Conclusion and Portents for the Future

But if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement. The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian’s hope of immortality is invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity mankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once?

Carl Jung, “The Undiscovered Self”, Collected Works, vol. 10 (1956) p. 266.

We had not, in the beginning, set out to prove or disprove anything, least of all the conclusion to which we had been ineluctably led. We had certainly not set out to challenge some of the most basic tenets of Christianity. On the contrary, we had begun by investigating a specific mystery. We were looking for answers to certain perplexing questions, explanations for certain historical enigmas. In the process we more or less stumbled upon something rather greater than we had initially bargained for. We were led to a startling, controversial and seemingly preposterous conclusion.

This conclusion compelled us to turn our attention to the life of Jesus and the origins of the religion founded upon him. When we did so, we were still not attempting to challenge Christianity. We were simply endeavouring to ascertain whether or not our conclusion was tenable. An exhaustive consideration of Biblical material convinced us that it was. Indeed we became convinced that our conclusion was not only tenable, but extremely probable.

We could not and still cannot prove the accuracy of our conclusion. It remains, to some extent at least, an hypothesis. But it is a plausible hypothesis, which makes coherent sense. It explains a great deal. And, so far as we are concerned, it constitutes a more historically likely account than any we have encountered of the events and personages which, two thousand years ago, imprinted themselves on Western consciousness and, in the centuries that followed, shaped our culture and civilisation.

If we cannot prove our conclusion, however, we have received abundant evidence from both their documents and their representatives that the Prieure de Sion can. On the basis of their written hints and their personal conversation with us, we are prepared to believe that Sion does possess something—something which does in some way amount to “incontrovertible proof” of the hypothesis we have advanced. We do not know precisely what this proof might be. We can, however, make an educated guess.

If our hypothesis is correct, Jesus’s wife and offspring (and he could have fathered a number of children between the ages of sixteen or seventeen and his supposed death), after fleeing the Holy Land, found a refuge in the south of France, and in a Jewish community there preserved their lineage. During the fifth century this lineage appears to have intermarried with the royal line of the Franks, thus engendering the Merovingian dynasty. In A.D. 496 the Church made a pact with this dynasty, pledging itself in perpetuity to the Merovingian bloodline—presumably in the full knowledge of that bloodline’s true identity. This would explain why Clovis was offered the status of Holy Roman Emperor, of “new Constantine”, and why he was not created king, but only recognised as such.

When the Church colluded in Dagobert’s assassination, and the subsequent betrayal of the Merovingian bloodline, it rendered itself guilty of a crime that could neither be rationalised nor expunged. It could only be suppressed. It would have had to be suppressed—for a disclosure of the Merovingians’ real identity would hardly have strengthened Rome’s position against her enemies. Despite all efforts to eradicate it, Jesus’s bloodline—or, at any rate, the Merovingian bloodline—survived. It survived in part through the Carolingians, who clearly felt more guilty about their usurpation than did Rome, and sought to legitimise themselves by dynastic alliances with Merovingian princesses. But more significantly it survived through Dagobert’s son, Sigisbert, whose descendants included Guillem de Gellone, ruler of the Jewish kingdom of Septimania, and eventually Godfroi de Bouillon. With Godfroi’s capture of Jerusalem in 1099, Jesus’s lineage would have regained its rightful heritage—the heritage conferred upon it in Old Testament times.

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

If our hypothesis is correct, the Holy Grail would have been at least two things simultaneously. On the one hand it would have been Jesus’s bloodline and descendants—the “Sang Raal”, the “Real” or “Royal” blood of which the Templars, created by the Prieure de Sion, were appointed guardians. At the same time the Holy Grail would have been, quite literally, the receptacle, or vessel, which received and contained Jesus’s blood. In other words it would have been the womb of the Magdalene and, by extension, the Magdalene herself. From this the cult of the Magdalene, as it was promulgated during the Middle Ages, would have arisen and been confused with the cult of the Virgin. It can be proved, for instance, that many of the famous “Black Virgins” or “Black Madonnas” early in the Christian era were shrines not to the Virgin but to the Magdalene—and they depict a mother and child. It has also been argued that the Gothic cathedrals—those majestic stone replicas of the womb dedicated to “Notre Dame”—were also, as Le Serpent rouge states, shrines to Jesus’s consort, rather than to his mother.

