by Robert Anton Wilson
GNOSIS #6
from
RAWilsonFans Website
Robert
Anton Wilson is the author of numerous books
including the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, The New
Inquisition, and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press, Los
Angeles CA) |
The Priory of Sion first came to the
attention of Americans with the publication in 1981 of
Holy Blood,
Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, a book so sensational and
wildly speculative that many readers decided to believe nothing in
it. Some even doubted the existence of the Priory of Sion, the
alleged 800-year old secret society which is the main topic of the
book. Other, of course, were eager to swallow everything in Holy
Blood, Holy Grail, and there is now a wide subculture, mostly in
occult and witchy circles, who fervently believe that Jesus married
Mary Magdalene and their descendents are alive and well in various
royal families of Europe; the allies or supporters of this “holy
bloodline” make up the backbone of the elusive Priory of Sion,
according to Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh.
Personally, I did not have an immediate yes-or-no reaction to this
new Christian “heresy.” I have long believed that Aristotelian
either/or logic is inadequate to deal with the “real,” or sensory,
or existential, world (since such logic only applies to the
abstractions or fictions created by Jesuits, Randroids,
Marxists and
other metaphysicians). I therefore did not believe or reject all of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail as a lump or package deal. I wondered how
much of it could be verified and how much of it could be refuted and
how much would remain at least temporarily in the “maybe” state of
quantum particles - like a coin tossed in the air and tumbling about
before coming down to rest in a definitive Heads or Tails position.
In checking out the historical scenario of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I
found that the largest part of it belongs in the Maybe category.
That is, most of it is speculation that can neither be proven or disproven by any of the techniques recognized by historians who
attempt to practice scientific method. Of course, there are “high
Maybes” and “low Maybes.” The genealogies relating the von Hapsburgs
or Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to the
Merovingian kings of
the dark ages seem to be high Maybes; although there is a certain
degree of uncertainty in all gene pools, the intermarriages of
European royalty have been zealously documented for many centuries
(since property and inheritance are involved in determining who was
the son of which royal house).
Dozens and scores of other matters-such
as the membership of Sir Isaac Newton in the alleged Priory - are
very low Maybes; the arguments cited by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh
are neither conclusive nor even plausible, and amount to what the
chaps at M.I.T. call “hand waving.” The attempted genealogical links
further back, from the Merovingians to Jesus of Nazareth, are even
lower Maybes and without exaggeration can be called wild guessing.
I decided to investigate other books on the Priory of Sion mystery
in search of further data, if there was any to be found and if the
whole saga was not made up almost entirely of “hand waving.” Since I
have dozens of other interests, I have not devoted the whole of the
past six years to studying this question, but I have done a lot of
reading, much of it in books not available in the United States
(since I live in Europe). I can begin stating my conclusions by
saying, like a famous editor, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Priory of
Sion.” Whether the Priory is 800 years old or has any link to Jesus,
however, are still questions that remain in the the quantum “maybe”
state; the coins in that case have not landed yet, or have not
landed where I can see them.
The Gnomes of
Zurich and the Priory
The European literature on the Priory of Sion is much more
voluminous than is realized by those who have only read Holy Blood,
Holy Grail. It is also much more diverse and, as you will shortly
see, various authors have attempted to expose or explain the Priory
with a variety of theories, some of which make the Jesus/Madalene
bloodline story rather tame by comparison.
To begin with a source that is merely speculative, mysterious, and a
bit sinister, but at least makes sense - before plunging into the
books that are very, very, very mysterious wildly speculative and
make no sense at all - in 1973 there appeared in Basel, Switzerland,
Les Dessows d’une Ambition Politique by a Swiss journalist named
Mattieu Paoli. The thesis of this book was fairly mundane, with only
a few eldritch touches. Paoli had discovered the existence of a
secret Freemasonic society of some sort made up of French
intellectuals and aristocrats, because some of the literature of
this secretive group was being distributed within Switzerland in a
very restricted way. This literature, in fact, was circulated only
to members of the Grand Loge Alpina, the largest and most
influential Freemasonic group in the Swiss cantons.
Of course, European ears prick up with
curiosity at the first mention of the Grand Loge Alpina. Among
Continental conspiracy buffs, the Grand Loge Alpina has a reputation
for unspecified mischief rather akin to that of
the Bohemian Club in
America. That is, although not even the most avid critic has ever
clearly demonstrated that the Grand Loge Alpina engages in criminal
or even unethical behavior, it is known to include some of the
richest men in Switzerland and the genera] assumption is that, like
the Bohemian Club, it is some sort of “invisible government,” or at
least a place where the Power Elite meet to discuss their common
interests. In a general sort of way, the GLA (an abbreviation for
the Grand Loge Alpina which I shall use occasionally to avoid
monotony) is more or less the group that English Prime Minister
Harold Wilson once characterized as “the Gnomes of Zurich” - the
cabal of bankers and financiers who, Wilson claimed, have more power
than any rival coalition in Europe.
Another shady rumor about the Grand Loge Alpina - which is worth
pursuing a bit, since Paoli first discovered the French secret
society through its connection with the GLA - is that the GLA has
heavily infiltrated the Vatican Bank, in collaboration with the
definitely criminal and conspiratorial P2 (or Propaganda due), the
Italian “Freemasonic” group which controlled the Italian secret
police in the 1970s, took money from both the CIA and KGB (and
apparently double-crossed both), had over 900 agents in other
branches of the Italian government and has been accused of every
possible felony from massive bank fraud to assassination and
terrorism, to laundering Mafia drug money through the Vatican Bank
and its affiliates, to plotting a fascist coup.
