Holy Blood, Holy Grail

by Baigent, Michael

  In deference to her request Jeanne was granted an audience with the duke at his capital in Nancy. When she arrived there, René d’Anjou is known to have been present. And when the duke of Lorraine asked her what she wished, she replied explicitly, in words that have constantly perplexed historians, "Your son [in-law], a horse and some good men to take me into France."4

  Both at the time and later, speculation was rife about the nature of René’s connection with Jeanne. According to some sources, probably inaccurate, the two were lovers. But the fact remains that they knew each other and that René was present when Jeanne first embarked on her mission. Moreover, contemporary chroniclers maintain that when Jeanne departed for the dauphin’s court at Chinon, René accompanied her. And not only that. The same chroniclers assert that René was actually present at her side during the siege of Orléans.5 In the centuries that followed a systematic attempt seems to have been made to expunge all trace of René’s possible role in Jeanne’s life. Yet René’s later biographers cannot account for his whereabouts or activities between 1429 and 1431—the apex of Jeanne’s career. It is usually and tacitly assumed that he was vegetating at the ducal court in Nancy, but there is no evidence to support this assumption.

  Circumstances argue that René did accompany Jeanne to Chinon. For if there was any one dominant personality at Chinon at the time, that personality was Iolande d’Anjou. It was Iolande who provided the febrile, weak-willed dauphin with incessant transfusions of morale. It was Iolande who inexplicably appointed herself Jeanne’s official patroness and sponsor. It was Iolande who overcame the court’s resistance to the visionary girl and obtained authorization for her to accompany the army to Orléans. It was Iolande who convinced the dauphin that Jeanne might indeed be the savior she claimed to be. It was Iolande who contrived the dauphin’s marriage— to her own daughter. And Iolande was René d’Anjou’s mother.

  As we studied these details, we became increasingly convinced, like many modem historians, that something was being enacted behind the scenes — some intricate, high-level intrigue or audacious design. The more we examined it, the more Jeanne d’Arc’s meteoric career began to suggest a "put-up job"—as if someone, exploiting popular legends of a "virgin from Lorraine" and playing ingeniously on mass psychology, had engineered and orchestrated the Maid of Orleans’ so-called mission. This did not, of course, presuppose the existence of a secret society. But it rendered the existence of such a society decidedly more plausible. And if such a society did exist, the man presiding over it might well have been René d’Anjou.

  RENÉ AND THE THEME OF ARCADIA

  If René was associated with Jeanne d’Arc, his later career, for the most part, was distinctly less bellicose. Unlike many of his contemporaries, René was less a warrior than a courtier. In this respect he was misplaced in his own age; he was, in short, a man ahead of his time, anticipating the cultured Italian princes of the Renaissance. An extremely literate person, he wrote prolifically and illuminated his own books. He composed poetry and mystical allegories as well as compendiums of tournament rules. He sought to promote the advancement of knowledge and at one time employed Christopher Columbus. He was steeped in esoteric tradition, and his court included a Jewish astrologer, Cabalist, and physician known as Jean de Saint-Rémy. According to a number of accounts Jean de Saint-Rémy was the grandfather of Nostradamus, the famous sixteenth-century prophet who was also to figure in our story.

  Rene’s interests included chivalry and the Arthurian and Grail romances. Indeed, he seems to have had a particular preoccupation with the Grail. He is said to have taken great pride in a magnificent cup of red porphyry that, he asserted, had been used at the wedding at Cana. He had obtained it, he claimed, at Marseilles—where the Magdalen, according to tradition, landed with the Grail. Other chroniclers speak of a cup in René’s possession—perhaps the same one— which bore a mysterious inscription incised into the rim:

  Qui bien beurra

  Dieu voira.

  Qui beurra tout d’une baleine

  Voira Dieu et la Madeleine.6

  (He who drinks well

  Will see God.

  He who quaffs at a single draught

  Will see God and the Magdalen.)

