by Colin Wilson
With remarkable detective work, Hancock traced the purported route of the Ark from Jerusalem to a church in Axum, in Ethiopia. The priests in charge of the Ark’ have consistently refused to allow it to be examined, but a recent book alleges that they have admitted that what they guard is actually a box that houses post-Christian copies of the Tables of the Law brought down by Moses from Sinai.6
Hancock’s suggestion is that the Templars were searching for the Ark, which legend declared had been hidden in a secret room below its sacred chamber when Babylonians burst into Solomon’s Temple in 587 BC to destroy it and drag the Jews into their Babylonian captivity.
Why would the nine knights have wanted the Ark? Presumably because, in that age of faith, when holy relics were venerated (and brought immense wealth to the church or abbey that possessed them), the ownership of the world’s holiest object would make the order that possessed it the most powerful in the world.
Whatever they were searching for, the knights do not seem to have found it. In 1126, seven years after starting their excavations, Hugh de Payens, their leader, returned to France. It looked as if the attempt to found an order had been a failure.
Then a rescuer appeared. Bernard of Clairvaux, later St Bernard, was a Cistercian and one of France’s most powerful churchmen, even though he firmly refused to be promoted above the rank of abbot. He was also the nephew of one of the knights, André de Montbard, who had accompanied Payens back to France. Two years later, a synod was convened in the town of Troyes, whose purpose was to persuade the Church to back the founding of the Order of Knights Templar. This came about in 1128, when the ‘Order of the Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’ was founded and made answerable only to the Pope. And with the support of St Bernard, recruits and money poured in, until the Templars became the richest order in Europe.
What happened? An association that is about to dissolve itself in 1126 becomes rich and powerful in a few years. What did Hugh de Payens and André de Montbard say to St Bernard to enlist such support? Was it simply a friendly act on behalf of his uncle? Or did the knights tell Bernard of important and fascinating discoveries they had made under the Temple?
Hancock hazards the interesting guess that the knights had something to offer Bernard in return for his support: Gothic architecture. Before that time, the major style of church architecture was Romanesque, a style with rounded arches supported on short, thick pillars. This was for purely practical reasons. The sheer weight of the ceilings and upper levels of a church meant that the weight pushed downward on the pillars and tended to make the walls bulge outward so that they often collapsed. Then architects solved the problem. Ceilings were made thinner and supported on ‘ribs’, and the arches were made narrower and higher – typically Gothic. The first abbey to use this new Gothic style was St Denis in Paris, under a great innovator, Abbot Suger. The thinner walls – supported by flying buttresses – allowed more space for windows, one of the most famous examples being the stained glass of Chartres, built later in the century (with the active encouragement of St Bernard).
Hancock wonders if it is possible that the Templars learned the secret of Gothic architecture in the vaults of Solomon’s
Temple. This is not, of course, to suggest that Solomon’s Temple was built in the Gothic style, but the Temple was famous for its beauty and harmony, and the knights may have stumbled upon some of the essential principles of Gothic architecture while they were there.
However, there is a problem of dating. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, architects began to solve the problem of the arches in 1120, when the nine knights had been excavating for only two years. This does not invalidate the theory – St Denis, the first Gothic abbey, was not started until 1140. And as Rand pointed out, the decline of Gothic architecture in the next few centuries was as obvious and inexplicable as the decline of pyramid building in the centuries immediately after the Giza pyramids had been built. The implication would be that in both cases, some tremendous injection of energy and inspiration created almost superhuman works of architecture and then ran out of steam.