The source of the claim that the Grand
Loge Alpina infiltrated the Vatican Bank and aided or abetted the
dirty dealings of P2 is David Yallop’s sensational book,
In God’s
Name, which is accurate as far as I have been able to check it but
contains literally hundreds of assertions which cannot be checked
because Yallop claims he cannot divulge his sources without risking
their lives. A large part of Yallop’s book, therefore, also remains,
for non-Aristotelians like me, in the quantum “maybe” state.
(For
the curious: two books dealing with the frauds and felonies of
the
Vatican Bank and their links with P2 and the Mafia, which document
all their claims and do not quote unidentified sources, are Richard
Hammer’s The Vatican Connection and Penny Lernoux’s
In Banks We
Trust.)
A digression about Freemasonry itself is probably obligatory at this
time. Contrary to popular impressions, Freemasons do not belong to
one global brotherhood with a unified system of dogma and ritual.
The world is, in fact, full of Freemasonic lodges that do not
recognize other Freemasonic lodges as “Fellow Craft” or “real
Freemasons” at all.
There are two types of split within the Freemasonic brotherhood -
political and metaphysical.
-
The political split dates back to the
French Revolution, when all Freemasonic groups were anti-Papist and
“radical” (inclined to replace absolute monarchy with either
Constitutional monarchy or with a Republican or even Democratic form
of government). This radical spirit began to splinter when British
Freemasons saw the Continental lodges moving too far to the Left,
and arranged that, in the U.K. at least, the Grandmaster of all
Craft lodges would always be a member of the Royal Family, thereby
guaranteeing a conservative flavor to the Grand Lodge and other
Anglo-dominated Craft groups such as Scottish Rite and the Royal
Arch. Most Continental lodges, however, are still basically radical
(e.g. the Grand Orient Lodge in France and Italy).
-
The metaphysical split occurs within both the conservative and
radical Craft groups. It divides Freemasons into those who, on one
hand, joined Freemasonry for practical purposes (business contacts
or covert political action) and only give lip service to the
“mystical” goals of Freemasonry without knowing or caring much about
what those “mystical” goals are; and, on the other hand, the
“occult” lodges which practice Freemasonry quite consciously as a
system of initiation similar to the ancient Mystery schools,
Gnosticism or Sufism. To make things more complicated, some see the
initiatory rituals of the Craft leading to pantheism or even a kind
of transcendental humanism, while others see the rituals as leading
back to a more traditional theism or even theocracy. To know that
the Priory of Sion is Freemasonic or an offshoot of Freemasonry is
not really to know much about its actual inner tradition.
Freemasonry has been repeatedly condemned by
the Vatican, and all
Freemasons are officially excommunicated. The Presbyterian Church of
Scotland also recently announced that no man can be a Freemason and
a Christian at the same time. This hostility from the ultra-orthodox
is justified (in its own internal logic) because Freemasonry was
based, originally, on the rather Sufic doctrine that all religions
are somewhat distorted remnants of a true Revelation that can only
be rediscovered through gnosis (inner experience) by one person at a
time.
(It is the purpose of Freemasonic ritual
to convey this gnosis by techniques of drama and shock somewhat
similar to those of shamanism, Sufism, the Gurdjieff schools or
Tibetan Buddhism.)
Conservative lodges in Christian
countries, however, still use the Bible as centerpiece of the Craft
altar. (Moslem Freemasons use the Koran.) The Orleanist lodges have
reversed the gnostic tradition and are totally agnostic; they use a
book of blank pages on their altar, and seem to share the Firesign
Theatre’s celebrated doctrine, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”
The Rights and
Privileges of Low-Cost Housing
Returning to Mattieu Paoli and his discovery of the links between
the Grand Loge Alpina and the unknown French Freemasons: M. Paoli’s
attempts to learn more about the latter group read like comic opera
- but so does much of this epic. The French group had a magazine
(limited in circulation only to its own members and those of the
Grand Loge Alpina.) It was called Circuit, and, although
Paoli does
not make much of this, the cover of the first issue he saw depicted
a map of France with a Jewish Star of David superimposed upon it and
something that looks much like a spaceship or UFO hovering above.
(I know that I am pushing the paranoia
buttons of both anti-semites and the more demoniac UFO theorists,
but I also believe that this is precisely the intent of the Priory
of Sion, which seems to have a flair for gallows humor.)
This strange magazine, Circuit, was
devoted entirely to astrology and other “occult” subjects but was
attributed to the Committee to Secure the Rights and Privileges of
Low Cost Housing - a group which Paoli was unable to locate anywhere
and which nobody else has ever been able to track down either.
At this point readers of normal skepticism will begin to share my
suspicion that the Priory of Sion at least has its own brand of
humor. In fact, the very name Priory of Sion may be intended to
spread panic among those weird people who still believe in the
Elders of Zion conspiracy.
Paoli eventually tracked down the publication offices of Circuit. It
was produced, not at the fictitious Committee to Secure the Rights
and Privileges of Low Cost Housing, but at the very real and
powerful Committee for Public Safety of the de Gaulle government in
Paris. The Committee for Public Safety, named after the similar
group during the French Revolution, was managed by two close friends
of President de Gaulle - Andre Malraux, novelist, art critic and
Nobel prizewinner in literature; and one Pierre Plantard de Saint
Clair, about whom we will shortly learn more and understand less.
Paoli, who had noted that de Gaulle had contributed an article to
Circuit, found other reasons to suspect that the de Gaulle
government was aware of, and sympathetic to, the goals of a shadowy
Freemasonic lodge called the Priory of Sion - which, by then, he had
determined was the real group behind the masquerade of the Committee
to Secure the Rights and Privileges of Low Cost Housing. The rest of
Paoli’s book is devoted to demonstrating that the Priory wielded
considerable power in Gaullist and conservative circles; Paoli
speculates, backed by fairly plausible evidence and inference, that
the Priory intends some major shift to the Right in French and
possibly European politics, or some form of Christian Socialism to
rival and undermine the spread of Marxism.