  It would not be inaccurate to regard René d’Anjou as a major impetus behind the phenomenon now called the Renaissance. Owing to his numerous Italian possessions he spent some years in Italy and through his intimate friendship with the ruling Sforza family of Milan established contact with the Medicis of Florence. There is good reason to believe that it was largely René’s influence that prompted Cosimo de’ Medici to embark on a series of ambitious projects-projects destined to transform Western civilization.

  In 1439, while René was resident in Italy, Cosimo de’ Medici began sending his agents all over the world in quest of ancient manuscripts. Then, in 1444, Cosimo founded Europe’s first public library, the Library of San Marco, and thus began to challenge the Church’s long monopoly of learning. At Cosimo’s express commission, the corpus of Platonic, neo-Platonic, Pythagorean, Gnostic, and Hermetic thought found its way into translation for the first time and became readily accessible. Cosimo also instructed the University of Florence to begin teaching Greek for the first time in Europe for some seven hundred years. And he undertook to create an academy of Pythagorean and Platonic studies. Cosimo’s academy quickly generated a multitude of similar institutions throughout the Italian peninsula, which became bastions of Western esoteric tradition. And from them the high culture of the Renaissance began to blossom.

  If René d’Anjou notably contributed in some measure to the formation of the academies, he also seems to have conferred upon them one of their favorite symbolic themes—that of Arcadia. Certainly it is in René’s own career that the motif of Arcadia appears to have made its debut in post-Christian Western culture. In 1449, for example, at his court of Tarascon, René staged a series of pas d’armes—curious hybrid amalgams of tournament and masque, in which knights tilted against each other and, at the same time, performed a species of drama or play. One of René’s most famous pas d’armes was called "The Pas d’Armes of the Shepherdess." Played by his mistress at the time, the Shepherdess was an explicitly Arcadian figure, embodying both romantic and philosophical attributes. She presided over a tourney in which knights assumed allegorical indentities representing conflicting values and ideas. The event was a singular fusion of the pastoral Arcadian romance with the pageantry of the Round Table and the mysteries of the Holy Grail.

  Arcadia figures elsewhere in René’s work as well. It is frequently denoted by a fountain or a tombstone, both of which are associated with an underground stream. This stream is usually equated with the river Alpheus—the central river in the actual geographical Arcadia in Greece, which flows underground and is said to surface again at the Fountain of Arethusa in Sicily. From the most remote antiquity to Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," the river Alpheus has been deemed sacred. Its very name derives from the same root as the Greek word alpha, meaning "first" or "source."

  For René the motif of an underground stream seems to have been extremely rich in symbolic and allegorical resonances. Among other things, it would appear to connote the "underground" esoteric tradition of Pythagorean, Gnostic, Cabalistic, and Hermetic thought. But it might also connote something more than a general corpus of teachings, perhaps some very specific factual information—a "secret" of some sort transmitted in clandestine fashion from generation to generation. And it might connote an unacknowledged and thus ’’subterranean’’ bloodline.

  In the Italian academies the image of the "underground stream" appears to have been invested with all these levels of meaning. And it recurs consistently—so much so, indeed, that the academies themselves have often been labeled Arcadian. Thus, in 1502 a major work was published, a long poem entitled Arcadia, by Jacopo Sannazaro—and René d’Anjou’s Italian entourage of some years before included one Jacques Sannazar, probably the poet’s father. In 1553 Sannazaro’s poem
was translated into French. It was dedicated, interestingly enough, to the cardinal of Lénoncourt—ancestor of the twentieth-century count of Lénoncourt who compiled the genealogies in the "Prieuré documents.’’

  During the sixteenth century Arcadia and the "underground stream" became a prominent cultural fashion. In England they inspired Sir Philip Sidney’s most important work, Arcadia.7 In Italy they inspired such illustrious figures as Torquato Tasso—whose master-piece, Jerusalem Delivered, deals with the capture of the Holy City by Godfroi de Bouillon. By the seventeenth century the motif of Arcadia had culminated in Nicolas Poussin and "Les Bergers d’Arcadie."

