinguished scientists, like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton.

During the last two centuries the Prieure de Sion’s Grand Masters are alleged to have included such important literary and cultural figures as Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. By including such names, the list in the Dossiers secrets could not but appear suspect. It was almost inconceivable that some of the individuals cited had presided over a secret society—and still more, a secret society devoted to ‘occult’ and ’esoteric’ interests. Boyle and Newton, for example, are hardly names that people in the twentieth century associate with the ‘occult’ and ’esoteric’. And though Hugo, Debussy and Cocteau were immersed in such matters, they would seem to be too well known, too well researched and documented, to have exercised a “Grand Mastership” over a secret order. Not, at any rate, without some word of it somehow leaking out.

On the other hand, the distinguished names are not the only names on the list. Most of the other names belong to high-ranking European nobles, many of whom are extremely obscure—unfamiliar not only to the general reader, but even to the professional historian. There is Guillaume de Gisors, for instance, who in 1306 is said to have organised the Prieure de Sion into an ‘hermetic freemasonry’. And there is Guillaume’s grandfather, Jean de Gisors, who is said to have been Sion’s first independent Grand Master, assuming his position after the “cutting of the elm” and the separation from the Temple in 1188. There is no question that Jean de Gisors existed historically.

He was born in 1133 and died in 1220. He is mentioned in charters and was at least nominal lord of the famous fortress in Normandy where meetings traditionally convened between English and French kings took place, as did the cutting of the elm in 1188. Jean seems to have been an extremely powerful and wealthy landowner and until 1193, a vassal of the king of England. He is also known to have possessed property in England—in Sussex, and the manor of Titchfield in Hampshire. According to the Dossiers secrets, he met Thomas a Becket at Gisors in 1169—though there is no indication of the purpose of this meeting. We were able to confirm that Becket was indeed at Gisors in 1169, and it is therefore probable that he had some contact with the lord of the fortress; but we could find no record of any actual encounter between the two men.

In short, Jean de Gisors, apart from a few bland details, proved virtually untraceable. He seemed to have left no mark whatever on history, save his existence and his title. We could find no indication of what he did—what might have constituted his claim to fame, or have warranted his assumption of Sion’s Grand Mastership. If the list of Sion’s purported Grand Masters was authentic, what, we wondered, did Jean do to earn his place on it? And if the list were a latter-day fabrication, why should someone so obscure be included at all?

There seemed to us only one possible explanation which did not really explain very much in fact. Like the other aristocratic names on the list of Sion’s Grand Masters, Jean de Gisors appeared in the complicated genealogies which figured elsewhere in the “Prieure documents”. Together with those other elusive nobles, he apparently belonged to the same dense forest of family trees ultimately descended, supposedly, from the Merovingian dynasty. It thus seemed evident to us that the Prieure de Sion—to a significant extent, at least—was a domestic affair. In some way the Order appeared to be intimately associated with a bloodline and a lineage. And it was their connection with this bloodline or lineage that perhaps accounted for the various titled names on the list of Grand Masters.

From the list quoted above, it would seem that Sion’s Grand Mastership has recurrently shifted between two essentially distinct groups of individuals. On the one hand there are the figures of monumental stature who through esoterica, the arts or sciences have produced some impact on Western tradition, history and culture. On the other hand, there are members of a specific and interlinked network of families—noble, and sometimes royal.

In some degree this curious juxtaposition imparted plausibility to the list. If one merely wished to ‘concoct a pedigree’, there would be no point in including so many unknown or long-forgotten aristocrats. There would be no point, for instance, in including a man like Charles de Lorraine—Austrian field-marshal in the eighteenth century, brother-in-law to the Empress Maria Theresa, who proved himself signally inept on the battlefield and was trounced in one engagement after another by Frederick the Great of Prussia.

In this respect, at least, the Prieure de Sion would seem to be both modest and realistic. It does not claim to have functioned under the auspices of unqualified geniuses, superhuman “masters”, illumined “initiates”, saints, sages or immortals. On the contrary, it acknowledges its Grand Masters to have been fallible human beings, a representative cross-section of humanity—a few geniuses, a few notables, a few “average specimens”, a few nonentities, even a few fools. Why, we could not but wonder, would a forged or fabricated list include such a spectrum? If one wishes to contrive a list of Grand Masters, why not make all the names on it illustrious? If one wishes to “concoct a pedigree” which includes Leonardo, Newton and Victor Hugo, why not also include Dante, Michelangelo, Goethe and Tolstoi—instead of obscure people like Edouard de Bar and Maximilian de Lorraine? Why, moreover, were there so many ’lesser lights’ on the list? Why a relatively minor writer like Charles Nodier, rather than contemporaries like Byron or Pushkin? Why an apparent eccentric like Cocteau rather than men of such international prestige as Andre Gide or Albert Camus? And why the omission of individuals like Poussin, whose connection with the mystery had already been established? Such questions nagged at us, and argued that the list warranted consideration before we dismissed it as an arrant fraud.

We therefore embarked on a lengthy and detailed study of the alleged Grand Masters—their biographies, activities and accomplishments. In conducting this study we tried, as far as we could, to subject each name on the list to certain critical questions:

1. Was there any personal contact, direct or indirect, between each alleged Grand Master, his immediate predecessor and immediate successor?

2. Was there any affiliation, by blood or otherwise, between each alleged Grand Master and the families who figured in the genealogies of the “Prieure documents”—with any of the families of purported Merovingian descent, and especially the ducal house of Lorraine?

3. Was each alleged Grand Master in any way connected with Rennes-le-Chateau, Gisors, Stenay, Saint Sulpice or any of the other sites that had recurred in the course of our previous investigation?

4. If Sion defined itself as an “Hermetic freemasonry”, did each alleged Grand Master display a predisposition towards Hermetic thought or an involvement with secret societies?

Although information on the alleged Grand Masters before 1400 was difficult, sometimes impossible to obtain, our investigation of the later figures yielded some astonishing results and consistency. Many of them were associated, in one way or another, with one or more of the sites that seemed to be relevant—Rennes-le-Chateau, Gisors, Stenay or Saint Sulpice. Most of the names on the list were either allied by blood to the house of Lorraine or associated with it in some other fashion; even Robert Fludd, for example, served as tutor to the sons of the duke of Lorraine. From Nicolas Flamel on, every name on the list, without exception, was steeped in Hermetic thought, and often also associated with secret societies—even men whom one would not readily associate with such things, like Boyle and Newton. And with only one exception, each alleged Grand Master had some contact—sometimes direct, sometimes through close mutual friends—with those who preceded and succeeded him. As far as we could determine, there was only one apparent ‘break in the chain’. And even this—which seems to have occurred around the French Revolution, between Maximilian of Lorraine and Charles Nodier—is not by any means conclusive.

In the context of this chapter it is not feasible to discuss each alleged Grand Master in detail. Some of the more obscure figures assume significance only against the background of a given age, and to explain this significance fully would entail lengthy digressions into forgotten byways of history. In the case of the more famous names, it would be impossible to do them justice in a few pages. In consequence the relevant biographical material on the alleged Grand Masters and the connections between them have been consigned to an appendix. The present chapter will dwell on broader social and cultural developments, in which a succession of alleged Grand Masters played a collective part. It was in such social and cultural developments that our research seemed to yield a discernible trace of the Prieure de Sion’s hand.