The Holy Grail, then, would have symbolised both Jesus’s bloodline and the Magdalene, from whose womb that bloodline issued. But it may have been something else as well. In A.D. 70, during the great revolt in Judaea, Roman legions under Titus sacked the Temple of Jerusalem. The pillaged treasure of the Temple is said to have found its way eventually to the Pyrenees; and M. Plantard, in his conversation with us, stated that this treasure was in the hands of the Prieure de Sion today. But the Temple of Jerusalem may have contained more than the treasure plundered by Titus’s centurions. In ancient Judaism religion and politics were inseparable. The Messiah was to be a priest-king, whose authority encompassed spiritual and secular domains alike. It is thus likely, indeed probable, that the Temple housed official records pertaining to Israel’s royal line—the equivalents of the birth certificates, marriage licences and other relevant data concerning any modern royal or aristocratic family. If Jesus was indeed “King of the Jews”, the Temple is almost certain to have contained copious information relating to him. It may even have contained his body—or at least his tomb, once his body was removed from the temporary tomb of the Gospels.

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

By 1100 Jesus’s descendants would have risen to prominence in Europe and, through Godfroi de Bouillon, in Palestine as well. They themselves would have known their pedigree and ancestry. But they might not have been able to prove their identity to the world at large; and such proof may well have been deemed necessary for their subsequent designs. If it were known that such proof existed, or even possibly existed, in the precincts of the Temple, no effort would have been spared to find it. This would explain the role of the Knights Templar who, under a cloak of secrecy, undertook excavations beneath the Temple, in the so-called Stables of Solomon. On the basis of the evidence we examined, there would seem to be little question that the Knights Templar were in fact sent to the Holy Land with the express purpose of finding or obtaining something. And on the basis of the evidence we examined, they would seem to have accomplished their mission. They would seem to have found what they were sent to find, and to have brought it back to Europe. What became of it then remains a mystery. But there seems little question that, under the auspices of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, something was concealed in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Chateau for which a contingent of German miners was imported, under the most stringent security, to excavate and construct a hiding-place. One can only speculate about what might have been concealed there. It may have been Jesus’s mummified body. It may have been the equivalent, so to speak, of Jesus’s marriage licence, and/or the birth certificates of his children. It may have been something of comparably explosive import. Any or all of these items might have been referred to as the Holy Grail. Any or all of these items might, by accident or design, have passed to the Cathar heretics and comprised part of the mysterious treasure of Montsegur.

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

Once installed on the throne of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the Merovingian dynasty could sanction and even encourage hints about its true ancestry. This would explain why the Grail romances appeared precisely when and where they did, and why they were so explicitly associated with the Knights Templar. In time, once its position in Palestine was consolidated, the “royal tradition” descended from Godfroi and Baudouin would probably have divulged its origins. The king of Jerusalem would then have taken precedence over all the monarchs of Europe, and the patriarch of Jerusalem would have supplanted the pope. Displacing Rome, Jerusalem would then have become the true capital of Christendom, and perhaps of much more than Christendom. For if Jesus were acknowledged as a mortal prophet, as a priest-king and legitimate ruler of the line of David, he might well have become acceptable to both Muslims and Jews. As king of Jerusalem, his lineal descendant would then have been in a position to implement one of the primary tenets of Templar policy—the reconciliation of Christianity with Judaism and Islam.

Historical circumstances, of course, never allowed matters to reach this point. The Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem never consolidated its position. Beleaguered on every side by Muslim armies, unstable in its own government and administration, it never attained the strength and internal security it needed to survive—still less to assert its supremacy over the crowns of Europe and the Church of Rome. The grandiose design foundered; and with the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 it collapsed completely. The Merovingians were once again without a crown. And the Knights Templar were not only redundant but also expendable.

In the centuries that followed, the Merovingians—aided and/or directed and/or protected by the Prieure de Sion—made repeated attempts to regain their heritage, but these attempts were confined to Europe. They seem to have involved at least three interrelated but essentially distinct programmes. One was the creation of a psychological atmosphere, a clandestine tradition intended to erode the spiritual esoteric thought, in the Rosicrucian manifestos and similar writings, in certain rites of Freemasonry and, of course, in the symbols of Arcadia and the underground stream. A second programme entailed political machination, intrigue and, if feasible, an overt seizure of power—the techniques employed by the Guise and Lorraine families in the sixteenth century, and by the architects of the Fronde in the seventeenth. A third programme by which the Merovingians sought to regain their heritage was dynastic intermarriage.

