Holy Blood, Holy Grail (64 page)

JEANNE DE BAR. Jeanne de Bar was born in 1295, the elder sister of Edouard.

She was thus a granddaughter of Edward I of England, and a niece of Edward

II. In 1310, at the age of fifteen, she was married to the earl of Warren,

Surrey, Sussex and Strathern and divorced from him some five years later, after he was excommunicated for adultery. Jeanne continued to live in

England, however; and though we could find no detailed record of her activities, she seems to have enjoyed extremely cordial relations with the

English throne. She seems to have had similar relations with the king of

France who in 1345 invited her back to the continent, where she became regent of the comte of Bar. In 1353 despite the Hundred Years War and the consequent hostility between England and France Jeanne returned to

England. When the French monarch was captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and imprisoned in London, Jeanne was allowed to

“comfort’ and minister to him. During his subsequent prolonged incarceration, Jeanne is said to have been his mistress, although both were elderly at the time. She died in

London in 1361.

According to the “Prieure documents’, Jeanne de Bar presided over the Prieure de Sion until 1351, ten years before her death. She thus appears to be the only figure on the list of Grand Masters to have resigned, abdicated, or been deposed from her position.

JEAN DE SAINT-CLAIR. Our researches yielded virtually nothing about Jean de

Saint-Clair, who seems to have been a very minor figure indeed. He was born around 1329 and descended from the French houses of Chaumont,

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Gisors and Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. According to the genealogies in the

“Prieure documents’, his grandfather was married to Jeanne de Bar’s aunt. This relationship is certainly tenuous. Nevertheless, it would seem to suggest that the Grand Mastership of Sion was still circulating exclusively within a network of interlinked families.

BLANCHE D’EVREUX. Blanche d’Evreux was in fact Blanche de Navarre, daughter of the king of Navarre. She was born in 1332. From her father she inherited the comtes of Longueville and Evreux, both immediately adjacent to Gisors; and in 1359 she became countess of Gisors as well. Ten years previously she had married Philippe VI, king of France, through whom she almost certainly knew Jeanne de Bar. She spent much of her life at the Chateau of Neuphle, near Gisors, and died there in 1398.

According to numerous legends, Blanche was immersed in alchemical studies and experimentation; and tradition speaks of laboratories at certain of her chateaux. She is said to have possessed a priceless alchemical work, produced in the Languedoc during the fourteenth century but based on a manuscript dating from the last days of the Merovingian dynasty seven hundred years before. She is also rumoured to have been a personal patron of Nicolas Flamel.

NicoLns FLA MEL Flamel’s is the first name on the list of Grand Masters not to be affiliated by blood with the genealogies in the “Prieure documents’; and with him the Grand Mastership of Sion seems to have ceased being exclusively a family sinecure.

Flamel was born around 1330 and worked for a time as a scrivener, or copyist, in Paris.

By virtue pf his occupation, many rare books passed through his hands, and he acquired proficiency in painting, poetry, mathematics and architecture. He also acquired an interest in alchemy, and Cabalistic and Hermetic thought.

Around 1361 Flamel, according to his own account, happened upon the alchemical text that was to transform his life. Its complete title is both puzzling and interesting The Sacred “Book of Abraham the Jew, Prince,

Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher to that Tribe of Jews who by

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the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the Gauls. This work subsequently became one of the most famous in Western esoteric tradition. The original is said to have been deposited in the Arsenal Library in Paris. Reproductions of it have been assiduously, religiously and, it would seem, vainly studied by successive generations of would-be adepts.

According to his own account, Flamel pored over the book with no greater success for twenty-one years. At last, on a journey to Spain in 1382, he claimed to have met a converted Jew in Leon who elucidated the text for him. On returning to Paris he applied what he had learned, and is said to have performed his first successful alchemical transmutation at noon on

January 17th the date that recurs so persistently in connection with Sauniere and Rennes-leChateau.

Whether Flamel’s account is accurate or not,~the fact remains that he became phenomenally wealthy. By the end of his life he owned more than thirty houses and tracts of land in Paris alone. At the same time, however, he seems to have been a modest man who did not revel-in power and lavished much of his wealth on good works. By 1413 he had founded and endowed fourteen hospitals, seven churches and three chapels in Paris, and a comparable number in Boulogne the old comte of Godfroi de Bouillon’s father. This altruism, perhaps even more than his dazzling success, endeared him to posterity. As late as the eighteenth century he was revered by men like Sir Isaac Newton, who painstakingly read through his works, copiously annotated them and even copied one of them out by hand.

