Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  By 1956 his supporters were numerous enough to officially register themselves (as all French social or religious organizations had to do) at the local town hall under the name of the Priory of Sion. The founders all gave themselves antiquarian-sounding pseudonyms, Plantard’s being Chyren and his friend André Bonhomme’s being Bellos. The subtitle of the sect was registered as the Knighthood of Catholic Rule and Institution of Independent Traditionalist Union whose acronym in French was ‘Circuit’ – the name they gave to their Vaincre-like magazine.

  The Priory of Sion might have remained just another small-time, eccentric alternative to Freemasonry were it not for the fact that the media at that time was awash with stories of rediscovered ancient texts and pedigrees. The Dead Sea Scrolls had recently been unearthed and, much closer to home, the French hotelier Noël Corbu was claiming that some mysterious ancient parchments had been found by a priest called Saunière bricked up in a pillar on his property in Rennes. Public interest in the prophecies of Nostradamus was at an all-time high and it was no coincidence that the name Chyren was taken from the anagrammatic ‘Chyren Selin’ with which Nostradamus referred to the great king who would inherit the earth.

  It was now, in the late 1950s, that Plantard decided to step up his game and make it known that not only did he hate Jews and Masons and want a Catholic French France, but he was in fact the last true heir to the throne of France: a direct descendant of one of the assassinated Merovingian kings, Dagobert II.

  The Merovingians were the Frankish dynasty who ruled what is now called France for several hundred years until Pepin the Short deposed their leader and instituted the Carolingian dynasty. The Merovingians were a highly religious people, obsessed with miracles and saints and enthusiastic founders of grand monasteries. They did not however believe that they were descended from Jesus, although this is the popular myth that has grown up, partly thanks to Plantard, in the last fifty years. Another proponent of the theory of the Merovingian’s special bloodline was the Italian esoteric writer Julius Evola whose charismatic public appearances had been much admired by high-ranking members of the Nazi party and whose ideas about pure Christian blood had no doubt influenced Plantard considerably.

  So Plantard decided to insert himself into the story of the ‘lost’ Frankish King Dagobert, and (inspired by Nostradamus) put it about that it had been secretly prophesied that Dagobert’s successor would show up one day to claim the throne after a period of terrible turbulence. There was no stopping him. Starting in the mid-1960s, he physically inserted pages of parchment into books in the Bibliothèque National de France in Paris, aided by his friend and accomplice Philippe de Chérisey. They signed the papers Philippe Toscan du Plantier and attempted to authenticate their provenance by calling them the Secret Files of Henri Lobineau. He also resurrected the story of Corbu’s parchments, publicizing the fact that details of Plantard’s false pedigree were recorded in them. But his coup de grâce was persuading the author (and, rather appropriately, surrealist) Gérard de Sède to write a book about the Corbu discoveries in which he would lay out the full story of the Priory of Sion and its leader’s links to France’s royal lineage. This book, L’or de Rennes, ou La vie insolite de Bérenger Saunière, curé de Rennes-le-Château (‘The Gold of Rennes, or The Strange Life of Bérenger Saunière, Priest of Rennes-le-Château’), turned out to be a popular hit, even more so when it was released in paperback under the more snappy title of The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château.

  With many people now believing that Plantard was more than merely a reactionary butler’s son from Paris, his dreams of commanding a grand religious cult with political aims (he had not forgotten his desire to re-create twentieth-century France for the Catholic French) looked within his grasp. And when Henry Lincoln, a British actor, sci-fi enthusiast and producer became interested in his case, it seemed that his story would finally reach beyond France. Lincoln was fascinated and convinced by Plantard’s claims, and made a series of documentaries for BBC2 on the subject. Following on the success of these programmes, which attracted hundreds of letters from intrigued viewers, he decided to team up with two other researchers, one French, and prepare a book on the subject. When they came upon the planted pedigrees in the National Library in Paris, they were convinced they had all the evidence they needed to publish the full story of Plantard’s claim to the throne, and in 1982 their book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail was published by Jonathan Cape in London.

