Conspiracy through the Centuries

How were we to synthesise the evidence we had accumulated? Much of it was impressive and seemed to bear witness to something—some pattern, some coherent design. The list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters, however improbable it had originally appeared, now displayed some intriguing consistencies. Most of the figures on the list, for example, were connected, either by blood or personal association, with the families whose genealogies figured in the “Prieure documents” and particularly with the house of Lorraine. Most of the figures on the list were involved with orders of one kind or another, or with secret societies. Virtually all the figures on the list, even when nominally Catholic, held unorthodox religious beliefs. Virtually all of them were immersed in esoteric thought and tradition. And in almost every case there had been some species of close contact between an alleged Grand Master, his predecessor and his successor.

Nevertheless, these consistencies, impressive though they might be, did not necessarily prove anything. They did not prove, for instance, that the Prieure de Sion, whose existence during the Middle Ages we had confirmed, had actually continued to survive through the subsequent centuries. Still less did they prove that the individuals cited as Grand Masters actually held that position. It still seemed incredible to us that some of them really did. So far as certain individuals were concerned, the age at which they allegedly became Grand Master argued against them. Granted, it was possible that Edouard de Bar might have been selected Grand Master at the age of five, or Rene d’Anjou at the age of eight, on the basis of some hereditary principle. But no such principle seemed to obtain for Robert Fludd or Charles Nodier, who both supposedly became Grand Master at the age of twenty-one, or for Debussy, who supposedly did so aged twenty-three. Such individuals would not have had time to ‘work their way up through the ranks’, as one might, for example, in Freemasonry. Nor had they even become solidly established in their own spheres. This anomaly made no apparent sense. Unless one assumed that Sion’s Grand Mastership was often purely symbolic, a ritual position occupied by a figurehead—a figurehead who, perhaps, was not even aware of the status accorded him.

However, it proved futile to speculate—at least on the basis of the information we possessed. We therefore turned back to history again, seeking evidence of the Prieure de Sion elsewhere, in quarters other than the list of alleged Grand Masters. We turned particularly to the fortunes of the house of Lorraine, and some of the other families cited in the “Prieure documents”. We sought to verify other statements made in those documents. And we sought additional evidence for the work of a secret society, acting more or less covertly behind the scenes.

If it was indeed genuinely secret, we did not, of course, expect to find the Prieure de Sion explicitly mentioned by that name. If it had continued to function through the centuries, it would have done so under a variety of shifting guises and masks, “fronts” and facades—just as it purportedly functioned for a time under the name Ormus, which it discarded. Nor would it have displayed a single obvious and specific policy, political position or prevailing attitude. Indeed, any such cohesive and unified stance, even if it could be gleaned, would have seemed highly suspect. If we were dealing with an organisation which had survived for some nine centuries, we would have to credit it with considerable flexibility and adaptability. Its very survival would have hinged on these qualities; and without them it would have degenerated into an empty form, as devoid of any real power as, say, the Yeomen of the Guard. In short, the Prieure de Sion could not have remained rigid and immutable for the whole of its history. On the contrary, it would have been compelled to change periodically, modify itself and its activities, adjust itself and its objectives to the shifting kaleidoscope of world affairs—just as cavalry units during the last century have been compelled to exchange their horses for tanks and armoured cars. In its capacity to conform to a given age and exploit and master its technology and resources, Sion would have constituted a parallel to what seemed its exoteric rival, the Roman Catholic Church; or perhaps, to cite a deceptively sinister example, to the organisation known as the Mafia. We did not, of course, see the Prieure de Sion as unadulterated villains. But the Mafia at least provided testimony of how, by adapting itself from age to age, a secret society could exist, and of the kind of power it could exercise.

The Prieure de Sion in France

According to the “Prieure documents”, Sion between 1306 and 1480 possessed nine commanderies. In 1481—when Rene d’Anjou died—this number was supposedly expanded to twenty-seven. The most important are listed as having been situated at Bourges, Gisors, Jarnac, Mont Saint-Michel, Montreval, Paris, Le Puy, Solesmes and Stenay. And, the Dossiers secrets add cryptically, there was ‘an arch called Beth-Ania—house of Anne—situated at Rennes-le-Chateau’. It is not clear precisely what this passage means, except that Rennes-le-Chateau would appear to enjoy some kind of highly special significance. And surely it cannot be coincidental that Sauniere, on building his villa, then christened it Villa Bethania.

According to the Dossiers secrets, the commandery at Gisors dated from 1306 and was situated in the rue de Vienne. From here it supposedly communicated, via an underground passageway, with the local cemetery and with the subterranean chapel of Sainte-Catherine located beneath the fortress. In the sixteenth century this chapel, or perhaps a crypt adjacent to it, is said to have become a depository for the archives of the Prieure de Sion, housed in thirty coffers.

Early in 1944, when Gisors was occupied by German personnel, a special military mission was sent from Berlin, with instructions to plan a series of excavations beneath the fortress. The Allied invasion of Normandy thwarted any such undertaking; but not long after, a French workman named Roger Lhomoy embarked on excavations of his own. In 1946 Lhomoy announced to the Mayor of Gisors that he had found an underground chapel containing nineteen sarcophagi of stone and thirty coffers of metal. His petition to excavate further, and make public his discovery, was delayed—almost deliberately, it might seem—by a welter of official red tape. At last, in 1962, Lhomoy commenced his requested excavations at Gisors. They were conducted under the auspices of Andre Malraux, French Minister of Culture at the time, and were not officially open to the public. Certainly no coffers or sarcophagi were found. Whether the underground chapel was found has been debated in the press, as well as in various books and articles. Lhomoy insisted he did find his way again to the chapel, but its contents had been removed. Whatever the truth of the matter, there is mention of the subterranean chapel of Sainte-Catherine in two old manuscripts, one dated 1696 and the other 1375.

On this basis, Lhomoy’s story at least becomes plausible. So does the assertion that the subterranean chapel was a depository for Sion’s archives. For we, in our own research, found conclusive proof that the Prieure de Sion continued to exist for at least three centuries after the Crusades and the dissolution of the Knights Templar. Between the early fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries, for example, documents pertinent to Orleans, and to Sion’s base there at Saint-Samson, make sporadic references to the Order. Thus it is on record that in the early sixteenth century members of the Prieure de Sion at Orleans—by flouting their ‘rule’ and ‘refusing to live in common’—incurred the displeasure of the pope and the king of France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the Order was also accused of a number of offences—failing to observe their rule, living “individually” rather than “in common”, being licentious, residing outside the walls of Saint-Samson, boycotting divine services and neglecting to rebuild the walls of the house, which had been seriously damaged in 1562. By 1619 the authorities seemed to have lost patience. In that year, according to the records, the Prieure de Sion was evicted from Saint-Samson and the house was made over to the Jesuits.

From 1619 onwards we could find no reference to the Prieure de Sion—not, at any rate, under that name. But if nothing else, we could at least prove its existence until the seventeenth century. And yet the proof itself, such as it was, raised a number of crucial questions. In the first place the references we found cast no light whatever on Sion’s real activities, objectives, interests or possible influence. In the second place these references, it seemed, bore witness only to something of trifling consequence—a curiously elusive fraternity of monks or religious devotees whose behaviour, though unorthodox and perhaps clandestine, was of relatively minor import. We could not reconcile the apparently remiss occupants of Saint-Samson with the celebrated and legendary Rose-Croix, or a band of wayward monks with an institution whose Grand Masters supposedly comprised some of the most illustrious names in Western history and culture.

