by Colin Wilson
Lincoln cites evidence to show that the two orders soon grew apart. It seems that the fabulous power and wealth of the Templars made them headstrong, ‘like unruly children’. Matters came to a head in 1187, when a Templar named Gerard de Ridefort led the knights into a rash encounter with the Saracens and lost Jerusalem – this time forever. At this point, it seems, the Order of Sion lost patience with the Templars, and broke with them. The Order now changed its name to the Priory of Sion. One of the major aims of the Priory was the restoration of the Merovingians to the throne of France. When the Templars were destroyed in 1307, the Priory continued to exist, no doubt because it was such a well-kept secret.
This could well explain why Louis XIV was anxious to get rid of Fouquet and to acquire Poussin’s painting. If the ‘secret that kings could not draw from him’ was the secret of the Priory of Sion, Louis may well have been worried. His uncle, Gaston d’Orléans, had been married to the Duke of Lorraine’s sister, and there was an attempt to depose Gaston’s elder brother, Louis XIII, in favour of Gaston, which would have meant that Merovingian blood would once again have flowed in the veins of the kings of France.
The attempt failed. But since Louis XIII was childless, it looked very much as if Gaston would nevertheless inherit the throne. Then, to everyone’s amazement, Louis XIII produced a son – at least his wife, Anne of Austria, did. Many people believed that Cardinal Richelieu was the true father, or perhaps that he employed a ‘stud’, who some suggest was Richelieu’s captain of musketeers, François Dauger, thus frustrating the designs of the Merovingians and the Priory of Sion.
François Dauger had two sons, called Louis and Eustache, and many people commented on their resemblance to Louis XIV, which would be understandable if, in fact, they were his half-brothers. Eustache was a ne’er-do-well, always in trouble. Both Louis and Eustache were eventually arrested, Louis for an affair of the heart, Eustache for general hellraising, but Louis was released and continued to rise in the world. Eustache disappeared, and may well have been the Man in the Iron Mask. (It was actually a velvet mask, and if indeed Eustache was the mystery prisoner, he may have been forced to wear it because of his resemblance to the king.) His offence may have been an attempt to blackmail the king– ‘Release my brother or else…’ – or he may have got involved with the Priory of Sion and the Merovingians, who would have been delighted to learn that Louis XIV had no right to be on the throne.
The Habsburgs were also members of the House of Lorraine, and therefore prime candidates for membership of the Priory of Sion, which sheds further light on the facts that one of Saunière’s guests was Johann von Habsburg and that Saunière received money from Austria. It sounds as if his visit to St Sulpice introduced him to people who were willing to share their secret and give him generous financial support as the present incumbent of Dagobert’s ancient stronghold…
This complex and fascinating story has another twist. Lincoln learned from the retired clergyman that the ‘real treasure’ was the knowledge that Jesus did not die on the cross, and this knowledge came from St Sulpice. If St Sulpice was the Paris headquarters of the Priory of Sion, then it may well be that Saunière’s secret – the secret that shocked the priest who attended his deathbed – was that Jesus had not died on the cross, and therefore the Christian Church had been built on foundations of sand, since it was based on the notion that Jesus died to save man from the burden of original sin.
When Lincoln was working on the BBC programme The Shadow of the Templars, he was suddenly struck by a startling thought. He and two researchers, Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, were joking about a legend that the mother of King Merovec, the founder of the Merovingian line, had been impregnated by a sea creature, and one of them joked that the story sounded ‘fishy’. Suddenly Lincoln and Leigh looked at one another as they were seized with the same suspicion. Fish – the symbol of Christianity. Could the legend mean that the lady had been impregnated by… a symbol of Christianity, a direct descendant of Jesus?
The Merovingian kings claimed that they reigned ‘by right of blood’ – royal blood – not by being anointed by the Church. Was the bloodline that they were so proud of that of Jesus himself? In which case, who was Jesus’s wife? In the village of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, a yearly ceremony celebrates the arrival of Mary Magdalen in France, bearing the True Cross and the Holy Grail. The church in Rennes-le-Château is dedicated to her and has two statues of her carrying the cross and the Grail. Saunière built a library called the Tour Magdala – the Magdalen Tower. Mystics of the Middle Ages identified her with the planet Venus – the goddess of love.