It is probably only a coincidence, but I cannot resist adding that
Paoli was later shot as a spy in Israel.
Extraterrestrials and Rains Of Frogs
Also in 1973 appeared la Race Fabuleuse by Gerard de Sede - a book
which, if you are willing to believe it, explains the Star of David
and the spaceship which Paoli had noted on the cover of Circuit. In
a word, La Race Fabuleuse is the kind of book loved by those who are
wild about von Daniken and Velikovsky. It deals with a secret
society - never called the Priory of Sion explicitly, although de Sede later admitted to Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh (the authors of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail) that he was indeed writing about the Priory
in La Race Fabuleuse. By and large, the book deals with unsolved
mysteries of French history and is full of intriguing puzzles and
novel ideas.
For instance, the town of Stenay has the Devil’s head on its coat of
arms, and frogs are often reported falling from the sky there. If
that’s the kind of thing that turns you on, de Sede is your main man
in the Priory mystery. Other strange data in La Race Fabuleuse
include stuff like this: The last Merovingian king, Dagobert II, was
murdered by persons unknown on December 23, 689, in the Ardennes
forest, which is named after a Stone Age bear-goddess. Arcadia in
ancient Greece was named after a bear-goddess, too, and Nostradamus
is a pen-name which means one devoted to “Our Lady” - a term which
usually, in France, refers to the Virgin Mary.
One whole chapter argues that the
“prophecies” of
Nostradamus are not predictions about the future at
all (that was a mask to slip his quatrains past the censors) but
coded revelations about what really happened in the past and was
excluded from official history. We are offered a new theory about
the Man in the Iron Mask, but that is left unfinished and we are led
instead into the mystery of why Louis VX was obsessed with Poussin’s
painting The Shepards of Arcadia, which brings us back to that bear
goddess again. After a while, one realizes that de Sede is not
explaining anything but dropping hints that lead in dozens of
directions and one suspects the whole book may be a complicated
hoax.
Then de Sede does explain; alas, his source cannot be revealed and
is hidden behind the title and initial, “Marquis de B.” Marquis de B
can neither confirm nor deny that de Sede is quoting him correctly
because he (the Marquis) was murdered in the Ardennes forest, just
like
Dagobert II, and on the anniversary of Dagobert’s death -
December 23, 1971. Anyway, if you are still with me, the reason
Dagobert and the mysterious Marquis were murdered is that they both
belonged to a secret Society made up of persons descended from the
Tribe of Benjamin in ancient Judea; and the Tribe of Benjamin was
not exactly like the orthodox Hebrews at all. In fact, the Tribe of
Benjamin intermarried with extraterrestrials from Sirius, became
superhuman due to this exotic genetic strain, and then migrated to
Greece, and then to France...
Whether or not one is inclined to believe a yarn like that on the
basis of the weird data offered, what is even more intriguing about
La Race Fabuleuse is that, even if one believes in these
Jewish-extraterrestrial French nobles, that theory only explains
some of the historical enigmas de Sede has presented to us. What
about those frogs falling out of the sky at Stenay, and why are two
forests named after bear goddesses made part of de Sede’s narrative,
and who the help are the gang that keeps murdering off these
Supermen, and why can’t the Supermen protect themselves better?
(For that matter, the head of Satan on
the coat of arms of Stenay - below
image - with which the book begins, is never
explained either.)
As the French themselves say, it gives one ferociously to think.
Treasure, Codes and Moon Blue Apples
In a later book, L’ Or de Rennes-le-Chateau, de Sede does not answer
any of these questions, but provides us with more wild theories and
even more strange data. Briefly, a priest manuscripts in an old
church in the Provencal town of Rennes-le-Chateau. (Like Stenay, the
town with the head of Satan on its coat of arms, Rennes-le-Chateau
was the home of a castle of the Merovingian dynasty, to which the
murdered Dagobert II belonged.)
You are going to love this if you have
any sense of humor at all. De Sede does not decode the sauniere
parchments, but the code is so simple a child might guess it. The
manuscripts have some letters raised above the others. Read these
letters only and get the message found by the ingenious authors of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
“TO DAGOBERT II. KING, AND TO SION
BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD... SHEPHERDESS, NO
TEMPTATION, THAT POUSSIN, TENIERS, HOLD THE KEY, PEACE 681. BY
THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE-OR DESTROY-THIS
DAEMON GUARDIAN AT NOON. BLUE APPLES.”
The conjunction of Dagobert and
Sion, of
course, seems to authenticate the medieval origin the Priory claims
for itself (although nobody, to my knowledge, has carbon-dated the Sauniere parchment, which might be a late forgery.) I cordially
invite you make what you can of the rest of the secret message.
Cabalists are especially likely to find something of interest in the
681. Others will be emotionally drawn to conjecture about the
“daemon” and the “horse” (not house) of God. Personally, I am
aesthetically fond of the noon blue apples as a topic for
speculation when I can’t get to sleep at night.....
The damned thing about this is that
there may indeed have the priest who found the parchment, Father Sauniere, became quite wealthy by unknown means, and that has kept
“the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau” a topic of keen interest among
French conspiracy buffs and puzzle addicts for nearly a hundred
years now.
Later, however, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh were to offer another
explanation of Father Sauniere’s wealth. But I will come to that.