According to the “Prieure documents”, Sion was an organisation of considerable power and influence, responsible for creating the Templars and manipulating the course of international affairs. The references we found suggested nothing of such magnitude. One possible explanation, of course, was that Saint-Samson at Orleans was but an isolated seat, and probably a minor one, of Sion’s activities. And indeed, the list of Sion’s important commanderies in the Dossiers secrets does not even include Orleans. If Sion was in fact a force to be reckoned with, Orleans can only have been one small fragment of a much broader pattern. And if this were the case, we would have to look for traces of the Order elsewhere.

The Dukes of Guise and Lorraine

During the sixteenth century the house of Lorraine and its cadet branch, the house of Guise, made a concerted and determined attempt to topple the Valois dynasty of France—to exterminate the Valois line and claim the French throne. This attempt, on several occasions, came within a hair’s breadth of dazzling success. In the course of some thirty years all Valois rulers, heirs and princes were wiped out, and the line driven to extinction.

The attempt to seize the French throne extended across three generations of the Guise and Lorraine families. It came closest to success in the 1550s and 1560s under the auspices of Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine and his brother, Francois, Duke of Guise. Charles and Francois were related to the Gonzaga family of Mantua and to Charles de Montpensier, Constable of Bourbon—listed in the Dossiers secrets as Grand Master of Sion until 1527. Moreover, Francois, Duke of Guise, was married to Anne d’Este, Duchess of Gisors. And in his machinations for the throne he seems to have received covert aid and support from Ferrante de Gonzaga, allegedly Grand Master of Sion from 1527 until 1575.

Both Francois and his brother, the cardinal of Lorraine, have been stigmatised by later historians as rabidly bigoted and fanatic Catholics, intolerant, brutal and bloodthirsty. But there is substantial evidence to suggest that this reputation is to some extent unwarranted, at least so far as adherence to Catholicism is concerned. Francois and his brother appear, quite patently, to have been brazen, if cunning, opportunists, courting both Catholics and Protestants in the name of their ulterior design. In 1562, for example, at the Council of Trent, the cardinal of Lorraine launched an attempt to decentralise the papacy—to confer autonomy on local bishops and restore the ecclesiastical hierarchy to what it had been in Merovingian times.

By 1563 Francois de Guise was already virtually king when he fell to an assassin’s bullet. His brother, the cardinal of Lorraine, died twelve years later, in 1575. But the vendetta against the French royal line did not cease. In 1584 the new duke of Guise and new cardinal of Lorraine embarked on a fresh assault against the throne. Their chief ally in this enterprise was Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers who, according to the “Prieure documents”, had become Grand Master of Sion nine years before. The banner of the conspirators was the Cross of Lorraine—the former emblem of Rene d’Anjou.

The feud continued. By the end of the century the Valois were at last extinct. But the house of Guise had bled itself to death in the process, and could put forward no eligible candidate for a throne that finally lay within its grasp.

It is simply not known whether there was an organised secret society, or secret order, supporting the houses of Guise and Lorraine. Certainly they were aided by an international network of emissaries, ambassadors, assassins, agents provocateurs, spies and agents who might well have comprised such a clandestine institution. According to Gerard de Sede, one of these agents was Nostradamus; and there are other “Prieure documents” which echo M. de Sede’s contention. In any case, there is abundant evidence to suggest that Nostradamus was indeed a secret agent working for Francois de Guise and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine.

If Nostradamus was an agent for the houses of Guise and Lorraine, he would have been responsible not only for providing them with important information concerning the activities and plans of their adversaries, but he would also, in his capacity as astrologer to the French court, have been privy to all manner of intimate secrets, as well as quirks and weaknesses of personality. By playing on vulnerabilities with which he had become acquainted, he could have psychologically manipulated the Valois into the hands of their enemies. And by virtue of his familiarity with their horoscopes, he might well have advised their enemies on, say, an apparently propitious moment for assassination. Many of Nostradamus’s prophecies, in short, may not have been prophecies at all. They may have been cryptic messages, ciphers, schedules, timetables, instructions, blueprints for action.

Whether this was actually the case or not, there is no question that some of Nostradamus’s prophecies were not prophecies but referred, quite explicitly, to the past—to the Knights Templar, the Merovingian dynasty, the history of the house of Lorraine. A striking number of them refer to the Razes—the old comte of Rennes-le-Chateau. And the numerous quatrains which refer to the advent of ’le Grand Monarch’—the Great Monarch—indicate that this sovereign will derive ultimately from the Languedoc. Our research revealed an additional fragment which linked Nostradamus even more directly to our investigation. According to Gerard de Sede, as well as to popular legend, Nostradamus, before embarking on his career as prophet, spent considerable time in Lorraine. This would appear to have been some sort of novitiate, or period of probation, after which he was supposedly ‘initiated’ into some portentous secret. More specifically he is said to have been shown an ancient and arcane book, on which he based all his own subsequent work. And this book was reportedly divulged to him at a very significant place—the mysterious Abbey of Orval, donated by Godfroi de Bouillon’s foster-mother, where our research suggested that the Prieure de Sion may have had its inception. In any case, Orval continued, for another two centuries, to be associated with the name of Nostradamus. As late as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era books of prophecies, purportedly authored by Nostradamus, were issuing from Orval.

The Bid for the Throne of France

By the mid-1620s the throne of France was occupied by Louis XIII. But the power behind the throne, and the real architect of French policy, was the king’s prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu is generally acknowledged to have been the arch-Machiavel, the supreme machinator, of his age. He may have been something more as well.

While Richelieu established an unprecedented stability in France, the rest of Europe—and especially Germany—flamed in the throes of the Thirty Years War. In its origins the Thirty Years War was not essentially religious. Nevertheless, it quickly became polarised in religious terms. On one side were the staunchly Catholic forces of Spain and Austria. On the other were the Protestant armies of Sweden and the small German principalities—including the Palatinate of the Rhine, whose rulers, Elector Frederick and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, were in exile at the Hague. Frederick and his allies in the field were endorsed and supported by “Rosicrucian” thinkers and writers both on the continent and in England.

In 1633 Cardinal Richelieu embarked on an audacious and seemingly incredible policy. He brought France into the Thirty Years War—but not on the side one would expect. For Richelieu, a number of considerations took precedence over his religious obligations as cardinal. He sought to establish French supremacy in Europe. He sought to neutralise the perpetual and traditional threat posed to French security by Austria and Spain. And he sought to shatter the Spanish hegemony which had obtained for more than a century—especially in the old Merovingian heartland of the Low Countries and parts of modern Lorraine. As a result of these factors, Europe was taken aback by the unprecedented action of a Catholic cardinal, presiding over a Catholic country, dispatching Catholic troops to fight on the Protestant side against other Catholics. No historian has ever suggested that Richelieu was a “Rosicrucian”. But he could not possibly have done anything more in keeping with “Rosicrucian” attitudes, or more likely to win him “Rosicrucian” favour.

In the meantime the house of Lorraine had again begun to aspire, albeit obliquely, to the French throne. This time the claimant was Gaston d’Orleans, younger brother of Louis XIII. Gaston was not himself of the house of Lorraine. In 1632, however, he had married the duke of Lorraine’s sister. His heir would thus carry Lorraine blood on the maternal side; and if Gaston ascended the throne Lorraine would preside over France within another generation. This prospect was sufficient to mobilise support. Among those asserting Gaston’s right of succession we found an individual we had encountered before—Charles, Duke of Guise. Charles had been tutored by the young Robert Fludd. And he had married Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse, owner of Couiza and Arques—where the tomb identical to the one in Poussin’s painting is located.

Attempts to depose Louis in favour of Gaston failed, but time—it seemed—was on Gaston’s side; or at least on the side of Gaston’s heirs, for Louis XIII and his wife, Anne of Austria, remained childless. Rumours were already in circulation that the king was homosexual or sexually incapacitated; and indeed, according to certain reports following his subsequent autopsy, he was pronounced incapable of begetting children.