  The more we explored the matter, the more apparent it became that something—a tradition of some sort, a hierarchy of values or attitudes, perhaps a specific body of information—was constantly being intimated by the "underground stream." This image seems to have assumed obsessive proportions in the minds of certain eminent political families of the period—all of whom, directly or indirectly, figure in the genealogies of the "Prieuré documents." And the families in question seem to have transmitted the image to their protégés in the arts. From René d’Anjou something seems to have passed to the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Estes, and the Gonzagas — the last of whom, according to the "Prieuré documents," provided Sion with two grand masters, Ferrante de Gonzaga and Louis de Gonzaga, count of Nevers. From them it appears to have found its way into the work of the epoch’s most illustrious poets and painters, including Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

  THE ROSICRUCIAN MANIFESTOS

  A somewhat similar dissemination of ideas occurred in the seventeenth century, first in Germany, then spreading to England. In 1614 the first of the so-called Rosicrucian manifestos appeared, followed by a second tract a year later. These manifestos created a furor at the time, provoking fulminations from the Church and the Jesuits, and eliciting fervently enthusiastic support from liberal factions in Protestant Europe. Among the most eloquent and influential exponents of Rosicrucian thought was Robert Fludd, who is listed as the Prieuré de Sion’s sixteenth grand master, presiding between 1595 and 1637.

  Among other things, the Rosicrucian manifestos promulgated the story of the legendary Christian Rosenkreuz.8 They purported to issue from a secret, "invisible" confraternity of "initiates" in Germany and France. They promised a transformation of the world and of human knowledge in accordance with esoteric, Hermetic principles—the "underground stream" that had flowed from René d’Anjou through the Renaissance. A new epoch of spiritual freedom was heralded, an epoch in which man would liberate himself from his former shackles, would unlock hitherto dormant "secrets of nature," and would govern his own destiny in accord with harmonious, all-pervading universal and cosmic laws. At the same time the manifestos were highly inflammatory politically, fiercely attacking the Catholic Church and the old Holy Roman Empire. These manifestos are now generally believed to have been written by a German theologian and esotericist, Johann Valentin Andrea, listed as grand master of the Prieuré de Sion after Robert Fludd. If they were not written by Andrea, they were certainly written by one or more of his associates.

  In 1616 a third Rosicrucian tract appeared, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. Like the two previous works, The Chemical Wedding was originally of anonymous authorship, but Andrea himself later confessed to having composed it as a "joke" or comedy.

  The Chemical Wedding is a complex Hermetic allegory, which subsequently influenced such works as Goethe’s Faust. As Frances Yates has demonstrated, it contains unmistakable echoes of the English esotericist, John Dee, who also influenced Robert Fludd. Andrea’s work also evokes resonances of the Grail romances and of the Knights Templar—Christian Rosenkreuz, for instance, is said to wear a white tunic with a red cross on the shoulder. In the course of the narrative a play is performed — an allegory within an allegory. This play involves a princess of unspecified "royal" lineage whose rightful domains have been usurped by the Moors and who is washed ashore in a wooden chest. The rest of the play deals with her vicissitudes and her marriage to a prince who will help her regain her heritage.

  Our research revealed assorted second- and third-hand links between Andrea and the families whose genealogies figure in the "Prieuré documents." We discovered no first-hand or direct links, however, except perhaps for Frederick, elector Palatine of the Rhine. Frederick was the nephew of an important French Protestant leader, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, viscount of Turenne and duke of Bouillon—Godfroi de Bouillon’s old title. Henri was also associated with the Longueville family, which figured prominently in both the "Prieuré documents" and our own inquiry. And in 1591 he had taken great trouble to acquire the town of Stenay.

  In 1613 Frederick of the Palatinate had married Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots, and great-granddaughter of Marie de Guise—and Guise was the cadet branch of the house of Lorraine. Marie de Guise, a century before, had been married to the duke of Longueville and then, on his death, to James V of Scotland. This created a dynastic alliance between the houses of Stuart and Lorraine. In consequence the Stuarts began to figure, if only peripherally, in the genealogies of the "Prieuré documents"; and Andrea, as well as the three alleged grand masters who followed him, displayed varying degrees of interest in the Scottish royal house. During this period the house of Lorraine was, to a significant degree, in eclipse. If Sion was a coherent and active order at the time, it might therefore have transferred its allegiance — at least partially and temporarily—to the decidedly more influential Stuarts.