Hancock has another, equally fascinating theory. The town of Troyes, in which the Templars received the support of the Church, was the home of the author Chrétien de Troyes, the poet who, between 1165 and 1182, was responsible for the first great literary treatments of the legend of King Arthur. He was the first to write about the Holy Grail – Hancock goes as far as to say that he invented the Holy Grail. Hancock suggests that the idea arose from the stories of the Ark of the Covenant, which Chrétien may have heard direct from Templar knights, and he cites the scholar Helen Adolf, who thought that another early Grail chronicler, Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote Parzifal, derived his version of the Grail – a stone – from the Kebra Nagast of Abyssinia. It is a fascinating idea, but seems to be contradicted by the opinion of various scholars, to the effect that stories of the Grail had been sung by minstrels long before Chrétien wrote them down.7
Why does this matter? It is important to bear in mind that the Templars were not simply seeking power – they soon acquired it in abundance — but that they began with a search for some mystery object, possibly the Ark, and that the Templar order was thereafter associated with the notion of a mystery, a belief that has persisted down to modern times.
The Second Crusade was initiated by Bernard of Clairvaux after the fall of Edessa in 1144, but it ended in failure; the Moslems under Saladin were to recapture Jerusalem in 1187. During the next century, seven more crusades failed to restore power to the Christians. The fall of Acre in 1291 completed their defeat, and the Knights Templar lost their raison d’être.
But they did not lose their power — or their wealth (based partly on exemption from taxes). With a new Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, they licked their wounds on the island of Cyprus and wondered what to do next. The problem was that Cyprus was insecure, with the Moslems raiding Limassol and taking captives who had to be ransomed. The Templars considered returning to France, but there were problems. King Philip the Fair (1265—1314) was in conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, and since the Templars regarded the Pope as their master, their return to France would be unwelcome to the king.
In fact, the whole order was unwelcome to the king, who felt they were — like their papal master — arrogant nuisances (this may have been because he had once applied to join them, and been rejected). When the Pope threatened to depose Philip, the king denounced Boniface as a heretic, and finally had him taken prisoner in his own house; Boniface died soon after being rescued.
When his successor, Boniface IX, showed signs of taking up the struggle where Boniface VIII left off, Philip arranged to have him poisoned, then had his own candidate, Archbishop Bertrand de Gotte of Bordeaux, placed on the papal throne. Philip laid down a number of preconditions for supporting Bertrand’s candidacy, one being that the new Pope should move the seat of the papacy to France. Another precondition was held in reserve and has never been revealed. Most scholars have concluded that the secret clause included a stipulation that the Pope should not oppose his plan to arrest the Templars and seize their money.
Bertrand became Pope Clement V in 1305, and the king immediately began to plan one of the most amazing coups in history. It was to arrest all the Templars — 15,000 of them — and accuse them of heresy. It could be compared to a modern king plotting to arrest all the officers in the army, navy and air force.
Incredibly, it succeeded. Sealed orders went out about four weeks before the swoop, and the Templars were arrested on Friday 13 October 1307.*
The Templars were accused of homosexuality, worshipping a demon called Baphomet and spitting on the cross. Under appalling tortures — such as being held over red hot braziers — many confessed, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay himself. But at their sentencing on 18 March 1314, Molay withdrew his confession, declaring that it had been forced from him by torture. The king was so enraged at having his plans thwarted that he immediately ordered Molay and his
friend Geoffrey de Charney, who also withdrew his confession, to be roasted alive over a slow fire.
This took place on the following day, on an island in the Seine called the Ile de Palais. It is said that Molay summoned the king and the Pope to meet him before the throne of God within a year. Whether this is true or not, he certainly called upon God to avenge his death. Within three months, both were dead — Philip gored by a boar during hunting, Clement of a fever.
The irony is that, in a sense, Philip had committed this act of savagery for nothing. He had been hoping to replenish his treasury — depleted by war — with the wealth of the Templars,
It is also known that on the day before the Templars were arrested, 12 October 1307, eighteen ships sailed out of La Rochelle, the Templars’ port. No one knows what became of them; they vanished from history. But at least one of these ships seems to have made its way to Scotland, where part of the wealth it carried went into the building of a remarkable chapel called Rosslyn, near Edinburgh. (It is also worth bearing in mind that Hugh de Payens was married to a Scotswoman called Catherine de St Clair, whose descendants later built Rosslyn.)
