If Newton’s scientific interests were less orthodox than we had at first imagined, so were his religious views. He was militantly, albeit quietly, hostile to the idea of the Trinity. He also repudiated the fashionable Deism of his time, which reduced the cosmos to a vast mechanical machine constructed by a celestial engineer. He questioned the divinity of Jesus and avidly collected all manuscripts pertaining to the issue. He doubted the complete authenticity of the New Testament, believing certain passages to be corruptions interpolated in the fifth century. He was deeply intrigued by some of the early Gnostic heresies and wrote a study of one of them. 6
Prompted by Fatio de Duillier, Newton also displayed a striking and surprising sympathy for the Camisards, or Prophets of Cevennes, who shortly after 1705 began appearing in London. So called because of their white tunics, the Camisards, like the Cathars before them, had arisen in the south of France. Like the Cathars they were vehemently opposed to Rome and stressed the supremacy of gnosis, or direct knowledge, over faith. Like the Cathars they queried Jesus’ divinity. And like the Cathars they had been brutally suppressed by military force—in effect, an eighteenth-century Albigensian Crusade. Driven out of the Languedoc, the heretics found refuge in Geneva and London.
A few weeks before his death, Newton, aided by a few intimate friends, systematically burned numerous boxes of manuscripts and personal papers. With considerable surprise his contemporaries noted that he did not, on his deathbed, request last rites.
CHARLES RADCLYFFE. From the sixteenth century the Radclyffes had been an influential Northumbrian family. In 1688, shortly before he was deposed, James II had created them earls of Derwentwater. Charles Radclyffe himself was born in 1693. His mother was an illegitimate daughter of Charles II by the king’s mistress, Moll Davis. Radclyffe was thus, on his mother’s side, of royal blood—a grandson of Charles II. He was cousin to Bonnie Prince Charlie and to George Lee, earl of Lichfield—another illegitimate grandson of the Stuart king. Not surprisingly, therefore, Radclyffe devoted much of his life to the Stuart cause.
CHARLES DE LORRAINE. Born in 1744, Charles de Lorraine was François’ brother and junior by four years. It is probable that both brothers had been exposed, in boyhood, to a Jacobite influence, for their father had offered protection and refuge at Bar-le-Duc to the exiled Stuarts. In 1735, when François married Maria Theresa, Charles became brother-in-law to the Austrian empress. Eleven years later, in 1744, he consolidated this relationship by marrying Maria Theresa’s sister, Marie Anne. In the same year, he was appointed governor-general of the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium) and commander-in-chief of the Austrian army.
François, on his marriage, had formally renounced all claim to Lorraine, which was entrusted to a French puppet. In exchange he received the archduchy of Tuscany. Charles, however, adamantly refused to acknowledge this transaction, refused to renounce his claim to Lorraine. Given François’ abdication, he was thus, in effect, titular duke of Lorraine. And in 1742 he advanced with an army of seventy thousand troops to recapture his native soil. He would most likely have done so, had he not been obliged to divert his army to Bohemia in order to thwart a French invasion.
In the military operations that followed Charles proved himself a skilled commander. Today he would no doubt be regarded as one of the better generals of his age, were it not his misfortune to be pitted repeatedly against Frederick the Great. It was against Charles that Frederick won one of his most dazzling and decisive victories, the Battle of Leuthen in 1757. And yet Frederick regarded Charles as a worthy and "redoubtable" adversary and spoke of him only in glowing terms.
Following his defeat at Leuthen, Charles was relieved of command by Maria Theresa and retired to his capital of Brussels. Here he established himself as a patron of the arts and assembled a glittering court—an elegant, gracious, and highly cultivated court that became a center for literature, painting, music, and the theater. In many respects this court resembled that of Charles’s ancestor, René d’Anjou, and the resemblance may well have been deliberate.