On first consideration it might seem that such Byzantine procedures would have been unnecessary; it might seem that the Merovingians—if they were indeed descended from Jesus—would have had no trouble establishing their supremacy. They needed only to disclose and establish their real identity, and the world would acknowledge them. In fact, however, things would not have been so simple. Jesus himself was not recognised by the Romans. When it was expedient to do so, the Church had no compunction in sanctioning the murder of Dagobert and the overthrow of his bloodline. A premature disclosure of their pedigree would not have guaranteed success for the Merovingians. On the contrary, it would have been much more likely to misfire—to engender factional strife, precipitate a crisis in faith, and provoke challenges from both the Church and other secular potentates. Unless they were well entrenched in positions of power, the Merovingians could not have withstood such repercussions—and the secret of their identity, their trump card, as it were, would have been played and lost for ever. Given the realities of both history and politics, this trump card could not have been used as a stepping stone to power. It could only be played when power had already been acquired—played, in other words, from a position of strength.

In order to re-establish themselves, therefore, the Merovingians were obliged to resort to more conventional procedures—the accepted procedures of the particular age in question. On at least four occasions these procedures came frustratingly close to success, and were thwarted only by miscalculation, by force of circumstance or by the totally unforeseen. In the sixteenth century, for example, the house of Guise very nearly managed to seize the French throne. In the seventeenth century the Fronde very nearly succeeded in keeping Louis XIV from the throne and supplanting him with a representative of the house of Lorraine. In the late nineteenth century blueprints were laid for a species of revived Holy League, which would have unified Catholic Europe—Austria, France, Italy and Spain—under the Habsburgs. These plans were thwarted by the erratic and aggressive behaviour of both Germany and Russia, who provoked a constant shift of alliances among the major powers and eventually precipitated a war which toppled all the continental dynasties.

It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the Merovingian bloodline probably came closest to the realisation of its objectives. By virtue of its intermarriage with the Habsburgs, the house of Lorraine had actually acquired the throne of Austria, the Holy Roman Empire. When Marie Antoinette, daughter of Francois de Lorraine, became queen of France, the throne of France, too, was only a generation or so away. Had not the French Revolution intervened, the house of Habsburg-Lorraine might well, by the early 1800s, have been on its way to establishing dominion over all Europe.

It would seem clear that the French Revolution was a devastating blow to Merovingian hopes and aspirations. In a single shattering cataclysm, the carefully laid and implemented designs of a century and a half were suddenly reduced to rubble. From references in the “Prieure documents”, moreover, it would seem that Sion, during the turmoil of the Revolution, lost many of its most precious records and possibly other items as well. This might explain the shift in the Order’s Grand Mastership—to specifically French cultural figures who, like Nodier, had access to otherwise unobtainable material. It might also explain the role of Sauniere. Sauniere’s predecessor, Antoine Bigou, had concealed, and possibly composed, the coded parchments on the very eve of the Revolution and then fled to Spain, where, shortly after, he died. It is thus possible that Sion, for a time at any rate, did not know precisely where the parchments were. But even if they were known to have been in the church at Rennes-le-Chateau, they could not easily have been retrieved without a sympathetic priest on the spot—a man who would do Sion’s bidding, refrain from embarrassing questions, keep silence, and not interfere with the Order’s interests and activities. If the parchments, moreover, referred to something else—something concealed in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Chateau—such a man would have been all the more essential.

Sauniere died without divulging his secret. So did his housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud. During the ensuing years there have been many excavations in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Chateau, but none of them has yielded anything. If, as we assume, certain explosive items were once concealed in the environs, they would certainly have been removed when Sauniere’s story began to attract attention and treasure-hunters—unless these items were concealed in some depository immune to treasure-hunters, in an underground crypt, for example, under a man-made pool on private property. Such a crypt would ensure safety and be proof against any unauthorised excavations. No such excavations would be possible unless the pool were first drained; and this could hardly be done clandestinely—especially by trespassers on private land. In fact a man-made pool does exist near Rennes-le-Chateau—near a site called, appropriately enough, Lavaldieu (the Valley or Vale of God). This pool might well have been constructed over an underground crypt which, in turn, might easily lead via a subterranean passageway to any of the myriad caves honeycombing the surrounding mountains.