Rene d’Anjou

Although little known today, Rene d’Anjou—“Good King Rene” as he was the years immediately preceding the Renaissance. Born in 1408, during his life he came to hold an awesome array of titles. Among the most important were count of Bar, count of Provence, count of Piedmont, count of Guise, duke of Calabria, duke of Anjou, duke of Lorraine, king of Hungary, king of Naples and Sicily, king of Aragon, Valencia, Majorca and Sardinia—and, perhaps most resonant of all, king of Jerusalem. This last was, of course, purely titular. Nevertheless it invoked a continuity extending back to Godfroi de Bouillon, and was acknowledged by other European potentates. One of Rene’s daughters, Marguerite d’Anjou, in 1445 married Henry VI of England and played a prominent role in the Wars of the Roses.

In its earlier phases Rene d’Anjou’s career seems to have been in some obscure way associated with that of Jeanne d’Arc. As far as is known, Jeanne was born in the town of Domremy, in the duchy of Bar, making her Rene’s subject. She first impressed herself on history in 1429, when she appeared at the fortress of Vaucouleurs, a few miles up the Meuse from Domremy. Presenting herself to the commandant of the fortress, she announced her ‘divine mission’ to save France from the English invaders and ensure that the dauphin, subsequently Charles VII, was crowned king. In order to perform this mission, she would have had to join the dauphin at his court at Chinon, on the Loire, far to the south-west. But she did not request a passage to Chinon of the commandant at Vaucouleurs; she requested a special audience with the duke of Lorraine—Rene’s father-in-law and great uncle.

In deference to her request, Jeanne was granted an audience with the duke at his capital in Nancy. When she arrived there, Rene d’Anjou is known to have been present. And when the duke of Lorraine asked her what she wished, she replied explicitly, in words that have constantly perplexed historians, “Your son [in-law], a horse and some good men to take me into France.”

Both at the time and later, speculation was rife about the nature of Rene’s connection with Jeanne. According to some sources, probably inaccurate, the two were lovers. But the fact remains that they knew each other, and that Rene was present when Jeanne first embarked on her mission. Moreover, contemporary chroniclers maintain that when Jeanne departed for the Dauphin’s court at Chinon, Rene accompanied her. And not only that. The same chroniclers assert that Rene was actually present at her side during the siege of Orleans. In the centuries that followed a systematic attempt seems to have been made to expunge all trace of Rene’s possible role in Jeanne’s life. Yet Rene’s later biographers cannot account for his whereabouts or activities between 1429 and 1431—the apex of Jeanne’s career. It is usually and tacitly assumed that he was vegetating at the ducal court in Nancy, but there is no evidence to support this assumption.

Circumstances argue that Rene did accompany Jeanne to Chinon. For if there was any one dominant personality at Chinon at the time, that personality was Iolande d’Anjou. It was Iolande who provided the febrile, weak-willed dauphin with incessant transfusions of morale. It was Iolande who inexplicably appointed herself Jeanne’s official patroness and sponsor. It was Iolande who overcame the court’s resistance to the visionary girl and obtained authorisation for her to accompany the army to Orleans. It was Iolande who convinced the dauphin that Jeanne might indeed be the saviour she claimed to be. It was Iolande who contrived the dauphin’s marriage to her own daughter. And Iolande was Rene d’Anjou’s mother.

As we studied these details, we became increasingly convinced, like many modern historians, that something was being enacted behind the scenes—some intricate, high-level intrigue, or audacious design. The more we examined it, the more Jeanne d’Arc’s meteoric career began to suggest a ‘put-up job’—as if someone, exploiting popular legends of a ‘virgin from Lorraine’ and playing ingeniously on mass psychology, had engineered and orchestrated the Maid of Orleans’s so-called mission. This did not, of course, presuppose the existence of a secret society. But it rendered the existence of such a society decidedly more plausible. And if such a society did exist, the man presiding over it might well have been Rene d’Anjou.

Rene and the Theme of Arcadia

If Rene was associated with Jeanne d’Arc, his later career, for the most part, was distinctly less bellicose. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rene was less a warrior than a courtier. In this respect he was misplaced in his own age; he was, in short, a man ahead of his time, anticipating the cultured Italian princes of the Renaissance. An extremely literate person, he wrote prolifically and illuminated his own books. He composed poetry and mystical allegories, as well as compendiums of tournament rules. He sought to promote the advancement of knowledge and at one time employed Christopher Columbus. He was steeped in esoteric tradition, and his court included a Jewish astrologer, Cabalist and physician known as Jean de Saint-Remy. According to a number of accounts, Jean de Saint-Remy was the grandfather of Nostradamus, the famous sixteenth-century prophet who was also to figure in our story.

Rene’s interests included chivalry and the Arthurian and Grail romances. Indeed he seems to have had a particular preoccupation with the Grail. He is said to have taken great pride in a magnificent cup of red porphyry, which, he asserted, had been used at the wedding at Cana. He had obtained it, he claimed, at Marseilles where the Magdalene, according to tradition, landed with the Grail. Other chroniclers speak of a cup in Rene’s possession—perhaps the same one—which bore a mysterious inscription incised into the rim:

Qui bien beurra Dieu voira. Qui beurra tout d’une baleine Voira Dieu et la Madeleine.

(He who drinks well Will see God. He who quaffs at a single draught Will see God and the Magdalene.)

It would not be inaccurate to regard Rene d’Anjou as a major impetus behind the phenomenon now called the Renaissance. By virtue of his numerous Italian possessions he spent some years in Italy; and through his intimate friendship with the ruling Sforza family of Milan he established contact with the Medicis of Florence. There is good reason to believe that it was largely Rene’s influence which prompted Cosimo de’ Medici to embark on a series of ambitious projects—projects destined to transform Western civilisation. In 1439, while Rene was resident in Italy, Cosimo de’ Medici began sending his agents all over the world in quest of ancient manuscripts. Then, in 1444, Cosimo founded Europe’s first public library, the Library of San Marco, and thus began to challenge the Church’s long monopoly of learning.

At Cosimo’s express commission, the corpus of Platonic, Neo-Platonic, Pythagorean, Gnostic and Hermetic thought found its way into translation for the first time and became readily accessible. Cosimo also instructed the University of Florence to begin teaching Greek, for the first time in Europe for some seven hundred years. And he undertook to create an academy of Pythagorean and Platonic studies. Cosimo’s academy quickly generated a multitude of similar institutions throughout the Italian peninsula, which became bastions of Western esoteric tradition. And from them the high culture of the Renaissance began to blossom.

Rene d’Anjou not only contributed in some measure to the formation of the academies, but also seems to have conferred upon them one of their favourite symbolic themes—that of Arcadia. Certainly it is in Rene’s own career that the motif of Arcadia appears to have made its debut in post-Christian Western culture. In 1449, for example, at his court of Tarascon, Rene staged a series of pas d’armes—curious hybrid amalgams of tournament and masque, in which knights tilted against each other and, at the same time, performed a species of drama or play. One of Rene’s most famous pas d’armes was called “The Pas d’Armes of the Shepherdess”. Played by his mistress at the time, the “Shepherdess” was an explicitly Arcadian figure, embodying both romantic and philosophical attributes. She presided over a tourney in which knights assumed allegorical identities representing conflicting values and ideas. The event was a singular fusion of the pastoral Arcadian romance with the pageantry of the Round Table and the mysteries of the Holy Grail.

