Holy Blood, Holy Grail

by Baigent, Michael

  When the articles in Circuit were not arcane or obscure, they were, according to M. Paoli, fervently nationalistic. In one of them, for instance, signed Adrian Sevrette, the author asserts that no solution for existing problems will be forthcoming.

  except through new methods and new men, for politics are dead. The curious fact remains that men do not wish to recognize this. There exists only one question: economic organization. But do there still exist men who are capable of thinking France, as during the Occupation, when patriots and resistance fighters did not bother themselves about the political tendencies of their comrades in the fight?33

  And from Volume 4 of Circuit M. Paoli quotes the following passage:

  We desire that the 1,500 copies of Circuit be a contact that kindles a light, we desire that the voice of patriots be able to transcend obstacles as in 1940, when they left invaded France to come and knock on the office door of the leader of Free France. Today, it is the same, before all we are French, we are that force which fights in one way or another to construct a France cleansed and new. This must be done in the same patriotic spirit, with the same will and solidarity of action. Thus we cite here what we declare to be an old philosophy.34

  There then follows a detailed plan of government to restore to France a lost luster. It insists, for example, on the dismantling of departments and the restoration of provinces:

  The department is but an arbitrary system, created at the time of the Revolution, dictated and determined by the era in accordance with the demands of locomotion (the horse). Today, it no longer represents anything. In contrast, the province is a living portion of France; it is a whole vestige of our past, the same basis as that which formed the existence of our nation; it has its own folklore, its customs, its monuments, often its local dialects, which we wish to reclaim and promulgate. The province must have its own specific apparatus for defense and administration, adapted to its specific needs, with the national unit.35

  M. Paoli then quotes eight pages that follow. The material they contain is organized under the following subheadings:

  Council of the Provinces

  Council of State

  Parliamentary Council

  Taxes

  Work and Production

  Medical

  National Education

  Age of Majority

  Housing and Schools

  The plan of government proposed under these subheadings is not inordinately controversial and could probably be instituted with a minimum of upheaval. Nor can the plan be labeled politically. It cannot be called left-wing or right-wing, liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. On the whole it seems fairly innocuous, and one is at a loss to see how it would necessarily restore any particular lost luster to France. As M. Paoli says, "The propositions ... are not revolutionary. However, they rest on a realistic analysis of the actual structures of the French state, and are impregnated with a solid good sense."36 But then the plan of government outlined in Circuit makes no explicit mention of the real basis on which, if implemented, it would presumably ultimately rest—the restoration of a popular monarchy ruled by the Merovingian bloodline. In Circuit there would be no need to state this, for it would constitute an underlying "given," a premise on which everything published in the magazine pivoted. For the magazine’s intended readers the restoration of the Merovingian bloodline was clearly too obvious and accepted an objective to need belaboring.

  At this point in his book M. Paoli poses a crucial question—a question that had haunted us as well:

  We have, on the one hand, a concealed descent from the Merovingians and, on the other, a secret movement, the Prieuré de Sion, whose goal is to facilitate the restoration of a popular monarchy of the Merovingian line ... But it is necessary to know if this movement contents itself with esoterico-political speculations (whose unavowed end is to make much money by exploiting the world’s gullibility and naïveté) or whether this movement is genuinely active.37

  M. Paoli then considers this question, reviewing the evidence at his disposal. His conclusion is as follows:

  Unquestionably, the Prieuré de Sion seems to possess powerful connections. In actuality, any creation of an association is submitted to a preliminary inquiry by the Minister of the Interior. This obtains as well for a magazine, a publishing house. And yet these people are able to publish, under pseudonyms, at false addresses, through nonexistent publishing houses, works which cannot be found in circulation either in Switzerland or in France. There are two possibilities. Either government authorities are not doing their jobs. Or else...38

  M. Paoli does not spell out the alternative. At the same time it is apparent that he personally regards the unstated alternative as the more probable of the two. M. Paoli’s conclusion, in short, is that government officials, and a great many other powerful people as well, are either members of Sion or obedient to it. If this is so, Sion must be a very influential organization indeed.