  Now, finally, Plantard’s most florid fantasies were portrayed as fact. Lincoln wrote that there was a secret society called the Priory of Sion who had had many illustrious leaders, including Leonardo da Vinci, and that they may well be related to Jesus through his relationship with Mary Magdalene. If this sounds familiar, that is because it was on this hoax-based book that the American novelist Dan Brown based his bestselling The Da Vinci Code.

  The idea of the Priory of Sion having a string of illustrious leaders like Leonardo was not made-up by Lincoln – it was a mainstay of Plantard’s hoax. He had carefully delineated a history of Grand Masters which stretched back hundreds of years. And when he came to the twentieth century and was faced with the challenge of bringing his pedigree up to the present day, he was careful to choose people who – while sufficiently illustrious to merit a place at the head of his fine secret society – had recently died so could not argue with him, such as the cultural icon Jean Cocteau. He was less careful about some of his other dates, claiming that certain of the Priory’s Masters had been active when in fact they too had already died.

  Ultimately, after decades of successful hoaxing, it was this list that would be Plantard’s undoing. One of the names on it – the most recent Grand Master, in fact – was a recently deceased businessman called Roger-Patrice Pelat. Pelat had died of a heart attack in 1989 in the middle of his being tried by the French courts for insider dealing. He was a close friend of President Mitterrand and an associate of many other important political and commercial figures in Paris. The judge presiding over the case was careful to explore every possible avenue relating to Pelat’s doings in order to avoid being accused of white-washing a high-profile case, and when he learned that Pelat was named as a member of a secret society, he ordered the headquarters of the Priory of Sion to be searched. The headquarters were Plantard’s home. On entering his living quarters investigators found a profusion of faked documents and inflammatory material claiming that this seventy-four-year-old man was the true king of France. Pelat’s family knew their relative would have had nothing to do with such a fantasist, and were keen to have him brought before the court.

  Under oath, he admitted he had fabricated all the evidence that pointed to his impressive bloodline, and indeed that the entire history of the Priory of Sion had been founded on make-believe. Letters between him and his associates, dating back many years, proved that his aims were to take power and money for himself rather than the good of the country he loved. In these letters he had also discussed various plans of action should anyone become suspicious of his claims. There is some evidence to suggest that even before the Pelat case in 1993 Plantard had tried to distance himself from the information about the Merovingian bloodline presented as fact in Lincoln’s book. But after being forced to out himself as a hoaxer before a court of law, he removed himself altogether from society and retired to the South of France. He returned to Paris to die in February 2000 and apparently spent his last days attended by his few remaining followers.

  Plantard’s legacy lives on, however, and not only in the form of the many treats we can imagine Dan Brown bought himself with the money from The Da Vinci Code. In France, people claiming to be members of the Priory of Sion periodically approach journalists and academics to put forward their versions of French history and their opinions about contemporary culture and in 2002 a man called Gino Sandri announced the official rebirth of Plantard’s cult.

  And the spin-off conspiracy theories continue apace. 2006’s The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guar
dians of Christ’s Sacred Bloodline by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince posits that Plantard’s hoax was designed to distract attention from the real truth: that Plantard was himself being controlled by an all-powerful, secret group of politicians who are trying to control the fate of Europe and make it into one super-state ruled according to their religious wills.

  Echoes of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are impossible to ignore at many levels throughout the strange history and afterlife of Pierre Plantard, and if there is one lesson to be learned from this peculiar affair it is surely that where politics, religion and literature collide, readers should have their hoax-detectors very finely tuned indeed.