But then, in 1638, after twenty-three years of sterile marriage, Anne of Austria suddenly produced a child. Few people at the time believed in the boy’s legitimacy, and there is still considerable doubt about it. According to both contemporary and later writers, the child’s true father was Cardinal Richelieu, or perhaps a “stud” employed by Richelieu, quite possibly his protege and successor, Cardinal Mazarin. It has even been claimed that after Louis XIII’s death, Mazarin and Anne of Austria were secretly married.

In any case the birth of an heir to Louis XIII was a serious blow to the hopes of Gaston d’Orleans and the house of Lorraine. And when Louis and Richelieu both died in 1642, the first in a series of concerted attempts was launched to oust Mazarin and keep the young Louis XIV from the throne. These attempts, which began as popular uprisings, culminated in a civil war that flared intermittently for ten years. To historians that war is known as the Fronde. In addition to Gaston d’Orleans, its chief instigators included a number of names, families and titles already familiar to us. There was Frederic-Maurice de la Tour d’Auvergne, Duke of Bouillon. There was the viscount of Turenne. There was the duke of Longueville—grandson of Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers and alleged Grand Master of Sion half a century before. The headquarters and capital of the frondeurs was, significantly enough, the ancient Ardennes town of Stenay.

The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement

According to the “Prieure documents”, the Prieure de Sion, during the mid-seventeenth century, “dedicated itself to deposing Mazarin”. Quite clearly it would seem to have been unsuccessful. The Fronde failed, Louis XIV did mount the throne of France and Mazarin, though briefly removed, was quickly reinstated, presiding as prime minister until his death in 1660. But if Sion did in fact devote itself to opposing Mazarin, we at last had some vector on it, some means of locating and identifying it. Given the families involved in the Fronde—families whose genealogies also figured in the “Prieure documents”—it seemed reasonable to associate Sion with the instigators of that turmoil.

The “Prieure documents” had asserted that Sion actively opposed Mazarin. They also asserted that certain families and titles—Lorraine, for example, Gonzaga, Nevers, Guise, Longueville and Bouillon—had not only been intimately connected with the Order, but also provided it with some of its Grand Masters. And history confirmed that it was these names and titles which had loomed in the forefront of resistance to the cardinal. It thus seemed that we had located the Prieure de Sion, and that we had identified at least some of its members. If we were right, Sion during the period in question, at any rate, was simply another name for a movement and a conspiracy which historians had long recognised and acknowledged.

But if the frondeurs constituted an enclave of opposition to Mazarin, they were not the only such enclave. There were others as well, overlapping enclaves which functioned not only during the Fronde but long afterwards. The “Prieure documents” themselves refer repeatedly and insistently to the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. They imply, quite clearly, that the Compagnie was in fact Sion, or a facade for Sion, operating under another name. And certainly the Compagnie in its structure, organisation, activities and modes of operation conformed to the picture we had begun to form of Sion.

The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement was a highly organised and efficient secret society. There is no question of it being fictitious. On the contrary, its existence has been acknowledged by its contemporaries, as well as by subsequent historians. It has been exhaustively documented, and numerous books and articles have been devoted to it. Its name is familiar enough in France, and it continues to enjoy a certain fashionable mystique. Some of its own papers have even come to light.

The Compagnie is said to have been founded, between 1627 and 1629, by a nobleman associated with Gaston d’Orleans. The individuals who guided and shaped its policies remained scrupulously anonymous, however, and are still so today. The only names definitively associated with it are those of intermediate or lower-ranking members of its hierarchy—the ‘front men’, so to speak, who acted on instructions from above. One of these was the brother of the duchess of Longueville. Another was Charles Fouquet, brother of Louis XIV’s Superintendent of Finances. And there was the uncle of the philosopher Fenelon who, half a century later, exerted a profound influence on Freemasonry through the Chevalier Ramsay. Among those most prominently associated with the Compagnie were the mysterious figure now known as Saint Vincent de Paul, and Nicolas Pavilion, bishop of Alet, the town a few miles from Rennes-le-Chateau, and Jean Jacques Olier, founder of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice. Indeed Saint Sulpice is now generally acknowledged to have been the Compagnie’s ‘centre of operations’.

In its organisation and activities the Compagnie echoed the Order of the Temple and prefigured later Freemasonry. Working from Saint Sulpice, it established an intricate network of provincial branches or chapters. Provincial members remained ignorant of their directors’ identities. They were often manipulated on behalf of objectives they themselves did not share. They were even forbidden to contact each other except via Paris, thus ensuring a highly centralised control. And even in Paris the architects of the society remained unknown to those who obediently served them. In short the Compagnie comprised a hydra-headed organisation with an invisible heart. To this day it is not known who constituted the heart. Nor what constituted the heart. But it is known that the heart beat in accordance with some veiled and weighty secret. Contemporary accounts refer explicitly to ’the Secret which is the core of the Compagnie’. According to one of the society’s statutes, discovered long afterwards, “The primary channel which shapes the spirit of the Compagnie, and which is essential to it, is the Secret.”

So far as uninitiated novice members were concerned, the Compagnie was ostensibly devoted to charitable work, especially in regions devastated by the Wars of Religion and subsequently by the Fronde—in Picardy, for instance, Champagne and Lorraine. It is now generally accepted, however, that this “charitable work” was merely a convenient and ingenious facade, which had little to do with the Compagnie’s real raison d’etre. The real raison d’etre was twofold—to engage in what was called ‘pious espionage’, gathering ‘intelligence information’, and to infiltrate the most important offices in the land, including circles in direct proximity to the throne.

In both of these objectives the Compagnie seems to have enjoyed a signal success. As a member of the royal “Council of Conscience”, for example, Vincent de Paul became confessor to Louis XIII. He was also an intimate adviser to Louis XIV until his opposition to Mazarin forced him to resign this position. And the queen mother, Anne of Austria, was, in many respects, a hapless pawn of the Compagnie, who for a time at any rate managed to turn her against Mazarin. But the Compagnie did not confine itself exclusively to the throne. By the mid-seventeenth century, it could wield power through the aristocracy, the parlement, the judiciary and the police—so much so, that on a number of occasions these bodies openly dared to defy the king.

In our researches we found no historian, writing either at the time or more recently, who adequately explained the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Most authorities depict it as a militant arch-Catholic organisation, a bastion of rigidly entrenched and fanatic orthodoxy. The same authorities claim that it devoted itself to weeding out heretics. But why, in a devoutly Catholic country, should such an organisation have had to function with such strict secrecy? And who constituted a “heretic” at that time? Protestants? Jansenists? In fact, there were numerous Protestants and Jansenists within the ranks of the Compagnie.

If the Compagnie was piously Catholic, it should, in theory, have endorsed Cardinal Mazarin—who, after all, embodied Catholic interests at the time. Yet the Compagnie militantly opposed Mazarin—so much so that the cardinal, losing his temper, vowed he would employ all his resources to destroy it. What is more, the Compagnie provoked vigorous hostility in other conventional quarters as well. The Jesuits, for instance, assiduously campaigned against it. Other Catholic authorities accused the Compagnie of ‘heresy’—the very thing the Compagnie itself purported to oppose. In 1651 the bishop of Toulouse charged the Compagnie with ‘impious practices’ and hinted at something highly irregular in its induction ceremonies—a curious echo of the charges levelled against the Templars. He even threatened members of the society with excommunication. Most of them brazenly defied this threat—an extremely singular response from supposedly ‘pious’ Catholics.

The Compagnie had been formed when the “Rosicrucian” furore was still at its zenith. The ‘invisible confraternity’ was believed to be everywhere, omnipresent and this engendered not only panic and paranoia, but also the inevitable witch-hunts. And yet no trace was ever found of a card-carrying “Rosicrucian”—nowhere, least of all in Catholic France. So far as France was concerned, the “Rosicrucians” remained figments of an alarmist popular imagination. Or did they? If there were indeed “Rosicrucian” interests determined to establish a foothold in France, what better facade could there be than an organisation dedicated to hunting out “Rosicrucians”? In short the “Rosicrucians” may have furthered their objectives, and gained a following in France, by posing as their own arch-enemy.