Surrealism and
Catholic Traditionalism
This is as good a place as any to mention the short and undated Le Cercle d’ Ulysse by
Jean Delaude. This pamphlet does not bother us
with demons, horses of God or frogs falling from the sky, and
doesn’t have a single noon blue apple. It states bluntly that the
Priory of Sion is a conservative Catholic secret society devoted
principally to the cause of making Archbishop Lefebvre the next
Pope. Delaude also claims that the Grandmaster of the Priory is the
Abbe Ducaud-Bourget (Lefebvre’s leading disciple), who succeeded the
surrealist poet Jean Cocteau, who had been Grandmaster until 1963.
(Holy Blood, Holy Grail produces documentary evidence that Cocteau
was indeed a Grandmaster of the Priory or, at least - one suspects
everything at this point - that somebody did a good job of forging
Cocteau’s name on a Priory document.)
While the noon blue apples have a Cocteauean or surrealist flavor to
them, it does appear that the Sauniere parchment really did exist at
least as early as the 1890s, so I reject the theory proposed by my
wife at this point, which is that the Priory is the last and
greatest of all surrealist pranks. No: Cocteau may have given his
own flavor to the enterprise, but the Priory clearly has a
pre-Cocteau origin, even if it doesn’t necessarily date back to
copulation between ancient Benjaminites and UFOnauts from Sirius.
(Still: it was Cocteau who said “The poet must always be a shady
character” and “One must run faster than beauty, even if it seems
one is running away from it.” I find these remarks helpful in trying
to intuit what the hell the Priory is really all about.)
As for Archbishop Lefebvre and the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget - linked to
the Priory by Delaude, remember? - these are two extremely
right-wing gentlemen indeed, leaders of what is called the Catholic
Traditionalist movement, and many have not been shy about hurling
the word “fascist” at them (Oddly, Lefebvre was a member of the
pro-fascist Action Francaise group in the 1930s, but Ducaud-Bourget
was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in the 1940s.) For our purposes
Lefebvre and Ducaud-Bourget can be characterized as the leaders of
that very conservative faction of the Catholic church, not yet
excommunicated, which is in such total rebellion against the
“Liberalism” (as they see it) of the Vatican that their lack of
excommunication may be the most interesting (and enigmatic) thing
about them.
Archbishop Lefebvre has long proclaimed that “Freemasons and
Satanists” have taken over
the Vatican, although that expression is
a bit redundant in his case, since Catholic Traditionalism regards
all Freemasons as Satanists (an opinion shared by some Protestant
Fundamentalists). Abbe Ducaud-Bourget was the first of the many
speculators to claim that the sudden death of Pope John Paul I
(JP-I) was murder. Still, the Vatican tolerates these heretics
within the Church.
One of their British supporters told The
Guardian newspaper that Lefebvre holds a “weapon” over the Vatican,
but declined to say what the “weapon” was. Naturally, Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh think it has something to do with the sex life of
Jesus.
Father Juan Krolm, the chap who tried to kill Pope John Paul II
(JP-II) at Fatima a few years ago, was ordained and trained by
Archbishop Lefebvre, but later became even more of an extremist.
Amusingly, at his trial, Father Krohn said he had no guilt about
trying to kill “the Antichrist” - his name for JP-Il - and that the
only shame in his life was what he called “sins of the flesh.”
According to
Father Malachi Martin, S.J. - another heretic -
Archbishop Lefebvre was responsible for sending inflammatory
documents to the previous Pope, JP-I (the one whose death has
aroused more conspiracy theories than anybody’s since that of John
F. Kennedy). In
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church,
Father
Martin says this Lefebvre material included documentation of
Freemasonic affiliations of various Cardinals, together with sexual
scandal, including photos of some Vatican officials with their girl
friends and others with their boy friends. Unless I misread him,
Father Martin seems to imply that it is a strange coincidence that
Pope John Paul I’s death followed so quickly upon his receipt of
this expose material from Archbishop Lefebvre.
Whatever one thinks of that speculation, and the claims about the
“murder” of JP-I attributed to unnamed sources in Yallop’s In God’s
Name, there is no doubt that
Mino Pecorelli, editor of the expose
newspaper L’Osservatore Politico Internazionale, did send JP-I a list of P2 and
Grand Loge Alpina members on the the staff of the Vatican Bank just
before that Pontiff’s sudden demise. What happened to Pecorelli
leaves little room for speculation.
He was shot dead on a street in
Rome, quite definitely by professional assassins. If you must
speculate, Signor Pecorelli was shot through the mouth - the
sasso in bocca, traditional Mafia punishment for informers.
The Sex
Life of the Late Redeemer
For the sake of the few who haven’t read the much-discussed Holy
Blood, Holy Grail, it is well to review a few of the counter-claims
of the egregious work. The authors, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh,
argue that, while Paoli may have been an independent investigator,
de Sede and Delaude appear to be members of the Priory of Sion and
that their works are not intended to reveal much of the truth but
just to arouse curiosity, controversy and mystery, and also to
prepare the intellectual climate in France for whatever astounding
political or religious revolution the Priory intends in the near
future.
Specifically, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh
claim there is no evidence that Archbishop Lefebvre and his
right-wing crowd have any link with the Priory; they assert that
that asserted linkage is a Priory joke at Lefebvre’s expense. They
also reject the extraterrestrial yarn, and replace it with their own
lovely yarn that the Priory is descended from Jesus and his
unacknowledged bride, Mary Magdalene.
It is worth mentioning at this point that the alleged romantic
alliance between Jesus and Magdalene is not the invention of Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh. The Gnostic gospels - all as early and
historically as plausible as the orthodox gospels - imply such a
relationship several times, and Jesus is described as kissing
Magdalene romantically in one celebrated text. It is also true that
celibacy was regarded by orthodox Jews of Jesus’ time much as
it is regarded in the post-Freudian world of today: namely, as a
rather kinky, unmanly and somewhat reverse life-style.
