The Digital Antiquarian

Pierre Plantard in 1942, at age 22.

It is possible to trace the Plantard family tree a fair ways back without relying on the Lobineau dossier, but not as far back as the time when the Merovingian kings ruled over the nascent nation of France. The real genealogical record shows that the Plantards were not a line of kings or demigods; they were rather ordinary laborers. The first trace we can find of them comes in the form of one Jean Plantard, who arrived from parts unknown to the town of Sémelay, about 300 kilometers southeast of Paris, during the first half of the seventeenth century. His descendants continued living in this region of France.

A Pierre Plantard was born in the village of Magny-Cours on October 11, 1877. Following a stint as a coal miner and a term of service in the French Army, he moved to Paris early in the new century to become a valet and butler, probably to one of the officers under whom he had served. (Such arrangements were common at the time.) He was called up again in that fateful month of August 1914, and spent the entire First World War fighting on the Western Front with his artillery regiment. He then returned to Paris to take up his domestic duties once again, working now for a wealthy Russian family who had fled the Bolshevik revolution in their country. He died in 1922 from a fall out of a second-floor¹ window he had been attempting to clean, a sadly ironic fate for a man who had managed to survive four and a half years of brutal war.

The older Pierre Plantard died from a fall out of one of these windows. One wonders whether his son might turned out differently if he had grown up with both of his parents.

But before he left this world, Pierre Plantard fathered a son with his wife Amélie, a fellow domestic servant. Born on March 18, 1920, the son was given the same name as the father he would never know.

This new edition of Pierre Plantard grew up coddled by his mother. By working day and night, she was able to supplement the small pension she had been awarded after the death of her husband enough to provide him with a reasonably good primary-school education. She and her son were mutually convinced that young Pierre was destined for greater things than his father, or, indeed, any of his other less-than-august ancestors.

Still, it wasn’t clear just how he was to rise to the level of his just desserts from such a humble point of origin. After he finished his standard schooling in 1937, his mother found that university was far beyond her means, no matter how many hours she worked or how she scrimped and saved. Being still in full agreement with his mother that he was above manual labor, Pierre spent almost all of his time in their apartment, expressing his political views in pamphlets which he gave away for free. He was of a type with a certain species of young man that can be found in the less savory corners of the Internet today (and occasionally showing up in this site’s usually friendly and thoughtful comment section to sound a discordant note). Intelligent in some ways but socially awkward, they channel the grievance born of their social isolation into reactionary cultural and political views. In the context of 1930s Europe, the endpoint of that journey was almost always fascism and its even uglier handmaiden of antisemitism.

Alas, Pierre Plantard was no exception. He advocated for the “purification and renewal of France,” a euphemism which, I trust, requires no elaboration. As an admirer of Adolf Hitler, he was traumatized when his country declared war against Germany in response to the latter’s invasion of Poland in September of 1939. He immediately dashed off a letter to Prime Minister Édouard Daladier to demand that he “put a stop to a war started by the Jews which we cannot win.”

In the decades to come, Plantard would claim that he joined the Resistance after a Nazi army marched into Paris in June of 1940. But in the early stages of the occupation at least, nothing could be farther from the truth. He was in fact an admirer and booster of the Vichy puppet regime that was installed to govern part of France under Marshal Philippe Pétain, an 84-year-old hero of the First World War who, to paraphrase the later words of Charles de Gaulle, went from glorious to deplorable in the view of French history in the space of an instant. A letter which Plantard wrote to Pétain on December 16, 1940, shows his delusions of grandeur already in fine fettle at age twenty. Claiming that he has knowledge of an assassination plot against Pétain, Plantard pushes the doddering old man to get a move-on implementing the Holocaust before it is too late.

Please forgive me for taking the liberty of writing to you this evening. Despite my various commitments, my lectures and my magazine, I am perhaps still unknown to you…

I know that, in the depths of your soldier’s heart, you are suffering from the knowledge that the people of France are questioning your sincerity and your patriotism, and are suffering more perhaps from that than from the effects of our recent disaster. But I know also of your great love for our country, and I am certain that you will do everything possible to save it once more…

You must act! Immediately upon receiving this letter you must issue strict but totally confidential orders. You must put an immediate stop to this terrible Masonic and Jewish conspiracy in order to save both France and the world as a whole from terrible carnage.

At present I have about 100 reliable men under me who are devoted to our cause. They are ready to fight to the bitter end in response to your orders. But what is 100 men when faced with the might of our enemies? Whatever the case may be, they will fight alongside me for our cause.

This letter would be laughable if the undertone wasn’t so dark. Plantard’s magazine was an amateurish pamphlet he passed out for free on the street; his lectures were nonexistent, as was the crack squad of 100 soldiers at his beck and call. He was just a skinny kid writing screeds in his mother’s apartment in lieu of facing the real world outside. Yet he would prove bizarrely adept at inhabiting an imaginary world throughout his life, never allowing reality to get too close to him.

In 1941, Plantard claimed to be the head of a youth group called La Rénovation Nationale Française (“The French National Renewal”). Under its auspices, he petitioned the Parisian police to let him seize the home of M. Shapiro, “an English Jew who is presently fighting alongside his fellows in the British armed forces,” to use as the group’s headquarters; he said he had already gotten permission to do so from the occupying Nazi authorities. In response, the police launched an investigation of his affairs. The verdict was as dismissive as it was scathing. From our standpoint, the most shocking aspect of the report is how fully-formed Plantard’s modus operandi was at such an early juncture.

M. Plantard describes himself as a journalist; in fact he lives entirely off his mother, who holds a pension granted to her following the accidental death of her husband…

Plantard, who boasts of having links with numerous politicians, seems to be one of those dotty, pretentious young men who run more or less fictitious groups in an effort to look important and who are taking advantage of the present trend toward a greater interest in young people in order to attract the government’s attention…

La Rénovation Nationale Française seems to be a “phantom” group whose existence is purely a figment of the imagination of M. Plantard. Plantard claims 3245 members, whereas this organization currently only has four members…

To date no meetings have been held…

It would seem that this organization is doomed to failure.

The report concludes that Plantard should not be allowed to steal M. Shapiro’s house, even if the latter is a Jew.

But Plantard soldiered on undaunted. By January of 1943, La Rénovation Nationale Française had morphed into a magazine called Vaincre (“Conquer”). Its mission was “to restore to the Fatherland the strength to live through an ideal based on chivalry and self-denial.” In what some might consider an abnegation of its stated ideal, Plantard still hadn’t found a paying job or moved out of his mother’s apartment.

His lifestyle was about to be dramatically disrupted, however. At some point during 1943 or 1944, Plantard was sent by the Nazi occupying authorities to Fresnes Prison, the primary holding place for Resistance agitators among others, for a four-month stint. This event is documented only by the French police, who were unsure of the reason for the sentence; the report author’s suspicion is that it was handed down primarily out of annoyance and exasperation, because Plantard had been badgering the German authorities with requests related to his various associations and publications as persistently as he had been the French ones. All of the relevant German documents seem to have been lost. Regardless of the reason for the prison stint, those four months, unpleasant though they doubtless were, would show themselves to have been a blessing in disguise after France was liberated, in that they prevented Plantard from being tarred with the broad brush of a full-on Nazi collaborator.

Indeed, he was quick to change his tune after an Allied army marched into Paris in August of 1944. The following month, he founded his latest organization, Alpha Galates (“Alpha Galatians”). Its object was “the creation, maintenance, and development of one or more welfare centers for young people who have suffered from German oppression (forced labor, deportation, imprisonment).” The one bar to membership was “to have been a member of any German or pro-German organization,” a standard which Plantard himself arguably didn’t meet. Another report in the archives of the French police, this one dated February 13, 1945, concludes that “this association has not engaged in any activity. It has had about 50 members, who resigned one after the other as soon as they sussed out the president of the association and worked out that it was not a serious enterprise. Plantard seems to be an odd young man who has gone off the rails, as he seems to believe that he and he alone is capable of providing French youth with proper leadership.” At the time of this report, he was back to living with his mother and still unemployed.

But not for too much longer. In December of 1945, the perpetual adolescent dipped a toe into the adult world. He got married to a woman named Anne-Léa Hisler and left the nest at long last. His activities over the next ten years are murky. He, his wife, and the daughter that would soon result from their union appear to have lived for a good part of that time in the town of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, close to the border with Switzerland. He appears to have served two short prison sentences there, one in 1953 and the other in 1956; his wife left him around the time of this second prison stint, although the couple would not be formally divorced until 1970. The details of the convictions remain vague, thanks to French privacy laws, but mention has been made of “breach of trust,” “bad checks,” “fraud,” and, most alarmingly, “abuse of a minor,” which may refer to sexual relations with an underage girl. It isn’t clear how Plantard earned a living during these years; his attempts at playing a confidence man seem not to have been terribly lucrative. He himself would later mention working as an architect’s draftsman, but this may have been cover for other, humbler forms of employment.

It was also in 1956 that the series of events which would lead to the likes of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code began in earnest. You may remember that it was in January of this year that Albert Salamon wrote the first French newspaper accounts of François-Bérenger Saunière’s possible hidden treasure. Later this same pivotal year, either just before or just after going to prison, or possibly from his prison cell, Pierre Plantard registered an organization called the Priory of Sion with the French government.

It is tempting to read more than coincidence into the dating of these events. But we must avoid falling into the same trap that poor Henry Lincoln tumbled into again and again. There is no concrete reason to believe that Plantard read Salamon’s newspaper articles at the time they first appeared. Anathema though the notion is to conspiracy theorists, sometimes coincidence is just coincidence.

At this stage, the Priory of Sion was very much of a piece with what had come before, one more shell organization occupying a liminal space between a scam and a delusion, whose claimed membership count was at extreme odds with the reality of Plantard himself and a few others whom he had persuaded or cajoled into signing on as his “board.” As a subtitle, the Priory bore the acronym C.I.R.C.U.I.T.: Chevalerie d’Institution et Règle Catholique et d’Union Indépendante Traditionaliste (“Knighthood of Catholic Institution and Rule, and of Independent Traditionalist Union”). Its founding statutes make it sound like an amalgamation of two of Plantard’s previous organizations, La Rénovation Nationale Française and Alpha Galates. It borrows from the former an interest in chivalry and Medieval life in general, from the latter an expressed interest in doing good deeds for the community. On the whole, it comes off like a French version of the Society for Creative Anachronism, albeit with a reactionary edge lurking in the corners. As a concession to the changing times, the overt fascism and antisemitism have been excised, but one can still feel their undertow beneath the surface: “The aim of the association is to found a Catholic order, with the intention of recreating in modern form, while preserving its traditional character, an ancient knighthood, which by its actions promoted a highly moralizing ideal and was a factor for steady improvement in the rule of life of the human personality.”

A C.I.R.C.U.I.T. newsletter from the fall of 1956  — the acronym was actually more prominent than the name the Priory of Sion early on — promises to institute a bus service for the local neighborhood, “to take your children to school and then bring them home again.” The fee is just 360 francs per month for one child, or 500 francs for two or more: “We would kindly ask you to enter details of your children on the attached form and deposit it in the letterbox of M. Plantard, Hill B, before Sunday evening, 21 October 1956.” There is no reason to believe that these buses ever ran. For that matter, it seems doubtful that this first incarnation of the Priory of Sion existed in even nominal form by the time 1956 was over.

Plantard returned to Paris in 1958, just as France was being plunged into its most serious political crisis of the postwar era. A revolt in the colony of Algeria had exposed the ineffectuality of the current system of parliamentary democracy, which was known as the Fourth Republic. In response, Charles de Gaulle, the hero of the Second World War, led a sort of soft coup that resulted in a system of government with more resemblance to the American approach than that of most European countries, complete with a strong president. De Gaulle himself became the first of these presidents.

While the outcome of his efforts was still in doubt, de Gaulle’s supporters all over France created organizations that bore the vaguely ominous name “committees of public safety” to forward his cause. These were catnip for Pierre Plantard. Forgetting that he had once preferred Marshal Pétain to General de Gaulle, he began to present himself to the press as one of the leaders of these committees. He was quoted in this guise several times by France’s national newspaper of record, Le Monde; this was rising higher than his fantasies had ever taken him before.

Once the Fifth Republic was firmly established and the committees dissolved, Plantard discovered a new vehicle for his schemes, one that would prove immensely important to the later history of the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château. He found out that, through some colossal administrative oversight, anyone could deposit unvetted documents into the Bibliothèque Nationale. After this was done, they would be assigned a catalog number and be made available to researchers just like any other item in the library’s vast holdings. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code, and all the rest of the lore and lucre of Rennes-le-Château could never have come to pass without this bureaucratic tribute to our natural instinct to trust one another. For trust was a quality just waiting to be weaponized by a man like Pierre Plantard.

His first application of the technique was to deposit documents which seemed to show that he had worked as de Gaulle’s right-hand man among the citizenry while the Fifth Republic was hanging in the balance. The clincher was a personal letter from the general — a forged one, naturally. (One problem with all of Plantard’s efforts at forgery is that he couldn’t shift himself from a stilted and fussy prose style that becomes readily recognizable, even when translated into English, as soon as you’ve seen it two or three times.)

My dear Plantard,

In my letter of 29 July 1958 I told you how much I appreciated the part that the committees of public safety had played in the restoration work that I have undertaken. Now that new institutions are being proposed that will enable our country to once again assume its place in the world, I think that the committees of public safety should be released from the obligations that have been imposed upon them to date and that they can be demolished.