  MARK HOFMANN

  THE HISTORY OF the Church of Latter Day Saints is inextricably entwined with stories of literary hoaxing. The entire movement is predicated on the alleged discovery by Joseph Smith in the 1820s of a series of ‘golden plates’ bound together with wire and inscribed with a mysterious Egyptian-style script telling of the pre-Jesus doings of God’s people in America. Smith claimed to have been led to the plates, which were buried in the ground near his home in New York, by an angel called Moroni, and to have been given, by divine gift, the ability to translate them. He was helped in the transcribing and publishing by his friend and neighbour Martin Harris, and in 1830 published the first edition of the Book of Mormon, which would become the central text for the millions of followers the group would go on to attract.

  Unsurprisingly, given the unusual and private nature of Smith’s discovery (and the fact that he claimed to have lost the golden plates soon after unearthing them), many people at the time and since have concluded that the whole thing was a hoax. Tensions between these nay-sayers and the powerful and numerous modern-day Mormons who believe Smith’s transcription is indeed a literal record have increased over the years and been fuelled especially by former Mormons who have left the Church of the Latter Day Saints (known as the LDS) and attempted publicly to discredit them.

  In the 1980s the anger and greed of one disgruntled apostate, Mark Hofmann, was to lead not only to one of the most damaging literary hoaxes of the twentieth century, but also to the violent deaths of two innocent people. Hofmann was a sixth-generation Mormon, born in Utah to devout parents. Although he never excelled academically, he was known to be good with his hands and to have a natural flair for engineering – as well as manufacturing a metal detector, childhood friends recall him making fire-bombs. His other passion was coin collecting, and he is said to have forged a mark on an old coin which fooled expert collectors when he was still a boy. As is customary in the LDS church, Hofmann was sent abroad to do missionary work when he left school and he ended up in the English city of Bristol. People who knew him at that time say he had already lost his faith, and was devouring Mormon-sceptic literature even as he was officially baptizing new converts into the religion. By the time he went home to Utah, although he enrolled in university to read sciences, he had another plan up his sleeve. Using his engineering and handicraft talents, and motivated apparently by the realization that the masters of his family’s religion were gulls, Hofmann set about planning the first of the many hoax materials he would unleash on his community throughout the next decade.

  In 1980, Hofmann, still a student, announced that he had found a seventeenth-century Bible which contained a mysterious folded script stuck to one of its pages. This text, it seemed, was none other than one of Martin Harris’s original transcriptions of the Book of Mormon – the very one he was on record as having given to the Columbia University classics professor Charles Anthon in 1828. Hofmann presented his discovery to the church in Utah, which immediately got its foremost Smith scholar and handwriting expert, Dean Jessee, on the case. Jessee deemed the manuscript genuine and the LDS church gave the hoaxer $20,000 for it.

  Emboldened by this early success, Hofmann gave up his place at university and decided to devote himself fulltime to playing the church for all it was worth. To account for the sudden influx of old Mormon documents which he was about to unleash on his community, he let it be known that he had developed a network of contacts within the families of early Mormons and also sought out collectors of old letters whose interest was not in Mormonism but in antiquarian stamps and post-marks, so would be willing to part with their collections if the money was right.

  Among the many texts Hofmann manufactured in his basement studio were a much-talked-about but never before seen document claiming that Joseph Smith had intended the leadership of the sect to be passed down to his son, not to his acolyte Brigham Young; letters from Smith’s mother and three men he claimed had witnessed his work on the golden plates; a printing contract between Martin Harris and a man called Grandin concerning the production of the first edition of the Book of Mormon; and in 1983 a letter supposedly from Smith which confirmed the view, unpopular in the eyes of the church and its leader Gordon B. Hinckley, that Smith was involved in magic and mysticism at the time he claimed to have discovered the plates. This last text, dated 1825 and written, again, in what seemed to be Smith’s hand, would be extremely inflammatory if it got out, so Hinckley paid $15,000 for it and resolved to keep its existence secret. But Hofmann tipped off the media and academic community that the letter was in the church’s possession, forcing them to admit to its existence.