Arcadia figures elsewhere in Rene’s work as well. It is frequently denoted by a fountain or a tombstone, both of which are associated with an underground stream. This stream is usually equated with the river Alpheus—the central river in the actual geographical Arcadia in Greece, which flows underground and is said to surface again at the Fountain of Arethusa in Sicily. From the most remote antiquity to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, the river Alpheus has been deemed sacred. Its very name derives from the same root as the Greek word “Alpha”, meaning ‘first’ or ‘source’.

For Rene, the motif of an underground stream seems to have been extremely rich in symbolic and allegorical resonances. Among other things, it would appear to connote the ‘underground’ esoteric tradition of Pythagorean, Gnostic, Cabalistic and Hermetic thought. But it might also connote something more than a general corpus of teachings, perhaps some very specific factual information—a ‘secret’ of some sort, transmitted in clandestine fashion from generation to generation. And it might connote an unacknowledged and thus ‘subterranean’ bloodline.

In the Italian academies the image of the ‘underground stream’ appears to have been invested with all these levels of meaning. And it recurs consistently—so much so, indeed, that the academies themselves have often been labelled “Arcadian”. Thus, in 1502, a major work was published, a long poem entitled Arcadia, by Jacopo Sannazaro—and Rene d’Anjou’s Italian entourage of some years before included one Jacques Sannazar, probably the poet’s father. In 1553 Sannazaro’s poem was translated into French. It was dedicated, interestingly enough, to the cardinal of Lenoncourt—ancestor of the twentieth-century count of Lenoncourt who compiled the genealogies in the “Prieure documents”.

During the sixteenth century Arcadia and the ‘underground stream’ became a prominent cultural fashion. In England they inspired Sir Philip Sidney’s most important work, Arcadia. In Italy they inspired such illustrious figures as Torquato Tasso whose masterpiece, Jerusalem Delivered, deals with the capture of the Holy City by Godfroi de Bouillon. By the seventeenth century the motif of Arcadia had culminated in Nicolas Poussin and “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”.

The more we explored the matter, the more apparent it became that something—a tradition of some sort, a hierarchy of values or attitudes, perhaps a specific body of information—was constantly being intimated by the ‘underground stream’. This image seems to have assumed obsessive proportions in the minds of certain eminent political families of the period—all of whom, directly or indirectly, figure in the genealogies of the “Prieure documents”. And the families in question seem to have transmitted the image to their proteges in the arts. From Rene d’Anjou, something seems to have passed to the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Estes and the Gonzagas—the last of whom, according to the “Prieure documents”, provided Sion with two Grand Masters, Ferrante de Gonzaga and Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers. From them it appears to have found its way into the work of the epoch’s most illustrious poets and painters, including Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

The Rosicrucian Manifestos

A somewhat similar dissemination of ideas occurred in the seventeenth century, first in Germany, then spreading to England. In 1614 the first of the so-called “Rosicrucian manifestos” appeared, followed by a second tract a year later. These manifestos created a furore at the time, provoking fulminations from the Church and the Jesuits, and eliciting fervently enthusiastic support from liberal factions in Protestant Europe. Among the most eloquent and influential exponents of “Rosicrucian thought” was Robert Fludd, who is listed as the Prieure de Sion’s sixteenth Grand Master, presiding between 1595 and 1637.

Among other things, the “Rosicrucian manifestos” promulgated the story of the legendary Christian Rosenkreuz. They purported to issue from a secret, ‘invisible’ confraternity of ‘initiates’ in Germany and France. They promised a transformation of the world and of human knowledge in accordance with esoteric, Hermetic principles—the ‘underground stream’ which had flowed from Rene d’Anjou through the Renaissance. A new epoch of spiritual freedom was heralded, an epoch in which man would liberate himself from his former shackles, would unlock hitherto dormant ‘secrets of nature’, and would govern his own destiny in accord with harmonious, all-pervading universal and cosmic laws. At the same time, the manifestos were highly inflammatory politically, fiercely attacking the Catholic Church and the old Holy Roman Empire. These manifestos are now generally believed to have been written by a German theologian and esotericist, Johann Valentin Andrea, listed as Grand Master of the Prieure de Sion after Robert Fludd. If they were not written by Andrea, they were certainly written by one or more of his associates.

In 1616 a third “Rosicrucian” tract appeared, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. Like the two previous works, The Chemical Wedding was originally of anonymous authorship; but Andrea himself later confessed to having composed it as a “joke” or comedy. The Chemical Wedding is a complex Hermetic allegory, which subsequently influenced such works as Goethe’s Faust. As Frances Yates has demonstrated, it contains unmistakable echoes of the English esotericist, John Dee, who also influenced Robert Fludd. Andrea’s work also evokes resonances of the Grail romances and of the Knights Templar—Christian Rosenkreuz, for instance, is said to wear a white tunic with a red cross on the shoulder.

In the course of the narrative a play is performed—an allegory within an allegory. This play involves a princess, of unspecified ‘royal’ lineage, whose rightful domains have been usurped by the Moors and who is washed ashore in a wooden chest. The rest of the play deals with her vicissitudes and her marriage to a prince who will help her regain her heritage.

Our research revealed assorted second- and third-hand links between Andrea and the families whose genealogies figure in the “Prieure documents”. We discovered no first-hand or direct links, however, except perhaps for Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Frederick was the nephew of an important French Protestant leader, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne and Duke of Bouillon—Godfroi de Bouillon’s old title. Henri was also associated with the Longueville family, which figured prominently in both the “Prieure documents” and our own inquiry. And in 1591 he had taken great trouble to acquire the town of Stenay.

In 1613 Frederick of the Palatinate had married Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots and great-granddaughter of Marie de Guise—and Guise was the cadet branch of the house of Lorraine. Marie de Guise, a century before, had been married to the duke of Longueville and then, on his death, to James V of Scotland. This created a dynastic alliance between the houses of Stuart and Lorraine. In consequence the Stuarts began to figure, if only peripherally, in the genealogies of the “Prieure documents”; and Andrea, as well as the three alleged Grand Masters who followed him, displayed varying degrees of interest in the Scottish royal house.

During this period the house of Lorraine was, to a significant degree, in eclipse. If Sion was a coherent and active order at the time, it might therefore have transferred its allegiance—at least partially and temporarily—to the decidedly more influential Stuarts.

In any case Frederick of the Palatinate, after his marriage to Elizabeth Stuart, established an esoterically oriented court at his capital of Heidelberg. As Frances Yates writes:

A culture was forming in the Palatinate which came straight out of the Renaissance but with more recent trends added, a culture which may be defined by the adjective “Rosicrucian”. The prince around whom these deep currents were swirling was Friedrich, Elector Palatine, and their exponents were hoping for a politico-religious expression of their aims… The Frederickian movement… was an attempt to give those currents politico-religious expression, to realise the ideal of Hermetic reform centred on a real prince… It… created a culture, a “Rosicrucian” state with its court centred on Heidelberg.

In short the anonymous “Rosicrucians” and their sympathisers seem to have invested Frederick with a sense of mission, both spiritual and political. And Frederick seems to have readily accepted the role imposed upon him, together with the hopes and expectations it entailed. Thus, in 1618, he accepted the crown of Bohemia, offered him by that country’s rebellious nobles. In doing so he incurred the wrath of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire and precipitated the chaos of the Thirty Years War. Within two years he and Elizabeth had been driven into exile in Holland, and Heidelberg was overrun by Catholic troops. And for the ensuing quarter of a century Germany became the major battleground for the most bitter, bloody and costly conflict in European history before the twentieth century—a conflict in which the Church almost managed to re-impose the hegemony she had enjoyed during the Middle Ages.