  Having conducted extensive research of his own, M. Paoli is satisfied with the Merovingian claim to legitimacy. To that extent, he admits, he can make sense of Sion’s objectives. Beyond this point, however, he confesses himself to be profoundly puzzled. What is the point, he wonders, of restoring the Merovingian bloodline today, thirteen hundred years after it was deposed? Would a modern-day Merovingian regime be different from any other modern-day regime? If so, how and why? What is so special about the Merovingians? Even if their claim is legitimate, it would seem to be irrelevant. Why, then, should so many powerful and intelligent people, both today and in the past, accord it not only their attention but their allegiance as well?

  We, of course, were posing precisely the same questions. Like M. Paoli we were prepared to acknowledge the Merovingian claim to legitimacy. But what possible significance could such a claim enjoy today? Could the technical legitimacy of a monarchy really be so persuasive and convincing an argument? Why, in the late twentieth century, should any monarchy, legitimate or not, command the kind of allegiance the Merovingians seemed to command?

  If we were dealing only with a group of idiosyncratic cranks, we could dismiss the matter out of hand. But we were not; on the contrary, we seemed to be dealing with an extremely influential organization that included in its ranks some of the most important, most distinguished, most acclaimed, and most responsible men of our age. And these men, in many cases, seemed to regard the restoration of the Merovingian dynasty as a sufficiently valid goal to transcend their personal political, social, and religious differences.

  It seemed to make no sense—that the restoration of a thirteen-hundred-year-old bloodline should constitute so vital a cause célèbre for so many public and highly esteemed people. Unless, of course, we were overlooking something. Unless legitimacy was not the only Merovingian claim. Unless there was something else of immense consequence that differentiated the Merovingians from other dynasties. Unless, in short, there was something very special indeed about the Merovingian blood royal.

  9

  The Long-haired Monarchs

  By this time, of course, we had already researched the Merovingian dynasty. As far as we could we had groped our way through a mist of fantasy and obscurity even more opaque than that surrounding the Cathars and the Knights Templar. We had spent some months endeavoring to disentangle complex strands of intertwined history and fable. Despite our efforts, however, the Merovingians remained for the most part shrouded in mystery.

  The Merovingian dynasty issued from the Sicambrians, a tribe of the Germanic people collectively known as the Franks. Between the fifth and seventh centuries the Merovingians ruled large parts of what are now France and Germany. The period of their ascendancy coincides with the period of King Arthur—a period that constitutes the setting for the romances of the Holy Grail. It is probably the most impenetrable period of what are now called the Dark Ages. But the Dark Ages, we discovered, had not been truly dark. On the contrary, it quickly became apparent to us that somebody had deliberately obscured them. To the extent t
hat the Roman Church exercised a veritable monopoly on learning, and especially on writing, the records that survived represent certain vested interests. Almost everything else has been lost—or censored. But here and there from time to time something slipped through the curtain drawn across the past, seeped out to us despite the official silence. From these shadowy vestiges a reality could be reconstructed—a reality of a most interesting kind and one very discordant with the tenets of orthodoxy.

  LEGEND AND THE MEROVINGIANS

  We encountered a number of enigmas surrounding the origins of the Merovingian dynasty. One usually thinks of a dynasty, for example, as a ruling family or house that not merely succeeds another ruling family or house but does so by virtue of having displaced, deposed, or supplanted its predecessors. In other words one thinks of dynasties as commencing with a coup d’état of one sort or another, often entailing the extinction of the previous ruling line. The Wars of the Roses in England, for instance, marked the change of a dynasty. A century or so later the Stuarts mounted the English throne only when the Tudors were extinct. And the Stuarts themselves were deposed forcibly by the houses of Orange and Hanover.

