Holy Blood, Holy Grail (23 page)

For a good part of his life, Cocteau was associated -sometimes intimately, sometimes peripherally with royalist Catholic circles. Here he frequently hobnobbed with members of the old aristocracy including some of Proust’s friends and patrons. At the same time, however, Cocteau’s Catholicism was highly suspect, highly unorthodox, and seems to have been more an aesthetic than a religious commitment.

In the latter part of his life, he devoted much of his energy to redecorating churches -curious echo, perhaps, of

Berenger Sauniere. Yet even then his piety was questionable: “They take me for a religious painter because I’ve decorated a chapel.

Always the same mania for labelling people.”a

Like Sauniere, Cocteau, in his redecorations, incorporated certain curious and suggestive details. Some are visible in the church of Notre Dame de

France, around the corner from Leicester Square in London. The church itself dates from 1865 and may, at its consecration, have had certain Masonic connections. In 1940, at the peak of the blitz, it was seriously damaged. Nevertheless, it remained the favourite centre of worship for many important members of the Free French Forces; and after the war it was restored and redecorated by artists from all over France. Among them was

Cocteau, who, in 1960, three years before his death, executed a mural depicting the Crucifixion. It is an extremely singular Crucifixion. There is a black sun, and a sinister, green-tinged and unidentified figure in the lower right-hand corner. There is a Roman soldier holding a shield with a bird emblazoned on it a highly styli sed bird suggesting an Egyptian rendering of Horus. Among the mourning women and dice-throwing centurions, there are two incongruously modern figures -one of whom is Cocteau himself, presented as a self portrait with his back significantly turned on the cross. Most striking of all is the fact that the mural depicts only the lower portion of the cross.

Whoever hangs upon it is visible only as far up as the knees so that one cannot see the face, or determine the identity of who is being

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crucified. And fixed to the cross, immediately below the anonymous victim’s feet, is a gigantic rose. The design, in short, is a flagrant Rose-Croix device. And if nothing else, it is a very singular motif for a Catholic church.

The Two John XXHIs

The Dossiers secrets, in which the list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters appeared, were dated 1956. Cocteau did not die until 1963. There was thus no indication of who might have succeeded him, or of who might preside over the

Prieure de Sion at present. But Cocteau himself posed one additional point of immense interest.

Until the ‘cutting of the elm’ in 1188, the “Prieure documents’

asserted,

Sion and the Order of the Temple shared the same Grand Master. After 1188

Sion is said to have chosen a Grand Master of its own, the first of them being jean de Gisors. According to the “Prieure documents’, every Grand

Master, on assuming his position, has adopted the name of jean (John) or, since there were four women, Jeanne (Joan). Sion’s Grand Masters are therefore alleged to have comprised a continuous succession of jeans and

Jeannes, from 1188 to the present. This succession was clearly intended to imply an esoteric and Hermetic papacy based on John, in contrast (and perhaps opposition) to the exoteric one based on Peter.

One major question, of course, was which John. John the Baptist? John the

Evangelist the “Beloved Disciple’ in the Fourth Gospel? Or John the Divine, author of the Book of Revelation? It seemed it must be one of these three because jean de Gisors in 1188 had purportedly taken the title of

Jean II. Who, then, was jean I?

Whatever the answer to that question, jean Cocteau appeared on the list of

Sion’s alleged Grand Masters as jean XXIII. In 1959, while Cocteau still presumably held the Grand Mastership, Pope Pius XII died and the assembled cardinals elected, as their new pontiff, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli of

Venice. Any newly elected pope chooses his own name; and Cardinal Roncalli caused considerable consternation when he chose the name of John XXIII.

Such consternation was not unjustified. In the first place the name

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”John’ had been implicitly anathematised since it was last used in the early fifteenth century by an antipope. Moreover, there had already been a John XXIII.

The antipope who abdicated in 1415 and who, interestingly enough, had previously been bishop of Alet was in fact John XXIII. It was thus unusual, to say the least, for Cardinal Roncalli to assume the same name.

