Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (34 page)

It is easy to miss the significance of these lines on a first reading. You skim the passage perhaps, marking only key words (academic, techniques, analysis, scholarship) and pass on happily to treasure and Merovingians. Look at it again, however, with the attention Henry Lincoln gave to decoding de Sède’s parchments. What do these sentences actually mean? Why exactly would the techniques of scholarship be inadequate? If the evidence was present to be able to make a decent hypothesis, then where was the problem?

The interesting word here, the one that stands out like Dagobert in a Sion document, is “requisite.” Presumably, what made any particular connection “between radically diverse” subjects “requisite” can only have been the needs of the hypothesis; it was the authors’ theories that required links to be made that normal standards of analysis weren’t going to permit. So to provide these hookups, the authors abandoned scholarly methods of analysis, describing—with considerable chutzpah—their alternative method as “a more comprehensive approach.”

This rationalization of an act of anti-scholarship was to be partly justified by the subject matter itself, since “much of what we were exploring lay in spheres deemed academically suspect.” This is a tricksy psychological inversion of meaning, since the authors are really wanting to convey that potential critics are (in their word) “conventional.” The implied image is of one type of narrow learning, belonging to fusty old academics or college pedants, versus another, far more exhilarating form of erudition. In this battle, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh are the new boys, the rebels. Like buccaneers they range wide, sailing free on the limitless seas of the past, unconstrained by the crabbed island existences of other scholars. They are cool, boasting, as they do, the historian’s inquiring mind but, more important, the novelist’s imaginative capacities. The novelist, they explain, is superior to the historian even when trespassing on the latter’s field, because “he recognizes that history is not confined to the recorded facts, but often lies in more intangible domains . . . in the psychic lives of both individuals and entire peoples.”
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Novelists have another obvious advantage over historians: facts don’t really matter that much. They are imaginatively free. So
The Holy Blood
authors liberate themselves, where it is “requisite,” from fact, but without ever quite admitting it. And their connecting technique is evident throughout every one of their books. Take this passage chosen, in a way that should surely please them, entirely at random—my copy of the book fell open at this page because it was next to the photos. We are near the beginning of chapter 13, “The Secret the Church Forbade.” Speculation about Jesus, the authors are claiming, is necessary because there is a vacuum of real information. They continue:

If Jesus was a legitimate claimant to the throne, it is probable that he was supported, at least initially, by a relatively small percentage of the population—his immediate family from Galilee, certain other members of his own aristocratic social class, and a few strategically placed representatives in Judea and the capital city, Jerusalem. Such a following, albeit distinguished, would hardly have been sufficient to ensure the realization of his objectives—the success of his bid for the throne. In consequence he would have been obliged to recruit a more substantial following from other classes—in the same way that Bonnie Prince Charlie, to pursue a previous analogy, did in 1745.
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One must admire that first “If,” which is the keystone holding up what follows. Then we have “it is probable.” Why is it “probable”? Why is he of the “aristocratic” class? Why a few “strategically placed” representatives? Why not many? Why not none? If it was many, then why not enough to realize his objectives? If. Probable. Would. Would. Each possibility is banked, turning into a probability upon which the next mini-hypothesis rests. The whole thing is like this, built brick by unreliable brick.

Such a technique, allied to (as Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh would have it) the synthesizing of radically diverse subject matter into the requisite coherent pattern, creates a scholarship where absolutely anything is possible, granted first the authors’ desire for it to be possible. Consider the section of
The Messianic Legacy
where they attempt to get a second wind out of the miasmic Priory of Sion. This body, they claim, has in modern times been operating in a murky sphere “where Christian Democratic parties of Europe, various movements dedicated to European unity, royalist cliques, neo-chivalric orders, freemasonic sects, the CIA, the Knights of Malta and the Vatican swirled together, pooled themselves temporarily for one or another specific purpose, then disengaged again.”
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One would like to have been present at a swirling involving, say, the CIA and the Knights of Malta on one side, and the Freemasons and the Vatican on the other.

