Holy Blood, Holy Grail (18 page)

on a man writing in 1170, for example, who makes a passing allusion to one or another individual as “Master’ or “Grand Master’ of the Temple. And additional evidence can be obtained by examining documents and charters of the period, in which one or another Templar official would append one or another title to his signature. It is thus hardly surprising that the sequence and dating of Grand Masters should engender considerable uncertainty and confusion.

Nor is it surprising that sequence and dating should vary, sometimes dramatically, from writer to writer, account to account.

Nevertheless, there were certain crucial details like those summarised above in which the “Prieure documents’ deviated significantly from all other sources. We could not, therefore, ignore such deviations. We

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had to determine, as far as we could, whether the list in the Dossiers secrets was based on sloppiness, ignorance or both; or, alternatively, whether this list was indeed the definitive one, based on “inside’

information, inaccessible to historians. If Sion did create the Knights Templar, and if Sion (or at least its records) did survive to the present day, we could reasonably expect it to be privy to details unobtainable elsewhere.

Most of the discrepancies between the list in the Dossiers secrets and those in other sources can be explained fairly easily. At this point, it is not worth exploring each such discrepancy and accounting for it.

But a single example should serve to illustrate how and why such discrepancies might occur. In addition to the Grand Master, the Temple had a multitude of local masters a master for England, for Normandy, for Aquitaine, for all the territories comprising its domains. There was also an overall European master, and, it would appear, a maritime master as well. In documents and charters these local or regional masters would invariably sign themselves

“Magister Templi’ - “Master of the Temple’. And on most occasions the Grand

Master -through modesty, carelessness, indifference or slapdash insouciance would also sign himself as nothing more than “Magister Templi’. In other words Andre de Montbard, regional Master of Jerusalem, would, on a charter, have the same designation after his name as the Grand Master, Bertrand de

Blanchefort.

It is thus not difficult to see how an historian, working with one or two charters alone and not cross-checking his references, might readily misconstrue Andre’s true status in the Order. By virtue of precisely this kind of error, many lists of Templar Grand Masters include a man named

Everard des Barres. But the Grand Master, by the Temple’s own constitutions, had to be elected by a general chapter in Jerusalem and had to reside there. Our research revealed that Everard des Barres was a regional master, elected and resident in France, who did not set foot in the Holy Land until much later. On this basis he could be excised from the list of Grand Masters as indeed he was in the Dossiers secrets. It was specifically on such academic fine points that the

“Prieure documents’ displayed a meticulous accuracy and precision we

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could not imagine being contrived after the fact. We spent more than a year considering and comparing various lists of

Templar Grand Masters. We consulted all writers on the Order, in English,

French and German, and then checked their sources as well. We examined the chronicles of the time like those of Guillaume de Tyre -and other contemporary accounts.

We consulted all the charters we could find and obtained comprehensive information on all those known to be still extant.

We compared signatories and titles on numerous proclamations, edicts, deeds and other Templar documents. As a result of this exhaustive inquiry, it became apparent that the list in the Dossiers secrets was more accurate than any other not only on the identity of the Grand Masters, but on the dates of their respective regimes as well. If a definitive list of the

Temple’s Grand Masters did exist, it was in the Dossiers secrets.z The accuracy of this list was not only important in itself. The implications attending it were much broader. Granted, such a list might perhaps have been compiled by an extremely careful researcher, but the task would have been monumental. It seemed much more likely to us that a list of such accuracy attested to some repository of privileged or ‘inside’

information information hitherto inaccessible to historians.

Whether our conclusion was warranted or not, we were confronted by one indisputable fact someone had obtained access, somehow, to a list which was more accurate than any other. And since that list despite its divergence from others more accepted proved so frequently to be correct, it lent considerable credibility to the “Prieure documents’ as a whole. If the Dossiers secrets were demonstrably reliable in this critical respect, there was somewhat less reason to doubt them in others.