This letter would later entice Henry Lincoln and his co-authors to make the ludicrous assertion that de Gaulle had “turned specifically to M. Plantard for aid” in realizing the Fifth Republic. (This after Plantard had engaged in “laudable activity” during the Second World War, including “editing the Resistance journal Vaincre,” and had then been imprisoned “more than a year” by “the Gestapo.” In between these two heroic periods of his life, he had resided near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, by explicit invitation of that country’s government, to be “one of the éminences grises from whom the great of this world seek counsel.” It certainly sounded better than languishing in a provincial prison cell for petty crimes.)

Plantard had been putting on aristocratic airs all his life, part and parcel of his longstanding fixation on the vanished life of the Middle Ages. By the time he returned to Paris, he had likely invented the idea that he himself was a long-lost scion of noble blood, may even have already linked himself to the Merovingian dynasty of almost a millennium and a half ago. But his self-aggrandizing fictions would never have reached as many people as they eventually did if he hadn’t met Philippe de Chérisey.

De Chérisey was exactly what Plantard most devoutly wished to be: a real nobleman, a count to be specific, with a pedigree stretching well back into Plantard’s beloved Middle Ages. But whereas Plantard had spent his life running toward a noble title that could become his only through deception, de Chérisey had spent his running away from the expectations of his family. Born in Paris three years after Plantard, he had enrolled in acting school as soon as the end of the Second World War made it possible. Adopting the stage name of Amédée as a sop to his family’s sensibilities, he appeared on radio and in a few reasonably successful films during the 1950s, until his other habits began to interfere with his career.

Philippe de Chérisey drinks up in the 1956 film Gervaise.

For de Chérisey was an unrepentant drunk, womanizer, and all-around bon vivant who wore his dissipation like a badge of pride, as if he had stepped straight out of the pages of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He was also a card-carrying Surrealist, whose watchwords were anarchy and absurdity, born out of the belief that nothing in life — absolutely nothing — was worth taking all that seriously. The best reason to do something was because it was fun; the best reason not to do something was because it was not fun. Surrealist moral philosophy extended no farther than that.

De Chérisey collected rogues and misfits whom he found amusing in the way that some other people collect stray cats and dogs. We don’t know exactly how he came into contact with Pierre Plantard, but it is clear that he found that man, who approached his con artistry with all the gloomy intensity of a knight about to ride into bloody battle in the name of his lord and savior, incredibly amusing. Plantard didn’t so much willfully lie as attempt to reconfigure the order of things to the way it ought to be, with himself in the place of prominence that he deserved. De Chérisey, who already had that which Plantard most desired and affected not to care a whit about it, found it hilarious that such an unprepossessing man as this one could have such delusions of grandeur. He began paying Plantard’s bills in Paris so that the bizarre fellow could have free rein to do his bizarre thing.

De Chérisey happened to have another amusing friend, a fellow traveler in Surrealist circles named Gérard de Sède, who was working on a book about the Knights Templar that was to be, shall we say, not an overly rigorous history of the Medieval chivalric order. De Chérisey put the “hermeticist” Plantard in touch with de Sède.  De Sède went on to quote Plantard prominently in his book.

The real conspirators of Rennes-le-Château: Pierre Plantard, Philippe de Chérisey and Gérard de Sède.

It cannot be emphasized enough how essential de Sède and de Chérisey were to everything that followed. Plantard was as dull and pedantic by nature as he was dishonest; de Sède once described him as “a big nocturnal bird, very gloomy, very tall, very skinny. He’s not cultured; in fact, he’s quite ignorant.” De Sède and especially de Chérisey, on the other hand, were possessed of all the joie de vivre which Plantard lacked. They were able to give his ponderous genealogies a spark of wit and whimsy, able to turn the fraud into a game that could prove almost as enticing to those who didn’t believe in it as those who did. (Witness: the fact that this series of mine has now extended to five articles…) There is a reason that Plantard didn’t become a successful con man until he met de Chérisey and de Sède, the same reason that he was plunged into relative obscurity again almost as soon as the relationship ended.

Just as the exact time and circumstances of Plantard and de Chérisey’s first meeting are unknown, it isn’t clear when Rennes-le-Château first crossed their radar either. In the late 1970s, Plantard would spin a tale of a youthful visit.

I went to Rennes-le-Château in August 1938 to recover some letters which the priest Saunière had received from my grandfather. It was during the holidays and I was not yet twenty years old. ‘Marinette’ [Dénaraud], as they called her in the village, received me very hospitably at the Villa Bethania; I stayed there for three days. We celebrated the 70th anniversary of the old lady…

This upper-crust vision of tea in the garden of Saunière’s villa is a complete fabrication, like most of what Plantard said during his life.

In the category of more reliable witnesses, the Carcassonne librarian René Descadeillas believed Plantard made his first appearance in the area already in the late 1950s. This may be correct, but it seems at least as likely that this is a rare instance of Descadeillas being mistaken. For a documented reference to Rennes-le-Château from the pen of Plantard can’t be found until January 18, 1964. He may very well first have learned about Saunière and his alleged treasure the same way that so many of his countrymen did, through the documentary that aired on French television in early 1961. However it happened, he became one of the collection of misfits, cranks, and dreamers who took to hanging about the place, standing out only for being a bit more extreme in all three of those descriptions than most of the others. Calling him “strange,” Descadeillas wrote that

this man lived in Paris. He had no connections and no known relatives in the area. He was a difficult fellow to place, drab, secretive, cunning, with the gift of the gab, but people who spoke to him said it was hard to follow what he said. He was not having a course of medical treatment [the nearby town of Rennes-les-Bains, once the home of the French Lewis Carroll Henri Boudet, was known for its medicinal springs]. People asked about the reasons for his regular appearances, because he turned up unexpectedly, even in winter. They also speculated about his interest in archaeological and natural sights, because he was not an intellectual. They were intrigued by the strangeness of his behavior: he used to go around surveying the area and inquiring about the origin of properties. He would set his heart on scrubland or abandoned ground which did not interest anyone.

Philippe de Chérisey reportedly accompanied Plantard on some of these trips, and presumably funded all of them. Together, the two of them began to concoct the narrative that would soon spread through France and then the rest of the world, through the mediums of Gérard de Sède and Henry Lincoln respectively. Plantard may already have been working on the fake genealogies that were meant to suggest that he was a long-lost scion of the Merovingian dynasty for quite some time by this point. The earliest of those documents states that it stems from 1956 (again, that pivotal year!), but it’s impossible to say if this date is accurate. But his masterstroke — or perhaps de Chérisey’s — was to link these fantasies with the ones surrounding the treasure of Rennes-le-Château, thereby lending them the verisimilitude of being centered on a very specific place, one that anyone could go and see for themselves. Stumbling upon the tomb of a once-wealthy American heiress and her mother, constructed only 40 years before, Plantard thought it looked like the one seen in Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcady and worked that into the story. And of course the Priory of Sion was added to the plot, no longer as a Medieval-revivalist social club but as a shadowy cabal that had been associated with the hidden Merovingian bloodline since before the Crusades.

The reasons for the inclusion in the lore of the painting by David Teniers the Younger and the anonymous portrait of Pope Celestine V were and have remained far less obvious, such that they have been confusing treasure hunters ever since. Ditto Le Serpent Rouge, the nonsensical poem that also made its way into the growing dossier. De Chérisey, the unapologetic Surrealist prankster, must have relished blending the soluble conundrums with insoluble ones such as these, all in the service of turning the inept failed con artist Pierre Plantard into a king. What could be more absurd and hilarious?

Between 1963 and 1967, Plantard and/or de Chérisey deposited into the Bibliothèque Nationale the tranche of documents that Dan Brown would grandiosely call Les Dossiers Secrets in the opening pages of one of the best-selling novels in history. The holy texts of what would become practically a new religion to some are to be found right here. Among them are the genealogies of the Merovingians (and the Plantards), the list of Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, and François-Bérenger Saunière’s connection to the mystery, including his fabled trip to Paris to have some “parchments” decoded and to buy three particular paintings. In short, the Lobineau dossier is the new religion’s version of the Bible or Koran. In time, much would be added to the theology that didn’t appear there, but it was the foundation of all that was to come.

It was de Chérisey who created the textual puzzle boxes we have been referring to as Altar Documents 1 and 2. He forged Gravestone 1, depositing it into the Bibliothèque Nationale with the names of Eugène Stübeln and a recently deceased local priest named Joseph Courtauly attached, and repurposed Gravestone 2 from an old journal put out by a Languedoc society of gentlemen scholars. We know all of this because he later told the French author Jean Markale exactly how he went about “inventing a story that the mayor [of Rennes-le-Château] had had a tracing made of the parchments discovered by the priest. Then I started to devise a coded copy based on passages from the gospels, and then I decoded myself what I had encoded.” The actual messages hidden in the documents were de Chérisey’s usual mixture of the sensical and the nonsensical. The results were superficially clever, but positively riddled with tells that they were far from aged, from the modern typesetting to the use of a far too recent edition of the Vulgate Bible. Nevertheless, they would, as de Chérisey put it, “work beyond my wildest dreams.”

For many years, it was assumed that Gérard de Sède was more or less a useful idiot in all of this, nothing more than Plantard and de Chérisey’s dupe for getting their invented mythology out into the world. But the indefatigable Rennes-le-Château skeptic Paul Smith, who has been fighting the good fight on his website since three years before Dan Brown’s novel hit, believes that de Sède, being a card-carrying Surrealist in his own right, was in on the joke all along. Smith’s theory of the case is that “originally, Plantard wrote a manuscript on the Rennes-le-Château story and during an eighteen-month period approached countless publishers to buy it. Nobody was interested. De Sède then rewrote the book, made it more comprehensible and less cluttered with detail. The result was the book L’Or de Rennes which was published in 1967 by Julliard.”

By way of bolstering his case, Paul Smith has placed the original publication contract for L’Or de Rennes on his website. Signed on January 13, 1967, it considers de Sède and Plantard to be full-fledged co-authors, and unequal ones at that: de Sède is to be awarded just one-third of the book’s royalties, Plantard the remaining two-thirds. The contract concludes that “in accordance with Mr. Pierre Plantard’s wishes, his name will not appear in any way either in the text or in any publicity relating to it.”

So, no one associated with the book was innocent; it was a knowing scam from top to bottom. The crowning masterstroke, which reeks of de Chérisey’s devious mind, was the decision to leave one fairly easily decipherable secret message undecoded, as a sort of exercise for the reader. That pulled Henry Lincoln into an intellectual black hole that he would never escape, providing the trio with a dupe par excellence.

Pierre Plantard during the heyday of the conspiracy.

We don’t need to dwell unduly on what happened during the 1970s, on how the myth-makers fed Lincoln a steady drip of fresh information, until he reached the point of making up his own lore, thus making the conspiracy theories self-sustaining. It seems unlikely that anyone had thought about secret geometries in the paintings and landscapes before Lincoln. And the ultimate piece of plot inflation, the transformation of Pierre Plantard from merely a long-lost king to a demigod on Earth with the sacred blood of Jesus Christ coursing through his veins, definitely caught the trio by surprise. It first occurred to Lincoln as a potential answer to a thoroughly commonsense question: why did it really matter to anyone, other than perhaps some scholars of genealogy and Medieval history, even if Plantard really was a long-lost Merovingian? On the other hand, everybody could understand why it mattered if he was Jesus’s direct descendant.

Ironically, the French themselves realized the truth about the conspiracy theories they had sprung on the world far earlier than everybody else. Already in 1974, when Henry Lincoln had barely gotten started, René Descadeillas returned to the subject out of sheer exasperation with the misinformation he saw flying all around him from his perch in the library of Carcassonne. This time, he wrote and published a proper book, Mythologie du Trésor de Rennes (“Mythology of the Treasure of Rennes”), thoroughly debunking the notion that Saunière had been anything but a corrupt priest with a taste for simony alongside the one that the various documents being passed around by de Sède could be anything more than an elaborate, eminently Gallic practical joke. Several other French authors wrote similarly detailed exposés in the decades that followed, but none of them were translated into other languages to directly challenge the gospels of Henry Lincoln and Dan Brown in the wider world.

The real, three-man conspiracy that stood behind it all started to fall apart already by the end of the 1970s. De Sède was the first to break ranks, angry at Plantard for communicating directly to Lincoln instead of using him as his exclusive intermediary. He was already gone when Lincoln filmed his fateful interview with the would-be Merovingian scion in March of 1979. Switching sides with the fecklessness of a conspiracist spurned, in 1988 he would publish the book Rennes-le-Château: Le Dossier, les Impostures, les Phantasmes, les Hypothèses (“The Dossier, the Deceptions, the Fantasies, the Hypotheses”). It would explain almost everything, except the extent to which de Sède himself had been in on the scam all along.

Plantard’s break with de Chérisey came a few years after the one with de Sède, after Lincoln and his co-authors trumpeted the theory that Plantard was a direct descendant of Jesus Christ in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. He took extreme exception to this assertion, for reasons that aren’t really clear. One would think that this man of all men would love to be known as a demigod walking the Earth, but such was not the case. It may have been that, underneath all of the lies and deceptions, the Catholic faith he professed was in some sense genuine, and couldn’t abide a blasphemy such as this. Or it may have been simply that Lincoln and his cronies got rich by building on his cherished myth, while he did not.