In 1976 an enigmatic little book was published in Italy and soon after translated into French. It was called The Prophecies o f Pope John XXIII and contained a compilation of obscure prophetic prose poems reputedly composed by the pontiff who had died thirteen years before in 1963, the same year as Cocteau. For the most part these ‘prophecies’ are extremely opaque and defy any coherent interpretation. Whether they are indeed the work of John XXIII is also open to question. But the introduction to the work maintains that they are Pope John’s work.

And it maintains something further as well that John XXIII was secretly a member of the “Rose-Croix’, with whom he had become affiliated while acting as Papal

Nuncio to Turkey in 1935.

Needless to say, this assertion sounds increflible. Certainly it cannot be proved, and we found no external evidence to support it. But why, we wondered, should such an assertion even have been made in the first place?

Could it be true after all? Could there be at least a grain of truth in it?

In 1188 the Prieure de Sion is said to have adopted the subtitle of

“Rose-Croix Veritas’. If Pope John was affiliated with a “Rose-Croix’

organisation, and if that organisation was the Prieure de Sion, the implications would be extremely intriguing. Among other things they would suggest that Cardinal Roncalli, on becoming pope, chose the name of his own seci,et Grand Master so that, for some symbolic reason, there would be a

John XXIII presiding over Sion and the papacy simultaneously.

In any case the simultaneous rule of a John (or jean) XXIII over both Sion and Rome would seem to be an extraordinary coincidence. Nor could the “Prieure documents’ have devised a list to create such a coincidence a list which culminated with jean XXIII at the same time that a man with that title occupied the throne of Saint Peter. For the list of Sion’s alleged

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Grand Masters had been composed and deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale no later than 1956 three years before John XXIII became pope.

There was another striking coincidence: In the twelfth century an Irish monk named Malachi compiled a series of Nostradamus-like prophecies.

In these prophecies -which, incidentally, are said to be highly esteemed by many important Roman Catholics, including the present pope, John-Paul II Malachai enumerates the pontiffs who will occupy the throne of Saint Peter in the centuries to come. For each pontiff he offers a species of descriptive motto. And for John XXIII the motto, translated into French, is “Pasteur et Nautonnier’ - “Shepherd and Navigator’.” The official title of

Sion’s alleged Grand Master is also “Nautonnier’.

Whatever the truth underlying these strange coincidences, there is no question that more than any other man Pope John XXIII was responsible for re-orienting the Roman Catholic Church and bringing it, as commentators have frequently said, into the twentieth century. Much of this was accomplished by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which John inaugurated. At the same time, however, John was responsible for other changes as well. He revised the Church’s position on Freemasonry, for example breaking with at least two centuries of entrenched tradition and pronouncing that a Catholic might be a Freemason. And in June 1960 he issued a profoundly important apostolic letter .3 This missive addressed itself specifically to the subject of “The Precious Blood of Jesus’. It ascribed a hitherto unprecedented significance to that blood. It emphasised

Jesus’s suffering as a human being, and maintained that the redemption of mankind had been effected by the shedding of his blood. In the context of

Pope John’s letter, Jesus’s human Passion, and the shedding of his blood, assume a greater consequence than the Resurrection or even than the mechanics of the Crucifixion.

The implications of this letter are ultimately enormous. As one commentator has observed, they alter the whole basis of Christian belief. If man’s redemption was achieved by the shedding of Jesus’s blood, his death and resurrection became incidental if not, indeed,

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superfluous. Jesus need not have died on the cross for the faith to

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retain its validity. 7 Conspiracy through the Centuries

How were we to synthesise the evidence we had accumulated? Much of it was impressive and seemed to bear witness to something some pattern, some coherent design. The list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters, however improbable it had originally appeared, now displayed some intriguing consistencies. Most of the figures on the list, for example, were connected, either by blood or personal association, with the families whose genealogies figured in the “Prieurcl documents’ and particularly with the house of

Lorraine. Most of the figures on the list were involved with orders of one kind or another, or with secret societies. Virtually all the figures on the list, even when nominally Catholic, held unorthodox religious beliefs.