RENE D’ANJOU. We discovered no recorded contact between Flamel and Rene d’Anjou. At the same time, however, Rene himself gave us sufficient material to ponder. Although little known today, he was one of the most important figures in the years immediately preceding the Renaissance. Born in 1408, he came, in the course of his life, to hold an awesome array of titles. Among the most important were count of Bar, count of Provence, count of Piedmont, count of Guise, duke of Calabria, duke of Anjou, duke of Lorraine, king of

Hungary, king of Naples and Sicily, king of Aragon, Valencia, Majorca and

Sardinia.

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And, perhaps most resonant of all, king of Jerusalem. This latter status was, of course, purely titular. Nevertheless, it invoked a continuity extending back to Godfroi de Bouillon, and was acknowledged by other

European potentates. One of Rene’s daughters, in 1445, married Henry VI of

England and became a prominent figure in the Wars of the Roses.

According to the “Prieure documents’, Rene became Grand Master of Sion in 1418 at the age of ten and his uncle, Louis, Cardinal de Bar, is said to have exercised a “regency Grand Mastership’ until 1428. Our research revealed that Rene was inducted into an order of some kind in 1418 1”Ordre du Levrier Blanc (“White Greyhound’) but we discovered no further information of consequence about it. Certainly it might have been Sion under another name.

Sometime between 1420 and 1422 the cardinal of Lorraine created another order, l’Ordre de la Fidelite, and Rene was admitted as one of the original members. In 1448 Rene established an order of his own, the Order of the

Crescent. Rene himself described the Order of the Crescent as a revived version of the old Order of the Ship and the Double Crescent of which

Guillaume de Gisors was a member a century and a half before. The original

Knights of the Crescent included Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan and father of Leonardo da Vinci’s patron; the count of Lenoncourt whose descendant, according to the “Prieure documents,” compiled the genealogies in the

Dossiers secrets; and one Ferri, lord of the important fiefdom in Lorraine dating from Merovingian times and called Sion-Vaudemont. These individuals were intended by Rene to comprise his riposte, so to speak, to the Order of the Garter in England and the Order of the Golden Fleece in Burgundy. But for reasons that remain unclear the Order of the Crescent incurred ecclesiastical displeasure and was suppressed by the Pope.

It is from Rene d’Anjou that the modern Cross of Lorraine symbol of the

Free French Forces during the Second World War ultimately derives. When he became duke of Lorraine the ‘now familiar cross with its two horizontal bars became his personal device.

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IO LANDE DE BAR. Born around 1428, Iolande de Bar was Rene d’Anjou’s daughter. In 1445 she was married to Ferri, lord of

Sion-Vaudemont and one of the original knights in Rene’s Order of the Crescent. After Ferris death Iolande spent most of her life at Sion-Vaudemont -which, under her auspices, was extended from a local pilgrimage centre to a sacred site for the whole of Lorraine. In the distant pagan past the place had already enjoyed such status, and a statue of

Rosemerthe, an old Gallo-Teutonic Mother Goddess, was subsequently found there. Even in early Christian times the site was regarded as holy although its name then was Mount Semita, implying something more Judaic than

Christian. During the Merovingian epoch a statue of the Virgin had been erected there, and in 1070 the ruling count of Vaudemont had publicly proclaimed himself “vassal of the Queen of Heaven’. The Virgin of Sion was officially declared “Sovereign of the Comte of Vaudemont’, festivals were held in her honour every May and she was acknowledged Protectress of all

Lorraine. Our researches yielded a charter, dating from 1396, which pertains to a special chivalric confraternity based on the mountain, Confraternity of Chevaliers de Sion which reputedly traced’ its origins to the old abbey on Mount Sion just outside Jerusalem. By the fifteenth century, however, Sion-Vaudemont seems to have lost some of its significance. Iolande de Bar restored to it something of its former glory.

Iolande’s son, Rene, subsequently became duke of Lorraine. On his parents’ instructions he was educated in Florence, thus becoming well versed in the esoteric tradition and orientation of the academies. His tutor was Georges

Antoine Vespucci, one of Botticelli’s chief patrons and sponsors.

SANDRO FILIPEPI. Better known as Botticelli, Sandro Filipepi was born in 1444. With the exception of Nicolas Flamel, his is the first name on the list of Sion’s alleged Grand Masters not to be directly affiliated with the families whose genealogies figure in the “Prieure documents’. At the same time, however, he seems to have enjoyed an extremely close rapport with some of those families. Among his patrons were the Medicis, the Estes, the

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Gonzagas and the Vespuccis the last of whom had provided the tutor for Iolande de Bar’s son, the future duke of Lorraine.

Botticelli himself studied under Filippo Lippi and Mantegna, both of whom had been patronised by Rene d’Anjou. He also studied under Verrocchio, an alchemist and exponent of Hermetic thought, whose other pupils included

Leonardo da Vinci.

Like most people we did not at first think of Botticelli in “occult’ or esoteric terms. But recent scholars of the Renaissance Edgar Wind, for instance, and Frances Yates have effectively argued an esoteric predisposition in him, and we deferred to the persuasiveness of their conclusions. Botticelli does seem to have been an “esotericist’, and the greater part of his work reflects an embodiment of esoteric principles. One of the earliest known decks of Tarot cards is ascribed to Botticelli or his tutor, Mantegna. And the famous painting “Primavera’ is, among many other things, an elaboration on the theme of Arcadia and the esoteric “underground stream’.

LEONARDO DA VINCI. Born in 1452, Leonardo was well acquainted with Botticelli in large part through their joint apprenticeship to Verrocchio.

Like Botticelli, he was patronised by the Medicis, the Estes and the Gonzagas. He was also patronised by Ludovico Sforza, son of Francesco

Sforza, one of Rene d’Anjou’s closest friends and an original member of the

Order of the Crescent.

Leonardo’s esoteric interests and orientation, like Botticelli’s, have by now been well established. Frances Yates, in conversation with one of our researchers, described him as an early “Rosicrucian’. But in Leonardo’s case esoterica would appear to extend even further than in Botticelli’s.

Even Vasari, his biographer and contemporary, describes him as being of “an heretical cast of mind’. What precisely might have constituted his heresy remains unclear. During the last few years, however, certain authorities have ascribed to him an ancient heretical belief that Jesus had a twin.

Certainly there is evidence for this contention, in a cartoon sketch called

“The Virgin with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Anne’, and in the famous

“Last Supper’ where there are, in fact, two virtually identical Christs.

But there is no indication of whether the doctrine of Jesus’s twin is

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to be taken literally or symbolically. Between 1515 and 1517

Leonardo, as a military engineer, was attached to the army of Charles de Montpensier and de Bourbon, Constable of France, Viceroy of Languedoc and Milan. In 1518 he established himself at the Chateau of

Cloux, and again seems to have been in proximity to the constable, who was living near by at Amboise.

CONN TABLE DE BOURBON. Charles de Montpensier and de Bourbon, Duke of

Chatellerault, Constable of France, was probably the single most powerful lord in France in the early sixteenth century. Born in 1490, he was the son of Claire de Gonzaga; and his sister married the duke of Lorraine, grandson of Iolande de Bar and great-grandson of Rene d’Anjou. Among Charles’s personal entourage was one jean de Joyeuse, who, through marriage, had become lord of Couiza, Rennes-leChateau and Arques, near where the tomb identical to the one in Poussin’s painting stands.

As Viceroy of Milan, Charles was in contact with Leonardo da Vinci; and this contact seems to have continued later, near Amboise. In 1521, however,

Charles incurred the displeasure of Franqois I of France, and was forced to abandon his estates and flee the country incognito. He found a refuge with

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and became a commander of the imperial army.

In this capacity he defeated and captured the French king at the Battle of

Pavia in 1525. Two years later he died while besieging Rome.

FERDINAND DE GONZAGUE. Ferrante de Gonzaga, as he is more commonly known, was born in 1507, the son of the duke of Mantua and of Isabelle d’Este one of Leonardo’s most zealous patrons. His primary title was count of