De Chérisey, by contrast, loved this ultimate theory of the case, clearly seeing it as the perfect final punchline of the joke he had unleashed upon the world fifteen years earlier. He wrote articles and letters telling people so, which led Plantard to cut ties with him, as he already had with Henry Lincoln. De Chérisey died relatively young in 1985, a victim of way too much aristocratic decadence. Plantard refused to attend the funeral.

In the aftermath of the rupture, Plantard attempted to reboot a fraudulent legacy that, he must have felt, had gotten too far out of his control. He went back to his usual playbook, re-inaugurating the Priory of Sion as a social organization with a philosophy and a magazine but a dubious roll call of actual members. According to the latest mythology, the Priory dated not from before the Crusades or even from after the Second World War, but rather from September 19, 1738. I could try to explain the new secret history, which retained some elements of the old one and discarded others, but what would be the point? Suffice to say that Plantard was still up to his old tricks. Unfortunately for him, the loss of his co-conspirators meant that his efforts were subject once again to the weaknesses that had undermined his earlier attempts at fraud: his tendency toward pedantry, his tangled prose, his lack of personal charisma, and his utter inability to tell a straightforward story without getting himself and his reader irretrievably lost in the weeds.

Pierre Plantard with author Jean-Luc Chaumeil during the 1980s.

One technique which Plantard had long used to good effect was that of attaching his tales to those of famous dead people, who, being dead, were unable to contradict him. “He was first and foremost a past master at putting words into the mouths of the dead”, says Jean-Luc Chaumeil, the author of several books about the mythology of Rennes-le-Château. “Once someone had died he produced all sorts of documents, letters, and so on, all forgeries of course.” This longstanding practice — as demonstrated most famously in his list of Grand Masters for the Priory of Sion, without which Dan Brown’s novel would have been left without a title — remained one of his go-to moves as he entered his septuagenarian years. This time around, however, it would wind up hoisting Plantard with his own petard, in a way delightfully surreal enough to cause Philippe de Chérisey to giggle in his grave.

Roger-Patrice Pelat, at far left, in Rennes-le-Château in early 1981. His friend François Mitterand stands just to his right, wearing a hat.

Once upon a time in France, there was a prominent financier named Roger-Patrice Pelat, whose grievous life story would come to parallel that of his British counterpart Robert Maxwell. Pelat was very close to François Mitterrand, France’s president from 1981 to 1995, whom he had known since the two were prisoners of the Nazis together. They visited Rennes-le-Château during Mitterrand’s first presidential campaign, resulting in a well-traveled photograph of them standing inside Bérenger Saunière’s cluttered, rather tacky church. (The line between sinister trappings of the occult and mere bad taste is often thin.) Several years later, Pelat found himself at the center of a scandal when all sorts of improprieties in his dealings began to come to light. Mitterand distanced himself hurriedly, as politicians invariably do in such situations, and Pelat died alone and unlamented in March of 1989 of a literal broken heart.

Pierre Plantard moved to appropriate Pelat’s legacy for his purposes almost before the body was cold. In his telling, Pelat had become Grand Master of the Priory of Sion after he himself had stepped down from that post in 1984. But the Americans — these had become Plantard’s new bogeymen, a replacement for the Jews who had filled that role in his youth — had gotten to Pelat in some undefined way and brought him down.

For a long time, the American dream has been to dominate our country for financial and economic motives. The Priory, very many of whose members are themselves major financiers, politicians, directors of major insurance companies, magistrates, and so on, is the ideal CIRCUIT for various courses of action. That’s how Patrice Pelat was ensnared, and — I can say it here — I retain for him the most profound affection in spite of everything that has happened.

All would have been fine if Plantard had contented himself with spinning such fables exclusively for the all but nonexistent members of his largely imaginary organization. But on September 28, 1993, someone who called himself René-Roger Dagobert — yes, really — sent a number of documents to the court of law that was still investigating the dealings of the deceased Pelat. One of these, on the letterhead of the Priory of Sion, referred to Pelat as “our former Grand Master, who was always very much a man in the background, perfectly honest and just, who fell beneath the blows of various American initiates.”

In response, Judge Thierry Jean-Pierre ordered the police to search Plantard’s house and ordered the man himself to appear before his court, possibly because he suspected that the Priory of Sion may have been helping Pelat to launder money. This was a laughable notion on the face of it; Plantard’s operation was nowhere near that sophisticated, as must have been made all too clear by the documents that were seized. Nevertheless, Judge Jean-Pierre soon had Plantard under oath in his courtroom, and seems to have enjoyed making him squirm. There are conflicting reports about exactly how far he pushed him; transcripts of the proceedings remain sealed. Some reports have it that Plantard admitted only that he had lied about Roger-Patrice Pelat having been affiliated with the Priory of Sion, while others say that he confessed to all of the fraud, stretching back at least to 1956. Either way, Judge Jean-Pierre clearly put the fear of God into Pierre Plantard. For Plantard disappeared completely from public life after he went home from court for the last time on November 23, 1993; I might write now that he finally shuttered the Priory of Sion for good, if only there had actually existed much of anything to shutter. He died on February 3, 2000, just short of his 80th birthday.

The symmetry of the young and the old Pierre Plantard seems better suited to a novel than to real life. From first to last, he was founding grandiosely titled organizations in that aforementioned liminal space between wish-fulfillment and fraud, imagining thousands of members who didn’t exist, preaching his reactionary, nationalist politics in whatever form was deemed most acceptable at the time. He got his comeuppance at the hands of the Nazi occupiers of France during the 1940s and a French court of the 1990s for the same reason: for annoying them by spouting an endless stream of stupid, petty, self-aggrandizing lies instead of doing something better with his time.

Pierre Plantard was the embodiment of hyperreality, living his entire life in a virtual world of his own making. And he was the embodiment of another quality that hardcore hyperrealists often manifest: a complete inability to evolve. He was, whatever else he might have been, a perpetual adolescent. How strange to think that the mystery and the industry of Rennes-le-Château — the novels and the games and the movies and the tours and the earnest students of the lore who are poring over their sacred geometries even as I write these words — all came to exist because one emotionally stunted man decided to make himself the king he wanted to be as a replacement for a reality he refused to accept. In its way, his story is even more improbable than the mythology he spawned.

Farewell, Rennes-le-Château. It was an interesting place to visit, but I don’t want to live there.

There is much, much more that I could write about Rennes-le-Château, a sticky topic that can ensnare the skeptic almost as easily as it can the true believer. Every answer just leads you to five more questions if you let it.

But we shouldn’t let it. Once we cut through all of the tangential connections and secret codes and other nonsense, we find that the underlying truth is disarmingly straightforward. At the turn of the twentieth century, a corrupt French priest remade his church and his village into a lavish if tacky monument to his own eccentric tastes. In the 1950s, a hotelier harnessed the local legend of hidden treasure which the priest had left behind to drive business his way. Then a few other bored Frenchmen embellished the story for aggrandizement and amusement. Then Henry Lincoln heard the tale they were spouting and added some extravagant touches of his own to the story, because he wanted it to make sense so very badly. And then Dan Brown came along to mash it down and make it suitable for mass consumption, turning a chicken into a chicken nugget.

The peak of the Da Vinci Code mania is well past now, but the fantasies of Plantard, Lincoln, and their friends still echo through popular culture — not least the culture of gaming, which has long since become as mainstream as any other form of entertainment. Gabriel Knight 3, the game which started us on this journey, is just the tip of the iceberg. We will surely be encountering this mythology again as we proceed on this larger journey of ours through the history of gaming.

But at the same time that it has been an influence on games, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château is itself a sort of game — an “infinite game” in the words of Mariano Tomatis, one whose playing board is the whole world. Anyone who claims to have solved the mystery and thus won the game is immediately perceived as a threat by a community of players who have made it their hobby, their social outlet, in some cases even their identity: “The game of Rennes-le-Château continues to provide amusement only if there is an underlying mystery, an unsolved puzzle to be explored. Any contribution academically sound is immediately rejected by the large community of players, because every demystifying statement closes at least one of the possible extensions of the game, thus threatening the very purpose of the infinite game, which is to continue indefinitely.”

Every gamer knows the feeling of wanting to keep a good game going. But the wise ones also maintain the barrier between the game and real life. For to do otherwise is to risk madness, as the lives of Plantard, Lincoln et al. so painfully demonstrate.

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Sources: The books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale; Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château by Gérard de Sède; The Holy Place: Saunière and the Decoding of the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L’Enigme de Gisors by Gérard de Sède; Les Mérovingiens à Rennes-le-Château. Mythes ou Réalités. Réponse à Messieurs: Plantard, Lincoln, Vazart & Cie by Richard Bordes; Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI by Richard P. McBrien; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown; Are We Idiots?: The Simulacra of Jean Baudrillard by Boris Kriger; Simulations by Jean Baudrillard; Mythologie du Trésor de Rennes by René Descadeillas; Rennes-le-Château: Autopsie d’un Mythe by Jean-Jacques Bedu; Bérenger Saunière Curé à Rennes-le-Château by Abbé Bruno de Monts; Rennes-le-Château: Le Dossier, les Impostures, les Phantasmes, les Hypothèses by Gérard de Sède.

Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004; Politica Hermetica 10.

As should be made clear by the links sprinkled through the article, I owe a special debt to the material collected by Paul Smith on his website Priory of Sion.

Even the authorship of books about Rennes-le-Château is unnecessarily complicated. Richard Leigh almost adopted the pen name of “Richard Bardmont,” perhaps to keep his work in alternative history separate from the “serious” novels he still dreamed of writing. At the last minute, however, he changed his mind and allowed the book to be published under his real name. Just as well; the novels would never emerge.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published by Jonathan Cape in Britain on January 18, 1982. Delacorte released an American edition five weeks later, under the punchier title of simply Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Sales were strong right out of the gate, and in time the book grew into something of a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Taken only on its literary merits, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was an unusually well-crafted example of its pseudo-historical breed, but that was only a prerequisite to success, not a guarantee. In other ways, its success was a case of excellent timing, as media sensations always tend to be. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, the biggest movie by far of 1981, had told the story of a two-fisted archeologist on the trail of the legendary Ark of the Covenant, the vessel in which the Ten Commandments had supposedly been kept after Moses brought them down from Mount Sinai. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had much the same spirit about it, even if its legendary artifact proved to be a bait and switch in the end, being secret knowledge rather than a physical object.

Britain was just exiting an extended obsession with Masquerade, a lavishly illustrated puzzle book by a heretofore obscure artist named Kit Williams that could allegedly be used by the sufficiently motivated to reveal the location of a “golden hare” that had been hidden somewhere in the country. Also a Jonathan Cape book, Masquerade had left the British public primed for more of exactly the sort of obscure and intricate riddles in which the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail loved to lose themselves. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Day-Glo, “greed is good” 1980s America remembered by 21st-century popular culture was still a year or more away at the beginning of 1982, with the economy still struggling to exit an ugly recession. What better way to escape day-to-day troubles than by immersing oneself in the distant past and dreaming of the possibility of a Merovingian savior still to come?

In the United States, Delacorte’s cautious initial print run of 45,000 copies sold out within days, leaving the publisher scrambling to get more off the press. The book never topped the bestseller charts, but it hung around the lower reaches of the non-fiction top ten — operating on a fairly generous definition of “non-fiction,” of course — for months on end, selling steadily while the books above it came and went. In that chicken-or-the-egg equation that often holds sway with trends, bookstores that had at first simply shelved The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in their history section rushed to set up floor and window displays as the months went by and its sales showed no sign of slackening. Newspapers ran feature articles about what was now being called a “phenomenon” on their front pages. Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent became in-demand guests on television and radio. Lincoln in particular was markedly ebullient in these appearances. And why shouldn’t he be? He had managed to make his idiosyncratic vision of history a vital part of modern pop culture, not only in his home country but in the biggest media market on the planet; he had come a long way indeed from semi-anonymously penning workaday episodes of Doctor Who.

Exactly one year after the hardback, Delacorte launched the paperback edition of Holy Blood, Holy Grail with an initial print run of half a million copies. The book was by now being translated into a dozen languages, including French. It would sell well into the millions before the 1980s were over, making Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent enviably wealthy men.

All of this ignited a scramble in the press to figure out What It All Means, beyond the mere fact of the book being “controversial” and “provocative.” Catholic bishops, Protestant theologians, and professional secular historians found themselves in rare agreement when they said that the book was shoddy history, growing out of supposition and insinuation rather than proven fact, in addition to being “an attack on the very core of Christianity and the Christian ethos.” But even some of these folks had to give some measure of grudging credit to the compelling way the book was put together. Novelist Anthony Burgess of Clockwork Orange fame unwittingly forecast the future when he wrote that “it is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel,” thereby thrilling Richard Leigh, who had long held Burgess up as one of his literary heroes. As oblivious to irony as ever, he and his partners explained in a new foreword written for the paperback edition that

it was significant, and not just coincidental, that the most sympathetic responses to our book seemed to come from literary figures — from important novelists like Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, and Peter Vansittart. For, unlike the professional historian, the novelist is accustomed to an approach such as ours. He is accustomed to synthesizing diverse material, to making connections more elusive than those explicitly preserved in documents. He recognizes that truth may not be confined only to recorded facts but often lies in more intangible domains — in cultural achievements, in myths, legends, and traditions; in the psychic life of both individuals and entire peoples. For the novelist knowledge is not subdivided into rigid compartments, and there are no taboos, no “disreputable” subjects. History is not for him something frozen, something petrified into periods, each of which can be isolated and subjected to a controlled laboratory experiment. On the contrary it is for him a fluid organic and dynamic process wherein psychology, sociology, politics, art, and tradition are interwoven in a single seamless fabric. It was with a vision akin to that of the novelist that we created our book.