Finally, Jesus is called “Rabbi” even in
the orthodox gospels and no man could be a rabbi in orthodox Judea
at that time who was not married. These facts are well known to
occultists and freethinkers and have even been discussed, albeit
gingerly, by a few liberal Christian theologians. What is unique
about Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the claim that the offspring of
Jesus and his bride are alive and among us today; but even that has
a kind of precedent. That odd little cult, the British Israelites,
have always claimed that the royal family of England is descended
from the House of David - although they never claimed the descent
was by way of Jesus, of course.
The shock that orthodox Christians feel at the concept of Jesus as
husband and father is distinctly odd in historical perspective. The
leaders of the other major patriarchal religions • Zoroaster,
Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius - were all family men.
As for the pagan gods: some were family men, but some were also
notorious fornicators. Christian sex-denial is a very strange and
eccentric departure from the norms of world religion, in which
fertility is generally considered sacred and venerated as one of the
main manifestations of divine grace and beauty.
Be that as it may, at this point two suspicions cross a mind as
baroque as mine. First, if certain books in French may be Priory
propaganda disguised to look like outside investigations, as Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh claim, could their own Holy Blood, Holy Grail be
more such propaganda, similarly disguised? And second, why do the
authors, like de Sede, drag in many subjects which do not fit their
own solution to the mysteries? Are they hinting or blandly raising
smoke screens or are they just disorganized in their thinking?
(For instance, they spend almost as much
space as de Sede on the bear-goddesses of Greece and France, but
this has no logical connection with their Jesus/Magdalene theory any
more than it has with de Sede’s Sirius theory. They also spend a lot
of time on Poussin’s painting, The Shepherds of Arcadia, without
ever really explaining its importance, although I think perhaps they
are hinting that the grave in the painting is that of the son of
Jesus and Magdalene, who evidently died in Rennes-le-Chateau in
southern France. )
Concretely, at least Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh did manage to get an
interview with a member of the Priory of Sion, and one who even
admitted he was the Grandmaster of the whole lodge. This was the
shadowy
Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair whom some of you may remember
co-managed the Committee for Public Safety (under de Gaulle) from
the office where the Priory’s magazine, Circuit, was published.
M. Plantard was marvelously esoteric in his conversation with Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh. He neither confirmed nor denied their theory that
he is descended from Jesus and Magdalene. He explained that the
“treasure” in the Father Sauniere parchment was “spiritual” rather
than “material” and added the helpful (or deliberately obscure)
comment that this spiritual treasure “belongs to Israel” and will be
returned there “at the proper time.”
Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh think the “treasure” is the
royal
bloodline of David and Jesus, which flows in the veins of M.
Plantard and his young son...
Bankers,
Anarchists and the Hollow Earth
Since Holy Blood, Holy Grail appeared in 1981, Baigent, Lincoln and
Leigh brought forth in England, in 1986, The Messianic Legacy, a
book which attempts to support their Jesus/Magdalene bloodline
theory with more evidence, most of it speculative. (As I was about
to mail this off to the editors of GNOSIS, I learned that this book
has just been published in the U.S. by Henry Holt & Co.) Naturally,
some further tidbits come to light. Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair
gave these intrepid researchers several more interviews, all
hermetic at best and downright dishonest at worst; then he abruptly
announced that he had resigned as Grandmaster of the Priory and was
not allowed to inform them of the name of his successor.
The door, in short, was closed in the faces of the investigators and
they were left out in the cold trying to make what they could out of
the gnomic utterances M. Plantard had granted them. Some of his
leads, however, did allow them to document, rather convincingly,
that the Priory of Sion is not an exclusively French/Swiss product
but has powerful branches in England and the U.S., seemingly linked
to parts of the banking industry... which reminds one of Paoli’s
linkage between the Priory and Swiss banking, leading to grubby and
sordid notions of what sort of mystery we are actually exploring
here.
For those who find International Banking Conspiracies too corny (or
too right wing), there is always the alternative of Michael Lamy’s
Jules Verne: Initiate et Initateur (1984). According to M. Lamy,
Verne was not only an initiate of the Priory of Sion but of the
Bavarian Illuminati as well, and the Priory itself is, in many
respects, a regrouping and a new false front for the Illuminati. The
Priory’s politics are Orleanist, which Lamy clarifies as
“aristocratic-anarchistic” - i.e. Nietzschean. (Think of Verne’s
characteristic heroes.) The real delight, however, is the secret of
Rennes-le-Chateau, the mysterious town where Father Sauniere found
the parchment about Dagobert, Sion, the treasure and those noon blue
apples, and where there is a grave that looks like the one in
Poussin’s enigmatic painting.
The secret is - ready? - that the
earth is hollow, of course (didn’t
you always suspect it?) and that in a Church at
Rennes-le-Chateau is
a secret door leading down to the underworld, which is inhabited by
a race of immortal superhumans. You see? Verne hinted at this,
various times, in several of his novels.
Actually, the church mentioned by Lamy really exists and even if
nobody else has found the hidden door leading down to the hollow
earth, it is certainly one of the weirdest churches in Christendom.
Among other things, it has a motto over the door saying ‘THIS PLACE
IS TERRIBLE.” It also has, among the Stations of the Cross, one
showing a child clad in what might be Scottish plaid among the crowd
watching Jesus carry his cross. Another Station can be interpreted
as showing conspirators removing the late Redeemer from the grave
during the night, as if to fake the Resurrection. You will be
delighted to know that this church is officially dedicated to Mary
Magdalene.