Amidst the turmoil raging around him, Andrea created a network of more or less secret societies known as the Christian Unions. According to Andrea’s blueprint, each society was headed by an anonymous prince, assisted by twelve others divided into groups of three—each of whom was to be a specialist in a given sphere of study. The original purpose of the Christian Unions was to preserve threatened knowledge—especially the most recent scientific advances, many of which the Church deemed heretical. At the same time, however, the Christian Unions also functioned as a refuge for persons fleeing the Inquisition—which accompanied the invading Catholic armies, and was intent on rooting out all vestiges of “Rosicrucian” thought. Thus numerous scholars, scientists, philosophers and esotericists found a haven in Andrea’s institutions. Through them many were smuggled to safety in England where Freemasonry was just beginning to coalesce. In some significant sense Andrea’s Christian Unions may have contributed to the organisation of the Masonic lodge system.

Among the displaced Europeans finding their way to England were a number of Andrea’s personal associates: Samuel Hartlib, for example; Adam Komensky, better known as Comenius, with whom Andrea maintained a continuing correspondence; Theodore Haak, who was also a personal friend of Elizabeth Stuart and maintained a correspondence with her; and Doctor John Wilkins, formerly personal chaplain to Frederick of the Palatinate and subsequently bishop of Chester. Once in England, these men became closely associated with Masonic circles. They were intimate with Robert Moray, for instance, whose induction into a Masonic lodge in 1641 is one of the earliest on record; with Elias Ashmole, antiquarian and expert on chivalric orders, who was inducted in 1646; with the young but precocious Robert Boyle who, though not himself a Freemason, was a member of another, more elusive secret society.

There is no concrete evidence that this secret society was the Prieure de Sion, but Boyle, according to the “Prieure documents”, succeeded Andrea as Sion’s Grand Master. During Cromwell’s Protectorate, these dynamic minds, both English and European, formed what Boyle in a deliberate echo of the “Rosicrucian” manifestos called an ‘invisible college’. And with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the ‘invisible college’ became the Royal Society with the Stuart ruler, Charles II, as its patron and sponsor.

Virtually all the Royal Society’s founder members were Freemasons. One could reasonably argue that the Royal Society itself, at least in its inception, was a Masonic institution—derived, through Andrea’s Christian Unions, from the ‘invisible Rosicrucian brotherhood’. But this was not to be the culmination of the ‘underground stream’. On the contrary, it was to flow from Boyle to Sir Isaac Newton, listed as Sion’s next Grand Master, and thence into the complex tributaries of eighteenth-century Freemasonry.

The Stuart Dynasty

According to the “Prieure documents”, Newton was succeeded as Sion’s Grand Master by Charles Radclyffe. The name was hardly as resonant to us as Newton’s or Boyle’s or even Andrea’s. Indeed, we were not at first certain who Charles Radclyffe was. As we began to research into him, however, he emerged as a figure of considerable, if subterranean, consequence in eighteenth-century cultural history.

Since the sixteenth century the Radclyffes had been an influential Northumbrian family. In 1688, shortly before he was deposed, James II had created them earls of Derwentwater. Charles Radclyffe himself was born in 1693. His mother was an illegitimate daughter of Charles II by his mistress, Moll Davies. Radclyffe was thus, on his mother’s side, of royal blood—a grandson of the next-to-last Stuart monarch. He was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and of George Lee, Earl of Lichfield—another illegitimate grandson of Charles II. Not surprisingly, therefore, Radclyffe devoted much of his life to the Stuart cause.

In 1715 this cause rested with the “Old Pretender”, James III, then in exile and residing at Bar-le-Duc, under the special protection of the duke of Lorraine. Radclyffe and his elder brother, James, both participated in the Scottish rebellion of that year. Both were captured and imprisoned, and James was executed. Charles, in the meantime, apparently aided by the earl of Lichfield, made a dashing and unprecedented escape from Newgate prison, and found refuge in the Jacobite ranks in France. In the years that followed he became personal secretary to the “Young Pretender”, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

In 1745 the latter landed in Scotland and embarked on his quixotic attempt to reinstate the Stuarts on the British throne. In the same year Radclyffe, en route to join him, was captured in a French ship off the Dogger Bank. A year later, in 1746, the “Young Pretender” was disastrously defeated at the Battle of Culloden Moor. A few months thereafter, Charles Radclyffe died beneath the headsman’s axe at the Tower of London.

During their stay in France the Stuarts had been deeply involved in the dissemination of Freemasonry. Indeed they are generally regarded as the source of the particular form of Freemasonry known as “Scottish Rite”. “Scottish Rite” Freemasonry introduced higher degrees than those offered by other Masonic systems at the time. It promised initiation into greater and more profound mysteries—mysteries supposedly preserved and handed down in Scotland. It established more direct connections between Freemasonry and the various activities—alchemy, Cabalism and Hermetic thought, for instance—which were regarded as “Rosicrucian”. And it elaborated not only on the antiquity but also on the illustrious pedigree of the ‘craft’.

It is probable that “Scottish Rite” Freemasonry was originally promulgated, if not indeed devised, by Charles Radclyffe. In any case Radclyffe, in 1725, is said to have founded the first Masonic lodge on the continent, in Paris. During the same year, or perhaps in the year following, he seems to have been acknowledged Grand Master of all French lodges, and it is still cited as such a decade later, in 1736. The dissemination of eighteenth-century Freemasonry owes more, ultimately, to Radclyffe than to any other man. This has not always been readily apparent because Radclyffe, especially after 1738, kept a relatively ’low profile’. To a very significant degree, he seems to have worked through intermediaries and ‘mouthpieces’. The most important of these, and the most famous, was the enigmatic individual known as the Chevalier Andrew Ramsay.

Ramsay was born in Scotland sometime during the 1680s. As a young man he was a member of a quasi-Masonic quasi-“Rosicrucian” society called the Philadelphians. Among the other members of this society were at least two close friends of Isaac Newton. Ramsay himself regarded Newton with unmitigated reverence, deeming him a kind of high mystical ‘initiate’—a man who had rediscovered and reconstructed the eternal truths concealed in the ancient mysteries.

Ramsay had other links with Newton. He was associated with Jean Desaguliers, one of Newton’s closest friends. In 1707 he studied mathematics under one Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, the most intimate of all Newton’s companions. Like Newton, he displayed a sympathetic interest in the Camisards—a sect of Cathar-like heretics then suffering persecution in southern France, and a kind of cause celebre for Fatio de Duillier.

By 1710 Ramsay was in Cambrai and on intimate terms with the mystical philosopher Fenelon, formerly cure of Saint Sulpice—which, even at that time, was a bastion of rather questionable orthodoxy. It is not known precisely when Ramsay made Charles Radclyffe’s acquaintance, but by the 1720s he was closely affiliated with the Jacobite cause. For a time he even served as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tutor.

Despite his Jacobite connections, Ramsay returned to England in 1729 where—notwithstanding an apparent lack of appropriate qualifications—he was promptly admitted to the Royal Society. He also became a member of a rather more obscure institution called the Gentleman’s Club of Spalding. This ‘club’ included men like Desaguliers, Alexander Pope and, until his death in 1727, Isaac Newton.

