Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
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Such a technique, allied to (as Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh would have it) the synthesizing of radically diverse subject matter into the requisite coherent pattern, creates a scholarship where absolutely anything is possible, granted first the authors’ desire for it to be possible. Consider the section of The Messianic Legacy where they attempt to get a second wind out of the miasmic Priory of Sion. This body, they claim, has in modern times been operating in a murky sphere “where Christian Democratic parties of Europe, various movements dedicated to European unity, royalist cliques, neo-chivalric orders, freemasonic sects, the CIA, the Knights of Malta and the Vatican swirled together, pooled themselves temporarily for one or another specific purpose, then disengaged again.”10 One would like to have been present at a swirling involving, say, the CIA and the Knights of Malta on one side, and the Freemasons and the Vatican on the other.
The playful Henry Lincoln has also been fond of using the partiality and contradictory nature of New Testament interpretations to sanction his own liberties. Is it more likely, he asks, that a man should have been born of a virgin, been able to walk on water, and rise from the dead than that he should have been born as other men are born, married, and raised a family? It’s a good line, but the trouble is that while the Gospels do create some evidence for a man called Jesus who led a religious movement in the early years of the Roman Empire, there is no evidence whatsoever from any source at all that that man might have been married or had children. None. And it’s hard not to be amazed by Lincoln’s own recollection, some years after The Holy Blood, of how the sacred Merovingian bloodline occurred to him and his colleagues. During a discussion, one of them remarked that there was something “fishy” about the Merovingians. And then, said Lincoln, “the penny dropped with an almighty clang!”11 Merovingians, fishy. Fish, early Christian symbol. Early Christian symbol, Jesus. Jesus, Jesus’s kids. Therefore, Merovingians, Jesus’s kids. And this was “a book that cannot easily be dismissed” according to the Reverend Neville Cryer, then general director of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
The Grail Upturned, the Blood Congealing
Even before discovering the real story of how The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—and hence Dan Brown’s fact box—came about, nitpickers and academic pedants were noticing some of the inconvenient improbabilities of the core story. Let’s begin with the key proposition, that the bloodline of Jesus was safeguarded in the persons of the Merovingian kings and their descendants. A moment’s pause should make us realize what an exhausting proposition this is. By the time the Jesus descendant married into the Merovingian house (four centuries and twelve generations after the supposed progeny of the Messiah first disembarked on the Riviera), there must have been thousands upon thousands of other Jesus descendants, or else we’d be talking about inbreeding that would make Pitcairn Island look like Piccadilly Circus. By now there would be millions of Jesus folk walking the earth, and yet, perversely, only one of them would be guarded by the Priory of Sion.
You can illustrate this point with reference to Elizabeth Windsor, who may trace her ancestry back to Edward the Confessor, but in the company of hundreds of thousands of others. At various times, the British monarchies have been fairly arbitrarily decided—by invasions, civil wars, coups, and revolutions—giving Scots, English, and Welsh the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Bruces, the Yorkists, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the House of Orange, the Hanoverians, and so on. Any branch of any of the alternatives would have thrown up, over time, a complete city’s worth of claimants to the thrones. Whom would a Confessor-bloodline support group have chosen from among the stadia full of possibilities?
The next problem is that Pierre Plantard, the supposed descendant of Jesus at the time that Lincoln et al reached their sensational conclusion, while certainly claiming to be the heir to Dagobert II (and who wasn’t?), never claimed to be a long-distance offspring of the Lamb of God. In fact, in 1983 he went to some lengths to disavow the claim made on his behalf by the questing Holy Blooders.
Third, the entire story of the Grail itself—cup, blood, and everything else—seems not to have existed before being invented in the late twelfth century by the poet Chrétien de Troyes. De Troyes, whose patron was Count Philip of Flanders, wrote The Story of the Grail as one of several knightly romances, and the popularity of the poem led to it being copied, altered, reedited, and retold over succeeding years. But, as the historian Richard Barber wrote, “In 1180, as far as we can tell, no one would have known anything of the ‘holy thing’ called the Grail.”12 The claim about the Sang Real, adds Barber, is based on a fifteenth-century English author’s mistranslation from the original French.