Virtually all of them were immersed in esoteric thought and tradition. And in almost every case there had been some species of close contact between an alleged Grand Master, his predecessor and his successor.

Nevertheless, these consistencies, impressive though they might be, did not necessarily prove anything. They did not prove, for instance, that the

Prieure de Sion, whose existence during the Middle Ages we had confirmed, had actually continued to survive through the subsequent centuries. Still less did they prove that the individuals cited as Grand Masters actually held that position. It still seemed incredible to us that some of them really did. So far as certain individuals were concerned, the age at which they allegedly became Grand Master argued against them. Granted, it was possible that Edouard de Bar might have been selected Grand Master at the age of five, or Rene d’Anjou at the age of eight, on the basis of some hereditary principle. But no such principle seemed to obtain for Robert

Fludd or Charles Nodier, who both supposedly became Grand Master at the age of twenty-one, or for Debussy, who supposedly did so aged twenty-three.

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Such individuals would not have had time to ‘work their way up through the ranks’, as one might, for example, in Freemasonry. Nor had they even become solidly established in their own spheres. This anomaly made no apparent sense. Unless one assumed that Sion’s Grand Mastership was often purely symbolic, a ritual position occupied by a figurehead a figurehead who, perhaps, was not even aware of the status accorded him.

However, it proved futile to speculate at least on the basis of the information we possessed. We therefore turned back to history again, seeking evidence of the Prieure de Sion elsewhere, in quarters other than the list of alleged Grand Masters. We turned particularly to the fortunes of the house of Lorraine, and some of the other families cited in the

“Prieure documents’. We sought to verify other statements made in those documents.

And we sought additional evidence for the work of a secret society, acting more or less covertly behind the scenes.

If it was indeed genuinely secret, we did not, of course, expect to find the Prieure de Sion explicitly mentioned by that name. If it had continued to function through the centuries, it would have done so under a variety of shifting guises and masks, “fronts’ and faqades just as it purportedly functioned for a time under the name Ormus, which it discarded. Nor would it have displayed a single obvious and specific policy, political position or prevailing attitude. Indeed, any such cohesive and unified stance, even if it could be gleaned, would have seemed highly suspect. If we were dealing with an organisation which had survived for some nine centuries, we would have to credit it with considerable flexibility and adaptability. Its very survival would have hinged on these qualities; and without them it would have degenerated into an empty form, as devoid of any real power as, say, the Yeomen of the Guard. In short, the Prieure de Sion could not have remained rigid and immutable for the whole of its history. On the contrary, it would have been compelled to change periodically, modify itself and its activities, adjust itself and its objectives to the shifting kaleidoscope of world affairs just as cavalry units during the last century have been compelled to exchange their horses for tanks and armoured cars. In its capacity to conform to a given age and exploit

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and master its technology and resources, Sion would have constituted a parallel to what seemed its exoteric rival, the

Roman Catholic Church; or perhaps, to cite a deceptively sinister example, to the organisation known as the Mafia. We did not, of course, see the

Prieure de Sion as unadulterated villains. But the Mafia at least provided testimony of how, by adapting itself from age to age, a secret society could exist, and of the kind of power it could exercise.

The Prieure de Sion in France

According to the “Prieure documents’, Sion between 1306 and 1480

possessed nine command eries In 1481when Rene d’Anjou died this number was supposedly expanded to twenty-seven. The most important are listed as having been situated at Bourges, Gisors, Jarnac, Mont Saint-Michel, Montreval,

Paris, Le Puy, Solesmes and Stenay. And, the Dossiers secrets add cryptically, there was

‘an arch called Beth-Ania house of Anne situated at Rennes-leChateau’.” It is not clear precisely what this passage means, except that Rennes-leChateau would appear to enjoy some kind of highly special significance. And surely it cannot be coincidental that Sauniere, on building his villa, then christened it Villa Bethania.