  In any case Frederick of the Palatinate, after his marriage to Elizabeth Stuart, established an esoterically oriented court at his capital of Heidelberg. As Frances Yates writes:

  A culture was forming in the Palatinate which came straight out of the Renaissance but with more recent trends added, a culture which may be defined by the adjective "Rosicrucian." The prince around whom these deep currents were swirling was Friedrich, Elector Palatine, and their exponents were hoping for a politico-religious expression of their aims . . . The Frederickian movement ... was an attempt to give those currents politico-religious expression, to realise the ideal of Hermetic reform centred on a real prince . . . It ... created a culture, a "Rosicrucian" state with its court centred on Heidelberg. 9

  In short the anonymous Rosicrucians and their sympathizers seem to have invested Frederick with a sense of mission, both spiritual and political. And Frederick seems to have readily accepted the role imposed upon him, together with the hopes and expectations it entailed. Thus, in 1618 he accepted the crown of Bohemia, offered him by that country’s rebellious nobles. In doing so he incurred the wrath of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire and precipitated the chaos of the Thirty Years War. Within two years he and Elizabeth had been driven into exile in Holland, and Heidelberg was overrun by Catholic troops. And for the ensuing quarter of a century Germany became the major battleground for the most bitter, bloody, and costly conflict in European history before the twentieth century—a conflict in which the Church almost managed to reimpose the hegemony she had enjoyed during the Middle Ages.

  Amidst the turmoil raging around him Andrea created a network of more or less secret societies known as the Christian Unions. According to Andrea’s blueprint, each society was headed by an anonymous prince, assisted by twelve others divided into groups of three—each of whom was to be a specialist in a given sphere of study.10 The original purpose of the Christian Unions was to preserve threatened knowledge—especially the most recent scientific advances, many of which the Church deemed heretical. At the same time, however, the Christian Unions also functioned as a refuge for persons fleeing the Inquisition—which accompanied the invading Catholic armies and was intent on rooting out all vestiges of Rosicrucian thought. Thus, numerous scholars, scientists, philosophers, and esotericists found a haven in Andrea’s institutions. Through them many were smuggled to safety in England—where Freemasonry was just beginning to coalesce. In s
ome significant sense Andrea’s Christian Unions may have contributed to the organization of the Masonic lodge system.

  Among the displaced Europeans finding their way to England were a number of Andrea’s personal associates: Samuel Hartlib; Adam Komensky, for example, better known as Comenius, with whom Andrea maintained a continuing correspondence; Theodore Haak, who was also a personal friend of Elizabeth Stuart and maintained a correspondence with her; and Doctor John Wilkins, formerly personal chaplain to Frederick of the Palatinate and subsequently bishop of Chester.

  Once in England, these men became closely associated with Masonic circles. They were intimate with Robert Moray, for instance, whose induction into a Masonic lodge in 1641 is one of the earliest on record; with Elias Ashmole, antiquarian and expert of chivalric orders, who was inducted in 1646; and with the young but precocious Robert Boyle—who, though he was not himself a Freemason, was a member of another, more elusive secret society.11 There is no concrete evidence that this secret society was the Prieuré de Sion, but Boyle, according to the "Prieuré documents," succeeded Andrea as Sion’s grand master.

  During Cromwell’s Protectorate these dynamic minds, both En - glish and European, formed what Boyle—in a deliberate echo of the Rosicrucian manifestos—called an invisible college. And with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the "invisible college" became the Royal Society12—with the Stuart ruler Charles II as its patron and sponsor. Virtually all the Royal Society’s founding members were Freemasons. One could reasonably argue that the Royal Society itself, at least in its inception, was a Masonic institution— derived, through Andrea’s Christian Unions, from the "invisible Rosicrucian brotherhood." But this was not to be the culmination of the "underground stream." On the contrary, it was to flow from Boyle to Sir Isaac Newton, listed as Sion’s next grand master, and thence into the complex tributaries of eighteenth-century Freemasonry.