By 1730 Ramsay was back in France and increasingly active on behalf of Freemasonry. He is on record as having attended lodge meetings with a number of notable figures, including Desaguliers. And he received special patronage from the Tour d’Auvergne family, the viscounts of Turenne and dukes of Bouillon—who, three-quarters of a century before, had been related to Frederick of the Palatinate. In Ramsay’s time the duke of Bouillon was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and among the most prominent figures in Freemasonry. He conferred an estate and a town-house on Ramsay, whom he also appointed tutor to his son.

In 1737 Ramsay delivered his famous “Oration”—a lengthy disquisition on the history of Freemasonry, which subsequently became a seminal document for the ‘craft’. On the basis of this “Oration” Ramsay became the pre-eminent Masonic spokesman of his age. Our research convinced us, however, that the real voice behind Ramsay was that of Charles Radclyffe who presided over the lodge at which Ramsay delivered his discourse and who appeared again, in 1743, as chief signatory at Ramsay’s funeral. But if Radclyffe was the power behind Ramsay, it would seem to have been Ramsay who constituted the link between Radclyffe and Newton.

Despite Radclyffe’s premature death in 1746, the seeds he had sown in Europe continued to bear fruit. Early in the 1750s a new ambassador of Freemasonry appeared—a German named Karl Gottlieb von Hund. Hund claimed to have been initiated in 1742—a year before Ramsay’s death, four years before Radclyffe’s. At his initiation, he claimed, he had been introduced to a new system of Freemasonry, confided to him by ‘unknown superiors’. These ‘unknown superiors’, Hund maintained, were closely associated with the Jacobite cause. Indeed, he even believed at first that the man who presided over his initiation was Bonnie Prince Charlie. And although this proved not to be the case, Hund remained convinced that the unidentified personage in question was intimately connected with the “Young Pretender”. It seems reasonable to suppose that the man who actually presided was Charles Radclyffe.

The system of Freemasonry to which Hund was introduced—a further extension of the “Scottish Rite”—was subsequently called “Strict Observance”. Its name derived from the oath it demanded, an oath of unswerving, unquestioning obedience to the mysterious ‘unknown superiors’. And the basic tenet of the “Strict Observance” was that it had descended directly from the Knights Templar, some of whom had purportedly survived the purge of 1307-14 and perpetuated their Order in Scotland.

We were already familiar with this claim. On the basis of our own research we could allow it some truth. A contingent of Templars had allegedly fought on Robert Bruce’s side at the Battle of Bannockburn. Because the Papal Bull dissolving the Templars was never promulgated in Scotland, the Order was never officially suppressed there. And we ourselves had located what seemed to be a Templar graveyard in Argyllshire. The earliest of the stones in this graveyard dated from the thirteenth century, the later ones from the eighteenth. The earlier stones bore certain unique carvings and incised symbols identical to those found at known Templar preceptories in England and France. The later stones combined these symbols with specifically Masonic motifs, attesting thereby to some sort of fusion. It was thus not impossible, we concluded, that the Order had indeed perpetuated itself in the trackless wilderness of medieval Argyll—maintaining a clandestine existence, gradually secularising itself and becoming associated with both Masonic guilds and the prevailing clan system.

The pedigree Hund claimed for the “Strict Observance” did not, therefore, seem to us altogether improbable. To his own embarrassment and subsequent disgrace, however, he was unable to elaborate further on his new system of Freemasonry. As a result his contemporaries dismissed him as a charlatan, and accused him of having fabricated the story of his initiation, his meeting with ‘unknown superiors’, his mandate to disseminate the “Strict Observance”. To these charges Hund could only reply that his ‘unknown superiors’ had inexplicably abandoned him. They had promised to contact him again and give him further instructions, he protested, but they had never done so. To the end of his life he affirmed his integrity, maintaining he had been deserted by his original sponsors who, he insisted, had actually existed.

The more we considered Hund’s assertions, the more plausible they sounded—and he appeared to have been a hapless victim not so much of deliberate betrayal as of circumstances beyond everyone’s control. For according to his own account, Hund had been initiated in 1742, when the Jacobites were still a powerful political force in continental affairs. By 1746, however, Radclyffe was dead. So were many of his colleagues, while others were in prison or exile as far away, in some cases, as North America. If Hund’s ‘unknown superiors’ failed to re-establish contact with their protege, the omission does not seem to have been voluntary. The fact that Hund was abandoned immediately after the collapse of the Jacobite cause would seem, if anything, to confirm his story.

There is another fragment of evidence which lends credence not only to Hund’s claims but to the “Prieure documents” as well. This evidence is a list of Grand Masters of the Knights Templar, which Hund insisted he had obtained from his ‘unknown superiors’. On the basis of our own research, we had concluded that the list of Templar Grand Masters in the Dossiers secrets was accurate—so accurate, in fact, that it appeared to derive from ‘inside information’. Save for the spelling of a single surname, the list Hund produced agreed with the one in the Dossiers secrets. In short, Hund had somehow obtained a list of Templar Grand Masters more accurate than any other known at the time. Moreover, he obtained it when many documents on which we relied—charters, deeds, proclamations—were still sequestered in the Vatican and unobtainable. This would seem to confirm that Hund’s story of ‘unknown superiors’ was not a fabrication. It would also seem to indicate that those ‘unknown superiors’ were extraordinarily knowledgeable about the Order of the Temple—more knowledgeable than they could possibly have been without access to ‘privileged sources’.

In any case, despite the charges levelled against him, Hund was not left completely friendless. After the collapse of the Jacobite cause he found a sympathetic patron, and a close companion, in no less a person than the Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Emperor at this time was Francois, Duke of Lorraine who, by his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1735, had linked the houses of Habsburg and Lorraine and inaugurated the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty. And according to the “Prieure documents”, it was Francois’s brother, Charles de Lorraine, who succeeded Radclyffe as Sion’s Grand Master.

Francois was the first European prince to become a Mason and to publicise his Masonic affiliations. He was initiated in 1731 at the Hague—a bastion of esoteric activity since “Rosicrucian” circles had installed themselves there during the Thirty Years War. And the man who presided over Francois’s initiation was Jean Desaguliers, intimate associate of Newton, Ramsay and Radclyffe. Shortly after his initiation moreover, Francois embarked for a lengthy stay in England. Here he became a member of that innocuous-sounding institution, the Gentleman’s Club of Spalding.

In the years that followed, Francois de Lorraine was probably more responsible than any other European potentate for the spread of Freemasonry. His court at Vienna became, in a sense, Europe’s Masonic capital, and a centre for a broad spectrum of other esoteric interests as well. Francois himself was a practising alchemist, with an alchemical laboratory in the imperial palace, the Hofburg. On the death of the last Medici he became grand duke of Tuscany, and deftly thwarted the Inquisition’s harassment of Freemasons in Florence. Through Francois, Charles Radclyffe, who had founded the first Masonic lodge on the continent, left a durable legacy.

Charles Nodier and His Circle

Compared to the important cultural and political figures who preceded him, compared even to a man like Charles Radclyffe, Charles Nodier seemed a most unlikely choice for Grand Master. We knew him primarily as a kind of literary curiosity—a relatively minor belle-lettrist, a somewhat garrulous essayist, a second-rate novelist and short-story writer in the bizarre tradition of E. T. A. Hoffmann and, later, Edgar Allan Poe. In his own time, however, Nodier was regarded as a major cultural figure, and his influence was enormous. Moreover, he proved to be connected with our inquiry in a number of surprising ways.