Father Sauniere, who was responsible for these un-Papist details of
decor, was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light in Paris, a
group which at various times also included Gerard Encausse and
Aleister Crowley. Encausse, under the pen-name “Papus,” wrote one of
the most influential modern books on Tarot; he later went to Russia
and became involved with the mystic Rasputin who wielded
considerable influence on the Czar and his family before the Russian
Revolution. Crowley wrote another influential book on Tarot and
became Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society
almost as inexplicable (to outsiders) as the Priory of Sion.
Curiously, both the Priory and the O.T.O. are linked, by various
commentators, with the Knights Templar, the medieval secret society
which is also claimed to be the origin of Freemasonry by many
Masonic historians.
The
Illuminati and the Knights of Malta
I’m sorry, but at this point I cannot resist throwing in one of
those odd coincidences that I keep stumbling upon in researching
secret societies. Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims, with some evidence,
that Father Saunier’s weird church in Rennes-le Chateau (near an old
Knights Templar fortification, by the way) was built with money’s
the eccentric priest received from the Archduke Ferdinand von
Hapsburg (who, they also claim, gave the other money that led the
town to believe Sauniere had found a treasure). A hundred years
earlier, the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg legalized Freemasonry in
Austria, abolished Catholic schools which he replaced with modern
secular (or non-denominational) schools and was the hero of
Beethoven’s first major work, the Emperor Joeseph Cantata, in which
he is hailed as “bringer of light” and “foe of darkness and
superstition.”
According to Maynard Solomon’s
biography, Beethoven,
the Illuminati paid Ludwig to write that bit
of music propaganda for the von Hapsburg “Illuminated Monarch” (as
he was often called). It almost makes one wonder if the von
Hapsburgs are kingpins in some occult group at least two centuries
old, as the Priorty books imply.
Of course, Holy Blood, Holy Grail includes genealogies which allege
that the von Hapsburgs are descended from Jesus and
Mary Magdalene.
However, the connection is through Dagobert and
the Merovingians, so
if you would rather believe de Sede’s thesis, the von Hapsburgs are
actually descended from ancient Hebrews and extraterrestrials from
Sirius. Whichever theory you prefer, or even if you doubt both of
them, it is interesting that the von Hapsburgs have held the
honorary title of Kings of Jerusalem for nearly 800 years.
The current scion of the clan,
Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, is President
of the League for the United States of Europe, a group which has
played a large role in creating the European parliament and is
steadily working toward greater unity between the European nations.
He is also a member of - hold Your breath -
the Bilderbergers, which
gives him two odd links with
Bernhard of the Netherlands. Prince
Bernhard was the founder and prime mover behind the Bilderberger
society, and the same Prince Bernhard is, according to the Baigent-Lincoln-Leigh
genealogies, descended Merovingian kings and hence from either Jesus
or those ancient astronauts from Sirius.
On the other hand, Dr. von Hapsburg is known as a fervent anti-Conununist
and is a Knight of Malta - i.e. an officer of the
Sovereign Military
Order of Malta (SMOM), the most right-wing of all Catholic secret
societies.
Other known members of SMOM have included,
-
Franz von Papen (the man who
persuaded President von Hindenberg to make Hitler the
Chancellor of Germany)
-
William Casey (the CIA chief who
died during the Irangate hearings)
-
General Richard Gehlen (Hitler’s
Chief of Intelligence who later became director of covert
operations in Soviet Russia for the CIA)
-
General Alexander Haig
-
Alexandre de Marenches (former
chief of French intelligence)
-
William F. Buckley Jr.
-
Clare Booth Luce (who was, of
course, a Dame, rather than a Knight, of Malta)
-
Licio Gelli (founder of the P2
conspiracy which laundered cocaine money for the CIA’s
favorite Latin American dictators by way of the Cisalpine
Overseas Bank whose board of directors included Vatican bank
chief Bishop Paul Marcinkus)
-
the late Roberto Calvi of Banco
Ambrosiano, who co-owned the Cisalpine Bank and was so
mysteriously found hanging from a bridge in London on June
18, 1982
-
the late Michele Sindona, lawyer
for the Mafia and manager of Vatican financial affairs in
the U.S., who was convicted of 65 counts of bank fraud in
New York, convicted of murdering a bank examiner in Rome,
and died in prison while awaiting trial on further charges
relating to the P2 bombings in Italy in the 1970s.
(See Lernoux’s In Banks We Trust for
details on P2, the CIA and the banking industry. See
Covert Action
Information Bulletin No. 25, Winter 1986 for more on SMOM and its
role as Vatican secret police.)
English journalist Gordon Thomas claims,
in The Year of Armageddon, that the Knights of Malta serve as
couriers between the Vatican and the CIA.
Lest the naive begin to think all this makes some kind of sense in
terms of a rational paradigm involving Catholic and other
conservative interests plotting to accomplish rational
political-economic goals that seem desirable to them, every part of
this jigsaw except the Knights of Malta is hostile to the Vatican
and has often been officially condemned by the Vatican. The
Illuminati, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Hermetic Brotherhood of
Light, P2, and the Priory of Sion are all included in the Vatican’s
general condemnation (reiterated for over 200 years now) against all
Freemasonic lodges.
All of these occult offshoots of Masonry
seem to include in their systems certain Hermetic and Sufic ideas
that have been condemned as heresy by the Vatican, and the books I
have summarized seem to demonstrate that all these secret societies
wish to replace the Vatican with some form of mystic Christianity
with distinctly gnostic overtones.
Jungian
and Rastafarian Connections?
The Cult of the Black Virgin, by Ean Begg, leads us further from
clarity and deeper, much deeper, into the murk. To begin with, Begg
‘s biography on the back of the book informs us that he is a former
Dominican monk and currently a Jungian psychotherapist - a
suggestive background for a man who has written the most
philosophically dense Priory of Sion book to appear thus far.