Fourth, there was no secret about where Bérenger Saunière, the priest of Rennes-le-Château got his wealth from: for just under a decade, between 1896 and 1905, Saunière supplemented his Church stipend by selling masses, actively advertising his Mass-saying services in newspapers and taking payment in the form of postal orders. At one point, Saunière was receiving as many as 150 postal orders a day, often from religious communities and frequently from outside France. Despite this, he wasn’t actually that rich: when he applied for a loan in 1913, he was assessed by a bank as being worth only 13,000 francs.
Fifth, the hollow Visigothic pillar in Saunière’s church wherein lay the cryptic parchments is actually solid and unable to contain anything. Sixth, the tomb near Rennes supposedly depicted by Poussin was built in 1903 to mark the burial of the local landowner’s wife and grandmother; the painting The Shepherds of Arcadia was completed 250 years earlier, somewhere between 1637 and 1639. There are many other objections, but six is enough.
You Knew It All Along
Things truly began to unravel, however, when people started to look into the life story of Jesus-descendant Pierre Plantard. In late 1940, when most of France was under occupation, a man signing himself Varran de Varestra wrote a letter from Paris to Marshal Pétain, the venerable head of state of the rump government of France in Vichy. The letter requested that Pétain do everything in his power to prevent the country being involved in further conflict. “You must,” begged Varestra, “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,” and added, “At present I have about a hundred reliable men under me who are devoted to our cause. They are ready to fight to the bitter end in response to your orders.”13
Seven weeks later, a report for the French secretary of state for the interior stated that Varestra was “none other than PLANTARD, Pierre Athanase Marie, born in Paris on 18 March 1920 (7th), the son of Pierre and RAULO, Amélie Marie, of French nationality, a bachelor.” Plantard senior, said the ministry report, had been a butler who had died after an accident at work, and Plantard junior now lived in a two-room apartment with his mother, whose small pension kept them both. It then detailed Plantard’s youthful activities in setting up or running various groups, some of them avowedly anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic. His current organization, La Renovation Nationale Française, the official detailed laconically, “seems to be a ‘phantom’ group whose existence is purely a figment of the imagination of M. Plantard. Plantard claims 3,245 members, whereas this organization currently only has four members (the executive committee). It is worth noting that one member of this committee, Mme. Grubius, is the daughter of the concierge at 22 Place Malesherbes.”14 Then, “Plantard . . . seems to be one of those dotty, pretentious young men who run more or less fictitious groups in an effort to look important.”15
The dotty Plantard turns up again in police records in 1954, which reveal that he was held by the Germans, who did not approve of secret societies, for four months in Fresnes prison toward the end of the war. In June 1956, the mayor of Annemasse in Haute-Savoie, where Plantard was now living, wrote a letter to a sub-prefect, referring to Plantard’s imprisonment at the end of 1953 after being found guilty of offenses against property. Also in the summer of 1956, and also in Annemasse, the regist
ration took place of a new organization—the Priory of Sion. Pierre Plantard was one of the four founding signatories to the statutes of an organization pledged to “the defense of the rights and the freedom of low-cost housing.” Thereafter the Priory fades even from recent history.
In January 1956, there was a series of stories in the French press, stories that originated with Noel Corbu, a restaurant proprietor in Rennes-le-Château who now owned the Saunière estate. Corbu may have been trying to get publicity for his rather isolated Hôtel de la Tour, which had opened the previous Easter, and his chosen method was to tell a wonderful tale of treasure and hollow columns. One headline to an interview in a local newspaper with Corbu read, “The Billionaire Priest of Rennes-le-Château’s Fabulous Discovery.”16
At some point in the next five or so years, Pierre Plantard went to Rennes and met Corbu. The Saunière fable captivated him; perhaps he also understood its value both financially and in creating a basis for his longtime fantasy of establishing his own importance. Whatever his motives, he set to work on writing a book about the treasure, incorporating new details such as the parchments supposedly found inside the Visigothic pillar, with their link to Dagobert II and the lost Merovingian line. His friend Philippe de Cherisey, a boozy but bright aristocrat, forged the parchments on Plantard’s behalf, and these, along with a number of other manufactured documents, were placed by the pair in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they might be discovered to give corroboration to Plantard’s story.