The Compagnie successfully defied both Mazarin and Louis XIV. In 1660, less than a year before Mazarin’s death, the king officially pronounced against the Compagnie and ordered its dissolution. For the next five years the Compagnie cavalierly ignored the royal edict. At last, in 1665, it concluded that it could not continue to operate in its ‘present form’. Accordingly all documents pertinent to the society were recalled and concealed in some secret Paris depository. This depository has never been located, although it is generally believed to have been Saint Sulpice. If it was, the Compagnie’s archives would thus have been available, more than two centuries later, to men like Abbe Emile Hoffet.

But though the Compagnie ceased to exist in what was then its ‘present form’, none the less it continued to operate at least until the beginning of the next century, still constituting a thorn in Louis XIV’s side. According to unconfirmed traditions, it survived well into the twentieth century. Whether this last assertion is true or not, there is no question that the Compagnie survived its supposed demise in 1665. In 1667 Moliere, a loyal adherent of Louis XIV, attacked the Compagnie through certain veiled but pointed allusions in Le Tartuffe. Despite its apparent extinction, the Compagnie retaliated by getting the play suppressed and keeping it so for two years, despite Moliere’s royal patronage. And the Compagnie seems to have employed its own literary spokesmen as well. It is rumoured, for example, to have included La Rochefoucauld who was certainly active in the Fronde. According to Gerard de Sede, La Fontaine was also a member of the Compagnie, and his charming, ostensibly innocuous fables were in fact allegorical attacks on the throne. This is not inconceivable. Louis XIV disliked La Fontaine intensely, and actively opposed his admission to the Academie Francaise. And La Fontaine’s sponsors and patrons included the duke of Guise, the duke of Bouillon, the viscount of Turenne and the widow of Gaston d’Orleans.

In the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement we thus found an actual secret society, much of whose history was on record. It was ostensibly Catholic, but was nevertheless linked with distinctly un-Catholic activities. It was intimately associated with certain important aristocratic families—families who had been active in the Fronde and whose genealogies figured in the “Prieure documents”. It was closely connected with Saint Sulpice. It worked primarily by infiltration and came to exercise enormous influence. And it was actively opposed to Cardinal Mazarin. In all these respects, it conformed almost perfectly to the image of the Prieure de Sion as presented in the “Prieure documents”. If Sion was indeed active during the seventeenth century, we could reasonably assume it to have been synonymous with the Compagnie. Or perhaps with the power behind the Compagnie.

Chateau Barberie

According to the “Prieure documents”, Sion’s opposition to Mazarin provoked bitter retribution from the cardinal. Among the chief victims of this retribution are said to have been the Plantard family—lineal descendants of Dagobert II and the Merovingian dynasty. In 1548, the “Prieure documents” state, Jean des Plantard had married Marie de Saint-Clair—thus forging another link between his family and that of the Saint-Clair/Gisors. By that time, too, the Plantard family was supposedly established at a certain Chateau Barberie near Nevers, in the Nivernais region of France. This chateau supposedly constituted the Plantards’ official residence for the next century. Then, on July 11th, 1659, according to the “Prieure documents”, Mazarin ordered the razing and total destruction of the chateau. In the ensuing conflagration, the Plantard family is said to have lost all its possessions.

No established or conventional history book, no biography of Mazarin, confirmed these assertions. Our researches yielded no mention whatever of a Plantard family in the Nivernais, or, at first, of any Chateau Barberie. And yet Mazarin, for some unspecified reason, did covet the Nivernais and the duchy of Nevers. Eventually he managed to purchase them—and the contract is signed July 11th, 1659, the very day on which Chateau Barberie is said to have been destroyed.

This prompted us to investigate the matter further. Eventually we exhumed a few disparate fragments of evidence. They were not enough to explain things, but they did attest to the veracity of the “Prieure documents”. In a compilation, dated 1506, of estates and holdings in the Nivernais a Barberie was indeed mentioned. A charter of 1575 mentioned a hamlet in the Nivernais called Les Plantards.

Most convincing of all, it transpired that the existence of Chateau Barberie had in fact been definitively established. During 1874-5 members of the Society of Letters, Sciences and Arts of Nevers undertook an exploratory excavation on the site of certain ruins. It was a difficult enterprise, for the ruins were almost unrecognisable as such, the stones had been vitrified by fire and the site itself was thickly overgrown with trees. Eventually, however, remnants of a town wall and of a chateau were uncovered. This site is now acknowledged to have been Barberie. Before its destruction it apparently consisted of a small fortified town and chateau. And it is within a short distance of the old hamlet of Les Plantards.

We could now say that Chateau Barberie indisputably existed and was destroyed by fire. And, given the hamlet of Les Plantards, there was no reason to doubt it had been owned by a family of that name. The curious fact was that there was no record of when the chateau had been destroyed, nor by whom. If Mazarin was responsible, he would seem to have taken extraordinary pains to eradicate all traces of his action. Indeed there seemed to have been a methodical and systematic attempt to wipe Chateau Barberie from the map and from history. Why embark on such a process of obliteration, unless there was something to hide?

Nicolas Fouquet

Mazarin had other enemies besides the frondeurs and the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Among the most powerful of them was Nicolas Fouquet, who in 1653, had become Superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV. A gifted, precocious and ambitious man, Fouquet, within the next few years, had become the wealthiest and most powerful individual in the kingdom. He was sometimes called “the true king of France”. And he was not without political aspirations. It was rumoured that he intended to make Brittany an independent duchy and himself its presiding duke.

Fouquet’s mother was a prominent member of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. So was his brother Charles, Archbishop of Narbonne in the Languedoc. His younger brother, Louis, was also an ecclesiastic. In 1656 Nicolas Fouquet dispatched Louis to Rome, for reasons which—though not necessarily mysterious—have never been explained. From Rome, Louis wrote the enigmatic letter quoted in Chapter 1—the letter that speaks of a meeting with Poussin and a secret “which even kings would have great pains to draw from him”. And indeed, if Louis was indiscreet in correspondence, Poussin gave nothing whatever away. His personal seal bore the motto “Tenet Confidentiam”.

In 1661 Louis XIV ordered the arrest of Nicolas Fouquet. The charges were extremely general and nebulous. There were vague accusations of misappropriation of funds, and others, even more vague, of sedition. On the basis of these accusations, all Fouquet’s goods and properties were placed under royal sequestration. But the king forbade his officers to touch the Superintendent’s papers or correspondence. He insisted on sifting through these documents himself—personally and in private.

The ensuing trial dragged on for four years and became the sensation of France at the time, violently splitting and polarising public opinion. Louis Fouquet—who had met with Poussin and written the letter from Rome—was dead by then. But the Superintendent’s mother and surviving brother mobilised the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, whose membership also included one of the presiding judges. The Compagnie threw the whole of its support behind the Superintendent, working actively through the courts and the popular mind. Louis XIV—who was not usually bloodthirsty—demanded nothing less than the death sentence. Refusing to be intimidated by him, the court passed a sentence of perpetual banishment. Still demanding death, the enraged king removed the recalcitrant judges and replaced them with others more obedient; but the Compagnie still seems to have defied him.

Eventually, in 1665, Fouquet was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. On the king’s orders he was kept in rigorous isolation. He was forbidden all writing implements, all means whereby he might communicate with anyone. And any soldiers who conversed with him were allegedly consigned to prison ships or, in some cases, hanged.