The playful Henry Lincoln has also been fond of using the partiality and contradictory nature of New Testament interpretations to sanction his own liberties. Is it more likely, he asks, that a man should have been born of a virgin, been able to walk on water, and rise from the dead than that he should have been born as other men are born, married, and raised a family? It’s a good line, but the trouble is that while the Gospels do create some evidence for a man called Jesus who led a religious movement in the early years of the Roman Empire, there is no evidence whatsoever from any source at all that that man might have been married or had children. None. And it’s hard not to be amazed by Lincoln’s own recollection, some years after
The Holy Blood,
of how the sacred Merovingian bloodline occurred to him and his colleagues. During a discussion, one of them remarked that there was something “fishy” about the Merovingians. And then, said Lincoln, “the penny dropped with an almighty clang!”
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Merovingians, fishy. Fish, early Christian symbol. Early Christian symbol, Jesus. Jesus, Jesus’s kids. Therefore, Merovingians, Jesus’s kids. And this was “a book that cannot easily be dismissed” according to the Reverend Neville Cryer, then general director of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

The Grail Upturned, the Blood Congealing

Even before discovering the real story of how
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—
and hence Dan Brown’s fact box—came about, nitpickers and academic pedants were noticing some of the inconvenient improbabilities of the core story. Let’s begin with the key proposition, that the bloodline of Jesus was safeguarded in the persons of the Merovingian kings and their descendants. A moment’s pause should make us realize what an exhausting proposition this is. By the time the Jesus descendant married into the Merovingian house (four centuries and twelve generations after the supposed progeny of the Messiah first disembarked on the Riviera), there must have been thousands upon thousands of other Jesus descendants, or else we’d be talking about inbreeding that would make Pitcairn Island look like Piccadilly Circus. By now there would be millions of Jesus folk walking the earth, and yet, perversely, only one of them would be guarded by the Priory of Sion.

You can illustrate this point with reference to Elizabeth Windsor, who may trace her ancestry back to Edward the Confessor, but in the company of hundreds of thousands of others. At various times, the British monarchies have been fairly arbitrarily decided—by invasions, civil wars, coups, and revolutions—giving Scots, English, and Welsh the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Bruces, the Yorkists, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the House of Orange, the Hanoverians, and so on. Any branch of any of the alternatives would have thrown up, over time, a complete city’s worth of claimants to the thrones. Whom would a Confessor-bloodline support group have chosen from among the stadia full of possibilities?

The next problem is that Pierre Plantard, the supposed descendant of Jesus at the time that Lincoln et al reached their sensational conclusion, while certainly claiming to be the heir to Dagobert II (and who wasn’t?), never claimed to be a long-distance offspring of the Lamb of God. In fact, in 1983 he went to some lengths to disavow the claim made on his behalf by the questing Holy Blooders.

Third, the entire story of the Grail itself—cup, blood, and everything else—seems not to have existed before being invented in the late twelfth century by the poet Chrétien de Troyes. De Troyes, whose patron was Count Philip of Flanders, wrote
The Story of the Grail
as one of several knightly romances, and the popularity of the poem led to it being copied, altered, reedited, and retold over succeeding years. But, as the historian Richard Barber wrote, “In 1180, as far as we can tell, no one would have known anything of the ‘holy thing’ called the Grail.”
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The claim about the Sang Real, adds Barber, is based on a fifteenth-century English author’s mistranslation from the original French.

Fourth, there was no secret about where Bérenger Saunière, the priest of Rennes-le-Château got his wealth from: for just under a decade, between 1896 and 1905, Saunière supplemented his Church stipend by selling masses, actively advertising his Mass-saying services in newspapers and taking payment in the form of postal orders. At one point, Saunière was receiving as many as 150 postal orders a day, often from religious communities and frequently from outside France. Despite this, he wasn’t actually that rich: when he applied for a loan in 1913, he was assessed by a bank as being worth only 13,000 francs.