Unfortunately, no publisher could be found who wanted to buy Plantard’s book; perhaps it was too badly written. But Plantard did have one acquaintance, Gérard de Sède, who could turn a word. In 1967, de Sède’s L’Or de Rennes appeared in print. The contract for the book included Philippe de Cherisey, entitling him to a share of what the book might earn. Extant from this period, there are dozens of letters exchanged between Plantard, de Cherisey, and de Sède detailing the progress of the hoax and discussing strategies for how to deal with the inevitable refutations of their stories .17 One of the elaborations was to construct a history and a role for Plantard’s fictitious Priory, and deposit that, too, in the Bibliothèque Nationale. There it lay, awaiting discovery by Henry Lincoln, intrigued by the de Sède book, indulged by the BBC, and conned by the French hoaxers.
All this was revealed in 1983—so, not long after the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—by Jean-Luc Chaumeil, a journalist on the fringe of the Priory hoaxers who still has the letters and a forty-four-page confession to forgery given to him by Philippe de Cherisey. Chaumeil’s accusations were borne out in this country by researchers such as Paul Smith, Robert Richardson, and the BBC producer Henry Cran, who all did what the original Chronicle team so signally failed to do, and checked the Priory story out. Cran, in the BBC’s 1996 Timewatch program “The History of a Mystery,” even managed to trace the Plantard line back to the sixteenth century, where they found a peasant who grew walnuts.
It was all a hoax, every bit of it. It began with a story, which then developed into a massive fantasy, support for which was manufactured by forging documents. Many of these were lists of names copied from other genealogies and registers, and then tinkered with; others were invented travelogues. The motives of the participants varied. De Cherisey was interested in surrealism and in the 1960s was involved in an organization called the Workshop for Potential Literature (Oulipo), in which the members played around with puzzles, ciphers, and codes. Plantard, as we have seen, had been trying most of his life to give himself some significance through shadowy or secret organizations, joining the many people through the centuries who have been attracted to the idea of membership in a clandestine society with elite, and sometimes occult, powers to organize the world. Finally, there were those motivated simply by money.
And one can only imagine their enjoyment at playing Lincoln along, constructing a clue here, suggesting an answer there, and perhaps wondering how on earth their deception managed to keep the BBC man and his associates in programming for the best part of a decade. Eventually, however, even Plantard exhausted his capacity for invention, admitting under oath in the mid-1990s that the entire business had been a fraud. When Plantard died in 2000, almost everyone who had followed the story knew that the world had just lost one of its more harmless and entertaining con artists. Everyone, that is, except Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Dan Brown.
Plantard’s Willing Victims
As for Henry Lincoln, in 2004 he told an interviewer that the late Pierre Plantard was so inscrutable and unreadable that he would have made a wonderful poker player. “In fact,” he went on, almost vehemently, “we don’t know anything about Bérenger Saunière the priest, we don’t know anything about Pierre Plantard, we don’t know anything about the Priory of Sion. We know almost nothing. That’s the word. The demonstrable facts are very few. All the rest is hearsay evidence, guesswork, and interpretation. None of the books written, including my own, have any validity whatsoever.”18 Though his words are revealing, Lincoln was quite wrong. By the time he gave this interview, we knew a great deal. In fact, we knew categorically that the Priory didn’t exist and that the documents were a con. But what we now want to know—for the purposes of this book—is whether the Holy Blood team were themselves the innocent (if materially enriched) victims of a hoax, or whether they effectively agreed to be deceived, or whether they were in some way complicit in the deception.