As for the parchments found by Sauniere, two of them—or, at any rate, facsimiles of two of them—have been reproduced, published and widely circulated. The other two, in contrast, have been kept scrupulously secret. In his conversation with us M. Plantard stated that they are currently in a safe deposit box in a Lloyds’ bank in London. Further than that we have been unable to trace them.

And Sauniere’s money? We know that some of it seems to have been obtained through a financial transaction involving the Archduke Johann von Habsburg. We also know that substantial sums were made available not only to Sauniere, but also to the bishop of Carcassonne, by the Abbe Henri Boudet, cure of Rennes-les-Bains. There is reason to conclude that the bulk of Sauniere’s revenue was paid to him by Boudet, through the intermediary Marie Denarnaud, Sauniere’s housekeeper. Where Boudet—a poor parish priest himself—obtained such resources remains, of course, a mystery. He would clearly seem to have been a representative of the Prieure de Sion; but whether the money issued directly from Sion remains an unanswered question. It might equally well have issued from the treasury of the Habsburgs. Or it might have issued from the Vatican, which might have been subjected to high-level political blackmail by both Sion and the Habsburgs. In any case, the question of the money, or a treasure that engendered it, became, for us, increasingly incidental, when measured against our subsequent discoveries. Its chief function, in retrospect, had been to draw our attention to the mystery. After that, it paled to relative insignificance.

We have formulated an hypothesis of a bloodline, descended from Jesus, which has continued up to the present day. We cannot, of course, be certain that our hypothesis is correct in every detail. But even if specific details here and there are subject to modification, we are convinced that the essential outlines of our hypothesis are accurate. We may perhaps have misconstrued the meaning of, say, a particular Grand Master’s activities; or an alliance in the power struggles and political machinations of eighteenth-century politics. But our researches have persuaded us that the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau does involve a serious attempt, by influential people, to re-establish a Merovingian monarchy in France—if not indeed in the whole of Europe—and that the claim to legitimacy of such a monarchy rests on a Merovingian descent from Jesus.

Viewed from this perspective a number of the anomalies, enigmas and unanswered questions raised by our researches become explicable. So do a great many of the seemingly trivial but equally baffling fragments: the title of the book associated with Nicolas Flamel, for example—The Sacred Book of Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher to the Tribe of Jews who by the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the Gauls; or the symbolic Grail cup of Rene d’Anjou, which vouchsafed, to the man who quaffed it at a single draught, a vision of both God and the Magdalene; or Andrea’s Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, which speaks of a mysterious girl-child of royal blood, washed ashore in a boat, whose rightful heritage has fallen into Islamic hands; or the secret to which Poussin was privy—as well as the “Secret” said to “lie at the heart” of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement.

During the course of our research we had encountered a number of other fragments as well. At the time they had seemed either totally meaningless or irrelevant. Now, however, they, too, make sense. Thus it would now seem clear why Louis XI regarded the Magdalene as a source of the French royal line—a belief which, even in the context of the fifteenth century, at first appeared absurd. It would also be apparent why the crown of Charlemagne—a replica of which is now part of the imperial Habsburg regalia—is said to have borne the inscription “Rex Salomon”. And it would be apparent why the Protocols of the Elders of Sion speak of a new king “of the holy seed of David”.

During the Second World War, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, the Cross of Lorraine became the symbol of the forces of Free France, under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. In itself this is somewhat curious. Why should the Cross of Lorraine—the device of Rene d’Anjou—have been equated with France? Lorraine was never the heartland of France. For most of her history, in fact, Lorraine was an independent duchy, a Germanic state comprising part of the old Holy Roman Empire. In part the Cross of Lorraine may have been adopted because of the important role the Prieure de Sion seems to have played in the French Resistance. In part it may have been adopted because of General de Gaulle’s association with members of the Prieure de Sion like M. Plantard. But it is interesting that, nearly thirty years before, the Cross of Lorraine figured provocatively in a poem by Charles Peguy. Not long before his death at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, Peguy—a close friend of Maurice Barres, author of La Colline inspiree—composed the following lines:

Les ames de Jesus c’est la croix de Lorraine, Et le sang dans l’artere et le sang dans la veine, Et la source de grace et la Claire fontaine; Les ames de Satan c’est la croix de Lorraine, Et c’est la meme artere et c’est la meme veine Et c’est le meme sang et la trouble fontaine…

(The arms of Jesus are the Cross of Lorraine, Both the blood in the artery and the blood in the vein, Both the source of grace and the clear fountain; The arms of Satan are the Cross of Lorraine, And the same artery and the same vein, And the same blood and the troubled fountain…)

In the late seventeenth century the Reverend Father Vincent, an historian and antiquarian in Nancy, wrote a history of Sion in Lorraine. He also wrote another work, entitled The True History of Saint Sigisbert, which also contains an account of the life of Dagobert II. On the title page of this latter work there is an epigraph, a quotation from the Fourth Gospel, “He is among you and you do not know Him.”

Even before we began our research, we ourselves were agnostic, neither pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. By virtue of our background and study of comparative religions we were sympathetic to the core of validity inherent in most of the world’s major faiths, and indifferent to the dogma, the theology, the accoutrements which comprise their superstructure. And while we could accord respect to almost every creed, we could not accord to any of them a monopoly on truth. Thus, when our research led us to Jesus, we could approach him with what we hoped was a sense of balance and perspective. We had no prejudices or preconceptions one way or the other, no vested interests of any kind, nothing to be gained by either proving or disproving anything. In so far as “objectivity” is possible, we were able to approach Jesus “objectively”—as an historian would be expected to approach Alexander, for example, or Caesar. And the conclusions that forced themselves upon us, though certainly startling, were not shattering. They did not necessitate a reappraisal of our personal convictions or shake our personal hierarchies of values.

But what of other people? What of the millions of individuals across the world for whom Jesus is the Son of God, the Saviour, the Redeemer? To what extent does the historical Jesus, the priest-king who emerged from our research, threaten their faith? To what extent have we violated what constitutes for many people their most cherished understanding of the sacred?

We are well aware, of course, that our research has led us to conclusions that, in many respects, are inimical to certain basic tenets of modern Christianity—conclusions that are heretical, perhaps even blasphemous. From the standpoint of certain established dogma we are no doubt guilty of such transgressions. But we do not believe that we have desecrated, or even diminished, Jesus in the eyes of those who do genuinely revere him. And while we ourselves cannot subscribe to Jesus’s divinity, our conclusions do not preclude others from doing so. Quite simply, there is no reason why Jesus could not have married and fathered children, while still retaining his divinity. There is no reason why his divinity should be dependent on sexual chastity. Even if he were the Son of God, there is no reason why he should not have wed and sired a family.

Underlying most Christian theology is the assumption that Jesus is God incarnate. In other words God, taking pity on His creation, incarnated Himself in that creation and assumed human form. By doing so He would be able to acquaint Himself at first-hand, so to speak, with the human condition. He would experience at first-hand the vicissitudes of human existence. He would come to understand, in the most profound sense, what it means to be a man—to confront from a human standpoint the loneliness, the anguish, the helplessness, the tragic mortality that the status of manhood entails. By dint of becoming man God would come to know man in a way that the Old Testament does not allow. Renouncing His Olympian aloofness and remoteness, He would partake, directly, of man’s lot. By doing so, He would redeem man’s lot—would validate and justify it by partaking of it, suffering from it and eventually being sacrificed by it.

The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience—exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity? We do not think so. In fact, we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels, and of established Christianity, is ultimately incomplete—a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our research enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.

On the whole, then, we do not think we have compromised or belittled Jesus. We do not think he has suffered from the conclusions to which our research led us. From our investigations emerges a living and plausible Jesus—a Jesus whose life is both meaningful and comprehensible to modern man.

We cannot point to one man and assert that he is Jesus’s lineal descendant. Family trees bifurcate, subdivide and in the course of centuries multiply into veritable forests. There are at least a dozen families in Britain and Europe today with numerous collateral branches who are of Merovingian lineage. These include the houses of Habsburg-Lorraine (present titular dukes of Lorraine and kings of Jerusalem), Plantard, Luxembourg-Montpezat, Montesquieu and various others. According to the “Prieure documents”, the Sinclair family in Britain is also allied to the bloodline, as are the various branches of the Stuarts. And the Devonshire family, among others, would seem to have been privy to the secret. Most of these houses could presumably claim a pedigree from Jesus; and if one man, at some point in the future, is to be put forward as a new priest-king, we do not know who he is.