  In the case of the Merovingians, however, there was no such violent or abrupt transition, no usurpation, no displacement, no extinction of an earlier regime. On the contrary, the house that came to be called Merovingian seems already to have ruled over the Franks. The Merovingians were already rightful and duly acknowledged kings. But there appears to have been something special about one of them—so much so that he conferred his name on the entire dynasty.

  The ruler from whom the Merovingians derived their name is most elusive, his historical reality eclipsed by legend. Merovée (Merovech or Meroveus) was a semi supernatural figure worthy of classical myth. Even his name bears witness to his miraculous origin and character. It echoes the French word for "mother" as well as both the French and Latin words for "sea."

  According to both the leading Frankish chronicler and subsequent tradition, Merovée was born of two fathers. When already pregnant by her husband, King Clodio, Merovée’s mother supposedly went swimming in the ocean. In the water she is said to have been seduced and/or raped by an unidentified marine creature from beyond the sea—"bestea Neptuni Quinotauri similis, " a "beast of Neptune similar to a Quinotaur," whatever a Quinotaur may have been. This creature apparently impregnated the lady a second time. And when Merovée was born, there allegedly flowed in his veins a commingling of two different bloods—the blood of a Frankish ruler and of a mysterious aquatic creature.

  Such fantastic legends are quite common, of course, not only in the ancient world, but in later European tradition as well. Usually they are not entirely imaginary, but symbolic or allegorical, masking some concrete historical fact behind their fabulous façade. In the case of Merovée the fabulous façade might well indicate an intermarriage of some sort—a pedigree transmitted through the mother, as in Judaism, for instance, or a mingling of dynastic lines whereby the Franks became allied by blood with someone else, quite possibly with a source from "beyond the sea"—a source which, for one or another reason, was transformed by subsequent fable into a sea creature.

  In any case, by virtue of his dual blood Merovée was said to have been endowed with an impressive array of superhuman powers. And whatever the historical actuality behind the legend, the Merovingian dynasty continued to be mantled in an aura of magic, sorcery, and the supernatural. According to tradition Merovingian monarchs were occult adepts, initiates in arcane sciences, practitioners of esoteric arts—worthy rivals of Merlin, their fabulous near-contemporary. They were often called the sorcerer-kings or thaumaturge-kings. By virtue of some miraculous property in their blood they could allegedly heal by the laying on of hands; and according to one account the tassels at the fringes of their robes were deemed to possess miraculous curative powers. They were said to be capable of clairvoyant or telepathic communication with beasts and with the natural world around them and to wear powerful magical necklaces. They were said to possess an arcane spell that protected them and granted them phenomenal longevity—which history, incidentally, does not seem to confirm. And they all supposedly bore a distinctive birthmark, which distinguished them from all other men, which rendered them immediately indentifiable, and which attested to their semi-divine or sacred blood. This birthmark reputedly took the form of a red cross, either over the heart—a curious anticipation of the Templar Blazon—or between the shoulder blades.

  The Merovingians were also frequently called the long-haired kings. Like Samson in the Old Testament, they were loath to cut their hair. Like Samson’s their hair supposedly contained their vertu—the essence and secret of their power. Whatever the basis for this belief in the puissance of the Merovingians’ hair, it seems to have been taken quite seriously, and as late as A.D. 754. When Childeric III was deposed in that year and imprisoned, his hair was ritually shorn at the Pope’s express command.

  However extravagant the legends surrounding the Merovingians, they would seem to rest on some concrete basis, some status enjoyed by the Merovingian monarchs during their own lifetimes. In fact the Merovingians were not regarded as kings in the modern sense of that word. They were regarded as priest-kings—embodiments of the divine, in other words, not unlike, say, the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. They did not rule simply by God’s grace. On the contrary, they were apparently deemed the living embodiment and incarnation of God’s grace—a status usually reserved exclusively for Jesus. And they seem to have engaged in ritual practices that partook, if anything, more of a priesthood than of kingship. Skulls found of Merovingian monarchs, for example, bear what appears to be a ritual incision or hole in the crown. Similar incisions can be found in the skulls of high priests of early Tibetan Buddhism—to allow the soul to escape on death and to open direct contact with the divine. There is reason to suppose that the clerical tonsure is a residue of the Merovingian practice.