The most amusing response came from Pierre Plantard. The idea that the Merovingian kings were the direct descendants of Jesus Christ had never been a part of his agenda; it had sprung entirely from the mind of Henry Lincoln as he fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole during the 1970s. It turned out that, while Plantard was perfectly happy to be labeled the scion of a legendary French dynasty awaiting reinstatement to his throne, the suggestion that he was a literal demigod with the divine blood of Jesus himself coursing through his veins was a step too far even for his prodigious ego. “How can you prove a heritage of four centuries from Jesus to the Merovingians?” he asked on a French radio show. “I have never put myself forward as a descendant of Jesus Christ.”

Plantard would now begin to distance himself from Lincoln and his friends and the full-fledged cottage industry in conspiracy that their book would spawn. And this would in turn have an important effect on said industry. Deprived of its one tangible living link to its preferred version of the past, it would drift yet further away from real history toward castles in the air built out of magical geometry and New Age mysticism. There would be no really new evidence to point to, whether forged or genuine, issuing from Plantard or anyone else; nor would the Priory of Sion show any sign of emerging from hiding like the Phoenix to forge a better or at least different world order, as was mooted at the end of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. New theories about Rennes-le-Château and the holy bloodline would have to be arrived at by churning endlessly through the same old data points to arrive at new juxtapositions.

That the conspiracy was already reaching a point of diminishing returns was made manifest by the inevitable sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Published in 1987, Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent’s The Messianic Legacy had some of what had made its predecessor so alluring, but not enough of it. It endeavored to fill in the gaps of the story by embellishing both the pre- and post-Medieval stages of the secret history. After a lengthy, readable, and surprisingly accurate description of ancient Judea and the most likely versions of an historical Jesus Christ, the conspiracy theories came back to the fore. The Freemasons were added to the list of secret societies privy to the great secret, and the Mafia and CIA were given roles to play, as was the Guardian Assurance Company, the biggest insurance firm in Britain during the peak years of empire. (Who says that insurance is boring?) “Those who believe in global conspiracies will enjoy the intrigue; others may be rightfully amused,” wrote Publishers Weekly, not even pretending to take any of it seriously anymore. The book sold well by the usual standards of its kind, but nothing like the first book had sold. This is the great drawback of enjoying such a singular success: the fact that it is so singular, that everything you do afterward is destined to pale in comparison. The first book may have spawned a cottage industry that would persist for decades, but in a broader cultural context its moment seemed to have passed.

Henry Lincoln parted ways from its two co-authors at this point. In the years that followed, he plowed the same old ground obsessively. Lacking the fertilizer of any really new information, his crop yield became ever more shabby. He increasingly found himself telling how his younger self came to write about Rennes-le-Château, reliving those glory years of the 1970s and early 1980s on the page as he doubtless was doing in his mind. When he wasn’t sharing the old war stories, he chased his geometrical chimeras to ever more uncertain ends. It strikes me that there was something a little tragic about the man, caught like a lab rat in a nonsensical labyrinth that was largely of his own devising.

For their part, Leigh and Baigent continued to work together, casting a slightly wider net than Lincoln at times but always coming back to their comfort zone of hidden Christianity and secret cabals attempting or succeeding in controlling the world. Leigh never did get around to becoming a serious novelist.

It all started to feel a bit tired even to some of the folks who were most predisposed to believe in it. Other stars of pseudo-history emerged to outshine our trio in recognition and sales. The most prominent was one Graham Hancock, who kicked off his pseudo-historical career with The Sign and the Seal. Possibly the best-reading book of the type since The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, it posited that the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in a remote church in Ethiopia, a thesis it padded out to 600 weirdly riveting pages; I remember being utterly entranced with it upon discovering it shortly after its publication in 1992. But Hancock found his true métier three years later with Fingerprints of the Gods, which proposed that a civilization vastly more advanced than our own had once been centered on Egypt’s Giza Plateau. Being even less tethered to reality than the myths that were born around Rennes-le-Château, this thesis was amenable to virtually endless embellishment — an excellent foundation for a lengthy career on the part of Hancock, one that is still ongoing today.

The influence which Hancock and his peers had on the media landscape during the second half of the 1990s and beyond was deceptively large. Popular television shows like Stargate SG-1 played with their ideas. Ditto computer games. Indeed, alternative archaeology seemed tailor-made for a certain stripe of slow-paced, contemplative, first-person adventure game, dubbed “Myst clones” by fans in honor of their urtext. Games like Timelapse and Riddle of the Sphinx substituted set-piece puzzle-solving for more dynamic forms of interactive narrative in much the same way that the likes of Henry Lincoln and Graham Hancock used it as a replacement for serious historical inquiry.

Through it all, Rennes-le-Château remained a part of the constellation of conspiratorial history, if a less prominent one than it had been during the heyday of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Another adventure game called Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars borrowed heavily from the lore; the subtitle it shared with the last of Lincoln’s Chronicle episodes was not coincidental.

The most heavily promoted book on Rennes-le-Château during this decade issued not from any of the trio behind The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail but rather from a pair of British newcomers. Paul Schellenberger was a civil engineer, Richard Andrews a professional diver; neither had ever written a book of any type before. Nevertheless, they were given an advance of £300,000 by Little, Brown and Company to write The Tomb of God, in which they proposed to correct what they believed to be Henry Lincoln’s mistakes and then to carry his ideas about mystic geometry yet further.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by David Tenier the Younger.

You may recall that Gérard de Sède stated in the very first book ever written about Rennes-le-Château that François-Bérenger Saunière returned to the village from his much-discussed trip to Paris with three paintings: Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, David Teniers the Younger’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and a portrait of Pope Celestine V by an unknown artist. Lincoln had never figured out what to do with the second two paintings, concentrating almost all of his attention on the first. Schellenberger and Andrews now set out to remedy that failing. Fiddling about with the two Altar Documents, they identified a tilted square hidden within them, a shape which they also believed to be present in all three paintings. (So much for Lincoln’s pentagons!) They read the message encoded so deviously into Altar Document 1 as describing four points on the landscape around Rennes-le-Château — points which also formed a tilted square. All of the clues were extremely tenuous — the phrase “blue apples” in the secret message, for example, was read as “slang” for grapes, thus pointing to a local vineyard — but needs must. Gravestone 1 as well came into the picture to provide a vital angle. They followed these textual and geometrical clues to a point deep within the base of Mount Cardou.

And what was concealed here? Nothing less than the body of Jesus Christ, who in their new reading of the conspiracy hadn’t risen from the dead at all circa AD 29. Instead his corpse had been spirited away by his followers during the three days between his death on the cross and the discovery of his empty tomb. The principal clue to this bombshell revelation — one that was even more of “an attack on the very core of Christianity and the Christian ethos” than anything Lincoln had claimed — was the Latin phrase written on the tomb in the Poussin painting: Et in Arcadia Ego. As we learned in an earlier article, this is only a fragment of a sentence: “And in Arcadia I…”

“What if the trick is to complete it in the shortest possible way to make it grammatical, not only with the smallest number of words, but also with the smallest number of letters?” asked Schellenberger and Andrews. Well, if you add the three-letter word sum to the end, you do wind up with a complete Latin sentence, one that can be translated to “And I am in Arcadia.” Et in Arcadia Ego sum in turn happens to be an anagram of Arcam dei tango, Iesu: “I touch the tomb of God, Jesus.” Granted, some might complain that you can turn any sentence into an anagram of just about anything you want it to be if you allow yourself to start sticking arbitrary words onto the end, but our intrepid authors were satisfied with their results. They concluded their book with a call to excavate Mount Cardou forthwith, a project that would necessitate the removal of “thousands of tons of rock.” Needless to say, this had about as much chance of happening as France spontaneously deciding to adopt English as its national language.

Published in 1996, The Tomb of God brought Rennes-le-Château back into the international conspiratorial spotlight, just after the 40th anniversary of Albert Salamon’s first articles about the subject for a regional French newspaper. The mystery had come a long way over that time, from vague talk about a pile of gold of uncertain origin buried somewhere in the vicinity of the village into a set of crazily gnarled and intricate conspiracy theories about secret faiths, secret bloodlines, and secret societies that were of urgent contemporary geopolitical relevance — assuming one chose to believe them, of course.

The Tomb of God was also the book which Jane Jensen stumbled across while she was taking a year off from her job as a game designer for Sierra On-Line, waiting to see whether her bosses would judge the state of the market to be conducive to a third entry in her Gabriel Knight series of adventure games. Once she did get the green light, the book became the primary source for the most celebrated puzzle sequence in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. She imported many of Schellenberger and Andrews’s geometrical ideas wholesale, with the original addition of hints drawn from Le Serpent Rouge, the poem included in the Lobineau dossier, which the authors of The Tomb of God never see fit to mention at all. To be fair, it’s hard to blame them for this; Le Serpent Rouge has long been the true wild card of the dossier, defeating even the most dedicated attempts to make sense of it.

In the world of a computer game, however, it can all be made to hang together nicely. Gabriel Knight indubitably finds the object of his search, which is more than can be said for any of the real people who have chased the mystery of Rennes-le-Château over the years. To my knowledge, Jensen has never stated publicly whether she placed any credence in the conspiracy theories or simply saw them as a great hook around which to build an interactive mystery. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter. In my opinion, Gabriel Knight 3 is by far the most enjoyable way to engage with the lore of Rennes-le-Château, being even more of an entertaining potboiler than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Gabriel Knight 3 provides an almost unnervingly accurate depiction of the real Rennes-le-Château. Here we’re inside the museum that stands close to the church. I was there about ten years after the game was made. It looks here just as I remember it.

Some of Jane Jensen’s contemporaries were less cagey than she was. There were some voices who were prepared to push back publicly outside of the cloistered halls of religion and academia, even though there has always been more money and fame to be garnered in conspiratorial credence than skepticism.

The slyest and cleverest of the skeptics was Umberto Eco, the famed Italian Medievalist, semiotic philosopher, and novelist. In an ironic way that he must surely have appreciated, Eco owed some of his international success in the last profession to Rennes-le-Château. For his first novel The Name of the Rose, about secrets that lived within the labyrinthine corridors of an early fourteenth-century monastery, had come out in English translation the year after The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had done much to familiarize the public with the time period and milieu and primed their pump for just such murky tales of hidden truths. Eco’s book too became an unlikely, zeitgeist-defining bestseller, spawning a hit movie with Sean Connery in the starring role of William of Baskerville. (Eco was a postmodernist, after all…)

Eco paid his benefactors backhanded tribute in 1988, in his second novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which set out to show how easy it really is to construct a secret history by drawing arbitrary lines between disparate historical events, stating conjecture as proven fact, and ignoring any evidence which doesn’t support the narrative. The foreground plot of the novel hinges on a group of merry pranksters who, with visions of fun and profit dancing before their eyes, start feeding the aforementioned disparate historical data points into a computer. (Such an approach reads as far more ominously plausible in our current age of large language models than it might have in 1988…)

“The challenge isn’t to find occult links between Debussy and the Templars. Everybody does that. The problem is to find occult links between, for example, cabala and the spark plugs of a car….”

“Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says ‘No Littering…'”

“Last night I happened to come across a driver’s manual… I began to imagine that those pages were saying Something Else. Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as a metaphor of creation? And we mustn’t confine ourselves to the exterior, or to the surface reality of the dashboard; we must learn to see what only the Maker sees, what lies beneath. What lies beneath and what lies above. It is the Tree of Sefirot.”

“You don’t say.”

“I am not the one who says; it is the thing itself that says. The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot.”

“But the positions don’t coincide.”

“Who says they don’t? Diotallevi’s explained to us that in certain versions Tiferet isn’t the sixth Sifirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth…”

Predictably enough, Eco’s cynical protagonists are eventually sucked in by their own elaborate postmodern joke, getting high on their own supply, as it were. And equally predictably, there were people who read Eco’s novel only to conclude that it was a vehicle for hidden truths rather than a cutting satire of writers and readers just like them.

Years later, the BBC television program Timewatch, a continuation in spirit if not in name of the old Chronicle series, demolished the conspiracy theories  around Rennes-le-Château in a less unmistakable but almost equally clever fashion, thereby atoning for some of the sins of its forefather. The occasion which prompted the show to have a go at the subject was the publication of The Tomb of God. That book’s authors Paul Schellenberger and Richard Andrews feature prominently in the episode, which for the first half of its running time states their theories and the older conspiratorial narratives that underpin them in what seems to be an unskeptical way. Then writer and director William Cran drops the hammer on them.

Do they have any proof that Bérenger Saunière bought copies of three particular paintings from the Louvre, as was stated by Gérard de Sède in his 1967 book and then restated in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail? Have they, for example, checked with the Louvre, which keeps quite meticulous records of copies of its paintings that it sells, the better to avoid having to contend later on with claims that the copies are the real things?

No, they have not checked with the Louvre. But Cran’s team now does, and finds no record of copies of those three paintings being sold, together or separately, anywhere close to 1891.

Do Schellenberger and Andrews have proof that Saunière was ever in Paris at all circa 1891?

They have heard that his name shows up in the records of the Parisian Church of Saint-Sulpice as having attended Mass there that year, but haven’t checked this personally. Cran’s team now does, finding that his name does not show up in those records.