Whether or not the wealth of Bérenger Saunière was part of a Templar treasure will never be known for certain, although Henry Lincoln is fairly sure he knows. What is certain is that there were two major Templar strongholds close to Rennes-le-Château – Bezu and Blanchefort – and that Philip the Fair failed to seize the wealth of either of them.
Back in 1969, after Henry Lincoln discovered Gérard de Sède’s book on his holiday in the Cevennes, he returned to London and succeeded in interesting a friend at the BBC in the story. The two of them went to Rennes-le-Château, and even on that first visit it began to look as if they were being observed. For example, in the neighbouring village of Rennes-les-Bains Lincoln found a spring called the Lover’s Fountain; close by was a rock bearing a heart pierced by an arrow, and underneath it were the words E. Calvé, 1891. Emma Calvé was the beautiful soprano who allegedly counted Saunière among her many lovers, and 1891 was the year he is supposed to have discovered the parchments. Lincoln photographed the inscription, but when he returned on the morrow, to photograph it by better light, the inscription had been hacked from the rock.
Gérard de Sède had agreed to act as a consultant on the programme, and was able to provide the key to decoding the second mystery parchment. It was an incredibly complex code, which involved a technique known to cipher experts as the Vigenère process. The alphabet is written twenty-six times, the first beginning with A, the second B, the third C, and so on. The key words MORT EPEE are placed over the parchment, and the letters are transformed using the Vigenère table.
The ‘noble Marie de Blanchefort’ text (which Saunière had tried to destroy) is then used as another key phrase, and finally the letters are placed on a chess board and a series of knight’s moves produces a message that may be translated: SHEPHERDESS WITHOUT TEMPTATION TO WHICH POUSSIN AND TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681 WITH THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I REACH THIS DEMON GUARDIAN AT MIDDAY BLUE APPLES.
This, presumably, is what led Saunière to the treasure, although it is hard to see how.
The Marie inscription ends with the letters PS. This, Lincoln learned from de Sède, stood for an organisation called the Priory of Sion. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Lincoln found that a number of pamphlets and documents had been deposited since 1956, many written under pseudonyms such as Anthony the Hermit’. One spoke about a secret order called the Priory of Sion, giving a list of its Grand Masters, which included the alchemist Nicolas Flamel (reputed to have made gold), Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and, more recently, Jean Cocteau. Saunière, we recall, had met Debussy on the trip to Paris. And according to these documents – collectively known as the Secret Dossier – the Priory of Sion was the inner hierarchy of the Knights Templar. And, the Secret Dossier claimed, the
Priory continued to exist even after the Templars were destroyed.
This suggested a new possibility, noted by another investigator, Lionel Fanthorpe, as well as by Henry Lincoln: perhaps Saunière had not found a treasure, only a secret – a secret worth a great deal of money.
Many known facts support this conclusion. According to Henry Buthion, who owned the hotel that was once Saunière’s Villa Bethanie, Saunière was often short of cash, and failed to pay 5,000 francs that he owed the makers of some expensive furniture he had ordered. He certainly died penniless, but that may have been because he simply allowed large sums of money to be paid direct to his housekeeper, Marie Denardaud. Still, a man with a hidden treasure does not run short of cash, even if he banks it.
Eventually, Lincoln’s television programme was made and broadcast under the title The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem .8 By then, so much material had come to light that it was clear that a second programme was going to be required.
Perhaps the most intriguing clue of all came soon after the programme was transmitted. A retired Church of England vicar wrote to tell Lincoln that the ‘treasure’ was not gold or jewels, but a document proving that Jesus was not crucified in AD 33, but had still been alive in AD 45.
Lincoln went to visit him. The clergyman obviously wished he had kept his mouth shut, but he finally admitted that his information had come from an Anglican scholar named Canon Alfred Lilley. And – Lincoln’s heart must have leaped as he heard this – Lilley had maintained close contact with scholars based at St Sulpice, and had known Emile Hoffet, who had introduced Saunière to Debussy. This obviously raised a fascinating possibility. If Debussy was, indeed, a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, could he have shared the belief that Jesus did not die on the cross? And was that Saunière’s secret, which so shocked the priest who listened to his final confession?