In 1665, the year of Fouquet’s imprisonment, Poussin died in Rome. During the years that followed, Louis XIV persistently endeavoured through his agents to obtain a single painting—“Les Bergers d’Arcadie”. In 1685 he finally managed to do so. But the painting was not placed on display—not even in the royal residence. On the contrary, it was sequestered in the king’s private apartments, where no one could view it without the monarch’s personal authority.

There is a footnote to Fouquet’s story, for his own disgrace, whatever its causes and magnitude, was not visited on his children. By the middle of the following century Fouquet’s grandson, the marquis of Belle-Isle, had become, in effect, the single most important man in France. In 1718 the marquis of Belle-Isle ceded Belle-Isle itself—a fortified island off the Breton coast—to the crown. In return he obtained certain interesting territories. One was Longueville, whose former dukes and duchesses had figured recurrently in our investigation. And another was Gisors. In 1718 the marquis of Belle-Isle became count of Gisors. In 1742 he became duke of Gisors. And in 1748 Gisors was raised to the exalted status of premier duchy.

Nicolas Poussin

Poussin himself was born in 1594 in a small town called Les Andelys—a few miles, we discovered, from Gisors. As a young man he left France and established residence in Rome, where he spent the duration of his life, returning only once to his native country. He returned to France in the early 1640s at the request of Cardinal Richelieu, who had invited him to undertake a specific commission.

Although he was not actively involved in politics, and few historians have touched on his political interests, Poussin was in fact closely associated with the Fronde. He did not leave his refuge in Rome. But his correspondence of the period reveals him to have been deeply committed to the anti-Mazarin movement, and on surprisingly familiar terms with a number of influential frondeurs—so much so, indeed, that, in speaking of them, he repeatedly uses the word “we”, thus clearly implicating himself.

We had already traced the motifs of the underground stream Alpheus, of Arcadia and Arcadian shepherds, to Rene d’Anjou. We now undertook to find an antecedent for the specific phrase in Poussin’s painting—“Et in Arcadia Ego”. It appeared in an earlier painting by Poussin, in which the tomb is surmounted by a skull and does not constitute an edifice of its own, but is embedded in the side of a cliff. In the foreground of this painting a bearded water-deity reposes in an attitude of brooding moroseness—the river god Alpheus, lord of the underground stream. The work dates from 1630 or 1635, five or ten years earlier than the more familiar version of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”.

The phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” made its public debut between 1618 and 1623 in a painting by Giovanni Francesco Guercino—a painting which constitutes the real basis for Poussin’s work. In Guercino’s painting two shepherds, entering a clearing in a forest, have just happened upon a stone sepulchre. It bears the now famous inscription, and there is a large skull resting on top of it. Whatever the symbolic significance of this work, Guercino himself raised a number of questions. Not only was he well versed in esoteric tradition. He also seems to have been conversant with the lore of secret societies, and some of his other paintings deal with themes of a specifically Masonic character—a good twenty years before lodges started proliferating in England and Scotland. One painting, “The Raising of the Master”, pertains explicitly to the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, architect and builder of Solomon’s temple. It was executed nearly a century before the Hiram legend is generally believed to have found its way into Masonry.

In the “Prieure documents”, “Et in Arcadia Ego” is said to have been the official device of the Plantard family since at least the twelfth century, when Jean de Plantard married Idoine de Gisors. According to one source quoted in the “Prieure documents”, it is cited as such as early as 1210 by one Robert, Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel. We were unable to obtain access to the archives of Mont Saint-Michel, and so could not verify this assertion. Our research convinced us, however, that the date of 1210 was demonstrably wrong. In point of fact, there was no abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel named Robert in 1210. On the other hand, one Robert de Torigny was indeed abbot of Mont Saint-Michel between 1154 and 1186. And Robert de Torigny is known to have been a prolific and assiduous historian whose hobbies included collecting mottoes, devices, blazons and coats-of-arms of noble families throughout Christendom.

Whatever the origin of the phrase, “Et in Arcadia Ego” seems, for both Guercino and Poussin, to have more than a line of elegiac poetry. Quite clearly it seems to have enjoyed some important secret significance, which was recognisable or identifiable to certain other people—the equivalent, in short, of a Masonic sign or password. And it is precisely in such terms that one statement in the “Prieure documents” defines the character of symbolic or allegorical art:

Allegorical works have this advantage, that a single word suffices to illumine connections which the multitude cannot grasp. Such works are available to everyone, but their significance addresses itself to an elite. Above and beyond the masses, sender and receiver understand each other. The inexplicable success of certain works derives from this quality of allegory, which constitutes not a mere fashion, but a form of esoteric communication.

In its context, this statement was made with reference to Poussin. As Frances Yates has demonstrated, however, it might equally well be applied to the works of Leonardo, Botticelli and other Renaissance artists. It might also be applied to later figures—to Nodier, Hugo, Debussy, Cocteau and their respective circles.

Rosslyn Chapel and Shugborough Hall

In our previous research we had found a number of important links between Sion’s alleged Grand Masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and European Freemasonry. In the course of our study of Freemasonry we discovered certain other links as well. These additional links did not relate to the alleged Grand Masters as such, but they did relate to other aspects of our investigation.

Thus, for example, we encountered repeated references to the Sinclair family—Scottish branch of the Norman Saint-Clair/Gisors family. Their domain at Rosslyn was only a few miles from the former Scottish headquarters of the Knights Templar, and the chapel at Rosslyn—built between 1446 and 1486—has long been associated with both Freemasonry and the Rose-Croix. In a charter believed to date from 1601, moreover, the Sinclairs are recognised as “hereditary Grand Masters of Scottish Masonry”. This is the earliest specifically Masonic document on record. According to Masonic sources, however, the hereditary Grand Mastership was conferred on the Sinclairs by James II, who ruled between 1437 and 1460—the age of Rene d’Anjou.

Another and rather more mysterious piece of our jigsaw puzzle also surfaced in Britain—this time in Staffordshire, which had been a hotbed for Masonic activity in the early and mid-seventeenth century. When Charles Radclyffe, alleged Grand Master of Sion, escaped from Newgate Prison in 1714, he was aided by his cousin, the earl of Lichfield. Later in the century the earl of Lichfield’s line became extinct and his title lapsed. It was bought in the early nineteenth century by descendants of the Anson family, who are the present earls of Lichfield.

The seat of the present earls of Lichfield is Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. Formerly a bishop’s residence, Shugborough was purchased by the Anson family in 1697. During the following century it was the residence of the brother of George Anson, the famous admiral who circumnavigated the globe. When George Anson died in 1762, an elegiac poem was read aloud in Parliament. One stanza of this poem reads:

Upon that storied marble cast thine eye. The scene commands a moralising sigh. E’en in Arcadia’s bless’d Elysian plains, Amidst the laughing nymphs and sportive swains, See festal joy subside, with melting grace, And pity visit the half-smiling face; Where now the dance, the lute, the nuptial feast, The passion throbbing in the lover’s breast, Life’s emblem here, in youth and vernal bloom, But reason’s finger pointing at the tomb!

This would seem to be an explicit allusion to Poussin’s painting and the inscription “Et in Arcadia Ego”—right down to the “finger pointing at the tomb”. And in the grounds of Shugborough there is an imposing marble bas-relief executed at the command of the Anson family between 1761 and 1767. This bas-relief comprises a reproduction—reversed, mirror-fashion—of Poussin’s “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”. And immediately below it, there is an enigmatic inscription, which no one has ever satisfactorily deciphered:

O.U.OSV.ANN. D M

The Pope’s Secret Letter

In 1738 Pope Clement XII issued a Papal Bull condemning and excommunicating all Freemasons, whom he pronounced ’enemies of the Roman Church’. It has never been altogether clear why they should have been regarded as such—especially as many of them, like the Jacobites, were Catholic. Perhaps the pope was aware of the connection we had discovered between early Freemasonry and the anti-Roman “Rosicrucians” of the seventeenth century. In any case some light may be shed on the matter by a letter released and published for the first time in 1962. This letter had been written by Pope Clement XII and addressed to an unknown correspondent. In its text the pope declares that Masonic thought rests on a heresy we had encountered repeatedly before—the denial of Jesus’s divinity. And he further asserts that the guiding spirits, the ‘masterminds’, behind Freemasonry are the same as those who provoked the Lutheran Reformation.