Basically, Begg deals with one of the great unsolved mysteries in
European archaeology and in Catholic history - the existence of well
over 400 statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary in European churches, in
which “the Mother of God” (as Catholics call her) is clearly and
unambiguously depicted as Black or Negroid.
Of course, the disciples of Marcus Garvey in general, and the
Rastafarians in particular, argue that Jesus and his family (and the
ancient Israelites in general) were Black; but these statues are not
a Rastafarian propaganda project. Most of
the Black Virgins in
European churches have existed for several hundred years and some
seemingly have been around since at least the birth of Christianity.
You will not be surprised to learn that Ean Begg attributes them to
the Priory of Sion, which he holds is at least as old as the authors
of Holy Blood, Holy Grail claimed in their wildest passages.
Why did the Priory go around planting evidence that Jesus’s mother
was Black? If they wanted to implant some proto-Rastafarian racial
doctrines about “God’s chosen people” being Black, why didn’t they
make Jesus and Joseph and the disciples Black, too, while they were
about it? Begg does not answer these questions. In fact, he does not
answer any questions, but raises more questions instead. He spends a
lot of time quoting familiar arguments that the Black Virgins were
originally idols of the Egyptian goddess, Isis, which the Christians
co-opted; but he shows that this doesn’t explain all the Black
Virgins, many of which were created in recent centuries and not
imported from Egypt.
Begg goes on to give us an especially tender version of Jung’s
theory of the Anima - the Ideal Female image in every male psyche -
and tells us legends in which Isis and Mary Magdalene function as
incarnations of the Anima. He seems to be hinting at the theory that
Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, but he never states that
explicitly. He also implies, repeatedly, that the Black Virgins are
not Virgins at all but portray Magdalene, an aspect of the Anima
which he suggests a more important to Western man than the Virgin
archetype. Many digressions deal with the Tarot, which Begg tries to
persuade us is chiefly a guide to the inner mysteries of the Priory
of Sion. (Encausse and Crowley, members of the Hermetic Brotherhood
of Light which included Father Sauniere, were also authorities on
the Tarot.)
After taking us all around Robin Hood’s barn, Begg leaves us with
two strong impressions or hints: we need to understand Jung and we
need to understand Sufism. Somehow, Jung, who considered himself a
Gnostic, and Sufism, which some claim is an Eastern branch of
Gnosticism, are the true keys to the Black Vlrgins and to the Priory
of Sion’s ultimate mission on this planet. Many hints seem to imply
broadly that Begg writes not as an outsider but as an initiate of
the Priory’s mysteries.
It is of some interest that Begg confirms the claim of the new book
by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh (The Messianic Legacy) that M. Plantard de Saint-Clair is no longer the Grandmaster of the Priory
of Sion and that the identity of the current Grandmaster is not to
be revealed to the profane.
Atlantis
and the Vagina of Nuit
The latest and most remarkable book in this whole bizarre area is
Genisis by David Wood. That is not a misprint but a Joycean or
hermetic pun; we are back again to the Magdalene-Isis connection.
Wood is the kind of writer who usually deals with ley lines, and he
has gone over the area around Rennes-le-Chateau drawing lines and
making diagrams like a pixilated Pythagoras. What he has found is
that the Church of Mary Magdalene is connected in a complex pattern
with every other major church or primitive megalith in the area and
the lines connecting them make up a pattern which Mr. Wood calls
“the vagina of Nuit.”
It looks about as much like a vagina to
me as Ronald Reagan looks like the Guggenheim Museum in New York;
but I am of the cynical school of cartographers who believe any
seven spots can be connected into a ley-line pattern if you use a
small enough map and a thick enough pencil. Mr. Wood, however finds
staggering revelations in the genitalia of this early Egyptian
sky-goddess.
It is impossible to give a coherent account of the argument of
Genisis for the same reason it is hopeless to try to explain Dali’s
Debris of on Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a
Telephone a Rationalist. Isis is one aspect of the Earth Mother, and
Nuit is another aspect, and for some reason the Knights Templar, who
were accused of sodomy by the Church, did not really commit sodomy
but instead cut off their penises and saved them in special chalices
(for reasons that make sense to Mr. Wood but not to me), and this
somehow or other proves that France was originally colonized from
Atlantis, and the human race as a whole (not just some royal
families) is of partly extraterrestrial origin, having been the
product of interbreeding between proto-humans and the Space Brothers
who appear as the sons of God in Genesis, and the genetic engineer
who raised us above the animal to the human level got himself
included in the Bible, much maligned, as Satan, and ... well, it
gets wilder and hairier as it goes along.
For what it is worth, I can comment that Aleister Crowley - once a
member of the same Hermetic Brotherhood of Ligh that included Father
Sauniere - believed that the world was astrologically predestined to
experience a revival of the worship of Nuit. Crowley also believed
any vagina was the vagin; of Nuit to a Tantric magician who knew how
to turn his beloved into an incarnation of the goddess. Crowley’s
sexmagick, however, did not involve amputating the penis but rather
prolonging coitus to the state of hypnotical trance. Nuit was also
Black, like the mysterious “Virgins” in Ean Begg’s book. And
de Sede
hinted, way back in La Race Fabuleuse, that the head of Satan on the
coat of arms of Stenay is somehow crucial to the Priory of Sion
mystery.
And the Beat
Goes on...
Before attempting to conclude or summarize all this, I have two
personal anecdotes to add to the tale. The first is a report from
Frederic Lehrman, the dean of Nomad University in Seattle, who
visited Rennes-le-Chateau a year ago and looked over some of the
sites mentioned in the Priory literature. Lehrman met a young man
who was also interested in the whole mystery and who had made a
major discovery. He had actually found a hidden sheaf of papers,
inside a hollow statue in the Temple of Magdalene (or so he said.)