Such reassurance was both timely and necessary. Without it, we might well have dismissed the third list in the Dossiers secrets the Grand Masters of the Prieure de Sion out of hand. For this third list, even

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at a cursory glance, seemed absurd. 6 The Grand Masters and the Underground Stream

In the Dossiers secrets,” the following individuals are listed as successive Grand Masters of the Prieure de Sion or, to use the official term, “Nautonnier’, an old French word which means ‘navigator’ or ‘helmsman’:

Jean de Gisors 1188-1220

Marie de Saint-Clair 1220-66

Guillaume de Gisors 1266-1307

Edouard de Bar 1307-36

Jeanne de Bar 1336-51

Jean de Saint-Clair 1351-66

Blanche d’Evreux 1366-98

Nicolas Flamel 1398-1418

Rene d’Anjou 1418-80

Iolande de Bar 1480-83

Sandro Filipepi 1483-1510

Leonard de Vinci 1510-19

Connetable de Bourbon 1519-27

Ferdinand de Gonzague 1527-75

Louis de Nevers 1575-95

Robert Fludd 1595-1637

J. Valentin Andrea 1637-54

Robert Boyle 1654-91

Isaac Newton 1691-1727

Charles Radclyffe 1727-46

Charles de Lorraine 1746-80

Maximilian de Lorraine 1780-1801

Charles Nodier 1801-44

Victor Hugo 1844-85

Claude Debussy 1885-1918

Jean Cocteau 1918 When we first saw this list, it immediately provoked our scepticism. On the one hand it includes a number of names which one would automatically expect to find on such a list names of famous

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individuals associated with the ‘occult’ and ‘esoteric’. On the other hand it includes a number of illustrious and improbable names individuals whom, in certain cases, we could not imagine presiding over a secret society. At the same time, many of these latter names are precisely the kind that twentieth-century organisations have often attempted to appropriate for themselves, thus establishing a species of spurious

‘pedigree’. There are, for example, lists published by AMORC, the modern “Rosicrucians’

based in California, which include virtually every important figure in Western history and culture whose values, even if only tangentially, happened to coincide with the Order’s own.

An often haphazard overlap or convergence of attitudes is deliberately misconstrued as something tantamount to ‘initiated membership’. And thus one is told that

Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and innumerable others were “Rosicrucians’ implying that they were card-carrying members who paid their dues regularly.

Our initial attitude towards the above list was equally cynical. Again, there are the predictable names -names associated with the ‘occult’ and ‘esoteric’. Nicolas Flamel, for instance, is perhaps the most famous and well documented of medieval alchemists.

Robert Fludd, seventeenth-century philosopher, was an exponent of Hermetic thought and other arcane subjects.

Johann Valentin Andrea, German contemporary of Fludd, composed, among other things, some of the works which spawned the myth of the fabulous Christian

Rosenkreuz. And there are also names like Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro

Filipepi, who is better known as Botticelli. There are names of distinguished scientists, like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton.

During the last two centuries the Prieure de Sion’s Grand Masters are alleged to have included such important literary and cultural figures as Victor Hugo,

Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau.

By including such names, the list in the Dossiers secrets could not but appear suspect. It was almost inconceivable that some of the individuals cited had presided over a secret society and still more, a secret society devoted to ‘occult’ and ‘esoteric’ interests. Boyle and Newton, for example, are hardly names that people in the twentieth century associate with the ‘occult’ and ‘esoteric’. And though Hugo,

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Debussy and Cocteau were immersed in such matters, they would seem to be too well known, too well researched and documented, to have exercised a “Grand Mastership’ over a secret order. Not, at any rate, without some word of it somehow leaking out.