The pope may well have been paranoid; but it is important to note that he is not speaking of nebulous currents of thought or vague traditions. On the contrary, he is speaking of a highly organised group of individuals—a sect, an order, a secret society—who, through the ages, have dedicated themselves to subverting the edifice of Catholic Christianity.

The Rock of Sion

In the late eighteenth century, when different Masonic systems were proliferating wildly, the so-called Oriental Rite of Memphis made its appearance. In this rite the name Ormus occurred, to our knowledge, for the first time—the name allegedly adopted by the Prieure de Sion between 1188 and 1307. According to the Oriental Rite of Memphis, Ormus was an Egyptian sage who, around A.D. 46, amalgamated pagan and Christian mysteries and, in so doing, founded the Rose-Croix.

In other eighteenth-century Masonic rites there are repeated references to the “Rock of Sion”—the same Rock of Sion which, as the “Prieure documents” quote, rendered the ‘royal tradition’ established by Godfroi and Baudouin de Bouillon “equal” to that of any other reigning dynasty in Europe. We had previously assumed that the Rock of Sion was simply Mount Sion—the ‘high hill’ south of Jerusalem on which Godfroi built an abbey to house the order which became the Prieure de Sion. But Masonic sources ascribe an additional significance to the Rock of Sion. Given their preoccupation with the Temple of Jerusalem, it is not surprising that they refer one to specific passages in the Bible. And in these passages the Rock of Sion is something more than a high hill. It is a particular stone—overlooked or unjustifiably neglected during the building of the Temple, which must subsequently be retrieved and incorporated as the structure’s keystone. According to Psalm 118, for example:

The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.

In Matthew 21:42 Jesus alludes specifically to this psalm:

Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.

In Romans 9:33 there is another reference, rather more ambiguous:

Behold, I lay in Sion a stumbling stone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.

In Acts 4:11 the Rock of Sion might well be interpreted as a metaphor for Jesus himself:

by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth… doth this man stand here before you whole. This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.

In Ephesians 2:20 the equation of Jesus with the Rock of Sion becomes more apparent:

built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.

And in 1 Peter 2:3-8 this equation is made even more explicit:

the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious. Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. Wherefore it is also contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient; whereunto also they were appointed.

In the very next verse, the text goes on to stress themes whose significance did not become apparent to us until later. It speaks of an elect line of kings who are both spiritual and secular leaders, a line of priest-kings:

But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people…

What were we to make of these baffling passages? What were we to make of the Rock of Sion—the keystone of the Temple, which seemed to figure so saliently among the “inner secrets” of Freemasonry? What were we to make of the explicit identification of this keystone with Jesus himself? And what were we to make of that “royal tradition” which because founded on the Rock of Sion—or on Jesus himself—was “equal” to the reigning dynasties of Europe during the Crusades?

The Catholic Modernist Movement

In 1833 Jean Baptiste Pitois, Charles Nodier’s former disciple at the Arsenal Library, was an official in the Ministry of Public Education. And in that year the Ministry undertook an ambitious project to publish all hitherto suppressed documents pertinent to the history of France. Two committees were formed to preside over the enterprise. These committees included, among others, Victor Hugo, Jules Michelet and an authority on the Crusades, Baron Emmanuel Rey.

Among the works subsequently published under the auspices of the Ministry of Public Education was Michelet’s monumental Le Proces des Templiers—an exhaustive compilation of Inquisition records dealing with the trials of the Knights Templar. Under the same auspices Baron Rey published a number of works dealing with the Crusades and the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. In these works there appeared in print for the first time original charters pertaining to the Prieure de Sion. At certain points the texts Rey quotes are almost verbatim with passages in the “Prieure documents”.

In 1875 Baron Rey co-founded the Societe de l’Orient Latin (“Society of the Latin or Frankish Middle East”). Based in Geneva, this society devoted itself to ambitious archaeological projects. It also published its own magazine, the Revue de l’Orient Latin, which is now one of the primary sources for modern historians like Sir Steven Runciman. The Revue de l’Orient Latin reproduced a number of additional charters of the Prieure de Sion.

Rey’s research was typical of a new form of historical scholarship appearing in Europe at the time, most prominently in Germany, which constituted an extremely serious threat to the Church. The dissemination of Darwinian thought and agnosticism had already produced a “crisis of faith” in the late nineteenth century, and the new scholarship magnified the crisis. In the past, historical research had been, for the most part, an unreliable affair, resting on highly tenuous foundations—on legend and tradition, on personal memoirs, on exaggerations promulgated for the sake of one or another cause. Only in the nineteenth century did German scholars begin introducing the rigorous, meticulous techniques that are now accepted as commonplace, the stock-in-trade of any responsible historian. Such preoccupation with critical examination, with investigation of first-hand sources, with cross-references and exact chronology, established the conventional stereotype of the Teutonic pedant. But if German writers of the period tended to lose themselves in minutiae, they also provided a solid basis for inquiry. And for a number of major archaeological discoveries as well. The most famous example, of course, is Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of the site of Troy.

It was only a matter of time before the techniques of German scholarship were applied, with similar diligence, to the Bible. And the Church, which rested on unquestioning acceptance of dogma, was well aware that the Bible itself could not withstand such critical scrutiny. In his best-selling and highly controversial Life of Jesus, Ernest Renan had already applied German methodology to the New Testament, and the results, for Rome, were extremely embarrassing.

The Catholic Modernist Movement arose initially as a response to this new challenge. Its original objective was to produce a generation of ecclesiastical experts trained in the German tradition, who could defend the literal truth of Scripture with all the heavy ordnance of critical scholarship. As it transpired, however, the plan backfired. The more the Church sought to equip its younger clerics with the tools for combat in the modern polemical world, the more those same clerics began to desert the cause for which they had been recruited. Critical examination of the Bible revealed a multitude of inconsistencies, discrepancies and implications that were positively inimical to Roman dogma. And by the end of the century the Modernists were no longer the elite shock-troops the Church had hoped they would be, but defectors and incipient heretics. Indeed, they posed the most serious threat the Church had experienced since Martin Luther, and brought the entire edifice of Catholicism to the brink of a schism unparalleled for centuries.

The hotbed for Modernist activity—as it had been for the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement—was Saint Sulpice in Paris. Indeed, one of the most resonant voices in the Modernist movement was the man who was director of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice from 1852 to 1884. From Saint Sulpice Modernist attitudes spread rapidly to the rest of France, and to Italy and Spain. According to these attitudes, Biblical texts were not unimpugnably authoritative, but had to be understood in the specific context of their time. And the Modernists also rebelled against the increasing centralisation of ecclesiastical power—especially the recently instituted doctrine of papal infallibility, which ran flagrantly counter to the new trend. Before long Modernist attitudes were being disseminated not only by intellectual clerics, but by distinguished and influential writers as well. Figures like Roger Martin du Gard in France, and Miguel de Unamuno in Spain, were among the primary spokesmen for Modernism.

The Church responded with predictable vigour and wrath. The Modernists were accused of being Freemasons. Many of them were suspended or even excommunicated, and their books were placed on the Index. In 1903 Pope Leo XIII established the Pontifical Biblical Commission to monitor the work of scriptural scholars. In 1907 Pope Pius X issued a formal condemnation of Modernism. And on September 1st, 1910, the Church demanded of its clerics an oath against Modernist tendencies.