Fifth, the hollow Visigothic pillar in Saunière’s church wherein lay the cryptic parchments is actually solid and unable to contain anything. Sixth, the tomb near Rennes supposedly depicted by Poussin was built in 1903 to mark the burial of the local landowner’s wife and grandmother; the painting
The Shepherds of Arcadia
was completed 250 years earlier, somewhere between 1637 and 1639. There are many other objections, but six is enough.

You Knew It All Along

Things truly began to unravel, however, when people started to look into the life story of Jesus-descendant Pierre Plantard. In late 1940, when most of France was under occupation, a man signing himself Varran de Varestra wrote a letter from Paris to Marshal Pétain, the venerable head of state of the rump government of France in Vichy. The letter requested that Pétain do everything in his power to prevent the country being involved in further conflict. “You must,” begged Varestra, “put an immediate stop to this terrible ‘Masonic and Jewish’ conspiracy in order to save both France and the world as a whole from terrible carnage,” and added, “At present I have about a hundred reliable men under me who are devoted to our cause. They are ready to fight to the bitter end in response to your orders.”
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Seven weeks later, a report for the French secretary of state for the interior stated that Varestra was “none other than PLANTARD, Pierre Athanase Marie, born in Paris on 18 March 1920 (7th), the son of Pierre and RAULO, Amélie Marie, of French nationality, a bachelor.” Plantard senior, said the ministry report, had been a butler who had died after an accident at work, and Plantard junior now lived in a two-room apartment with his mother, whose small pension kept them both. It then detailed Plantard’s youthful activities in setting up or running various groups, some of them avowedly anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic. His current organization, La Renovation Nationale Française, the official detailed laconically, “seems to be a ‘phantom’ group whose existence is purely a figment of the imagination of M. Plantard. Plantard claims 3,245 members, whereas this organization currently only has four members (the executive committee). It is worth noting that one member of this committee, Mme. Grubius, is the daughter of the concierge at 22 Place Malesherbes.”
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Then, “Plantard . . . seems to be one of those dotty, pretentious young men who run more or less fictitious groups in an effort to look important.”
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The dotty Plantard turns up again in police records in 1954, which reveal that he was held by the Germans, who did not approve of secret societies, for four months in Fresnes prison toward the end of the war. In June 1956, the mayor of Annemasse in Haute-Savoie, where Plantard was now living, wrote a letter to a sub-prefect, referring to Plantard’s imprisonment at the end of 1953 after being found guilty of offenses against property. Also in the summer of 1956, and also in Annemasse, the registration took place of a new organization—the Priory of Sion. Pierre Plantard was one of the four founding signatories to the statutes of an organization pledged to “the defense of the rights and the freedom of low-cost housing.” Thereafter the Priory fades even from recent history.

In January 1956, there was a series of stories in the French press, stories that originated with Noel Corbu, a restaurant proprietor in Rennes-le-Château who now owned the Saunière estate. Corbu may have been trying to get publicity for his rather isolated Hôtel de la Tour, which had opened the previous Easter, and his chosen method was to tell a wonderful tale of treasure and hollow columns. One headline to an interview in a local newspaper with Corbu read, “The Billionaire Priest of Rennes-le-Château’s Fabulous Discovery.”
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At some point in the next five or so years, Pierre Plantard went to Rennes and met Corbu. The Saunière fable captivated him; perhaps he also understood its value both financially and in creating a basis for his longtime fantasy of establishing his own importance. Whatever his motives, he set to work on writing a book about the treasure, incorporating new details such as the parchments supposedly found inside the Visigothic pillar, with their link to Dagobert II and the lost Merovingian line. His friend Philippe de Cherisey, a boozy but bright aristocrat, forged the parchments on Plantard’s behalf, and these, along with a number of other manufactured documents, were placed by the pair in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they might be discovered to give corroboration to Plantard’s story.