Holy Blood, Holy Grail (66 page)

“correspondences’ or correlations between music and architecture. And, like many Masons he ascribed great significance to the configuration and dimensions of Solomon’s Temple. The dimensions and configuration of the Temple he believed to conceal alchemical formulae; and he believed the ancient ceremonies in the Temple to have involved alchemical processes.

Such preoccupations on Newton’s part were something of a revelation to us.

Certainly they do not concur with his image as it is promulgated in our own century -the image of the scientist who, once and for all, established the separation of natural philosophy from theology. In fact, however, Newton, more than any other scientist of his age, was steeped in Hermetic texts and, in his own attitudes, reflected Hermetic tradition.

A deeply religious person, he was obsessed by the search for a divine unity and network of correspondences inherent in nature.

This search led him into an exploration of sacred geometry and numerology a study of the intrinsic properties of shape and number. By virtue of his association with Boyle, he was also a practising alchemist who, in fact, attributed a paramount importance to his alchemical works In addition to personally annotated copies of the

“Rosicrucian’ manifestos, his library included more than a hundred alchemical works. One of these, a volume by Nicolas Flamel, he had laboriously copied in his own hand.

Newton’s preoccupation with alchemy continued all his life. He maintained a voluminous and cryptic correspondence on the subject with Boyle, Locke, Fatio de Duillier and others.

One letter even has certain key words excised.

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

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Deism of his time, which reduced the cosmos to a vast mechanical 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.s

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

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them, had arisen in the south of France. Like the Cathars they were vehemently opposed

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Like the Cathars they queried Jesus’s 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 death-bed, 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 Francois’s brother and junior by four years. It is probable that both brothers

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had been exposed, in boyhood, to a Jacobite influence, for their father had offered protection and refuge at Bar-leDuc to the exiled Stuarts. In 1735, when FranQois 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.

Francois, 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

Franqois’s abdication, he was thus, in effect, titular duke of Lorraine.

And in 1742 he advanced with an army of 70,000 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 around him an elegant, gracious and highly cultivated court which became a centre for literature, painting, music and the theatre. In many respects this court resembled that of Charles’s ancestor, Rene 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 proteges who had been a major military power until the sixteenth century.

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Later, in 1770, a new Coadjutor of the Teutonic Order was appointed Charles’s favourite 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 17th’

the date of

Nicolas Flamel’s first alchemical transmutation, of Marie de Blanchefort’s tombstone, of Sauniere’s fatal stroke.

MAXIMILIAN DE LORRAINE. Born in 1756, Maximilian de Lorraine or Maximilian von Habsburg was Charles de Lorraine’s favourite 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 Munster, 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 be became an assiduous patron of the arts. Among his proteges 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 easy-going ruler, beloved by his subjects and esteemed by his peers. He seems to have epitomised 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 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

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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 openly consorted 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 Gand

Masters a pattern which 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, Franqois. 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

“Prieure documents’. After the French Revolution the Prieure 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 research 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 Besancon and, before the Revolution, a member of the local Jacobite Club. After the outbreak of the Revolution,

Nodier senior became Mayor of Besancon and President of the town’s Revolutionary Tribunal. He was also a highly esteemed Master Mason, in

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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 initially sympathetic to the Revolution, Nodier quickly turned against it. He performed a similar volte face in his altitude towards

Napoleon, and by 1802 was vociferous in his opposition to the emperor.

In that year he published, in London, a satirical poem, The Napoleone.

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 Besancon and kept under half-hearted 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 Besanqon 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

Besanpon, 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,

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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 travelled together to attend the coronation of Charles X. In the years that followed Hugo formed his own salon, modelled on Nodier’s and patronised 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’s 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.