  In 1653 an important Merovingian tomb was found in the Ardennes—the tomb of King Childeric I, son of Merovée and father of Clovis, most famous and influential of all Merovingian rulers. The tomb contained arms, treasure, and regalia such as one would expect to find in a royal tomb. It also contained items less characteristic of kingship than of magic, sorcery, and divination—a severed horse’s head, for instance, a bull’s head made of gold, and a crystal ball.1

  One of the most sacred of Merovingian symbols was the bee, and King Childeric’s tomb contained no less than three hundred miniature bees made of solid gold. Along with the tomb’s other contents these bees were entrusted to Leopold Wilhelm von Hapsburg, military governor of the Austrian Netherlands at the time and brother of the Emperor Ferdinand III.2 Eventually most of Childeric’s treasure was returned to France. And when he was crowned emperor in 1804 Napoleon made a special point of having the golden bees affixed to his coronation robes.

  This incident was not the only manifestation of Napoleon’s interest in the Merovingians. He commissioned a compilation of genealogies by one Abbé Pichon, to determine whether or not the Merovingian bloodline had survived the fall of the dynasty. It was on these genealogies, commissioned by Napoleon, that the genealogies in the "Prieuré documents’’ were in large part based.3

  THE BEAR FROM ARCADIA

  The legends surrounding the Merovingians proved worthy of the age of Arthur and the Grail romances. At the same time they constituted a daunting rampart between us and the historical reality we wanted to explore. When we at last gained access to it—or what little of it had survived—this historical reality was somewhat different from the legends. But it was not any the less mysterious, extraordinary, or evocative.

  We could find little verifiable information about the true origins of the Merovingians. They themselves claimed descent from Noah, whom they regarded, even more than Moses, as the source of all biblical wisdom—an interesting position, which surfaced again a thousand years later in European Freemasonry. The Merovingians also claimed direct descent from ancient Tro
y—which, whether true or not, would serve to explain the occurrence in France of Trojan names like Troyes and Paris. More contemporary writers—including the authors of the "Prieuré documents"—have endeavored to trace the Merovingians to ancient Greece, and specifically to the region known as Arcadia. According to these documents the ancestors of the Merovingians were connected with Arcadia’s royal house. At some unspecified date toward the advent of the Christian era they supposedly migrated up the Danube, then up the Rhine, and established themselves in what is now western Germany.

  Whether the Merovingians derived ultimately from Troy or from Arcadia would now seem to be academic, and there is not necessarily a conflict between the two claims. According to Homer a substantial contingent of Arcadians was present at the siege of Troy. According to early Greek histories Troy was in fact founded by settlers from Arcadia. It is also worth noting in passing that the bear, in ancient Arcadia, was a sacred animal—a totem on which mystery cults were based and to which ritual sacrifice was made.4 Indeed, the very name Arcadia derives from "Arkades," which means "People of the Bear." The ancient Arcadians claimed descent from Arkas, the patron deity of the land, whose name also means "bear." According to Greek myth, Arkas was the son of Callisto, a nymph connected with Artemis the huntress. To the modern mind Callisto is most familiar as the constellation Ursa Major—the Great Bear.

  For the Sicambrian Franks, from whom the Merovingians issued, the bear enjoyed a similar exalted status. Like the ancient Arcadians they worshiped the bear in the form of Artemis—or, more specifically, the form of her Gallic equivalent, Arduina, patron goddess of the Ardennes. The mystery cult of Arduina persisted well into the Middle Ages, one center of it being the town of Lunéville, not far from two other sites recurring repeatedly in our investigation—Stenay and Orval. As late as 1304 statutes were still being promulgated by the Church forbidding worship of the heathen goddess. 5