On the other hand the distinguished names are not the only names on the list. Most of the other names belong to high-ranking European nobles, many of whom are extremely obscure unfamiliar not only to the general reader, but even to the professional historian. There is Guillaume de Gisors, for instance, who in 1306 is said to have organised the Prieure de Sion into an ‘hermetic freemasonry’. And there is Guillaume’s grandfather, jean de

Gisors, who is said to have been Sion’s first independent Grand Master, assuming his position after the “cutting of the elm’ and the separation from the Temple in 1188. There is no question that Jean de Gisors existed historically. He was born in 1133 and died in 1220. He is mentioned in charters and was at least nominal lord of the famous fortress in Normandy where meetings traditionally convened between English and French kings took place, as did the cutting of the elm in 1188. Jean seems to have been an extremely powerful and wealthy landowner and until 1193, a vassal of the king of England. He is also known to have possessed property in England in Sussex, and the manor of Titchfield in Hampshire.z According to the

Dossiers secrets, he met Thomas a Becket at Gisors in 1169 though there is no indication of the purpose of this meeting. We were able to confirm that Becket was indeed at Gisors in 1169,3 and it is therefore probable that he had some contact with the lord of the fortress; but we could find no record of any actual encounter between the two men.

In short, jean de Gisors, apart from a few bland details, proved virtually untraceable. He seemed to have left no mark whatever on history, save his existence and his title. We could find no indication of what he did what might have constituted his claim to fame, or have warranted his assumption of Sion’s Grand Mastership. If the list of Sion’s purported Grand Masters was authentic, what, we wondered, did Jean do to earn his place on it?

And if the list were a latter-day fabrication, why should someone so obscure be included at all?

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There seemed to us only one possible explanation 135 which did not really explain very much in fact. Like the other aristocratic names on the list of Sion’s Grand Masters, jean de Gisors appeared in the complicated genealogies which figured elsewhere in the “Prieure documents’.

Together with those other elusive nobles, he apparently belonged to the same dense forest of family trees ultimately descended, supposedly, from the

Merovingian dynasty. It thus seemed evident to us that the Prieure de Sion to a significant extent, at least was a domestic affair. In some way the

Order appeared to be intimately associated with a bloodline and a lineage.

And it was their connection with this bloodline or lineage that perhaps accounted for the various titled names on the list of Grand Masters.

From the list quoted above, it would seem that Sion’s Grand Mastership has recurrently shifted between two essentially distinct groups of individuals.

On the one hand there are the figures of monumental stature who through esoterica, the arts or sciences have produced some impact on Western tradition, history and culture. On the other hand, there are members of a specific and interlinked network of families noble, and sometimes royal.

In some degree this curious juxtaposition imparted plausibility to the list. If one merely wished to ‘concoct a pedigree’, there would be no point in including so many unknown or long-forgotten aristocrats.

There would be no point, for instance, in including a man like Charles de Lorraine Austrian field-marshal in the eighteenth century, brother-in-law to the

Empress Maria Theresa, who proved himself signally inept on the battlefield and was trounced in one engagement after another by Frederick the Great of

Prussia.

In this respect, at least, the Prieure de Sion would seem to be both modest and realistic.

It does not claim to have functioned under the auspices of unqualified geniuses, superhuman “masters’, illumined “initiates’, saints, sages or immortals. On the contrary, it acknowledges its Grand Masters to have been fallible human beings, a representative cross-section of humanity - a few geniuses, a few notables, a few “average specimens’, a few nonentities, even a few fools.

Why, we could not but wonder, would a forged or fabricated list include

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such a spectrum? If one wishes to contrive a list of Grand Masters, why not make all the names on it illustrious? If one wishes to

“concoct a pedigree’ which includes Leonardo,

Newton and Victor Hugo, why not also include Dante, Michelangelo, Goethe and

Tolstoi instead of obscure people like Edouard de Bar and Maximilian de

Lorraine? Why, moreover, were there so many ‘lesser lights’ on the list? Why a relatively minor writer like Charles Nodier, rather than contemporaries like Byron or Pushkin? Why an apparent’ eccentric like Cocteau rather than men of such international prestige as Andre Gide or Albert Camus? And why the omission of individuals like Poussin, whose connection with the mystery had already been established? Such questions nagged at us, and argued that the list warranted consideration before we dismissed it as an arrant fraud.