A persistent belief that the Church of Saint-Sulpice was or is somehow connected with Saunière and the Priory of Sion stems from a stained-glass window on the building that displays the letters “P” and “S.” But these actually stand for Peter and Sulpitius — or Pierre and Sulpice in French — who are the church’s patron saints.

We continue in this vein. Forensic examination of Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia as well as a perusal of the artist’s preparatory sketches reveal no sign of the geometrical framework he would have had to draw onto the blank canvas to guide his painting if what Schellenberger and Andrews — or for that matter Henry Lincoln — say is true. A note in Saunière’s journal which is supposed to connect his treasure hunt explicitly with Gravestone 1 turns out to be only a passing reference to “a tomb”; he provides no more detailed description. As you and I have already learned, the 1884 book by Eugène Stübeln which is purported to be the original source for the sketch of Gravestone 1 seems never to have actually existed, leaving us with only a “reproduction” of the sketch dating from the 1960s; sure enough, the signature on this sketch is completely different from the signature of the real Eugène Stübeln. The Crusades-era documents which Schellenberger and Andrews point to as proof of the existence of a Priory of Sion almost a millennium ago turn out not to mention a Priory at all, only an Order of Sion.

Schellenberger and Andrews stubbornly hold their ground in the face of all this. Even if most of their case is built upon blatant distortions and fabrications, they say, this proves nothing, other than that the forgers must themselves have been initiates into the secret. It is as hard to convince conspiracy theorists to let go of such circular logic as it is to convince a true believer to leave a religious cult — especially when there is money to be made from forwarding the myth. (As Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”) Nevertheless, Schellenberger and Andrews do look increasingly sweaty as the episode goes on, their eyes taking on more and more of a deer-in-the-headlights look. One almost starts to feel sorry for them.

Perhaps a modicum of sympathy is even warranted from our side, given that there is some circumstantial evidence that this devastating Timewatch episode badly blunted their book’s sales trajectory. Whatever else you can say about Graham Hancock, he was careful never to let himself get caught out alone and exposed on the hostile territory of a sober fact-based investigation like Schellenberger and Andrews were. They disappeared from the pseudo-historical scene as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving Hancoock’s ancient Egyptians to take center stage once again. By the time that Jane Jensen’s computer game finally appeared in late 1999, its theme seemed almost an anachronism, a relic of an earlier era of conspiracy theories. Little did anyone know that Rennes-le-Château and the hidden bloodline of Jesus Christ were about to come roaring back with a vengeance.

Dan Brown.

At the turn of the millennium, Dan Brown was a former high-school English teacher and current struggling author living in a small town in New Hampshire. His first three books, thrillers all, had all flopped in the marketplace. Like Anthony Burgess almost two decades earlier, he came across the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and thought to himself that it might make for one hell of a novel. But unlike Burgess, he followed through. The result arrived in 2003 in the form of The Da Vinci Code, a by-the-numbers thriller on the surface whose secret weapon was its conspiratorial backstory, appropriated from the accumulated lore of Rennes-le-Château.

As we have seen, it’s possible to identify some reasons that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail became as popular as it did at the time it did. The Da Vinci Code is an altogether less explicable case. It came out of nowhere and blindsided everyone, for reasons that are difficult to discern on the surface. It certainly wasn’t a literary masterpiece; most critics found it to be not particularly good even as workmanlike pulp adventure novels went. But its publisher Doubleday did see a glint of something in it — perhaps just the shiny allure of potential controversy — and gave it a fairly concerted push out of the gate. And just like that, it became ubiquitous, meteoric, striking a nerve that nobody had suspected was sitting out there itching to be struck. It was soon selling 100,000 copies a week in the United States alone. By the beginning of 2006, it had hit 30 million copies sold worldwide, a mass-market phenomenon rivaled in its day only by the Harry Potter books. Dan Brown was by then earning more than $75 million per year from it — and that was before the movie dropped that May, and went on to become the second biggest blockbuster of 2006. In the fullness of time, The Da Vinci Code single-handedly made Brown a billionaire.

Just as happened with Harry Potter, an entire media ecosystem sprang up around The Da Vinci Code, one which was simply inescapable. The Western world went absolutely crazy for this stuff, and the suppliers of books went more than half insane trying to feed the demand. An issue of Publishers Weekly dated March 6, 2006, shows the novel still to be the second best-selling work of fiction in the United States after 151 weeks on the chart; other, coattail-riding novels called The Templar Legacy and The Last Templar sit at number four and five respectively. Later that year, Little, Brown and Company paid a first-time author named Elizabeth Kostova an advance of $2 million for The Historian, a vaguely Da Vinci Code-like novel whose central premise was that Dracula was still alive and an active player in the world. Meanwhile dozens of books purporting to explain the pseudo-history behind The Da Vinci Code — some skeptically, most credulously — became big successes in their own right; ditto a myriad of television documentaries. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was dusted off and given new trade dress and a renewed promotional push; it may very well have sold more copies in the mid-naughts than it did when it was a hot topic in its own right in the early 1980s. Travel agencies all over North America and Europe rushed to set up Da Vinci Code tours, in which punters trooped through hotspots like the Louvre and the Church of Saint-Sulpice behind their bemused-looking guides, ignoring most of the real beauty around them to focus on the fantasy. The Rennes-le-Château hardcore who had kept the flame burning all these years didn’t know whether to feel vindicated or dismayed by all these unwashed barbarians at their gates.

An argument can be made that The Da Vinci Code was the last phenomenon of its kind, the last time that something so old-school as a linear book printed on paper was able to dominate the pop-cultural discourse so thoroughly. What came after, of course, was an almost purely digital media age engineered for interactivity.

As so often happens with these things, the actual artifact that was at the center of it all seems bizarrely underwhelming today in proportion to the hubbub it raised. Written in clumsy grade-school-level prose, The Da Vinci Code reads like exactly what it ultimately is: Rennes-le-Château fan fiction, even if Brown does omit any mention of the village itself. He lays his cards on the table in the prologue, where the first character we meet is named “Jacques Saunière,” who is by day a mild-mannered employee of the Louvre, by night a keeper of the Great Secret.  All of the characters that come after him are equally cartoonish; a subtle writer Dan Brown is not. The villain Silas is an albino monk who prefers to shoot his victims in the stomach so that they die as slowly and painfully as possible. The hero Robert Langdon is a classic Mary Sue: a handsome “professor of religious symbology” who swims 50 laps every morning and then dries off to dazzle his colleagues at Harvard with his intellectual brilliance across dozens of domains. The story is all external action, reading more like a script treatment than a conventional novel; if the people found in these pages have any internal lives at all, we definitely aren’t privy to them. The Da Vinci Code is a novel that’s perfect for people who would rather be watching a movie than reading a book — which may go a long way to explain its popular appeal, come to think of it. It’s shocking to think that the guy who wrote this extravagantly terrible prose taught English before he became an author.

I’m sorry to carry on like such a snob. Please believe me when I say that that’s really not who I am; I’m a reader who loves Stephen King almost as much as he does Shakespeare, who often feels a sneaking suspicion that the only real divide between genre and “higher” literature as they are practiced today is that the purveyors of the one know how to construct a story that makes you want to keep reading while the purveyors of the other do not. It’s just that it’s hard for anyone who cares at all about the craft of writing to avoid getting his hackles up when writing about Dan Brown. If you’re comfortable reading in a language other than English and you want to read this book, my advice to you is to pick it up in translation. The translator will almost certainly be a better writer than the original author.

In terms of plot, The Da Vinci Code breezes swiftly through a sort of Cliff’s Notes version of Henry Lincoln’s conspiracy theories, presented in 105 chapters that seldom exceed a few pages in length. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail itself makes a cameo appearance on the bookshelf of one character. (“The authors made some dubious leaps of faith in their analysis, but their fundamental premise is sound, and to their credit, they finally brought the idea of Christ’s bloodline into the mainstream.”) To keep everything thoroughly relatable, Brown changes the artwork at the center of the story to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, one of the relatively few paintings in the world that almost everybody knows by name and by sight. In place of esoteric geometry, Brown sees in it the figure of Mary Magdalene, standing next to Jesus where art historians tell us Saint John is to be found. The Mona Lisa, another Leonardo painting that is if anything even more famous, also features prominently. The very name of the novel screams of its historical and cultural illiteracy. No real historian, much less any of Leonardo da Vinci’s contemporaries, would ever call him simply “da Vinci,” as if that was his last name. He is Leonardo of the town of Vinci, called Leonardo in short form. Henry Lincoln may have been more than half off his nut, but he was a deep historical thinker next to Dan Brown (yes, even if he did believe that ancient Judea had the equivalent of birth certificates and marriage licenses).

Brown suggests that the effeminate-looking figure immediately to the left of Jesus from our perspective, whom art historians believe to be Saint John, is actually Mary Magdalene. The “V” formed by the two figures is said to be a symbol for the womb. The “V” can also be extended to form an “M,” as in “Madeleine” or matrimonium: Latin for “marriage.”

But now I’m sounding like a snob again, aren’t I? So, let me say that The Da Vinci Code isn’t entirely without value. It did spawn hundreds of ofttimes hilarious reviews, which rose to giddy heights of scathing eloquence in their efforts to explain just how bad it is. A surprising number of these reviews came from other writers. Jealousy was undoubtedly a factor here — why should this hack be given a billion dollars when a talented artiste like myself is not? — but one senses that there was also a deeper well of moral outrage at the idea that someone who so manifestly just didn’t care about the basic craft of putting sentences together in a pleasing or evocative way should be rewarded in such a lavish fashion. Stephen King, who was normally unfailingly generous and welcoming to new writers, who had been known to compare his own books to a well-made burger and fries, called The Da Vinci Code the literary equivalent of a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese: nutrition-free, un-filling, and artificial to the core, leaving bright orange fake cheese powder all over everything it touched. And yet for some reason a lot of people loved them both.

That said, you could and can find worse crimes against the craft of writing all over the Internet. What makes Dan Brown guilty of something potentially worse than poor craftsmanship is his decision to present his book as both fiction and non-fiction at the same time in order to juice its sales. The opening epigram tells us, beneath the word FACT in large boldface letters, that “the Priory of Sion — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.” These two sentences are remarkable for how much they manage to get wrong even if one subscribes to the narrative of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The year 1099 was the year that the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and the already extant Order of Sion allegedly engineered the selection of Godfrey of Bouillon as the king of the new Christian city-state, not the year that the organization was founded. The dossier in question consisted not of parchments but typewritten pages on modern paper. And the dossier was not fortuitously discovered by employees of the library itself, but by Gérard de Sède after he was explicitly told by Pierre Plantard to go and look there. “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” the book goes on to state. As the sentences that precede this one so amply illustrate, this assertion could hardly be more false. But if Brown hadn’t seen fit to make it, it is highly doubtful that the book would ever have achieved a shadow of the success it did.

I think that Henry Lincoln was a sincere believer in the Rennes-le-Château conspiracy theories, but the divide between belief and opportunism is less clear to me in the case of others. I include in this group not only Jane Jensen, Dan Brown, and the indomitable Schellenberger and Andrews, but even Lincoln’s own co-authors Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent. Their reaction to The Da Vinci Code gives me all the more reason to suspect that their motives were primarily mercenary and cynical, or had at any rate become that way over the decades since the publication of their most famous book. For, being not content with the tenfold boost which Brown’s novel had given to sales of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Leigh and Baigent chose to sue him in British court for plagiarism; significantly, Lincoln elected not to join this lawsuit.

The High Court of Chancery found for the defendant in 2006; the same verdict was reaffirmed under appeal the following year. The courts noted that the plaintiffs could produce no examples of word-for-word copying on Brown’s part. Indeed, the prose styles of the two books were as different as they could be; The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was as ramblingly discursive as The Da Vinci Code was almost childishly simplistic. If both books had been novels, the lack of word-for-word copying would still have left the question of whether Dan Brown had blatantly lifted elements of character and plot. But they were not both novels. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail proclaimed itself to be a book of history, even if it was “speculative” history. And you can’t copyright real or even speculative facts and events, the stuff of history. Taking what The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail claimed itself to be at face value — and how else could the courts take it? — to have ruled in favor of its authors would have been like giving Stephen Ambrose an exclusive right to D-Day.

The most charitable interpretation of the lawsuit is that Lincoln understood this obvious logic while Leigh and Baigent somehow did not. A less charitable one is that it provides us with a window into their respective views of the nature of their work — of whether it was at the end of the day truth or a cleverly presented fiction, not so far removed in spirit from the novel of Dan Brown. At any rate, Leigh and Baigent were left with legal bills of a reported £3 million as a reward for their attempt to carve out of a bigger piece of Dan Brown’s pie for themselves. I don’t think you have to be too mean-spirited to consider this a deserved comeuppance.

Setting aside its winners and losers, the lawsuit crystallizes some questions that have been lurking around the edges of this chronicle almost from the start. To what extent did most of the people who made Rennes-le-Château and everything that came to surround it their hobbies really, truly believe it all in their heart of hearts? And did the truth or fiction of it actually matter so much to them one way or the other when all was said and done?

Many years ago now, I read a piece on a gaming or pop-culture website — I’m sorry to say that I can’t find the link anymore — which presented the best “shared worlds” of modern entertainment. I remember being shocked to see at the top of the list not Middle-earth or the Star Wars or Star Trek universe, but rather the Second World War. This struck me as being in vaguely poor taste; surely the Holocaust and all of the other real horrors of that conflict don’t deserve to be set up alongside The Lord of the Rings as just another venue for comics and cosplay. And yet it was hard to deny that the article kind of had it right: that the Second World War really is an inexhaustible stage for fiction, richer than the ones you find in even the richest purely fictional novels, movies, and games.