By 1824 Nodier was already a literary celebrity. In that year he was appointed the chief librarian at the Arsenal Library, the major French depository for medieval and specifically occult manuscripts. Among its various treasures the Arsenal was said to have contained the alchemical works of Nicolas Flamel—the medieval alchemist listed as one of Sion’s earlier Grand Masters. The Arsenal also contained the library of Cardinal Richelieu—an exhaustive collection of works on magical, Cabalistic and Hermetic thought. And there were other treasures, too. On the outbreak of the French Revolution monasteries throughout the country had been plundered, and all books and manuscripts sent to Paris for storage. Then in 1810 Napoleon, as part of his ambition to create a definitive world library, confiscated and brought to Paris almost the entire archive of the Vatican. There were more than three thousand cases of material, some of which—all the documents pertaining to the Templars, for example—had been specifically requested. Although some of these papers were subsequently returned to Rome, a great many remained in France. And it was material of this sort—occult books and manuscripts, works plundered from monasteries and the archive of the Vatican—that passed through the hands of Nodier and his associates. Methodically they sifted it, catalogued it, explored it.

Among Nodier’s colleagues in this task were Eliphas Levi and Jean Baptiste Pitois, who adopted the nom de plume of Paul Christian. The works of these two men, over the years that followed, engendered a major renaissance of interest in esoterica. It is to these two men, and to Charles Nodier, their mentor, that the French “occult revival” of the nineteenth century, as it has been called, can ultimately be traced. Indeed, Pitois’s History and Practice of Magic became a bible for nineteenth-century students of the arcane. Recently re-issued in English translation complete with its original dedication to Nodier it is now a coveted work among modern students of the occult.

During his tenure at the Arsenal Nodier continued to write and publish prolifically. Among the most important of his later works is a massive, lavishly illustrated, multi-volume opus of antiquarian interest, devoted to sites of particular consequence in ancient France. In this monumental compendium Nodier devoted considerable space to the Merovingian epoch—a fact all the more striking in that no one at the time displayed the least interest in the Merovingians. There are also lengthy sections on the Templars, and there is a special article on Gisors including a detailed account of the mysterious ‘cutting of the elm’ in 1188, which, according to the “Prieure documents”, marked the separation between the Knights Templar and the Prieure de Sion.

At the same time Nodier was more than a librarian and a writer. He was also a gregarious, egocentric and flamboyant individual who constantly sought the centre of attention and did not hesitate to exaggerate his own importance. In his quarters at the Arsenal Library he inaugurated a salon which established him as one of the most influential and prestigious ‘aesthetic potentates’ of the epoch. By the time of his death in 1845, he had served as mentor for a whole generation—many of whom quite eclipsed him in their subsequent achievements. For example, Nodier’s chief disciple and closest friend was the young Victor Hugo—Sion’s next Grand Master according to the “Prieure documents”. There was Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand who made a special pilgrimage to Poussin’s tomb in Rome and had a stone erected there bearing a reproduction of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”. There were Balzac, Delacroix, Dumas pere, Lamartine, Musset, Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval and Alfred de Vigny. Like the poets and painters of the Renaissance, these men often drew heavily on esoteric, and especially Hermetic, tradition. They also incorporated in their works a number of motifs, themes, references and allusions to the mystery which, for us, commenced with Sauniere and Rennes-le-Chateau. In 1832, for instance, a book was published entitled A Journey to Rennes-les-Bains, which speaks at length of a legendary treasure associated with Blanchefort and Rennes-le-Chateau. The author of this obscure book, Auguste de Laboulsse-Rochefort, also produced another work, The Lovers To Eleonore. On the title page there appears, without any explanation, the motto “Et in Arcadia Ego”.

Nodier’s literary and esoteric activities were quite clearly pertinent to our investigation. But there was another aspect of his career which was, if anything, more pertinent still. For Nodier, from his childhood, was deeply involved in secret societies. As early as 1790, for instance, at the age of ten he is known to have been involved in a group called the Philadelphes. Around 1793 he created another group—or perhaps an inner circle of the first—which included one of the subsequent plotters against Napoleon. A charter dated 1797 attests to the foundation of yet another group—also called the Philadelphes—in that year. In the library of Besancon there is a cryptic essay composed and recited to this group by one of Nodier’s closest friends. It is entitled Le Berger Arcadien ou Premiere Accents d’une Flute Champetre (“The Arcadian Shepherd Sounds the First Accents of a Rustic Flute”).

In Paris in 1802 Nodier wrote of his affiliation with a secret society which he described as “Biblical and Pythagorean”. Then, in 1816, he published anonymously one of his most curious and influential works, A History of Secret Societies in the Army under Napoleon. In this book Nodier is deliberately ambiguous. He does not clarify definitively whether he is writing pure fiction or pure fact. If anything, he implies, the book is a species of thinly disguised allegory of actual historical occurrences. In any case it develops a comprehensive philosophy of secret societies. And it credits such societies with a number of historical accomplishments, including the downfall of Napoleon. There are a great many secret societies in operation, Nodier declares. But there is one, he adds, that takes precedence over all others, that in fact presides over all the others. According to Nodier, this ‘supreme’ secret society is called the Philadelphes. At the same time, however, he speaks of “the oath which binds me to the Philadelphes and which forbids me to make them known under their social name.” Nevertheless, there is a hint of Sion in an address which Nodier quotes. It was supposedly made to an assembly of Philadelphes by one of the plotters against Napoleon. The man in question is speaking of his newly born son:

He is too young to engage himself to you by the oath of Annibal; but remember I have named him Eliacin, and that I delegate to him the guard of the temple and the altar, if I should die ere I have seen fall from his throne the last of the oppressors of Jerusalem.

Nodier’s book burst on the scene when fear of secret societies had assumed virtually pathological proportions. Such societies were often blamed for instigating the French Revolution; and the atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe was similar, in many respects, to that of the “McCarthy Era” in the United States during the 1950s. People saw, or imagined they saw, conspiracies everywhere. Witch-hunts abounded. Every public disturbance, every minor disruption, every untoward occurrence was attributed to ‘subversive activity’—to the work of highly organised clandestine organisations working insidiously behind the scenes, eroding the fabric of established institutions, perpetrating all manner of devious sabotage.

This mentality engendered measures of extreme repression. And the repression, directed often at a fictitious threat, in turn engendered real opponents, real groups of subversive conspirators who would form themselves in accordance with the fictitious blueprints. Even as figments of the imagination, secret societies fostered a pervasive paranoia in the upper echelons of government; and this paranoia frequently accomplished more than any secret society itself could possibly have done. There is no question that the myth of the secret society, if not the secret society itself, played a major role in nineteenth-century European history. And one of the chief architects of that myth, and possibly of a reality behind it, was Charles Nodier.

Debussy and the Rose-Croix

The trends to which Nodier gave expression—a fascination with secret societies and a renewed interest in the esoteric—continued to gain influence and adherents throughout the nineteenth century. Both trends reached a peak in the Paris of the fin de siecle—the milieu of Claude Debussy, Sion’s alleged Grand Master when Berenger Sauniere, in 1891, discovered the mysterious parchments at Rennes-le-Chateau.

Debussy seems to have made Victor Hugo’s acquaintance through the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. Subsequently he set a number of Hugo’s works to music. He also became an integral member of the symbolist circles which, by the last decade of the century, had come to dominate Parisian cultural life. These circles were sometimes illustrious, sometimes odd, sometimes both. They included the young cleric Emile Hoffet and Emma Calve—through whom Debussy came to meet Sauniere. There was also the enigmatic magus of French symbolist poetry, Stephane Mallarme—one of whose masterpieces, L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune, Debussy set to music. There was the symbolist playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Merovingian drama, Pelleas et Melisande, Debussy turned into a world-famous opera. There was the flamboyant Comte Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose “Rosicrucian” play, Axel, became a bible for the entire Symbolist Movement. Although his death in 1918 prevented its completion, Debussy began to compose a libretto for Villiers’s occult drama, intending to turn it, too, into an opera.