But several things, at any rate, are clear. So far as we personally are concerned, Jesus’s lineal descendant would not be any more divine, any more intrinsically miraculous, than the rest of us. This attitude would undoubtedly be shared by a great many people today. We suspect it is shared by the Prieure de Sion as well. Moreover the revelation of an individual, or group of individuals, descended from Jesus would not shake the world in the way it might have done as recently as a century or two ago. Even if there were “incontrovertible proof” of such a lineage, many people would simply shrug and ask, “So what?” As a result there would seem to be little point in the Prieure de Sion’s elaborate designs—unless those designs are in some crucial way linked with politics. Whatever the theological repercussions of our conclusions, there would seem, quite clearly, to be other repercussions as well—political repercussions with a potentially enormous impact, affecting the thinking, the values, the institutions of the contemporary world in which we live.

Certainly in the past, the various families of Merovingian descent were thoroughly steeped in politics, and their objectives included political power. This would also seem to have been true of the Prieure de Sion and a number of its Grand Masters. There is no reason to assume that politics should not be equally important to both Sion and the bloodline today. Indeed all the evidence suggests that Sion thinks in terms of a unity between what used to be called Church and State—a unity of secular and spiritual, sacred and profane, politics and religion. In many of its documents Sion asserts that the new king—in accordance with Merovingian tradition—would “rule but not govern”. In other words he would be a priest-king, who functions primarily in a ritual and symbolic capacity; and the actual business of governing would be handled by someone else—conceivably by the Prieure de Sion.

During the nineteenth century the Prieure de Sion, working through Freemasonry and the Hieron du Val d’Or, attempted to establish a revived and “updated” Holy Roman Empire—a kind of theocratic United States of Europe, ruled simultaneously by the Habsburgs and by a radically reformed Church. This enterprise was thwarted by the First World War and the fall of Europe’s reigning dynasties. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that Sion’s present objectives are basically similar—at least in their general outlines—to those of the Hieron du Val d’Or.

Needless to say, our understanding of those objectives can only be speculative. But they would seem to include a theocratic United States of Europe—a trans- or pan-European confederation assembled into a modern empire and ruled by a dynasty descended from Jesus. This dynasty would not only occupy a throne of political or secular power, but quite conceivably, the throne of Saint Peter as well. Under that supreme authority there might then be an interlocking network of kingdoms or principalities, connected by dynastic alliance and intermarriage—a kind of twentieth-century “feudal system”, but without the abuses usually associated with that term. And the actual process of governing would presumably reside with the Prieure de Sion which might take the form of, say, a European Parliament endowed with executive and/or legislative powers.

A Europe of this sort would constitute a new and unified political force in international affairs—an entity whose status would ultimately be comparable to that of the Soviet Union, or the United States. Indeed it might well emerge stronger than either, because it would rest on deep-rooted spiritual and emotional foundations, rather than on abstract, theoretical or ideological ones. It would appeal not only to man’s head, but to his heart as well. It would draw its strength from tapping the collective psyche of Western Europe, awakening the fundamental religious impulse.

Such a programme may well appear quixotic. But history by now should have taught us not to underestimate the potential of the collective psyche, and the power to be obtained by harnessing it. A few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable that a religious zealot without an army of his own, without a political party behind him, without anything at his disposal save charisma and the religious hunger of a people could single-handedly topple the modern and superbly equipped edifice of the Shah’s regime in Iran. And yet that is precisely what the Ayatollah Khomeini managed to do.

We are not, of course, sounding a warning. We are not, implicitly or explicitly, comparing the Prieure de Sion to the Ayatollah. We have no reason to think Sion sinister—as one might the demagogue of Iran. But the demagogue of Iran bears eloquent witness to the deep-rooted character, the energy, the potential power of man’s religious impulse and the ways in which that impulse can be channelled to political ends. Such ends need not entail an abuse of authority. They may be as laudable as those of Churchill or de Gaulle were during the Second World War. The religious impulse can be channelled in any of innumerable directions. It is a source of immense potential power. And it is all too often ignored or overlooked by modern governments founded on, and often fettered to, reason alone. The religious impulse reflects a profound psychological and emotional need. And psychological and emotional needs are every bit as real as the need for bread, for shelter, for material security.