Lincoln and Leigh were led to speculate that Jesus and Mary Magdalen had come to France and founded the bloodline of the Merovingians. Perhaps the tomb that Poussin painted was, in fact, the tomb of Jesus? It was this extraordinary speculation – and Lincoln insists that it is merely a speculation – that made The Holy Blood and the Grail (1982)10 by Lincoln, Leigh and Baigent an instant bestseller.
By now Lincoln had learned, through the detective work of a BBC researcher, that the most important living member of the Priory of Sion was a man called Pierre Plantard. Plantard was indeed the name of a noble family of the Merovingian line. A meeting was arranged, and Lincoln invited Plantard to view the second Rennes-le-Château film, The Priest, the Painter and the Devil. He proved to be a kindly and courteous gentleman – born in 1920 – and a group of his followers were present. The closest seemed to be a marquis named Philip de Cherisey. Lincoln was to learn that de Cherisey was responsible for much of the Secret Dossier deposited in the Louvre.
Sitting behind them, Lincoln was pleased to observe that they became suddenly attentive when the film showed an image of one of the parchments, in which Lincoln had detected the form of a pentagram, a figure made by joining the points of a five-pointed star.
The pentagram is, of course, one of the most ancient magical symbols. I was once advised to draw one (mentally) on my gatepost if I wanted to deter unwelcome visitors – it had to be upside-down. Upright it is supposed to keep evil at bay; upside-down (like a man standing on his head) it is supposed to attract sinister forces.
What is its origin? No one is sure, although it played an important part in the geometry of Pythagoras. One of the most convincing explanations involves the planet Venus. If we imagine the earth as the centre of the solar system (as the ancients believed), it becomes obvious that there will be moments when every planet will be ‘eclipsed’ by the sun as it comes between the planet and the earth. Mercury, for example, is ‘eclipsed’ three times a year, and if we draw lines between these three points in the heavens they form an irregular triangle. Mars is ‘eclipsed’ four times, and the figure is an irregular rectangle. In fact, all the planets make irregular figures, except Venus, which makes a regular pentacle. If, as we have argued in this book, the ancients were studying the heavens much earlier than anyone supposed, it seems probable that Venus was associated with the pentagram at a very early date.11
In addition to the hidden pentagram (which was not a regular one) in one of the parchments, Lincoln also noticed something odd about the geometry of Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie. Looking for the ‘secret’ that seems to have alarmed Louis XIV, he noticed that the staff of the shepherd on the right is neatly cut in two by the shepherd’s arm, and the distance from the top of the staff to the shepherd’s pointed finger is precisely this same ‘half measure’. He soon noticed other ‘half measures’ throughout the painting. The picture had obviously been designed geometrically. He showed the painting to Professor Christopher Cornford, of the Royal College of Art, who found something even more fascinating.
When Cornford reported to Henry Lincoln on Les Bergers d’Arcadie, he explained that he began by looking for one of two ‘systems’ in constant use by classical painters. One is a number system, based on Plato’s Timaeus (a dialogue about the creation of the universe), which became highly influential in the Renaissance. The other is a far older system, a geometry
based on the Golden Section. Cornford expected to find the Timaeus system in Poussin’s painting, because the Golden Section system was then regarded as extremely old-fashioned, and in fact he did find traces of it. But the basic system used in Les Bergers dArcadie is the Golden Section. The painting is also full of pentagonal geometry.
Consider the following pentagram drawn in a circle:
A pentagram is the quintessential golden section geometric figure. In the diagram EF is a phi ratio of EB, and CF is a phi ratio of CA.
When Cornford looked more closely, he could draw a pentagram that went outside the painting
In short, the pentacle was encoded into Poussin’s painting.