It certainly began to look more and more as if this was the answer. We may recall that when Saunière left Paris, he purchased some copies of paintings from the Louvre, among them Les Bergers d’Arcadie, which shows three shepherds and a shepherdess standing by a tomb bearing the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’.
While they were filming the first programme, de Sède told Lincoln that the actual tomb used in the painting had been discovered at Arques, not far from Rennes-le-Château. In fact, the tomb, although it had no Latin inscription, was otherwise identical, even to the stone on which the shepherd is resting his foot in the painting.
Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was one of the most distinguished painters of his time; although born in Normandy it was in Rome that he won fame and spent most of his life. For a short time he had served Louis XIII and Richelieu. Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie came into the possession of Louis XIV after his agents had been trying, with great tenacity, to lay their hands on it for some time, yet when the king finally obtained it, he kept it locked away in his private chambers; rumour has it that he was afraid that it might reveal some secret if it was displayed more publicly. The painting itself seems to offer no clues as to why the king wanted it so badly, or why he subsequently kept it from the eyes of the world.
What we do know, however, is that in 1656 the king’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, sent his own younger brother Louis to Rome to see Poussin, and that Louis then wrote to Fouquet:
He and I have planned certain things of which in a little while I shall be able to inform you fully; things which will give you, through M. Poussin, advantages which kings would have great difficulty in obtaining from him, and which, according to what he says, no one in the world will ever retrieve in centuries to come; and furthermore, it would be achieved without much expense and could even turn to profit, and they are matters so difficult to enquire into that nothing on earth at the present time could bring a greater fortune nor perhaps ever its equal…9
What can he have been talking about? ‘Nothing on earth could ever bring a greater fortune’ sounds like a treasure, except that he also says it could ‘even turn to profit’, which suggests that he means something else after all. What is certain is that the king, who was o
nly five years old when he came to the throne, nursed an increasing dislike of his brilliant and ambitious finance minister. Fouquet became immensely wealthy and, according to his assistant Colbert, managed this by cooking the books every afternoon. In 1661, Louis had him arrested, and he was eventually imprisoned. (Some historians have suggested that he was the famous Man in the Iron Mask, but he died twenty-three years before the mysterious prisoner.)
Is it possible that when Fouquet sent his brother Louis to see Poussin it was with treasonous intent?
The Merovingian king Dagobert II, born in AD 651, was kidnapped as a child and taken to Ireland, while a usurping major-domo took his place. He returned to France – in fact, to Rennes-le-Château – married to a Visigoth princess named Giselle, and reclaimed the throne, but was murdered in 679 as he lay asleep under a tree. The Church certainly played some part in the assassination, but his major-domo, Pepin the Fat, was also involved. Pepin was the grandfather of the famous warrior Charles Martel, who turned back the Moslem invasion of France at the Battle of Poitiers. Martel’s son, Pepin the Short, seized the throne and inaugurated the Carolingian dynasty, fathering its most famous member, the great Charlemagne.
The descendants of Dagobert were understandably resentful about being deprived of the throne, and there was always a movement in favour of their restoration, rather like that of the Jacobites in England. Similar to the Jacobites, they were a lost cause, but one Merovingian descendant achieved a fame that rivalled that of Charles Martel or Charlemagne. He was Godfrey de Bouillon (1058–1100), Duke of Lorraine, the man who led the First Crusade and recaptured Jerusalem – the knight who became the first King of Jerusalem.
There can also be little doubt that he was the founder – or one of the founders – of another dynasty, the Priory of Sion, or, as it was first known, the ‘Order of Our Lady of Sion’. Sion is another name for Jerusalem, and soon after the capture of Jerusalem an Abbey of Sion was built on the Temple Mount and its occupants were known as the Order of Our Lady of Sion. According to the Secret Dossier, the Order was founded in 1090, nine years before the fall of Jerusalem. Five of the nine original Templars were members. It seems probable that the Templar order sprang out of the Order of Sion.