We know that the Prieure de Sion is not a “lunatic fringe” organisation. We know it is well financed and includes—or, at any rate, commands sympathy from—men in responsible and influential positions in politics, economics, media, the arts. We know that since 1956 it has increased its membership more than fourfold, as if it were mobilising or preparing for something; and M. Plantard told us personally that he and his Order were working to a more or less precise timetable. We also know that since 1956 Sion has been making certain information available discreetly, tantalisingly, in piecemeal fashion, in measured quantities just sufficient to provide alluring hints. Those hints provoked this book.

If the Prieure de Sion intends to “show its cards”, the time is ripe for it to do so. The political systems and ideologies which, in the early years of our century, seemed to promise so much have virtually all displayed a degree of bankruptcy. Communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism, Western-style democracy have all, in one way or another, betrayed their promise, jaundiced their adherents and failed to fulfill the dreams they engendered. Because of their small-mindedness, lack of perspective and abuse of office, politicians no longer inspire confidence, only distrust.

In the West today there is increasing cynicism, dissatisfaction and disillusion. There is increasing psychic stress, anxiety and despair. But there is also an intensifying quest for meaning, for emotional fulfilment, for a spiritual dimension to our lives, for something in which genuinely to believe. There is a longing for a renewed sense of the sacred that amounts, in effect, to a full-scale religious revival—exemplified by the proliferation of sects and cults, for example, and the swelling tide of fundamentalism in the United States. There is also, increasingly, a desire for a true “leader”—not a Fuhrer, but a species of wise and benign spiritual figure, a priest-king in whom mankind can safely repose its trust. Our civilisation has sated itself with materialism and in the process become aware of a more profound hunger. It is now beginning to look elsewhere, seeking the fulfilment of emotional, psychological and spiritual needs.

Such an atmosphere would seem eminently conducive to the Prieure de Sion’s objectives. It places Sion in the position of being able to offer an alternative to existing social and political systems. Such an alternative is hardly likely to constitute Utopia or the New Jerusalem. But to the extent that it satisfies needs which existing systems do not even acknowledge it could well prove immensely attractive.

There are many devout Christians who do not hesitate to interpret the Apocalypse as nuclear holocaust. How might the advent of Jesus’s lineal descendant be interpreted? To a receptive audience, it might be a kind of Second Coming.

Postscript to the Paperback Edition

Since the publication of our book, much new material has been forthcoming. Some readers, with extremely important new information, have been open and generous in passing it on to us. Others have preferred to be cryptic, enigmatic and elliptical, speaking mysteriously of unspecified knowledge they possess, or unspecified research they have done which has led to equally unspecified conclusions of a startling/amazing/shattering/definitive nature. Such hints may indeed attest to new and valid material or to an irrelevant intellectual ingenuity and a need for spurious mystification.

In any case, we have received letters from people so aggressively over-cautious and secretive that we wonder why they bothered to write to us at all. Their shroud of obscurity and opacity seems to have been generated by a fear (verging sometimes on paranoia) that they may be deprived, unscrupulously, of the fruits of their work—that we might steal the results of their research, or their decipherments, or the treasure they are convinced they have located, and leave them unacknowledged, unrecognised, unrewarded.

In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, we have presented our material openly. We have also supplied information about relevant sources, in order that others may be stimulated to research of their own. The time for mystification is now past. We hope that readers who have what they consider worthwhile material will be as forthcoming as we have tried to be. We urge them, if possible, to publish it themselves. Alternatively, we request them to make their findings available to us.

We hereby publicly state that no such material will be published, used or exploited by us unless some prior and mutually acceptable arrangement has been concluded with those who provide it. We also publicly state that all such material, if used by us in any way, will be duly acknowledged in a fashion that is likewise mutually acceptable. We would also like to state that we have NO interest, beyond the historical and archaeological, in any “treasure” uncovered in connection with Rennes-le-Chateau. We wish only to observe and record such discoveries as and when they might be made. Any cash rewards accruing from any ’treasure’ would remain with those whose information leads to the location of the relevant site.