That led Cornford to make an interesting suggestion. Could the phrase ‘Poussin holds the key…’ be anything to do with the landscape around Rennes-le-Château, which is where Saunière searched for the treasure? This led Lincoln to one of his most important discoveries. When he looked at a map of the Rennes-le-Château region, one thing was immediately obvious: three of its key sites — Rennes-le-Château, the Templar château of Bezu and the Blanchefort château — were three points of a triangle. And all were on hilltops.
When Lincoln drew the triangle on his map, and proceeded to measure its lines, he received a surprise. It was a precise isosceles triangle, that is, with two sides exactly equal. With Bezu at the apex of the triangle, the lines from Bezu to Blanchefort and from Bezu to Rennes-le-Château were equal.
This could not have been an accident. At some point in time, it seemed that someone had observed that the three hilltops made a precise triangle and, in due course, they had been chosen as part of a secret pattern.
Lincoln found himself wondering if, by any remote chance, there were two more hilltops that would form the rest of a pentagram. Of course, he felt, that would be asking too much… yet when he studied the map, he was staggered to find that there were two such hilltops, in precisely the right places. The eastern one was called La Soulane, and the western one Serre de Lauzet. When the five hilltops were joined up, they formed an exact pentacle.
There was one more surprise to come. When Lincoln looked for the centre of the map, he found that it was marked by another hill, called La Pique. Although its summit looked on the map like the dead centre, it was actually 250 yards to the south-east of centre, but that was to be expected – after all, this was not a man-made landscape.
So this was the basic secret of Rennes-la-Château: that it was part of a sacred landscape. Perhaps this is why Rennes-le-Château was chosen by Dagobert as his home and why his son Sigisbert fled there after his father’s murder. The royal blood of the Merovingians was associated with a magic landscape.
Rand had first become intrigued by Rennes after reading The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It states that a few miles east of Rennes-le-Château lie the ruins of the Château of Blanchefort, ancestral home of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who presided over the order in the mid-twelfth century.
It seems that Blanchefort ‘commissioned certain mysterious excavations’ in the mountain where his château stood, all under conditions of the greatest secrecy. In 1156 a contingent of German miners arrived to work the mountain, apparently for gold, but there couldn’t possibly have been any gold left in the mountain of Blanchefort, as the Romans had exhausted the mines centuries earlier.12 And they were ‘forbidden to fraternise in any way with the local population and were kept strictly segregated from the surrounding community’. Lincoln hints that something else in the area had attracted the Grand
Master. Rand naturally wondered if it might have anything to do with his blueprint of sacred sites.
He wrote: I agree with Lincoln’s conclusion that the complexity of Rennes-le-Château is evidence that “… the ancient surveyors… have left us the empirical reality of their amazing labours. They have left us the evidence of their skills and knowledge which, through many long centuries, has been lost and forgotten.”13 This dovetails with everything we’ve discovered about the Atlantis Blueprint.’
Lincoln also notes the importance of the Golden Section in the whole Rennes complex and links it to the planet Venus. He argues that the reason Venus is so widely worshipped in world mythology is because its orbit appears pentagonal to us on earth. The pentagon is the geometric figure that most conclusively registers the Golden Section. 100,000 years ago, during the Yukon Pole, Rennes was located at a Golden Section division of a line drawn from pole to pole.