Nevertheless Modernism continued to flourish until the First World War diverted public attention to other concerns. Until 1914 it remained a cause celebre. One Modernist author, the Abbe Turmel, proved a particularly mischievous individual. While ostensibly behaving impeccably at his teaching post in Brittany, he published a series of Modernist works under no less than fourteen different pseudonyms. Each of them was placed on the Index, but not until 1929 was Turmel identified as their author. Needless to say, he was then summarily excommunicated.

In the meantime Modernism spread to Britain, where it was warmly welcomed and endorsed by the Anglican Church. Among its Anglican adherents was William Temple, later archbishop of Canterbury, who declared that Modernism ‘is what most educated people already believe’. One of Temple’s associates was Canon A. L. Liney. And Liney knew the priest from whom we had received that portentous letter which spoke of ‘incontrovertible proof that Jesus did not die on the cross’. Liney, as we knew, had worked for some time in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of the Abbe Emile Hoffet—the man to whom Sauniere brought the parchments found at Rennes-le-Chateau. With his expertise in history, language and linguistics, Hoffet was the typical young Modernist scholar of his age. He had not been trained at Saint Sulpice, however. On the contrary, he had been trained in Lorraine. At the Seminary School of Sion: La Colline inspiree.

The Protocols of Sion

One of the most persuasive testimonials we found to the existence and activities of the Prieure de Sion dated from the late nineteenth century. The testimonial in question is well enough known—but it is not recognised as a testimonial. On the contrary it has always been associated with more sinister things. It has played a notorious role in recent history and still tends to arouse such violent emotions, bitter antagonisms and gruesome memories that most writers are happy to dismiss it out of hand. To the extent that this testimonial has contributed significantly to human prejudice and suffering, such a reaction is perfectly understandable. But if the testimonial has been criminally misused, our researches convinced us that it has also been seriously misunderstood.

The role of Rasputin at the court of Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia is more or less generally known. It is not generally known, however, that there were influential, even powerful esoteric enclaves at the Russian court long before Rasputin. During the 1890s and 1900s one such enclave formed itself around an individual known as Monsieur Philippe, and around his mentor, who made periodic visits to the imperial court at Petersburg. And Monsieur Philippe’s mentor was none other than the man called Papus—the French esotericist associated with Jules Doinel (founder of the neo-Cathar church in the Languedoc), Peladan (who claimed to have discovered Jesus’s tomb), Emma Calve and Claude Debussy. In a word, the “French occult revival” of the late nineteenth century had not only spread to Petersburg. Its representatives also enjoyed the privileged status of personal confidants to the czar and czarina.

However, the esoteric enclave of Papus and Monsieur Philippe was actively opposed by certain other powerful interests—the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, for example, who was intent on installing her own favourites in proximity to the imperial throne. One of the grand duchess’s favourites was a rather contemptible individual known to posterity under the pseudonym of Sergei Nilus. Sometime around 1903 Nilus presented a highly controversial document to the czar—a document that supposedly bore witness to a dangerous conspiracy. But if Nilus expected the czar’s gratitude for his disclosure, he must have been grievously disappointed. The czar declared the document to be an outrageous fabrication, and ordered all copies of it to be destroyed. And Nilus was banished from the court in disgrace.

Of course the document—or, at any rate, a copy of it—survived. In 1903 it was serialised in a newspaper but failed to attract any interest. In 1905 it was published again—this time as an appendix to a book by a distinguished mystical philosopher, Vladimir Soloviov. At this point it began to attract attention. In the years that followed it became one of the single most infamous documents of the twentieth century.

The document in question was a tract, or, more strictly speaking, a purported social and political programme. It has appeared under a variety of slightly differing titles, the most common of which is The Protocols of the Elders of Sion. The Protocols allegedly issued from specifically Jewish sources. And for a great many anti-Semites at the time they were convincing proof of an “international Jewish conspiracy”. In 1919, for example, they were distributed to troops of the White Russian Army—and these troops, during the next two years, massacred some 60,000 Jews who were held responsible for the 1917 Revolution. By 1919 the Protocols were also being circulated by Alfred Rosenberg, later the chief racial theoretician and propagandist for the National Socialist Party in Germany. In Mein Kampf Hitler used the Protocols to fuel his own fanatical prejudices, and is said to have believed unquestioningly in their authenticity. In England the Protocols were immediately accorded credence by the Morning Post. Even The Times, in 1921, took them seriously and only later admitted its error. Experts today concur—and rightly so, we concluded—that the Protocols, at least in their present form, are a vicious and insidious forgery. Nevertheless, they are still being circulated in Latin America, in Spain, even in Britain as anti-Semitic propaganda.

The Protocols propound in outline a blueprint for nothing less than total world domination. On first reading they would seem to be the Machiavellian programme—a kind of inter-office memo, so to speak—for a group of individuals determined to impose a new world order, with themselves as supreme despots. The text advocates a many-tentacled hydra-headed conspiracy dedicated to disorder and anarchy, to toppling certain existing regimes, infiltrating Freemasonry and other such organisations, and eventually seizing absolute control of the Western world’s social, political and economic institutions. And the anonymous authors of the Protocols declare explicitly that they ‘stage-managed’ whole peoples ‘according to a political plan which no one has so much as guessed at in the course of many centuries’.

To a modern reader the Protocols might seem to have been devised by some fictitious organisation like SPECTRE—James Bond’s adversary in Ian Fleming’s novels. When they were first publicised, however, the Protocols were alleged to have been composed at an International Judaic Congress which convened in Basle in 1897. This allegation has long since been disproved. The earliest copies of the Protocols, for example, are known to have been written in French—and the 1897 Congress in Basle did not include a single French delegate. Moreover, a copy of the Protocols is known to have been in circulation as early as 1884—a full thirteen years before the Basle Congress met. The 1884 copy of the Protocols surfaced in the hands of a member of a Masonic lodge—the same lodge of which Papus was a member and subsequently Grand Master. Moreover, it was in this same lodge that the tradition of Ormus had first appeared—the legendary Egyptian sage who amalgamated pagan and Christian mysteries and founded the Rose-Croix.

Modern scholars have established in fact that the Protocols, in their published form, are based at least in part on a satirical work written and printed in Geneva in 1864. The work was composed as an attack on Napoleon III by a man named Maurice Joly, who was subsequently imprisoned. Joly is said to have been a member of a Rose-Croix order. Whether this is true or not, he was a friend of Victor Hugo; and Hugo, who shared Joly’s antipathy to Napoleon III, was a member of a Rose-Croix order.

It can thus be proved conclusively that the Protocols did not issue from the Judaic Congress at Basle in 1897. That being so, the obvious question is whence they did issue. Modern scholars have dismissed them as a total forgery, a wholly spurious document concocted by anti-Semitic interests intent on discrediting Judaism. And yet the Protocols themselves argue strongly against such a conclusion. They contain, for example, a number of enigmatic references—references that are clearly not Judaic. But these references are so clearly not Judaic that they cannot plausibly have been fabricated by a forger either. No anti-Semitic forger with even a modicum of intelligence would possibly have concocted such references in order to discredit Judaism. For no one would have believed these references to be of Judaic origin.

Thus, for instance, the text of the Protocols ends with a single statement, “Signed by the representatives of Sion of the 33rd Degree.” Why would an anti-Semitic forger have made up such a statement? Why would he not have attempted to incriminate all Jews, rather than just a few—the few who constitute ’the representatives of Sion of the 33rd Degree’? Why would he not declare that the document was signed by, say, the representatives of the International Judaic Congress? In fact, the ‘representatives of Sion of the 33rd Degree’ would hardly seem to refer to Judaism at all, or to any ‘international Jewish conspiracy’. If anything, it would seem to refer to something specifically Masonic. And the 33rd Degree in Freemasonry is that of the so-called “Strict Observance”—the system of Freemasonry introduced by Hund at the behest of his ‘unknown superiors’, one of whom appears to have been Charles Radclyffe.