Chaumeil’s own book exposing the Priory scam went to press after the last of the Chronicle programs in 1979 but before The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail appeared in 1982. Chaumeil told Channel 4 television that he had alerted the Holy Blood trinity to the fact of the scam up to a year before they completed their book. This allegation was subsequently put to Michael Baigent by the actor and TV historian Tony Robinson. Was it true? “I don’t recall that,” replied Baigent, adding, almost surreally, “but then Chaumeil was never necessarily very close to the inner groups of the Priory.” Robinson persisted. How did Baigent respond to Chaumeil’s revelation that the Priory was a surrealist fantasy?
BAIGENT: He’s wrong.
ROBINSON: Why are you so sure that he’s wrong?
BAIGENT: Because I’ve seen the documents, I’ve researched them, I spent six years looking at the Priory and I’m satisfied that the Priory existed.19
Baigent’s claim is, and always has been, that his team checked all the information it was given, and that, “in the end everything we could check proved accurate.” This checking must, at the very least, have been carried out in the most forgiving way, since by 1993 everyone involved at the French end of the Priory had admitted that it and its documents were fraudulent. In the afterword to the 1996 edition of The Holy Blood, its authors argued that they “granted a novelist might fabricate a comparable precision. But M. Plantard had no aesthetic justification for doing so. Neither did he stand to gain financially or in any other way. In the absence of any plausible reason for fabrication, we had no reason to doubt his word.”20 In their inverted world, Leonardo and Jean Cocteau could easily be guarding the Merovingian bloodline, but Pierre Plantard really couldn’t be an impostor.
They had an almost heroic way of fending off evidence of the Priory’s real origins. This is how they put it in The Messianic Legacy published in 1987. One wonders if their counsel had read this passage before the Dan Brown trial.
Nothing appeared straightforward; nothing could be taken at face value; everything had an alternative explanation. The Prieure de Sion had begun to seem to us like a holographic image, shifting prismatically according to the light and the angle from which it was viewed. From one perspective it appeared an influential, powerful and wealthy international secret society, whose members included eminent figures in the arts, in politics, in high finance. From another perspective it seemed a dazzlingly ingenious hoax devised by a small group of individuals for obscure purposes of their own. Perhaps, in some fashion, it was both.21
And perhaps Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh
are, in some fashion, a group of Zulu women from the high veld. My instinct is that Baigent’s background heavily influenced his thinking. His personal history suggests someone rejecting the Establishment of his childhood, looking for other spiritual keys to unlock the world and thinking, for a time at least, that he has discovered them. He was brought up in an intensely Catholic family in New Zealand, attending church three times a week and given private tuition in Catholic theology from the age of five. In partial rebellion, the young Baigent looked for his own answers, attending, in turn, “every Christian church in our town, including Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Mormon churches.” At university, he changed from a science degree to comparative religion. He then joined a Christian Kabbalah group called the Builders of Adytum. By 1976, he was in London, sharing a flat in north London with Richard Leigh, through whom, as we’ve discovered, he was drawn into the Henry Lincoln Chronicle series. By then working as a photographer, Baigent sold his cameras and worked night shifts at a soft-drinks factory so that he could afford to be involved in the Priory research. “With hindsight,” he said in his court deposition, “I became obsessed with it.”22
Obsession occurs again in relation to Baigent. The skeptic Paul Smith visited him in Winchester in early 1993. “I found him very hospitable,” wrote Smith, “courteous to talk with, but still believing in the Priory of Sion, in Merovingian Bloodlines existing to the present day, and his Line of David obsession was evident.” Smith discovered that among Baigent’s papers were several effectively proving the Saunière story was a myth. The problem was that this evidence, Smith thought, lay “in the possession of somebody who did not know how to use it properly because they preferred to pursue non sequiturs relating to pseudo-history.”23