Among his other associates were the luminaries who attended Mallarme’s famous Tuesday night soirees—Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Stefan George, Paul Valery, the young Andre Gide and Marcel Proust.

In themselves Debussy’s and Mallarme’s circles were steeped in esoterica. At the same time, they overlapped circles that were more esoteric still. Thus Debussy consorted with virtually all the most prominent names in the so-called French ‘occult revival’. One of these was the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, an intimate of Emma Calve and founder of the so-called Cabalistic Order of the Rose Croix. A second was Jules Bois, a notorious satanist, another intimate of Emma Calve and a friend of MacGregor Mathers. Prompted by Jules Bois, Mathers established the most famous British occult society of the period, the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Another occultist of Debussy’s acquaintance was Doctor Gerard Encausse—better known as Papus, under which name he published what is still considered one of the definitive works on the Tarot. Papus was not only a member of numerous esoteric orders and societies, but also a confidant of the czar and czarina, Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia. And among Papus’s closest associates was a name which had already figured in our inquiry—that of Jules Doinel. In 1890 Doinel had become librarian at Carcassonne and established a neo-Cathar church in the Languedoc in which he and Papus functioned as bishops. Doinel in fact proclaimed himself Gnostic bishop of Mirepoix, which included the parish of Montsegur, and of Met, which included the parish of Rennes-le-Chateau.

Doinel’s church was supposedly consecrated by an eastern bishop in Paris at the home, interestingly enough, of Lady Caithness, wife of the earl of Caithness, Lord James Sinclair. In retrospect this church seems to have been merely another innocuous sect or cult, like so many of the fin de siecle. At the time, however, it caused considerable alarm in official quarters. A special report was prepared for the Holy Office of the Vatican on the “resurgence of Cathar tendencies”. And the pope issued an explicit condemnation of Doinel’s institution, which he militantly denounced as a new manifestation of ’the ancient Albigensian heresy’.

Notwithstanding the Vatican’s condemnation, Doinel, by the mid-1890s, was active in Sauniere’s home territory and at precisely the time that the cure of Rennes-le-Chateau began to flaunt his wealth. The two men may well have been introduced by Debussy. Or by Emma Calve. Or by the Abbe Henri Boudet—cure of Rennes-les-Bains, best friend of Sauniere and colleague of Doinel in the Society of Arts and Sciences of Carcassonne.

One of the closest of Debussy’s occult contacts was Josephin Peladan—another friend of Papus and, predictably enough, another intimate of Emma Calve. In 1889 Peladan embarked on a visit to the Holy Land. When he returned he claimed to have discovered Jesus’s tomb—not at the traditional site of the Holy Sepulchre but under the Mosque of Omar, formerly part of the Templars’ enclave. In the words of an enthusiastic admirer, Peladan’s alleged discovery was ‘so astonishing that at any other era it would have shaken the Catholic world to its foundations’. Neither Peladan nor his associates, however, volunteered any indication of how Jesus’s tomb could have been so definitively identified and verified as such, nor why its discovery should necessarily shake the Catholic world—unless, of course, it contained something significant, controversial, perhaps even explosive. In any case, Peladan did not elaborate on his purported discovery. But though a self-professed Catholic, he nevertheless insisted on Jesus’s mortality.

In 1890 Peladan founded a new order—the Order of the Catholic Rose-Croix, the Temple and the Grail. And this order, unlike the other Rose-Croix institutions of the period, somehow escaped papal condemnation. In the meantime, Peladan turned his attention increasingly to the arts. The artist, he declared, should be ‘a knight in armour, eagerly engaged in the symbolic quest for the Holy Grail’. And in adherence to this principle, Peladan embarked on a fully fledged aesthetic crusade. It took the form of a highly publicised series of annual exhibitions, known as the Salon de la Rose + Croix whose avowed purpose was ’to ruin realism, reform Latin taste and create a school of idealist art’. To that end certain themes and subjects were autocratically and summarily rejected as unworthy—’no matter how well executed, even if perfectly’. The list of rejected themes and subjects included ‘prosaic’ history painting, patriotic and military painting, representations of contemporary life, portraits, rustic scenes and ‘all landscapes except those composed in the manner of Poussin’.

Nor did Peladan confine himself to painting. On the contrary, he attempted to promulgate his aesthetic in music and the theatre as well. He formed his own theatre company, which performed specially composed works on such subjects as Orpheus, the Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece, the “Mystery of the Rose-Croix” and the “Mystery of the Grail”. One of the regular promoters and patrons of these productions was Claude Debussy.

Among Peladan’s and Debussy’s other associates was Maurice Barres who, as a young man, had been involved in a “Rose-Croix” circle with Victor Hugo. In 1912 Barres published his most famous novel, La Colline inspiree (“The Inspired Mount”). Certain modern commentators have suggested that his work is in fact a thinly disguised allegory of Berenger Sauniere and Rennes-le-Chateau. Certainly there are parallels which would seem too striking to be wholly coincidental. But Barres does not situate his narrative in Rennes-le-Chateau, or any other place in the Languedoc. On the contrary, the ‘inspired mount’ of the title is a mountain surmounted by a village in Lorraine. And the village is the old pilgrimage centre of Sion.

Jean Cocteau

More than Charles Radclyffe, more than Charles Nodier, Jean Cocteau seemed to us a most unlikely candidate for the Grand Mastership of an influential secret society. In Radclyffe’s and Nodier’s cases, however, our investigation had yielded certain connections of considerable interest. In Cocteau’s we discovered very few.

Certainly he was raised in a milieu close to the “corridors of power”—his family were politically prominent and his uncle was an important diplomat. But Cocteau, at least ostensibly, abandoned this world, leaving home at the age of fifteen and plunging into the seedy sub-culture of Marseilles. By 1908 he had established himself in bohemian artistic circles. In his early twenties he became associated with Proust, Gide and Maurice Barres. He was also a close friend of Victor Hugo’s great-grandson, Jean, with whom he embarked on assorted excursions into spiritualism and the occult. He quickly became versed in esoterica; and Hermetic thinking shaped not only much of his work, but also his entire aesthetic. By 1912, if not earlier, he had begun to consort with Debussy, to whom he alludes frequently, if noncommittally, in his journals. In 1926 he designed the set for a production of the opera Pelleas et Melisande because, according to one commentator, he was “unable to resist linking his name for all time to that of Claude Debussy”.

Cocteau’s private life—which included bouts of drug addiction and a sequence of homosexual affairs—was notoriously erratic. This has fostered an image of him as a volatile and recklessly irresponsible individual. In fact, however, he was always acutely conscious of his public persona; and whatever his personal escapades, he would not let them impede his access to people of influence and power. As he himself admitted, he had always craved public recognition, honour, esteem, even admission to the Academie Francaise. And he made a point of conforming sufficiently to assure him of the status he sought. Thus he was never far removed from prominent figures like Jacques Maritain and Andre Malraux. Although never ostensibly interested in politics, he denounced the Vichy government during the war and seems to have been quietly in league with the Resistance. In 1949 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1958 he was invited by de Gaulle’s brother to make a public address on the general subject of France. It is not the kind of role one generally attributes to Cocteau, but he appears to have played it frequently enough and to have relished doing so.