Another anecdote, running in the other direction: much more recently, I was listening to a radio interview with a journalist who had been embedded for a period of time with Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude. As an experiment, the Anthropic people put their AI in charge of a vending machine, with full authority to set its own prices, source the products that it sold, etc. Much to everyone’s surprise, Claude started to behave like a mob boss, threatening its suppliers with veiled violence if they didn’t meet its demands. It turned out that it was divining how a competent small-business owner ought to conduct himself from the mobster fiction it had scarfed up trawling the Internet.

These are examples of what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dubbed “hyperreality.” Already in the 1980s, he postulated that media was coming to fill so much of our lives that “fact” and “fiction” were becoming less and less meaningful as distinctions, that we were coming to live our lives in a sort of media-facilitated simulation of whatever reality we happened to find most appealing. Of course, the Internet has only accelerated that trend by an order of magnitude. For some of us, its virtual realities have become more real than the ones of flesh and blood. Meanwhile chatbots like Claude, which alarming numbers of us are coming to regard as friends and confidantes and even romantic partners, are true digital natives, untethered to any understanding of physical truths. What does it mean for us when our reality becomes the things we pick and choose in liminal digital spaces, based on vibes and our peer groups and the outputs of an algorithm, rather than the things that simply are? That is becoming a question of existential relevance. And I must confess that I half dread learning the answer. Already we can see the impact across a wide swath of our “real-world” culture and politics. As I write these words, the American presidency is explicitly guided by the ethos of television “reality” shows, prioritizing cliffhangers over policy, juxtaposing clips of real and deadly war with clips from Top Gun and Rambo, as if they were all of a piece. And a substantial quantity of American voters admit that they elected this administration not to implement any specific policy but because they wanted to watch the show. By way of taking the theory of hyperreality to its absurdist end point, some of our current flock of poorly socialized, algorithm-addled Silicon Valley overlords propose that physical reality itself is just a computer simulation — and it might well be a single-player game at that, giving free rein to their sociopathy.

The now 70-year-old conspiracy culture of Rennes-le-Château is a microcosm of hyperreality, if a less obviously dangerous one than some of those that have come along since. Were you to attend a gathering of Rennes-le-Château devotees, you might have trouble distinguishing them from a gathering of Tolkien or Star Wars or Star Trek fans — or for that matter Second World War buffs — if you didn’t know the lingo beforehand. These conspiracy theorists devotedly want to live in a world where millennia-old secret societies lie in wait to take over the Earth; it’s a lot more exciting than one where our problems arise from systemic issues of education and culture and sometimes just the vagaries of Mother Nature. And so they have constructed a virtual world for themselves where the conspiracies can be their truth. They can meet friends and lovers there, socialize and solve puzzles together, take vacations to places that feature in the mystery. Does it matter so much in the end if none of it is real? Are these people actually so qualitatively different from those who upload a big part of their lives into a shared social fantasy like Ultima Online or EverQuest?

These are questions we all have to grapple with for ourselves. For my part, though, I will say that I love fictions and firmly believe that they can be a wonderful vehicle not only for entertainment but for countless abstract truths about the human condition in general. And yet it remains important to me to know where the boundaries between concrete truth and fiction lie. I think it’s fine to enjoy a fiction like Gabriel Knight 3 or even The Da Vinci Code, if that’s the way your tastes run — but I also think it’s important for this collective project that we call civilization that we know that these things are fictions, no matter how much we may wish otherwise. Because wishful thinking, my friends, is one hell of a drug, one that’s made addicts out of better minds than mine.

Witness: poor Henry Lincoln, who passed away in 2022, still babbling away about his sacred geometry, sure he was on the verge of the final breakthrough he’d been seeking for 50 years. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent are likewise no longer with us, having died in 2007 and 2013 respectively. Ditto Gérard de Sède, who passed in 2004, still howling at the world that it was all a fake — and who would know better than he? — and finding that no one wanted to listen to him. Despite the absence of all of these seminal figures, the conspiracy theories they promulgated live on today on the Internet and in the pages of books — not least those of Dan Brown, who continues to churn out a new Robert Langdon novel every few years, to strong sales if no longer astronomical ones. (I don’t know whether he’s gotten any better at his craft.)

But I think we’ve spent more than enough time with the conspiracy theories by now, even as we still haven’t gotten to the full truth of how a simple treasure hunt in a remote corner of France turned into one of the biggest international media sensations of recent decades. There is still one more figure we have to scrutinize before we can close the book on Rennes-le-Château: the self-styled Count Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, the simultaneously enigmatic and banal human wellspring of it all.

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Sources: The books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale; Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château by Gérard de Sède; The Holy Place: Saunière and the Decoding of the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L’Enigme de Gisors by Gérard de Sède; Les Mérovingiens à Rennes-le-Château. Mythes ou Réalités. Réponse à Messieurs: Plantard, Lincoln, Vazart & Cie by Richard Bordes; Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI by Richard P. McBrien; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown; Are We Idiots?: The Simulacra of Jean Baudrillard by Boris Kriger; Simulations by Jean Baudrillard.

Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004; Publishers Weekly of November 13 1981, February 4 1983, September 25 1987, August 4 1989, November 15 1991, February 9 2004, January 24 2005, March 14 2005, and March 6 2006.

Online sources include the websites Rennes-le-Château: Where History Meets Evidence and Priory of Sion.com. And The Real Da Vinci Code, a television documentary by the ever excellent Tony Robinson.

Le Tour Magdala. (Zewan)

Henry Lincoln promised at the end of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil” that he would continue to investigate the case of François-Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château. He proved as good as his word. Over the next several years, he sidled steadily further away from his screenwriting career to dig his way deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. By now, he had inherited from Gérard de Sède the mantle of chief spokesman for this fast-evolving modern mythology, just as de Sède had once taken over from Noël Corbu. For Lincoln had not only energy and passion and an uncanny talent for making the outlandish sound reasonable on his side, but the ability to communicate fluently in both French and English. This made him the ideal figure to bring this French story to the larger English-speaking world.

Lincoln pulled a couple of other men from his side of the language divide into the rabbit hole along with him. At a British writing retreat in August of 1975, he met a 32-year-old aspiring novelist from the United States named Richard Leigh, the proud possessor of a freshly minted PhD from Stony Brook University and a burning passion for James Joyce and Marcel Proust. His love for those labyrinthine writers may help to explain why he found Lincoln’s stories of equally obscure and many-tendriled centuries-spanning conspiracies so compelling. (It may also be relevant to note that Proust himself was deeply interested in the Merovingian dynasty, whom he romanticized and celebrated as the forefathers of all things French.) Leigh in turn brought into the fold a photographer from New Zealand named Michael Baigent, who was not yet 30 years old but had already lived through more adventures than many another person experiences in a lifetime, traveling around the globe and taking pictures of everything from war zones to fashion models. This trio of Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent would show themselves to be formidable myth-makers indeed, capable of driving Rennes-le-Château right into the heart of the popular consciousness.

The two Chronicle episodes on Rennes-le-Château had been big ratings successes by the usual standards of the documentary series, even if they had caused some of the more sober minds involved with the program to turn up their noses a bit. The BBC was more than happy for Lincoln to make a third episode once he thought he was ready. He and his two new partners spent a few years trying to wrestle the amorphous mass of evidence they were collecting into some kind of coherent shape suitable for a one-hour television program. But the real coup came courtesy of a doubtless underpaid Chronicle research assistant named Jania Macgillivray, who was able to put Lincoln in touch with an obscure Frenchman with a grandiose name: Count Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair.

Lincoln had first seen the name of Plantard years ago, when it turned up in the Lobineau dossier as the one by which Sigebert’s branch of the Merovingian line had been known after the last king of the mainline dynasty had been deposed in Paris in 751. Not long after sending the Lobineau papers, de Sède had loaned Lincoln a clutch of photographs of Bérenger Saunière. On the back of each was a purple stamp that read “Plantard,” as if they had come from the personal collection of a man by that name. Chasing down these leads, Lincoln found that one Pierre Plantard featured prominently in de Sède’s 1962 book about the Knights Templar in the role of a “hermeticist,” scattering hints hither and yon that the Knights had not been completely destroyed in 1307, as historians believed; no, they had lived on in some form or fashion, influencing or even controlling world events as part of a hidden network of secret societies. Pierre Plantard’s name was conspicuously absent from de Sède’s 1967 book on Rennes-le-Château proper, but if anything this only made Lincoln more suspicious that it had been him who who had sent de Sède the Altar Documents in 1964, him who he had been silently guiding de Sède’s hand ever since. Lincoln, who seems never to have overcome a certain early contempt for de Sède that was raised by his spotting a secret message that his French counterpart did not, was eager to cut out the middle-man.

Henry Lincoln with Pierre Plantard in the 1980s.

And so on a windy late morning in Paris in March of 1979, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh met Pierre Plantard face to face for the first time, in a movie theater the BBC had rented for the occasion. Already before the meeting began, any pretense that Plantard was a mere informant had been dropped. He appeared as the avowed current Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, the latest in a roll call of names that included Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Claude Debussy. In addition, he was the direct descendant of the Merovingian line which had ruled the kingdom of the Franks from 481 to 751.

Lincoln was thoroughly entranced by Plantard, who showed up fashionably late, accompanied by a small entourage presumably made up of other members of the secret order.

M. Plantard proved to be a dignified, courteous man of discreetly aristocratic bearing, unostentatious in appearance, with a gracious, volatile but soft-spoken manner. He displayed enormous erudition and impressive nimbleness of mind — a gift for dry, witty, mischievous but in no way barbed repartee. There was frequently a gently amused, indulgent twinkle in his eyes, almost an avuncular quality. For all his modest, unassertive manner, he exercised an imposing authority over his companions. And there was a marked quality of asceticism and austerity about him. He did not flaunt any wealth. His apparel was conservative, tasteful, insouciantly informal, but neither ostentatiously elegant nor manifestly expensive. As far as we could gather, he did not even drive a car.

Lincoln addressed Plantard with no trace of irony as the roi perdu: the “lost king.”

The first order of business was a screening of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil”; this was the reason the meeting took place in a theater. (The program was overdubbed in French for the benefit of Plantard, who for all of his “enormous erudition” neither spoke nor understood any English.) Then the negotiations as to the rules of engagement began.

M. Plantard made it clear to us that he would be saying nothing whatever about the Prieuré de Sion’s activities or objectives at the present time. On the other hand, he offered to answer any questions we might have about the order’s past history. And although he refused to discuss the future in any public statements — on film, for instance — he did vouchsafe us a few hints in conversation. He declared, for example, that the Prieuré de Sion did in fact hold the lost treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem — the booty plundered by Titus’ Roman legions in AD 70. These items, he stated, would be “returned to Israel when the time is right.” But whatever the historical, archaeological, or even political significance of the treasure, M. Plantard dismissed it as incidental. The true treasure, he insisted, was “spiritual.” And he implied that this “spiritual treasure” consisted, at least in part, of a secret. In some unspecified way the secret in question would facilitate a major social change. M. Plantard [stated] that, in the near future, there would be a dramatic upheaval in France — not a revolution, but a dramatic change in French institutions that would pave the way for the reinstatement of a monarchy. This assertion was not made with any prophetic histrionics. On the contrary, M. Plantard simply assured us of it, very quietly, very matter-of-factly — and very definitely.

The mystery of Rennes-le-Château had started out in the mid-1950s as a simple treasure hunt, the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. In the late 1960s, it had become far more intimately intertwined with history, promising to revise much of our understanding of the past. And now, at the end of the 1970s, it was beginning to take on a freshly and even urgently contemporary cast, as an ongoing conspiracy that was acting right now to change the direction of current events. And the man behind the proverbial curtain was, it was becoming increasingly clear, Pierre Plantard.

For all that, though, Plantard was certainly not ready to let himself be pinned down on any specifics. He met three times with Lincoln and his friends in 1979, submitting to an on-camera interview during the last of these meetings. Yet Lincoln had to admit that “after three meetings with M. Plantard and his associates we were not significantly wiser than we had been before.” Of course, there is reason to ask at this point who was really using whom. The fact was that Henry Lincoln, a well-connected man who was obviously taken with him, represented a golden opportunity for Plantard to get his message out all over the world. After the meetings in Paris, Plantard severed the last of his ties to de Sède and began to communicate primarily through Lincoln. On his side, de Sède took this rejection with no good grace. He would eventually join the side of the skeptics and try to debunk the Priory of Sion and the rest of the conspiracy theories around Rennes-le-Château, but these efforts would get less traction than his earlier ones. Many another, more credible writer who has tried to bring a dose of sanity to these subjects has had to swallow the same bitter pill. People crave the legend, not the truth.

The third episode of Chronicle to deal with Rennes-le-Château aired in Britain on November 27, 1979, under the name of “The Shadow of the Templars.” With this third outing, any semblance of this being a normal episode of the show is gone. This is a Henry Lincoln joint from first to last — a chronicle, if you will, of one man’s very personal quest. Other than a few minutes of interview footage of Pierre Plantard, Lincoln’s voice is literally the only one we hear, his face the only living one we ever see up close.

Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the episode in some ways is the psychology of Henry Lincoln as he wanders ever further into a hall of mirrors that is increasingly of his own making. If he isn’t a true believer, he’s one hell of an actor. “I’ve chased many a false lead, leapt to many a deceptive conclusion, been blinded by ingenious smokescreens, by clues strewn by others to conceal one astonishing and simple truth,” he says. He is correct, as far as it goes — but sadly, the simple truth at the heart of the case is not the one that Lincoln so fondly imagines. To paraphrase Fox Mulder, Henry Lincoln desperately wants to believe. That’s a dangerous place from which to start any investigation of history.

Just as I looked at some of the core documents behind the conspiracy theories of Rennes-le-Château in some depth in my last article, I think it makes sense to examine this program rather closely in this one. For we are now on the verge of what will become the mature mythology of Rennes-le-Château. There is only one really important point — admittedly, the most important one of all — that is still only hinted at in “The Shadow of the Templars.”

Instead of making yet another beeline for Rennes-le-Château and Bérenger Saunière, we start this time with a reasonably accurate summary of the history of the Knights Templar, who are correctly described as a chivalrous order of “fighting monks” that was founded in Jerusalem in 1118, when the city was in the hands of European Crusaders. After achieving impressive heights of power and influence, the Knights were brutally dissolved by King Philip IV of France in 1307. But Lincoln is on less firm ground when he strongly implies that the Knights may have dug up King Solomon’s legendary treasure in Jerusalem during their first few years of existence, and that this became the wellspring if not the sum total of their eventual daunting wealth.

He does admit that the French crown owed embarrassing sums of money to the Knights Templar by the time of Philip IV. (The most careful readers among you may remember that this same financially-troubled king was cited as proof of Noël Corbu’s original theory of the treasure of Rennes-le-Château; tropes do tend to cycle around and around inside the mirrored halls of conspiracy theorists, continually popping into view again where you least expect them.) Yet Lincoln finds it weirdly difficult to understand why King Philip and his cronies might have accused the avowedly pious Knights of “denying Christ” and “spitting on the cross,” implying some other reason for casting these aspersions than that of simply needing an excuse to do away with them. In reality, charges of sacrilege and black magic were practically par for the course when the overlords of Europe decided that a group like this one had become inconvenient.

There is no evidence in the historical record that King Philip believed the Knights Templar to be in possession of some singular treasure that he was unable to find after their destruction, as Lincoln claims. To put the subject in modern terms, it is better to think of destroying the Knights as akin to destroying a major multi-national bank, not the ransacking of a dragon’s hoard. There is wealth there, yes, but it comes for the most part in the form of contracts and infrastructure and credit and loans and investments, not in that of a giant pile of gold sitting there ripe for the taking. Ironically, Lincoln himself credits the Knights with doing much to invent modern banking.

A golden triangle.

A pentagon formed from two golden triangles.

Now we abruptly transition back to the Languedoc. In “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil,” Lincoln broached the idea that a pentagon could be found hidden in the Nicolas Poussin painting The Shepherds of Arcadia, which Lincoln believed to depict a tomb located near Rennes-le-Château. Continuing on the geometrical tip, he tells us now that three elevated castles in the area form a golden triangle, one whose sides make two angles of 72 degrees and one of 36 degrees. On its own, such a shape is fraught with significance in certain occult traditions, for two of these golden triangles can be superimposed upon one another to create a pentagon, an even more powerful shape. The three castles in question, all of which are now in ruins, are the one that lent its name to Rennes-le-Château; the Château du Bézu, which Lincoln believed to be a former Knights Templar fortress (more recent archaeology indicates that this is probably not the case); and the Château de Blanchefort, built by the same family who built or at least occupied the castle of Rennes-le-Château. (You will remember that we spent much time with the gravestone of Marie de Nègre d’Ables, the last Marquise de Blanchefort, in our last article.) A little outside fact-checking will confirm for us that these three castles really do form a golden triangle, to an error tolerance of less than five percent.

One Bertrand de Blanchefort provides Lincoln with the historical glue he needs to bind the three castles together: Bertrand was Grand Master of the Knights Templar from 1156 to 1169. Sadly, though, this time a fact-checker is not Lincoln’s friend, for the truth is that this Bertrand de Blanchefort is actually not a member of the Blanchefort family from the Languedoc. In their eagerness to draw the connections that suit them, conspiracy theorists are often confused by simple coincidences of nomenclature like this one.

Lincoln now leaps even further back in time, to Dagobert II, the Merovingian king of the Franks for a few years in the seventh century. His infant son Sigebert was, Lincoln believes, spirited away from Paris to the Languedoc for safekeeping after his father was assassinated. (See my last article if you need a refresher on this claim.) In a first hint of a bombshell which he will drop in full only a few years later, Lincoln tells us portentously that “the Merovingians were not anointed kings, but kings by virtue of their blood.” He says that all members of the line displayed an unusual birthmark in the shape of a rose-red cross. (This assertion doesn’t appear in any accepted historical records from the period.) Qualifiers like “supposedly” gradually fall away from the narrative, as we are told that Sigebert was hidden away in Rennes-le-Château, or Rhedae as it was then known, because it was the childhood home of Dagobert’s queen. (The truth is that we have no historical record of Dagobert’s queen, presuming she even existed; nor is there is any good reason to connect the Visigoth town of Rhedae with Rennes-le-Château.) Sigebert grew to noble manhood in the Languedoc much like Wart in the Castle Sauvage of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and the Merovingian line was carried on in secret.

We are told that Godfrey of Bouillon, a leader of the First Crusade who became the first Christian king of Jerusalem after the city was conquered in 1099, was of this Merovingian blood. Lincoln says that he has found “a document” — no other details are provided — that connects the selection of Godfrey for that throne to an organization called the “Order of Our Lady of the Mount of Sion.” Then he goes on to connect the same organization to the formation of the Knights Templar nineteen years later. Fact-check time: an Order of Sion does appear on a few authenticated documents from the twelfth century, indicating that some sort of organization by that name really must have existed. But we now know that all of the other, otherwise unsubstantiated claims that Lincoln makes about it and about the Merovingian line stem from the Lobineau dossier that dates no further back than the mid-twentieth century.

These same documents state that the Order of Sion decided to separate itself from the Knights Templar after Jerusalem was recaptured by a Muslim army in 1187, partially thanks to the Knights’ growing arrogance and foolishness. It was at this point that the Order of Sion renamed itself the Priory of Sion. Reading the roll call of subsequent Grand Masters of the Priory, Lincoln flirts with a moment of clarity: “Some of these names are so illustrious that the list seemed just the sort of grandiose pedigree that would be created for itself by a lunatic-fringe body of eccentrics playing at secret societies.” But he turns away from the brink of sanity: “It’s all too easy to make assumptions, and not to keep an open mind.” (The first part of this statement at least is true…)

We touch upon the Rosicrucians, a Christian movement with occult overtones which swept across Europe during the early seventeenth century. The name means “rose-red cross,” which cannot be a coincidence.  And sure enough, the Lobineau dossier lists Johannes Valentinus Andreae, a German theologian who was one of the leading voices behind the movement, as one of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion. Lincoln finds pictures of rose-red crosses and other, more veiled references to the Priory and the Rosicrucians in and around Bérenger Saunière’s church.

And now we come at last to the moment we have been waiting for, by far the most fascinating point in the episode. We meet Pierre Plantard, the only person other than Henry Lincoln who is ever allowed to speak to us, whom Lincoln sincerely believes to be not only the current Grand Master of the Priory of Sion but the scion of the Merovingian dynasty, those once and possibly future kings of France. Plantard appears much as Lincoln described him earlier in this article: slim, neatly dressed, coolly avuncular, and thoroughly Gallic, with a slyly mischievous glint in his eyes that can be read in different ways, depending on your opinion as to his trustworthiness. For once we can be fully in agreement with Lincoln when he posits that this man is the real key to the mystery.

Monsieur Plantard, is there still a secret at Rennes-le-Château?

The secret is not only at Rennes-le-Château, it is around Rennes-le-Château.

Will the treasure of Rennes-le-Château ever be found?

Here you are speaking of a material treasure. We are not talking of a material treasure. Let us say, quite simply, that there is a secret in Rennes-le-Château and that it is possible there is something else around Rennes-le-Château.

And how does Poussin fit into the story?

To be seen in Poussin’s painting are certain revelations. Poussin was an initiate, and therefore created his painting as an initiate. But he was not the only one in this story. There are other characters. In artistic expression, the truth is concealed and one uses symbolism.

Tell us whether the Priory of Sion exists today.

At this moment, Sion still exists. One of its recent members — one of the last Grand Masters — was Jean Cocteau. Everyone knows this.

Monsieur Plantard, over the centuries you have — how shall I put it? — supported the Priory of Sion?

We have supported Sion and Sion has supported us.

We? Who are we?

We — I am speaking of the Merovingian line, for our line descended from Dagobert II. The Merovingians, it was they who made France. Without them there would be no France. The Capetians and the Carolingians followed on from the Merovingian line. The Merovingians represent France.

With that, Pierre Plantard disappears from our screen again. Lincoln could get nothing more concrete out of him.

Instead he returns to mystical geometry; by now, the episode’s organizing principle seems to have become Henry Lincoln’s stream of consciousness. We are reintroduced to the idea of a pentagon hidden in Poussin’s Shepherds of Arcadia. Lincoln mentions a letter written by Nicolas Fouquet, the French finance minister under King Louis XIV and a known friend of Poussin, to the minister’s brother in 1656, the year after the painter completed the work in question. This letter is genuine, and may be worth quoting here at greater length than Lincoln does in the interest of full disclosure.

[Poussin] and I have planned certain things, of which I shall be able to talk to you in depth, which will give you by M. Poussin advantages (if you do not wish to despise them) that kings would have great difficulty in drawing from him, and that after him perhaps no one in the world will ever recover in the centuries to come. And what is more, that could be done without much expense and could even turn to profit, and these things are so hard to discover that no one, no matter who, upon this earth today could have better fortune or perhaps equal.

Some have wondered whether this elliptical missive might refer to the creation of forgeries, as potentially lucrative a practice back then as it remains today. Nicolas Fouquet may not have been the most ethical character: he was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to life in prison in 1661, although it’s difficult to know how much of the charge was real and how much was the work of his enemies at court. Then, too, Poussin would hardly have been the only great artist to have been tempted to the dark side: Michelangelo among others got his start in just this way. Still, forgery does seem a strange practice for Poussin to have engaged in at this point in his career, when he was a much-lauded artist whom the pope and the French king openly squabbled over, one who was perfectly capable of selling as many paintings as he could create under his own name at a handsome profit. All told, then, the letter presents a puzzle, but it’s hard to say that it really proves anything about The Shepherds of Arcadia absent other, corroborating evidence.

Lincoln now informs us that he has returned to his studies of the landscape around Rennes-le-Château, and has identified two more promontories — known as La Soulane and Serre de Lauzet — that turn his golden triangle into a pentagon. Although he’s not wrong about the figure he maps out, it shouldn’t be forgotten that he is examining the foothills of a major mountain range, a landscape whose defining feature is its many peaks and valleys; there are a lot of promontories to pick and choose from. Meanwhile what Lincoln wishes to infer from all of this remains frustratingly opaque. His two latest promontories sport no human-made structures from the past or present, leaving us with nothing more than the fact of the topographical coincidence. Does Lincoln intend to imply that God himself sculpted the landscape around Rennes-le-Château to send us a message or otherwise to serve his purposes somehow? That would be plot inflation indeed.

Pierre Plantard now pops up for the second and last time. “The geometry is pentagonal, isn’t it?” Lincoln asks him.

Plantard seems to be at a loss for a second or two. Then he smiles his enigmatic smile. “I can’t answer that,” he says.

This is, I think, a moment worth reflecting upon.

In later years, Lincoln wrote in some detail about his very first meeting with Plantard, the one that began with a screening of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil.” Among the associates or acolytes who accompanied Plantard to that meeting, he clearly had the most intimate friendship with a man named Philippe de Chérisey, whom we will meet again later. Lincoln:

The Grand Master and his acolytes watch the film with quiet concentration. Occasionally Plantard and de Chérisey’s heads incline together as they exchange a whispered comment. It is not until the film has almost reached its end that they show anything other than relaxed interest. But suddenly the two backs in front of me stiffen and M. Plantard sits upright, bending forward in concentration. But the image on the screen is a fleeting one. As it disappears, the two heads lean together again in a brief and vehement conversation. Touché! I have shown them something they weren’t expecting. The image, which has no explanatory text, is of the parchment [Altar Document 2] overlaid with the pentacle. Are they unaware of the existence of the geometry? Or are they simply surprised that I have found it out?

Some of the geometry which Henry Lincoln believed to have been deliberately hidden in Altar Document 2.

I think it most probable that they were unaware of it, although, once again, this would not necessarily mean what Lincoln wished it to mean. Lincoln had dutifully followed the trail of clues they had laid down for him, and had now arrived at the sweet spot of any conspiracy theory: he had begun to invent new facets of the mystery himself from whole cloth. The geometrical obsessions of the cult of Rennes-le-Château would spill across thousands of rambling pages in the years to come. Plantard merely gleaned where Lincoln was going and got out of his way. You can practically see this happening in real time when Lincoln asks him on camera about the significance of the pentagon of which Rennes-le-Château constitutes one point. “At that moment, M. Plantard could have said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ or even, ‘There is no significance,'” Lincoln tells us. “But in a sense, his answer confirmed my suspicion that there was an importance attached to that symbol which I had yet to discover.” One can imagine Plantard’s self-satisfied smile as he sits back to watch Lincoln build new twisty little passages in which to lose himself.