In 1761 Charles became grand master of the Teutonic Order—a latter-day chivalric vestige of the Old Teutonic Knights, the Templars’ Germanic protégés who had been a major military power until the sixteenth century. Later, in 1770, a new coadjutor of the Teutonic Order was appointed—Charles’s favorite nephew, Maximilian. During the years that followed, the bond between uncle and nephew was extremely close; and in 1775, when an equestrian statue of Charles was raised in Brussels, Maximilian was again in attendance. The official unveiling of this statue, which had been very precisely scheduled, was on January 17 7—the date of Nicolas Flamel’s first alchemical transmutation, of Marie de Blanchefort’s tombstone, of Saunière’s fatal stroke.
MAXIMILIAN DE LORRAINE. Born in 1756, Maximilian de Lorraine— or Maximilian von Hapsburg—was Charles de Lorraine’s favorite nephew and Maria Theresa’s youngest son. As a youth he had seemed destined for a military career, until a fall from a horse left him crippled in one leg. As a result he turned his energies to the Church, becoming, in 1784, bishop of Münster, as well as archbishop and imperial elector of Cologne. On the death of his uncle, Charles, in 1780 he also became grand master of the Teutonic Order.
In other respects, too, Maximilian followed in his uncle’s footsteps. Like Charles he became an assiduous patron of the arts. Among his protégés were Haydn, Mozart, and the young Beethoven. The latter even intended to dedicate the First Symphony to him. By the time the work was finished and published, however, Maximilian had died.
Maximilian was an intelligent, tolerant, and easygoing ruler, beloved by his subjects and esteemed by his peers. He seems to have epitomized the ideal of the enlightened eighteenth-century potentate and was probably one of the most cultured men of his age. In political matters he appears to have been particularly lucid and urgently sought to warn his sister, Marie Antoinette, of the storm then just beginning to gather in France. When the storm broke, Maximilian did not panic. In fact, he seems to have been generally sympathetic to the original objectives of the French Revolution, while at the same time providing a haven for aristocratic refugees.
Although Maximilian declared that he was not a Freemason, this statement has often been questioned. Certainly he is widely suspected of having belonged to one or another secret society—despite his position in the Church and Rome’s vigorous prohibition of such activities. In any case he is known to have consorted openly with members of the "craft"—including, of course, Mozart.
Like Robert Boyle, Charles Radclyffe, and Charles de Lorraine, Maximilian appears to reflect a certain pattern in the list of Sion’s alleged grand masters—a pattern that in fact extends back to the Middle Ages. Like Boyle, Radclyffe, and his own uncle, Maximilian was a youngest son. The list of alleged grand masters includes a number of younger or youngest sons—many of whom appear in lieu of more famous elder brothers.
Like Radclyffe and Charles de Lorraine, Maximilian kept a relatively low profile, working quietly behind the scenes and acting— assuming Sion’s grand master acts at all—through intermediaries and mouthpieces. Radclyffe, for example, appears to have acted through the Chevalier Ramsay, then through Hund. Charles de Lorraine would seem to have acted through his brother, François. And Maximilian seems to have acted through cultural figures, as well as through certain of his own numerous siblings—Marie Caroline, for instance, who as queen of Naples and Sicily was largely responsible for the spread of Freemasonry in those domains.
CHARLES NODIER. Born in 1780, Charles Nodier seems to inaugurate a pattern that obtains for all Sion’s alleged grand masters after the French Revolution. Unlike his predecessors he not only lacks noble blood but seems to have had no direct contact whatever with any of the families whose genealogies figure in the "Prieuré documents." After the French Revolution the Prieuré de Sion—or at least its purported grand masters—would appear to have been divorced both from the old aristocracy and from the corridors of political power; or so, at any rate, our resea
rch led us to conclude at the time.
Nodier’s mother was one Suzanne Paris, who is said not to have known her parents. His father was a solicitor in Besançon and, before the Revolution, a member of the local Jacobite Club. After the outbreak of the Revolution, Nodier senior became Mayor of Besançon and president of the town’s revolutionary tribunal. He was also a highly esteemed master Mason, in the forefront of Masonic activity and politics at the time.