The Protocols contain other even more flagrant anomalies. The text speaks repeatedly, for example, of the advent of a “Masonic Kingdom”, and of a “King of the blood of Sion”, who will preside over this “Masonic Kingdom”. It asserts that the future king will be of ’the dynastic roots of King David’. It affirms that ’the King of the Jews will be the real Pope’ and ’the patriarch of an international church’. And it concludes in a most cryptic fashion, “Certain members of the seed of David will prepare the Kings and their heirs… Only the King and the three who stood sponsor for him will know what is coming.” As an expression of Judaic thought, real or fabricated, such statements are blatantly absurd. Since Biblical times no king has figured in Judaic tradition, and the very principle of kingship has become utterly irrelevant. The concept of a king would have been as meaningless to Jews of 1897 as it would be to Jews today; and no forger can have been ignorant of this fact. Indeed the references quoted would appear to be more Christian than Judaic. For the last two millennia the only “King of the Jews” has been Jesus himself—and Jesus, according to the Gospels, was of the “dynastic roots of David”. If one is fabricating a document and ascribing it to a Jewish conspiracy, why include such patently Christian echoes? Why speak of so specifically and uniquely Christian a concept as a pope? Why speak of an “international church” rather than an international synagogue or an international temple? And why include the enigmatic allusion to ’the King and the three who stood sponsor’—which is less suggestive of Judaism and Christianity than it is of the secret societies of Johann Valentin Andrea and Charles Nodier? If the Protocols issued wholly from a propagandist’s anti-Semitic imagination, it is difficult to imagine a propagandist so inept, or so ignorant and uninformed.

On the basis of prolonged and systematic research, we reached certain conclusions about the Protocols of the Elders of Sion. They are as follows:

1. There was an original text on which the published version of the Protocols was based. This original text was not a forgery. On the contrary it was authentic. But it had nothing whatever to do with Judaism or an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’. It issued rather from some Masonic organisation or Masonically oriented secret society which incorporated the word “Sion”.

2. The original text on which the published version of the Protocols was based need not have been provocative or inflammatory in its language. But it may well have included a programme for gaining power, for infiltrating Freemasonry, for controlling social, political and economic institutions. Such a programme would have been perfectly in keeping with the secret societies of the Renaissance, as well as with the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement and the institutions of Andrea and Nodier.

3. The original text on which the published version of the Protocols was based fell into the hands of Sergei Nilus. Nilus did not at first intend it to discredit Judaism. On the contrary, he brought it to the czar with the intention of discrediting the esoteric enclave at the imperial court—the enclave of Papus, Monsieur Philippe and others who were members of the secret society in question. Before doing so, he almost certainly doctored the language, rendering it far more venomous and inflammatory than it initially was. When the czar spurned him, Nilus then released the Protocols in their doctored form for publication. They had failed in their primary objective of compromising Papus and Monsieur Philippe. But they might still serve a secondary purpose—that of fostering anti-Semitism. Although Nilus’s chief targets had been Papus and Monsieur Philippe, he was hostile to Judaism as well.

4. The published version of the Protocols is not, therefore, a totally fabricated text. It is rather a radically altered text. But despite the alterations certain vestiges of the original version can be discerned—as in a palimpsest, or as in passages of the Bible. These vestiges which referred to a king, a pope, an international church, and to Sion—probably meant little or nothing to Nilus. He certainly would not have invented them himself. But if they were already there, he would have had no reason, given his ignorance, to excise them. And while such vestiges might have been irrelevant to Judaism, they might have been extremely relevant to a secret society. As we learned subsequently, they were—and still are—of paramount importance to the Prieure de Sion.

The Hieron du Val d’Or

While we pursued our independent research, new “Prieure documents” had continued to appear. Some of them—privately printed works, like the Dossiers secrets, and intended for limited circulation—were made available to us through the offices of friends in France or through the Bibliotheque Nationale. Others appeared in book form, newly published and released on the market for the first time.

In some of these works there was additional information on the late nineteenth century, and specifically on Berenger Sauniere. According to one such “up-dated” account, Sauniere did not discover the fateful parchments in his church by accident. On the contrary he is said to have been directed to them by emissaries of the Prieure de Sion who visited him at Rennes-le-Chateau and enlisted him as their factotum. In late 1916 Sauniere is reported to have defied the emissaries of Sion and quarrelled with them. If this is true, the cure’s death in January 1917 acquires a more sinister quality than is generally ascribed to it. Ten days before his death he had been in satisfactory health. Nevertheless ten days before his death a coffin was ordered on his behalf. The receipt for the coffin, dated January 12th, 1917, is made out to Sauniere’s confidante and housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud.

A more recent and, if anything, more apparently authoritative “Prieure” publication elaborates further on Sauniere’s story and would seem to confirm, at least in part, the account summarised above. According to this publication, Sauniere himself was little more than a pawn and his role in the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau has been much exaggerated. The real force behind the events at the mountain village is said to have been Sauniere’s friend, the Abbe Henri Boudet, cure of the adjacent village of Rennes-les-Bains.

Boudet is said to have provided Sauniere with all his money—a total of thirteen million francs between 1887 and 1915. And Boudet is said to have guided Sauniere on his various projects—the public works, the construction of the Villa Bethania and the Tour Magdala. He is also said to have supervised the restoration of the church at Rennes-le-Chateau, and to have designed Sauniere’s perplexing Stations of the Cross as a kind of illustrated version, or visual equivalent, of a cryptic book of his own.

According to this recent “Prieure” publication, Sauniere remained essentially ignorant of the real secret for which he acted as custodian until Boudet, in the throes of approaching death, confided it to him in March 1915. According to the same publication, Marie Denarnaud, Sauniere’s housekeeper, was in fact Boudet’s agent. It was through her that Boudet supposedly transmitted instructions to Sauniere. And it was to her that all money was made payable. Or, rather, most money. For Boudet, between 1885 and 1901, is said to have paid 7,655,250 francs to the bishop of Carcassonne—the man who, at his own expense, dispatched Sauniere to Paris with the parchments. The bishop, too, would seem then to have been essentially in Boudet’s employ. It is certainly an incongruous situation—an important regional bishop being the paid servitor of a humble, backwater parish priest. And the parish priest himself? For whom was Boudet working? What interests did he represent? What can have given him the power to enlist the services, and the silence, of his ecclesiastical superior? And who can have furnished him with such vast financial resources to be dispensed so prodigally? These questions are not answered explicitly. But the answer is constantly implicit—the Prieure de Sion.

Further light on the matter was shed by another recent work which, like its predecessors, seemed to draw on ‘privileged sources’ of information. The work in question is Le Tresor du triangle d’or (“The Treasure of the Golden Triangle”) by Jean-Luc Chaumeil, published in 1979. According to M. Chaumeil, a number of clerics involved in the enigma of Rennes-le-Chateau—Sauniere, Boudet, quite probably others like Hoffet, Hoffet’s uncle at Saint Sulpice and the bishop of Carcassonne—were affiliated with a form of “Scottish Rite” Freemasonry. This Freemasonry, M. Chaumeil declares, differed from most other forms in that it was “Christian, Hermetic and aristocratic”. In short, it did not, like many rites of Freemasonry, consist primarily of free-thinkers and atheists. On the contrary, it seems to have been deeply religious and magically oriented—emphasising a sacred social and political hierarchy, a divine order, an underlying cosmic plan. And the upper grades or degrees of this Freemasonry, according to M. Chaumeil, were the lower grades or degrees of the Prieure de Sion.

In our own researches we