The papers were not in code, like those found by Father Sauniere in
the 1890s and they did not deal with Merovingian kings or noon blue
apples. They were stories from a German newspaper dated 1904 and did
not refer in any way to any of the subjects connected to the Priory
in any previous literature.
Perhaps some joker placed those old German news clippings in the
statue to bewilder the next researcher. (But how would a casual
joker guess that a statue was hollow?) Perhaps the Priory did it as
another of their merry pranks. Perhaps there really is some deep
code in those news stories and the young man will find it reveals
the secret of the Alchemical Furnace or who shot Kennedy, or where
Moses was when the light went out, or something like that.
My second anecdote is even more ambiguous. At a seminar in
Hof-am-Frankenwald in Bavaria - the old stomping grounds of the
Illuminati - I actually met a man whom I’ll call Fritz, who was a
member of the Priory of Sion (or so he alleged). He came from
Holland and was very much the Amsterdam New Age type, which is not
unlike the Marin County New Age type. He told me that all the books
on the Priory were inaccurate and that the true initiates of the
Prior found them all hilariously silly.
On the grounds that maybe Fritz really was a member of the Priory of Sion and not a put-on artist, I paid very close attention to
everything he said during the seminar week-end. He was pro-Green (in
Europe that means ecological, decentralist and anti-Marxist
radical.) He was keen on space colonies, negative on life extension,
shared the Bucky Fuller-Werner Erhard-Bob Geldorf vision that we can
abolish starvation in this generation, and seemed unconvincing (to
me) when agreeing with some local Theosophists about the evils of
psychedelic drugs. He used the word “pneumocracy” to describe his
ideal society and explained that this means “rule by the Spirit.”
(That we are entering the age of rule by the Spirit was the “heresy”
of Joachim of Fiore, 13th century founder of a stream of radical
millenarianism in Europe.) All of Fritz’s attitudes would seem to be
typical of what I know of left-wing occult Freemasonry in
Continental Europe.
Due to my unfortunate sense of humor and my inclination to mischief,
I tried a little test on Fritz when the weekend was over. When I
shook his hand, I formed a certain series of grips and whispered a
formula I shall here hide behind the metathesis, “Bob Saw Jupiter’s
Moons.” He looked startled and responded with the correct
counter-sign and the words I shall disguise as “Tuba Concerto.” I
cannot say more about this for reasons of discretion, but I can
vouch for Fritz’s initiation into one of the higher levels of
orthodox Freemasonry or else into one of the “occult” Freemasonic
lodges that share these grips and magick formulae.
This adds some credibility to his claim
of membership in the Priory of Sion, or at least to some personal
knowledge of the Priory. (Even if he belonged to a different occult
lodge, those grips would entitle him to visit in any occult
Freemasonic lodge on the Continent, and would probably get him into
Priory meetings.)
In conclusion, I think we have a high B.S. factor in all the public
revelations about the Priory of Sion. I offer five alternative
theories which all make -sense to me at various times, although I am
far from totally convinced by any of them.
1. The Priory is a left-wing
occult group in the tradition of the Grand Orient lodge and
the
Illuminati. Its intent is to overthrow the political power of
the Vatican and recreate Gnostic Christianity. Its long-range
politics (within this model) are still mysterious. Gnostic cults
have varied from theocratic autocracy and downright tyranny to
Dionysian and or Discordian anarchism.
2. The Priory is, like P2 in Italy, actually a front for
the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). Its function is to
serve as another Vatican secret police organization and pretend
to be Freemasonic, so that if the members are caught in any high
crimes the Freemasons will be blamed instead of the Knights of
Malta.
(This actually seems to have worked in Italy. Although
the ringleaders of P2 - Gelli, Calvi, Sindona - were all Knights
of Malta, hardly anybody knows that who hasn’t researched P2
thoroughly, and most people think of P2 as “a Freemasonic
conspiracy.”)
3. The Priory really is a front for Archbishop Lefebvre
and Catholic Traditionalism. It intends to abolish Liberalism,
Rationalism, Socialism and Modernism in general, and usher us
back into the medieval world of an absolute Papacy and no more
damned heretics anywhere. All the seeming evidence that appears
to contradict this is part of a smoke screen and intended to
dupe those who would not otherwise cooperate in such a
reactionary program.
4. The Priory is made up of Totally Enlightened Beings
who happen to be very rich bankers and love art and artists.
They enjoy playing mind-fuck games on other, un-Enlightened
financiers and on groups that imagine they are Enlightened but
aren’t.
5. What we have here is just another commercial
“conspiracy,” or “affinity group,” with an unusually Continental
flavor of art and culture about it. Cocteau ‘s membership seems
well documented; almost as well documented is that of Claude
Debussy, the composer; Malraux could hardly have been ignorant
of what was going on in the office he shared with Pierre
Plantard de Saint-Clair. By and large, Continental politicians
and businessmen are more “cultured” and “intellectual” than
their American counterparts, and think it prestigious rather
than “queer” to have artists among their friends: Europe does
not share the American delusion that artistic/philosophical
interests are unmasculine and make one unfit for positions of
power.
The Priory of Sion might be what
the
Bohemian Club could have become if America’s ruling class were not
terrified that any intellectual interests on their part would make
them look like “sissies.” In short, the Priory could be a club of
rich and powerful men who also enjoy occult and historical
romanticizing: the aristocratic equivalent of the Society for
Creative Anachronism or Dungeons and Dragons.
Whichever theory you prefer, or if you like a sixth theory of your
own, the whole Priory of Sion saga seems to shed a new and (I would
say) surrealist or psychedelic light on the famous remark by Ishmael
Reed:
“The history of the world is the
history of the warfare between secret societies.”
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