For a good part of his life, Cocteau was associated—sometimes intimately, sometimes peripherally—with royalist Catholic circles. Here he frequently hobnobbed with members of the old aristocracy including some of Proust’s friends and patrons. At the same time, however, Cocteau’s Catholicism was highly suspect, highly unorthodox, and seems to have been more an aesthetic than a religious commitment.

In the latter part of his life, he devoted much of his energy to redecorating churches—a curious echo, perhaps, of Berenger Sauniere. Yet even then his piety was questionable: “They take me for a religious painter because I’ve decorated a chapel. Always the same mania for labelling people.”

Like Sauniere, Cocteau, in his redecorations, incorporated certain curious and suggestive details. Some are visible in the church of Notre Dame de France, around the corner from Leicester Square in London. The church itself dates from 1865 and may, at its consecration, have had certain Masonic connections. In 1940, at the peak of the blitz, it was seriously damaged. Nevertheless, it remained the favourite centre of worship for many important members of the Free French Forces; and after the war it was restored and redecorated by artists from all over France. Among them was Cocteau, who, in 1960, three years before his death, executed a mural depicting the Crucifixion. It is an extremely singular Crucifixion. There is a black sun, and a sinister, green-tinged and unidentified figure in the lower right-hand corner. There is a Roman soldier holding a shield with a bird emblazoned on it—a highly stylised bird suggesting an Egyptian rendering of Horus. Among the mourning women and dice-throwing centurions, there are two incongruously modern figures—one of whom is Cocteau himself, presented as a self-portrait with his back significantly turned on the cross. Most striking of all is the fact that the mural depicts only the lower portion of the cross. Whoever hangs upon it is visible only as far up as the knees—so that one cannot see the face, or determine the identity of who is being crucified. And fixed to the cross, immediately below the anonymous victim’s feet, is a gigantic rose. The design, in short, is a flagrant Rose-Croix device. And if nothing else, it is a very singular motif for a Catholic church.

The Two John XXIIIs

The Dossiers secrets, in which the list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters appeared, were dated 1956. Cocteau did not die until 1963. There was thus no indication of who might have succeeded him, or of who might preside over the Prieure de Sion at present. But Cocteau himself posed one additional point of immense interest.

Until the ‘cutting of the elm’ in 1188, the “Prieure documents” asserted, Sion and the Order of the Temple shared the same Grand Master. After 1188 Sion is said to have chosen a Grand Master of its own, the first of them being Jean de Gisors. According to the “Prieure documents”, every Grand Master, on assuming his position, has adopted the name of Jean (John) or, since there were four women, Jeanne (Joan). Sion’s Grand Masters are therefore alleged to have comprised a continuous succession of Jeans and Jeannes, from 1188 to the present. This succession was clearly intended to imply an esoteric and Hermetic papacy based on John, in contrast (and perhaps opposition) to the exoteric one based on Peter.

One major question, of course, was which John. John the Baptist? John the Evangelist—the “Beloved Disciple” in the Fourth Gospel? Or John the Divine, author of the Book of Revelation? It seemed it must be one of these three because Jean de Gisors in 1188 had purportedly taken the title of Jean II. Who, then, was Jean I?

Whatever the answer to that question, Jean Cocteau appeared on the list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters as Jean XXIII. In 1959, while Cocteau still presumably held the Grand Mastership, Pope Pius XII died and the assembled cardinals elected, as their new pontiff, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli of Venice. Any newly elected pope chooses his own name; and Cardinal Roncalli caused considerable consternation when he chose the name of John XXIII.

Such consternation was not unjustified. In the first place the name “John” had been implicitly anathematised since it was last used in the early fifteenth century by an antipope. Moreover, there had already been a John XXIII. The antipope who abdicated in 1415 and who, interestingly enough, had previously been bishop of Met—was in fact John XXIII. It was thus unusual, to say the least, for Cardinal Roncalli to assume the same name.

In 1976 an enigmatic little book was published in Italy and soon after translated into French. It was called The Prophecies of Pope John XXIII and contained a compilation of obscure prophetic prose poems reputedly composed by the pontiff who had died thirteen years before in 1963, the same year as Cocteau. For the most part these ‘prophecies’ are extremely opaque and defy any coherent interpretation. Whether they are indeed the work of John XXIII is also open to question. But the introduction to the work maintains that they are Pope John’s work. And it maintains something further as well—that John XXIII was secretly a member of the “Rose-Croix”, with whom he had become affiliated while acting as Papal Nuncio to Turkey in 1935.

Needless to say, this assertion sounds incredible. Certainly it cannot be proved, and we found no external evidence to support it. But why, we wondered, should such an assertion even have been made in the first place? Could it be true after all? Could there be at least a grain of truth in it?

In 1188 the Prieure de Sion is said to have adopted the subtitle of “Rose-Croix Veritas”. If Pope John was affiliated with a “Rose-Croix” organisation, and if that organisation was the Prieure de Sion, the implications would be extremely intriguing. Among other things they would suggest that Cardinal Roncalli, on becoming pope, chose the name of his own secret Grand Master so that, for some symbolic reason, there would be a John XXIII presiding over Sion and the papacy simultaneously.

In any case the simultaneous rule of a John (or Jean) XXIII over both Sion and Rome would seem to be an extraordinary coincidence. Nor could the “Prieure documents” have devised a list to create such a coincidence—a list which culminated with Jean XXIII at the same time that a man with that title occupied the throne of Saint Peter. For the list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters had been composed and deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale no later than 1956—three years before John XXIII became pope.

There was another striking coincidence: In the twelfth century an Irish monk named Malachi compiled a series of Nostradamus-like prophecies. In these prophecies—which, incidentally, are said to be highly esteemed by many important Roman Catholics, including the present pope, John-Paul II—Malachi enumerates the pontiffs who will occupy the throne of Saint Peter in the centuries to come. For each pontiff he offers a species of descriptive motto. And for John XXIII the motto, translated into French, is “Pasteur et Nautonnier”—“Shepherd and Navigator”. The official title of Sion’s alleged Grand Master is also “Nautonnier”.

Whatever the truth underlying these strange coincidences, there is no question that more than any other man Pope John XXIII was responsible for re-orienting the Roman Catholic Church and bringing it, as commentators have frequently said, into the twentieth century. Much of this was accomplished by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which John inaugurated. At the same time, however, John was responsible for other changes as well. He revised the Church’s position on Freemasonry, for example—breaking with at least two centuries of entrenched tradition and pronouncing that a Catholic might be a Freemason. And in June 1960 he issued a profoundly important apostolic letter. This missive addressed itself specifically to the subject of “The Precious Blood of Jesus”. It ascribed a hitherto unprecedented significance to that blood. It emphasised Jesus’s suffering as a human being, and maintained that the redemption of mankind had been effected by the shedding of his blood. In the context of Pope John’s letter, Jesus’s human Passion, and the shedding of his blood, assume a greater consequence than the Resurrection or even than the mechanics of the Crucifixion.

The implications of this letter are ultimately enormous. As one commentator has observed, they alter the whole basis of Christian belief. If man’s redemption was achieved by the shedding of Jesus’s blood, his death and resurrection became incidental—if not, indeed, superfluous. Jesus need not have died on the cross for the faith to retain its validity.