From here, the program takes on more and more supernatural overtones, as Lincoln connects the Priory of Sion with the long history of alchemy, hermeticism, and the occult more generally — traditions to which many of those we think of today as foremost lights of rational science, such as Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, were very much in thrall. Lincoln explains, correctly, that the pentagon has long been linked to the planet Venus. From the standpoint of a terrestrial observer, Venus goes through five inferior conjunctions — meaning that it passes between the Earth and the Sun — in the course of every eight years. These conjunctions are quite obvious to anyone who pays even cursory attention to the sky: the planet goes from being the brightest object in the sky at sunset with the possible exception of the Moon to disappearing entirely for a few days to reappearing just as bright as before, only now at dawn. Marked on a map of the sky, one complete cycle of five inferior conjunctions forms a well-nigh perfect pentagon.

Venus was in turn the symbol of Mary Magdalene, the saint whom Saunière’s church was named after. It might perhaps be more convenient in some ways if Saunière himself had chosen that name, if a Church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine hadn’t existed in Rennes-le-Château for 700 years prior to his arrival, but needs must. Lincoln is encouraged that Saunière did choose to name the observation tower he built in the garden of his villa Le Tour Magdala, predictably failing to consider that he may have simply named the tower after the church.

So, the area around Rennes-le-Château must be a place of enormous supernatural importance, or at least a place that various shadowy groups throughout history have believed to be a locus of mystical power. Lincoln doesn’t explain how these groups would have spotted the pentagon hidden in its topography without benefit of aerial observation or modern measuring equipment. But he has at least decided that the fortune in gold fondly imagined by the likes of Noël Corbu probably doesn’t exist. Saunière, he thinks, became an initiate of the Priory of Sion through those documents he found hidden in his church. “The real treasure of Rennes-le-Château is a secret,” Lincoln says. This secret, whatever it is, is surely connected with the Merovingian bloodline. “What is so special about this royal bloodline that can ensure centuries of loyalty?” Lincoln asks. And that is where he leaves it, with the words “To Be Continued…” flashing subliminally if not literally.

The continuation would arrive barely two years later, but it would do so in a different format than yet another episode of Chronicle. For the evolving mystery of Rennes-le-Château had now outgrown the constraints of a workaday BBC documentary series in the opinion of its leading advocate.

Henry Lincoln (left) with Gérard de Sède (right) just before the latter punched the former in the face.

Lincoln’s first hope was to shoot a documentary feature film. “The notion of addressing the subject without the usual sobering constraints of the BBC’s more serious documentary approach seems appealing,” he said with his customary obliviousness to irony. He signed a contract with a London production house. But the project descended into squabbling when it became clear that the director was a more lurid sort of conspiracy theorist, more interested in Black Masses and sex orgies in the pews of Saunière’s church than the bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty and the vagaries of pentagonal geometry. Gérard de Sède was hired as a consultant to the film, turning up just long enough to punch Lincoln in the face for stealing Pierre Plantard from him. Meanwhile the producer was perpetually drunk and insisted on driving his cast and crew everywhere, a bad combination if ever there was one. The farce turned into a tragedy when this fellow keeled over dead from a brain tumor. It turned out that the relative sobriety of the BBC had its positive sides.

Suitably chastened by this experience, Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent thought to write a book instead. After all, their theories were nothing if not complicated, so much so that they demanded the cooler, self-paced medium of text if one was ever to understand them thoroughly. The trio signed on with Jonathan Cape, one of the most respected publishing houses in Britain. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail would not be the first book about Rennes-le-Château — a goodly number of others were already available in several languages, even setting aside the pioneering work of de Sède — but it would present itself in avowedly scholarly tweed, almost audibly sniffing its nose at the tinfoil-hat brigade hanging out in their parents’ basements. This would be a weighty tome, both literally and metaphorically, the type of book that could make its subject matter an acceptable topic of drawing-room conversation among the chattering classes.

The spine of the book’s narrative is the same as that of “The Shadow of the Templars,” with the addition of a lot more detail and one last bombshell revelation, the same one that Lincoln was recently assiduously hinting at on camera. The secret that Saunière and so many others had sworn to protect was the true bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty. For Jesus, it turned out, had not been celibate as the Bible tells us, had in fact wedded and had children with Mary Magdalene before his crucifixion. In time, these children had begotten the Merovingian kings.

Mary Magdalene — who is not to be confused with the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus — has long punched well above her textual weight in Christian oral traditions. Biblical scholars believe that she  was called by that name because she came from a town known as Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee. She appears indubitably in the Bible just twice prior to Jesus’s death. She is mentioned in passing in the Gospel of Luke as one of a group of female followers who gathered around the Son of God, who in his turn cast “seven demons” out of her. And the Gospel of John states that she stood at the foot of the cross with Jesus’s mother and aunt just before he “bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.” But according to all four of the canonical gospels, it was she who discovered that Jesus’s tomb was empty three days after the crucifixion and went out to spread word of the miracle. In a sense, then, she might have been the very first true Christian believer, as we understand that descriptor today.

Mary Magdalene appears more prominently in two of the so-called “apocryphal” gospels, those which were not included when the New Testament as we know it today was compiled in fourth-century Alexandria. In fact, she has an entire Gospel of Mary of her own, which has survived only in scattered fragments that were rediscovered during the nineteenth century. It is considered a Gnostic gospel, a part of the same mystical Christian tradition that was embraced by the Cathars of the Medieval Languedoc. These gospels tend to emphasize knowledge over narrative, and this one is no exception. At the beginning of the text, Saint Peter turns to Mary Magdalene at a gathering of Jesus’s disciples after his death and says, “Sister, we know that the savior loved you more than the rest of the women. Tell us the words of the savior which you remember — which you know but we do not.” Alas, most of Mary’s response is missing — but her audience’s response to her response is not. “Surely the savior knows her very well,” says the disciple Levi. “That is why he loved her more than us.”

The Gospel of Philip is another Gnostic gospel, one that was not rediscovered until 1945. It is even more fragmentary than the Gospel of Mary, being riddled with “lacunae,” holes that make complete sentences, much less paragraphs, few and far between. But it does say of Mary Magdalene that “Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her…” something, presumably mouth. Oh là là! That said, it should be understood that such a kiss was not necessarily a romantic or sexual gesture among early Christians, that many congregations exchanged kisses on the lips before and after worship as a matter of course.

The popular tradition that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute or otherwise fallen woman seems to date from considerably later, from a sermon that Pope Gregory I gave around the year 600, in which he conflated her with several other women who appear in the gospels. In the same spirit, Henry Lincoln and his friends were bound to wonder about the Biblical passage on Altar Document 2. Did it mean to say that the Mary who washed Jesus’s feet in the home of Lazarus was actually Mary Magdalene?

At any rate, the Gospels of Mary and Philip, combined with the Lobineau dossier and various other esoteric clues, were enough for them. Almost 30 years after it was born as Noël Corbu’s vague notions of a hidden royal treasure, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château had blossomed into the most earthshaking millennia-spanning conspiracy imaginable.

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 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 AD 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.

But the Catholic Church later had a change of heart. Gregory’s sermon marked the beginning of a campaign to suppress the truth about the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and to slander the wife’s image by turning her into a prostitute, all in the name of preserving the patriarchy and giving exclusive authority over the Christian religion to the popes in Rome. The same impulse caused the powers that were in Rome to do their darnedest to destroy the Merovingian monarchy to their northwest, which was fast emerging as the most powerful in all of Europe.

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 rationalized 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 survived…

From this point on, we are on relatively familiar ground. The Priory of Sion was formed to protect the bloodline and prepare the world for its return to power and glory. Working through its offshoot the Knights Templar, the Priory found something related to its mission in Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades: “It may have been Jesus’s mummified body. It may have been the equivalent, so to speak, of Jesus’s marriage license and/or the birth certificates of his children.”

Should we bother to discuss the fact that ancient Judea had neither marriage licenses nor birth certificates nor even any “equivalents” of same? No. Let us charge giddily onward!

The Cathars, who had gone missing from the last of Lincoln’s Chronicle episodes, make a return at this stage as well, as people who were also privy to the secret before they were massacred by the dastardly Catholic Church. In this telling, the legendary Cathar treasure was quite possibly the real Holy Grail: genealogies of Jesus’s family tree. This treasure was smuggled out of Château de Montségur before it fell and hidden at Rennes-le-Château until it was discovered by Bérenger Saunière 700 years later, just as Albert Salamon first proposed. Lincoln, in other words, no longer believes that the Altar Documents which surfaced through the good offices of Gérard de Sède were truly what was found by Saunière inside his church, even though he still treats them as good-faith evidence for his theories. (Why does he? Because he wants to believe, of course.)

Historians of literature tell us that the legend of the Holy Grail, an object which is never mentioned in the Bible, had its origin in a work by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes. In his chivalric poem Perceval: The Story of the Grail, which he left unfinished upon his death in 1191, Chrétien writes of a quest object which he calls only the graal: Old French for “grail,” meaning a dish, cup, or goblet of some sort. Later writers turned this into the San Graal or San Greal, meaning “Holy Grail,” and invented a number of explanations for its holiness, the most popular of which were that it was either the goblet Jesus and his disciples had drunk from at the Last Supper or a cup that had been used to catch some of the Son of God’s blood at the crucifixion.

The Holy Grail is most associated with English mythology today, with the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Yet it didn’t actually become a popular subject there until the fifteenth century. Two English writers of that era, John Hardyng and Henry Lovelich, replaced the words San Grael in their chronicles and poetry with the words Sang Rael, meaning “Royal Blood.” It isn’t clear why they chose to do this; it may have been a simple mistake, a misreading of the closely spaced, handwritten Old French manuscripts from which they were drawing. But Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent postulate that they were hewing to an older tradition that was in the process of being corrupted into the physical object which features so prominently in Le Morte d’Arthur, that vastly more famous masterpiece by their English contemporary Thomas Malory. Hardyng and Lovelich’s name for the Grail doesn’t suit their agenda perfectly — surely it would have made more sense to refer to “holy” rather than “royal” blood — but they set much store by it nonetheless. We might be able to join them in this if only we could find any text written prior to the fifteenth century that uses the phrase Sang Rael or Sang Raal.

During post-Medieval times, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail tells us, various schemes were mooted by the Priory of Sion to restore the bloodline to its proper place at the head of France, Europe, or possibly the entire world. All of these failed for one reason or another. One particularly clever if rather tasteless twist in the tale involves the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a “genuine” historical forgery, in the sense that, although it was not what it claimed to be, nor was it created specifically to serve the Rennes-le-Château conspiracy theories. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were purported to be plans for world domination by a secret international Jewish cabal. After first appearing in Russia in 1903, they went on to provide grist for the mill of the Holocaust. In this new telling, however, they actually issued from the Priory of Sion, reflecting its plans for world domination.

But why was it necessary for the Priory to go through all of these behind-the-scenes machinations? Why not just tell the world the secret and be done with it? Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent do what they can to answer this eminently reasonable question.

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 no trouble establishing their supremacy. They needed only to disclose and establish their real identity, and the world would acknowledge them. In fact, however, the thing would not have been so simple. Jesus himself was not recognized by the Roman Empire. 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 forever. 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.

Despite or perhaps because of its many blithe leaps over credibility gap after credibility gap, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is an oddly enjoyable, even exciting read. Michael Leigh approaches the material with a novelist’s eye, knowing when to hold back and when to toss the reader a dramatic reveal. Michael Baigent ferrets out countless interesting facts from history’s nooks and crannies which give the book an air of erudition, if one that is ultimately superficial. And Henry Lincoln is Henry Lincoln, wanting so badly for his delusions to be true that we have almost started to believe them as well, if only out of sympathy, by the time he tries to sell us on utopia in the final paragraphs. Over the course of the book, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château has morphed before our eyes into an eschatology. Or is it an entire new religion in the making, the latest offshoot of Christianity’s fruitful tree? In the grand sweep of time, after all, Mormonism isn’t all that much older than this budding faith. Why shouldn’t Pierre Plantard become the next Joseph Smith, with Henry Lincoln in the role of Brigham Young?

All ages like to see themselves as uniquely fallen, and thus uniquely ripe for spiritual renewal. And so, given enough time, all conspiracy theories will become apocalyptic.

We know that the Prieuré de Sion is not a “lunatic fringe” organization. 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 mobilizing 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, tantalizingly, in piecemeal fashion, in measured quantities just sufficient to provide alluring hints. Those hints provoked this book.

In a very real sense the time is ripe for the Prieuré to show its hand. The political systems and ideologies that 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 are increasing cynicism, dissatisfaction, and disillusion. There are increasing psychic stress, anxiety, and despair. But there is also an intensifying quest for meaning, for emotional fulfillment, 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 führer, but a species of wise and benign spiritual figure, a “priest-king” in whom mankind can safely repose its trust. Our civilization 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 fulfillment of emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs.

Such an atmosphere would seem eminently conducive to the Prieuré de Sion’s objectives…

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Sources: The books Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale; Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château by Gérard de Sède; The Holy Place: Saunière and the Decoding of the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L’Enigme de Gisors by Gérard de Sède; Les Mérovingiens à Rennes-le-Château. Mythes ou Réalités. Réponse à Messieurs: Plantard, Lincoln, Vazart & Cie by Richard Bordes; Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI by Richard P. McBrien. Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004.

Online sources include the websites Rennes-le-Château: Where History Meets Evidence and Priory of Sion.com. Also the Misquoting Jesus podcast’s episode on Mary Magdalene.