It was not alone. Nanking, China, also fits this pattern exactly. The surprising fact is that both linkages occur only during the Yukon Pole. Nor is this the only connection between ancient Celts and China. In Uriel’s Machine, Lomas and Knight examine the research of archaeologist Dr Elizabeth Wayland Barber, whose book The Mummies of Urumchi is a study of the mummified remains of several Caucasians found in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Barber discovered plaid material with the mummies. She wrote: ‘Not only does this woollen plaid look like Scottish tartans but it also has the same weight, feel and initial thickness as a kilt cloth.’14
Lomas and Knight comment:
Barber acknowledges that two unrelated people could come up with the same twill weave, plaids and tartans, but when she considered all the factors which had coincided, she was quite firm in her conclusion: It rules out coincidence. It seems certain, then, that these people had a direct connection with the population of the British Isles who also wove plaid and tartans, the people we now call the Celts.15
In The New View Over Atlantis, John Michell also makes the connection between the ancient Celts and China:
In China until recently, as long ago in Britain, every building, every stone and wood, was placed in the landscape in accordance with a magic system by which the laws of mathematics and music were expressed in the geometry of the earth’s surface. The striking beauty and harmony of every part of China, which all travellers have remarked, was not produced by chance. Every feature was contrived. Where nature had placed two hills in discord, Chinese geomancers had the shape of one altered.16
The fact that Rennes-le-Château and Nanking are both located at a Golden Section division of the pole-to-pole distance is further support that either the Celts and Chinese shared knowledge, or, more likely, that their separate traditions are derived from a common source.
My own favourite story about Rand’s researches concerns a pyramid, not in Egypt or Mexico, but in China.
In the summer of 1997, Rand was thinking about the Hudson Bay Pole and the orientation of Mexican religious sites to it. At this time, he heard from Laura Lee, friend and radio interviewer whose Seattle-based show is broadcast internationally, that the German writer Hartwig Hausdorf was going to appear on her programme to talk about ancient pyramids in China. Rand had no idea that there were pyramids in China.
Hausdorf, the author of The Chinese Roswell, had been influenced by Erich von Däniken’s ‘ancient astronaut’ theory, and had travelled in China, Tibet and Mongolia searching for evidence of aliens visiting earth in the remote past. Hausdorf explained on the radio programme how, in the spring of 1945, an American air force pilot named James Gaussman was returning from Chungking when engine trouble forced him to a low altitude near Xian, in Shansi province. Directly below him he saw a white pyramid of ‘colossal size’. He took some photographs, although these would not be published for another forty-five years. Two years later, in 1947, a pilot named Maurice Sheahan caught a glimpse of another enormous pyramid when he was flying over Shansi province, and again took pictures. Although these were published in the New York Times and other newspapers in March 1947, Chinese archaeologists denied that China had any pyramids.17
In 1962, a New Zealand airline pilot named Bruce Cathie was also informed by the Chinese that there were no pyramids in China. He was nevertheless able to confirm the existence of several of them, and in a book called The Bridge of Infinity18 suggested that there are a network of pyramids over the surface of the earth whose purpose is connected
with ley lines and earth energies. (His views have something in common with those of Christopher Dunn.)
In March 1994, Hausdorf succeeded in getting permission to visit Xian, a former imperial capital that is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilisation. (Emperor Qin Shihuang, who built the Great Wall, has a tomb there, surrounded by 10,000 life-size terracotta soldiers.) He saw a number of pyramids on the plain, but they were not 1,000 feet high, as Gaussman had reported, only about 200 feet high, less than half the height of the Great Pyramid. They were flat-topped, and made of clay baked to the consistency of stone. Trees and other vegetation had been planted on them. Hausdorf realised that he was standing in a kind of crater at the top, suggesting that a chamber had collapsed.
On two subsequent visits, Hausdorf examined sixteen pyramids, and he claims to have counted a hundred. Professor Wang Zhijun, director of the Banpo Museum, who discussed
The so-called ‘White Pyramid’ of China is located at a Golden Section division of the North Pole and equator distance.
them with him, seemed to feel that they might be part of a sacred system of feng shui lines, a Chinese variation of leys. The professor estimated that they dated from about 2,500 BC – the time of the pyramids of Giza. Hausdorf was unable to visit the White Pyramid of Xian himself, and admitted that he was not sure of its existence.
Rand was investigating phi sites when he heard about the White Pyramid. He found the city of Xian, in Shansi province, in his Times Atlas, but had no idea how far away the White Pyramid might be. As a speculation, he wondered if it might be a phi distance from the pole, and worked out that this should be 3,337.2 nautical miles, which would be 34 degrees, 23 minutes north.