Charles Nodier displayed an extraordinary precocity, allegedly becoming involved in—among other things—cultural and political affairs at the age of ten! By the age of eighteen he had established a literary reputation and continued to publish prolifically for the rest of his life, averaging a book a year. His work covers an impressively diverse spectrum—travel journals, essays on literature and painting, studies of prosody and versification, a study of antennae in insects, an inquiry into the nature of suicide, autobiographical reminiscences, excursions into archaeology, linguistics, legal questions, and esoterica, not to mention a voluminous corpus of fiction. Today Nodier is generally dismissed as a literary curiosity.
Although he was initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, Nodier quickly turned against it. He performed a similar volte-face in his attitude toward Napoleon and by 1804 was vociferous in his opposition to the emperor. In that year he published, in London, a satirical poem, The Napoléone. Having produced this seditious tract, he then, oddly enough, set about calling attention to the fact that he had done so. The authorities at first paid no attention to him, and Nodier seems to have gone inordinately out of his way simply to get arrested. At last, after writing a personal letter to Napoleon in which he professed his guilt, he was imprisoned for a month, then sent back to Besançon and kept under halfhearted surveillance. Nevertheless, Nodier claimed later that he had continued to oppose the regime, becoming involved in two separate plots against Napoleon, in 1804 and again in 1812. Although he was given to boasting and bravado, this claim may not have been without substance. Certainly he was friendly with the instigators of the two plots, whom he had met in Besançon during his youth.
VICTOR HUGO. Hugo’s family was originally from Lorraine—of distinguished aristocratic descent, he later insisted—but he himself was born in Besançon, that hotbed of subterranean subversive activity, in 1802. His father was a general under Napoleon but maintained very cordial relations with the conspirators involved in the plot against the emperor. One of these conspirators, in fact, was Madame Hugo’s lover, cohabiting with her in the same house and playing an important role in her son’s development, being the young Victor’s godfather and mentor. Thus, Hugo had been exposed to the world of intrigue, conspiracy, and secret societies from the age of seven.
By the age of seventeen he was already a fervent disciple of Charles Nodier, and it was from Nodier that he acquired his erudite knowledge of Gothic architecture, which figures so saliently in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In 1819 Hugo and his brother established a publishing house in conjunction with Nodier, and this house produced a magazine under Nodier’s editorial direction. In 1822 Hugo married in a special ceremony at Saint Sulpice. Three years later he and Nodier, with their wives, embarked on a prolonged journey to Switzerland. In the same year, 1825, the two friends traveled together to attend the coronation of Charles X. In the years that followed Hugo formed his own salon, modeled on Nodier’s and patronized by most of the same celebrities. And when Nodier died in 1845, Hugo was one of the pallbearers at the funeral.
Like Newton, Hugo was a deeply religious man, but his religious views were highly unorthodox. Like Newton he was militantly anti-Trinitarian and repudiated Jesus’ divinity. As a result of Nodier’s influence he was immersed all his life in esoterica, in Gnostic, Cabalistic, and Hermetic thought—a preoccupation that figures prominently in his poetry and prose. And he is known to have been connected with a so-called Rose-Croix order, which also included Eliphas Lévi and the young Maurice Barrès.
Hugo’s political attitudes have always been a source of perplexity to critics and historians, and they are too complex, too inconsistent, too contingent on other factors to be discussed here. We found it significant, however, that despite his personal admiration for Napoleon, Hugo was a staunch royalist who welcomed the restoration of the old Bourbon dynasty. Yet at the same time he seems to have regarded the Bourbons as desirable only in a provisional way—a kind of stopgap measure. On the whole he appears to have despised them and was particularly fierce in his condemnation of Louis XIV. The ruler whom Hugo most enthusiastically endorsed—indeed, the two were close personal friends—was Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" elected to preside over a popular monarchy. And Louis Philippe was allied by marriage to the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine. His wife, in fact, was Maximilian of Lorraine’s niece.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY. Debussy was born in 1862, and though his family was poor, he quickly established wealthy and influential contacts. While still in his teens he was performing as pianist in the château of the French president’s mistress and seems to have become acquainted with the head of state as well. In 1880 he was adopted by the Russian noblewoman who had patronized Tchaikovsky and traveled with her to Switzerland, Italy, and Russia. In 1884, after winning a coveted musical prize, he studied for a time in Rome. Between 1887 and 1906 he lived mostly in Paris, but the years preceding and following this period were devoted to extensive travel. These travels are known to have brought him into contact with a number of eminent people. We endeavored to determine whether any of them were connected with the families whose genealogies figure in the "Prieuré documents," but our efforts for the most part proved futile. Debussy, it transpired, was curiously secretive about his aristocratic and political associates. Many of his letters have been suppressed; and in those that have been published important names and often whole sentences have been scrupulously excised.