  This particular hoax is telling on two counts. Firstly, it proves that Hofmann’s aim was not only to earn himself a good living, but to humiliate the institution he felt had been lying to its followers – and itself – for so long. It also taps into the greatest insecurity – the ideological Achilles’ heel – of LDS churchmen: that their esteemed founder was a dabbler in heathen magic rather than a vessel for the word of God. It was the fear that this might one day be proven to be true that ensured the leaders of the church would pay up and shut up whenever Hofmann presented them with a new piece of anti-Smith ‘history’, and which led to the hoax that would make his name infamous far beyond Utah.

  The Salamander Letter must have been written by Hofmann sometime in late 1983 because in the first week of 1984 it was offered for sale to the LDS Church Historical Department. Don Schmidt was the man first approached about buying the letter and when he read it, he must have known there was trouble of one kind or another ahead. It was a missive supposedly written by the scribe Martin Harris to a new convert called William Wines Phelps, and it described the true story of Smith’s discovery of the golden plates in terms dramatically opposed to those put about by the church establishment. It painted Smith not as one led by a divine angel to the site of the plates, but as a common treasure-digger on the make. Worse still, it claimed that far from being visited by an angel at the site of the buried texts, Smith had encountered a ‘white salamander’ which rose up out of the ground in the manner of a daemonic spirit. This salamander then transformed itself into a spirit of questionable affiliation and began to bargain with Smith, denying him ownership of the plates unless he produced his dead brother, Alvin, as an accomplice. This element chimed dangerously with one of the most keenly suppressed rumours put about by Smith’s dissenters: that he had been involved in a thoroughly unchristian exhumation of his brother for use in a magical ceremony.

  Schmidt, the LDS historian, was being asked for a piece of Mormon gold in return for the letter, but after consulting with Hinckley, made a lesser offer, which Hofmann, acting through an intermediary, Lyn Jacobs, turned down. He then offered it for sale to two prominent critics of the church, thinking they would jump at the chance to have ‘proof’ that Smith was not as saintly as people said. These two potential buyers, however, immediately suspected it was a fake. Finally, an agreement was reached in January 1984 with a Utah collector called Steven Christensen who bought the letter for $40,000. Christensen’s aim was to have the document authenticated then sell it back to the church at a profit, but a year later he was still unable to have its provenance verified. Only a few months later, Christensen would be dead.

  What turned Hofmann from an angry hoaxer into a murde
rer is not clear, but his childhood passion for making incendiary devices, coupled with his increasing feeling of isolation, raises the question of psychopathic tendencies. Certainly, by the time he resorted to manufacturing a series of bombs in his basement studio, he was a man at the end of his tether: after failing to sell the Salamander Letter to his first choices of buyers, questions about the provenance of his discoveries were beginning to be asked publicly and it must have seemed to him that it was only a matter of time before he was unmasked. And like other hoaxers before him, he had promised his demanding clients marvellous new items for sale (such as the famous McLellin collection of papers, pertaining to one of the church’s earliest apostles) which he did not have the time or ability to produce. Added to this, the hefty income he was making from the forged texts was not enough to finance his increasingly lavish lifestyle and his passion for collecting rare and antiquarian books. Debt collectors were closing in and in order to divert attention from himself and his crimes, on 15 October, 1985, he took the drastic step of sending the letter-bomb that would kill Christensen. Later that day, he sent another which took the life of Christensen’s associate’s wife, Kathleen Sheets.

  Christensen and Sheets were involved in an investment project together which had gone badly wrong, and Hofmann apparently hoped to make the attacks look like they were related to that. But when a third bomb exploded accidentally in Hofmann’s own car, it was not long before police raided his home workshop which contained not only bomb-making equipment but the tools with which he had created his many forged items. Aided by the FBI’s new forensic analysis techniques, the police were able to prove that the inflammatory documents Hofmann had sold to members of the LDS church were hoaxes. Seemingly unrepentant for the crimes he committed, it was decided in court that life should mean life for this particular hoaxer, and he languishes to this day in a Utah state penitentiary. Gordon B. Hinckley, the church leader who believed in Hofmann’s literary discoveries, said afterwards: