Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (38 page)

Another popular computer game,
Deus Ex,
also features the Illuminati as a secret society controlling the world in company with the Knights Templar. In addition to its political and economic powers, exerted via the World Trade Organization, in
Deus Ex
the Illuminati maintains a hidden store of viruses to be unleashed on groups or entire countries that fail to meet its demands. The Templars are less clearly drawn, representing one of four forces the player may join to achieve the game's objectives. Neither group, as presented here or elsewhere, bears much similarity to the actual namesake organizations.

Through all of these literary, cinematic and computer game productions, readers and viewers found it easy to draw a distinct line between fantasy and reality. Viewers of
The Godfather
, for example, left the movie theater feeling they had acquired an insight into the operations of Cosa Nostra, but few felt any new threat to their lives. Both the film and the book it was based upon ignored the historic heritage behind the organization, choosing to focus on actions of ruthless criminals united by blood and marriage who saw their work as simply a means of doing business. The groups were real, but the threat, while also real, remained distant, and the Mafia's historical roots were never addressed.

Not until Umberto Eco's philosophical satire
Foucault's Pendulum
, in which three Italian editors become caught up in an apparent linkage between historical secret societies extending back to the Crucifixion, did a major novel deal with historical facts. In Eco's rampant and often hilarious tale, organizations such as the Templars, Freemasons, Priory of Sion, Assassins, Rosicrucians, Kabbalah, Druids, Gnostics—the entire pantry of secret societies and their primary characters—pop up both as historical relics and contemporary participants. Part Marx Brothers movie script, part Robert Ludlum thriller and part philosophical treatise, Eco's 1988 narrative satisfied two widely disparate groups: conspiracy buffs who suspect that 8 billion
lives on the planet are controlled by a handful of shadowy plotters, and skeptics who revel in the delight of seeing the emperor's new wardrobe finally being revealed.

Foucault's Pendulum
was clearly inspired by a 1982 book ostensibly published as non-fiction, but widely assessed as a work of fantasy loosely based on fact.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
appeared six years before Eco's opus, and while the latter was amusing and enlightening to readers who could follow its meandering plot and respond to its cynical humor, the former ignited something else among a more gullible public.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
was inspired by the experience of a British film producer and former actor named Henry Soskin, whose previous claim to fame had been performing bit parts in the 1960s tv series
The Avengers
. Changing his name to Henry Lincoln, and changing his position from in front of the camera to behind it, Soskin detected a missing translation of an encrypted message in an obscure book on Rennes-le-Chateau. After researching the tale of Father Saunière and his mysterious wealth, Lincoln produced a documentary film about the supposed treasure, milking the story of every nuance to heighten the drama.

Some time later, Lincoln encountered a university lecturer and budding novelist named Richard Leigh, who harbored a fascination with the Knights Templar. Perhaps the Templars and the Saunière mystery could be linked together, tracking a tale extending from Christ's crucifixion down to contemporary times. Leigh recruited a former photo-journalist named Michael Baigent, and together this triumvirate invested four years researching, speculating, postulating and finally writing a book that spun 100,000 words of conjecture into a theory connecting virtually every secret society extant, in reality or fantasy, over two thousand years. At the core of the tale were three unproved (and unconfirmable) assertions:

1. Christ did not die on the cross; an impostor took his place, permitting Christ to escape across the Mediterranean to the south of France.

2. Christ was not single and celibate; he married Mary Magdalene and fathered at least one child, who accompanied the parents on the journey.

3. The descendants of Christ's children have been active in determining the fate of the world for twenty centuries.

As the premise for a historical novel, this is splendid stuff. In the hands of authors as divergent in their periods and styles as Thomas B. Costain or Don de Lillo, it could have been a respectable flight of fancy and an entertaining, even informative, peek at some of history's most interesting events.

The authors and their publisher did not see it this way. They believed that the impact of a non-fictional hypothesis had a better opportunity of generating interest and sales than a historical novel, and they were proven correct when
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
appeared on the best-seller list almost from the day of its publication in 1982. It also managed to inspire the only book that has seriously challenged the Harry Potter series for sales volume in recent years: Dan Brown's
The Da Vinci Code
. Until that point, Brown had hardly distinguished himself as a writer destined for greatness. His previous work,
Angels and Demons
, blended the Illuminati and Syrian Ismailis in a laughingly awkward manner, and included the author's erroneous assumption that Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Iran and India all speak and write the same language.

Holy Blood
and
Da Vinci
are as closely linked as any literary parent and progeny can be, even to the extent of each mirroring the other:
Holy Blood
is imaginative fiction posing as reality, and
Da Vinci
is pseudo-reality posing as fiction.

Despite his assertions that many of the organizations, characters and events in his book are real, Brown can neatly sidestep criticisms about his novel by pointing at the “fiction” designation. The trio of authors who concocted
Holy Blood
have no such defense except their protests of unfair attacks by skeptical critics, delivered with great passion and conviction in later editions of their book. But complaints of unfair criticism
cannot overcome weaknesses that fail to suspend disbelief among perceptive readers.

Throughout their tale, the authors frequently pose the query, “What if?” What if the power of the Templars rose to the same extent as a prominent individual who happened to be their contemporary? Does that point to a relationship? Perhaps, but it hardly proves it. Once their “what if?” premise is established, it is treated from that point forward like a proven assertion on which an entire network of suppositions can be strung. The result is a spider web that supports its builder, but is quickly swept away in the first fresh breeze.

Most serious works of non-fiction base their premise on accessible facts, established by a credible source identified to the reader. The
Holy Blood
authors take a startling new stance. History can only be seriously interpreted, they claim, when the researcher seeks conclusions from among apparently unrelated events, even when the events are, at best, apocryphal. In effect, they are suggesting that documented facts are no more important—and perhaps less so—than colorful myths. If this is truly the case, an enormous volume of new information awaits discovery by imaginative historians who link, for example, the early-1944 consolidation of Nazi power in Europe with that winter's unprecedented levels of snowfall in North America.

The analogy of a spider's web may favor the strength of the web over the ability of
Holy Blood
to sustain close examination, because the authors themselves ask the reader to forgive their frequent sleight of hand. Consider these exit doors for truth, appearing on consecutive pages of the 1996 paperback edition:

This, of course, was only a speculative hypothesis, with no documentary confirmation. (p. 115)

The possibility cannot be proved, but neither can it be dismissed out of hand. (p. 116)

On the basis of these connections, we have formulated a tentative hypothesis. (p. 117)

Repeatedly, Lincoln
et al.
seize on colorful speculation that advances their theories while discarding any hard evidence that discredits them. They also proffer, as corroboration for their argument, material that is not only suspect in veracity but often confirmable as fraudulent. Much of their case rests on
Les dossiers secrets de Henri Lobineau,
supposedly containing detailed lineages tracing the Merovingian dynasty from the fifth-century Frankish leader Meroveus through the mysterious Giselle de Razes to the ninth-century Sigisbert vi. These had already been declared a forgery by the man acknowledged as their creator, the prankster and dipsomaniac Philippe de Chérisy, when he filed court documents suing Pierre Plantard to recover payment for producing the fraudulent documents. Plantard, who declared himself a direct descendant of Dagobert and Giselle, and director of the Priory of Sion, never disputed de Chérisy's claim, although he later concocted the story that de Chérisy had merely copied originals in Plantard's possession. Nowhere in
Holy Blood
is de Chérisy's lawsuit against Plantard mentioned, nor anything about de Chérisy's questionable background.

Noel Corbu, who invented much of the fable as a means of building traffic to his hotel and restaurant, is mentioned in
Holy Blood
only as the purchaser of Villa Bethania, a man left frustrated by the death of Marie Denarnaud before she could relate details of her past. Nothing more is said of him or of the tale played to guests at Corbu's restaurant while they dined. Both facts, of course, would trip up the entire thesis presented by the authors, who prefer that nothing obstruct their claim to solving perhaps the greatest mystery of all time.

Holy Blood
challenges its readers to prove the existence of a negative reality by asking them to show that a hypothesized event did
not
occur. Proof that something does not exist may work in mathematics, where negatives can be theorized and assessed, but not in history. To demonstrate the vacuity of
Holy
Blood
’s premise, imagine a non-fiction work on the existence of Santa Claus, based upon evidence that no one has yet proven he does
not
exist.

This could all be a matter of literary bashing, suitable for bookish nabobs to lob back and forth in
The New York Review of Books
and
The Times Literary Review
, producing little more than bruised egos and fits of jealousy among authors and editors (“Why didn't
I
get the idea for that book!!??”). If this were the sole by-product, none of us would or should give it a thought. There may be more to the picture, however.

While it may be entertaining to trace the tracks of stampeding minds among historical clues, stitching dozens of links together to create an apparent chain of proof, the practice creates risks from certain unstable members of society. The more outrageous of this group reside on the far fringes of the left and right wings of political thought, who are quick to identify every problem in life, on either a personal or global scale, as rooted in a secret cabal of power brokers. On the surface, this should be of little consequence. Paranoia is not new nor, when spread among groups with nothing better to do with their spare time, is it necessarily cause for concern. Unfortunately, the basis for much of this paranoia is often racial, and that's where the game grows serious.

If
Holy Blood
can lend credence to such easily proven frauds as Priory of Sion, it can also convince those who are open to such persuasion that aberrations like
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
are rooted in reality.

The
Protocols
are mentioned in
Holy Blood
in an unfortunately typical manner. First, the authors disown its veracity (“Experts today concur—and rightly so, we concluded—that the
Protocols
, at least in their present form, are a vicious and insidious forgery.”). Later, after agreeing with respectable sources that the
Protocols
are a forgery, they claim this discredited tome is “of paramount importance to the Prieuré de Sion.”

How and why are they important? No details are given. Almost 230 pages later, the
Protocols
are mentioned again, but
only briefly and for the last time, when a reference to them is used to support the authors’ claim that a new king will carry “the holy seed of David.” If the
Protocols
are “a vicious and insidious forgery,” why rely upon the document for anything at all? The authors are performing a dance here, waltzing around a scurrilous text while remaining close enough to use it for support when it serves their purposes.

Nothing established about the
Protocols
suggest they are anything more than a fable presented as fact to achieve questionable, often nefarious, goals. Here, in brief, is their history:

In 1868 a German novelist named Hermann Goedsche, using the English pen name Sir John Retcliffe, published a novel titled
Biarritz
. The plot centered on a Jewish cabal intent on taking over the world. Goedsche appears to have been inspired by the French writer Maurice Joly, whose
Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu
spun a tale based on opposition to Napoleon iii. Goedsche, a notorious antiSemite, lifted Joly's plot device, introducing Jews to the story line as the villains.

All of this might have slipped out of sight beneath the waves like similar bad writing except for the precarious position of Russian czar Nicholas ii near the end of the nineteenth century. In a move designed to strengthen his hand among the Russian people and weaken his political opponents, the czar demanded a device that would expose his enemies as allies in a conspiracy involving world domination. From our perspective today, the “world domination” motive sounds like a Hollywood scriptwriter's pitch for yet another James Bond movie, but in the heady paranoia of Russia in 1895, it carried enough whiffs of validity to convince some of the people some of the time.