Debussy seems to have made Victor Hugo’s acquaintance through the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. He later set a number of Hugo’s works to music. During his time in Paris he became an integral member of the symbolist circles who dominated the cultural life of the French capital. These circles were sometimes illustrious, sometimes odd, sometimes both. They included the young cleric Émile Hoffet—through whom Debussy came to meet Bérenger Saunière; Emma Calvé, the esoterically oriented diva; the enigmatic magus of French symbolist poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé—one of whose masterpieces, L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, Debussy set to music; the symbolist playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, whose drama Pelléas et Mélisande Debussy turned into a world-famous opera; and the flamboyant Comte Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who wrote the Rosicrucian play Axël. Although his death in 1918 prevented its completion, Debussy began to compose a libretto for Villiers’s occult drama, intending to turn it, too, into an opera. Among his other associates were the luminaries who attended Mallarmé’s famous Tuesday night soirées—Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Marcel Proust.
In themselves Debussy’s and Mallarmé’s circles were steeped in esoterica. At the same time they overlapped other circles that were more esoteric still. Thus, Debussy consorted with virtually all the most prominent names in the so-called French occult revival.
JEAN COCTEAU. Born in 1889, Cocteau seemed to us a most unlikely candidate for the grand mastership of an influential secret society. But so, too, did some of the other names when we first encountered them. For nearly all those other names certain relevant connections gradually became apparent. In Cocteau’s case few such connections did.
It is worth noting, however, that Cocteau was raised in a milieu close to the corridors of power—his family was politically prominent and his uncle was an important diplomat. Despite his subsequent bohemian existence he never completely divorced himself from these influential spheres. Outrageous though his behavior sometimes was, he retained close contact with individuals highly placed in aristocratic and political circles. Like many of Sion’s alleged grand masters—Boyle, Newton, Debussy, for instance—he app
eared to remain sublimely aloof from politics. During the German Occupation he took no active part in the Resistance, but made apparent his antipathy to the Pétain regime. And after the war he seems to have enjoyed considerable currency with de Gaulle, whose brother commissioned him to deliver an important lecture on the state of France. For us the most convincing testimony of Cocteau’s affiliation with the Prieuré de Sion resides in his work—in the film Orphée, for instance, in such plays as The Eagle Has Two Heads (based on the Hapsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria), and in the decoration of such churches as Notre Dame de France in London. Most convincing of all, however, is his signature appended to the statutes of the Prieuré de Sion.
Bibliography
I The Prieuré Documents
ANTOINE L’ERMITE. Un Trésor Mérovingien à Rennes-le-Château. Anvers, 1961.
BEAUCEAN, Nicolas. Au Pays de la Reine Blanche. Paris, 1967.
BLANCASCALL, Madeleine. Les Descendants mérovingiens ou l’enigme du Razès Wisigoth. Geneva, 1965.
BOUDET, Henri. La Vraie Langue celtique. Carcassonne, 1886.
—. La Vraie Langue celtique. Facsimile edition with preface by Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. Paris, 1978.
CHÉRISEY, Philippe de. Circuit. Liege, 1968.
—.L’Or de Rennes pour un Napoléon. Liege, 1975.
—. L’Enigme de Rennes. Paris, 1978.
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