Holy Blood, Holy Grail Read online

  During the seventeenth century engineers were commissioned to investigate the mineralogical prospects of the area and draw up detailed reports. In the course of his report one of them, César d’Arcons, discussed the ruins he had found, remains of the German workers’ activity. On the basis of his research he declared that the German workers did not seem to have been engaged in mining.37 In what, then, were they engaged? César d’Arcons was unsure—smelting, perhaps, melting something down, constructing something out of metal, perhaps even excavating a subterranean crypt of some sort and creating a species of depository.

  Whatever the answer to this enigma, there had been a Templar presence in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château since at least the mid-twelfth century. By 1285 there was a major preceptory a few miles from Bézu, at Campagne-sur-Aude. Yet near the end of the thirteenth century Pierre de Voisins, lord of Bézu and Rennes-le-Château, invited a separate detachment of Templars to the area, a special detachment from the Aragonese province of Roussillon.38 This fresh detachment established itself on the summit of the mountain of Bézu, erecting a lookout post and a chapel. Ostensibly, the Roussillon Templars had been invited to Bézu to maintain the security of the region and protect the pilgrim route that ran through the valley to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. But it is unclear why these extra knights should have been required. In the first place, they cannot have been very numerous—not enough to make any significant difference. In the second place, there were already Templars in the neighborhood. Finally, Pierre de Voisins had troops of his own, who, together with the Templars already there, could guarantee the safety of the environs. Why, then, did the Roussillon Templars come to Bézu? According to local tradition they came to spy. And to exploit or bury or guard a treasure of some sort.

  Whatever their mysterious mission, they obviously enjoyed some kind of special immunity. Alone of all Templars in France they were left unmolested by Philippe le Bel’s seneschals on October 13, 1307. On that fateful day the commander of the Templar contingent at Bézu was a Seigneur de Goth.39 And before taking the name of Pope Clement V, the archbishop of Bordeaux—King Philippe’s vacillating pawn—was Bertrand de Goth. Moreover, the new Pontiff’s mother was Ida de Blanchefort, of the same family as Bertrand de Blanchefort. Was the Pope then privy to some secret entrusted to the custody of his family—a secret that remained in the Blanchefort family until the eighteenth century, when the Abbé Antoine Bigou, cure of Rennes-le-Château and confessor to Marie de Blanchefort, composed the parchments found by Saunière? If this were the case, the Pope might well have extended some sort of immunity to his relative commanding the Templars at Bézu.

  The history of the Templars near Rennes-le-Château was clearly as fraught with perplexing enigmas as the history of the order in general. Indeed, there were a number of factors—the role of Bertrand de Blanchefort, for example—that seemed to constitute a discernible link between the general and the more localized enigmas.

  In the meantime, however, we were confronted with a daunting array of coincidences—coincidences too numerous to be truly coincidental. Were we in fact dealing with a calculated pattern? If so, the obvious question was who devised it, for patterns of such intricacy do not devise themselves. All the evidence available to us pointed to meticulous planning and careful organization—so much so that increasingly we suspected there must be a specific group of individuals, perhaps comprising an order of some sort, working assiduously behind the scenes. We did not have to seek confirmation for the existence of such an order. The confirmation thrust itself upon us.

  4

  Secret Documents

  Confirmation of a third order—an order behind both the Templars and the Cistercians—thrust itself upon us. At first, however, we could not take it seriously. It seemed to issue from too unreliable a source. Until we could authenticate the veracity of this source, we could not believe its claims.

  In 1956 a series of books, articles, pamphlets, and other documents relating to Bérenger Saunière and the enigma of Rennes-le-Chateau began to appear in France. This material has steadily proliferated and is now voluminous. Indeed, it has come to constitute the basis for a veritable "industry." And its sheer quantity, as well as the effort and resources involved in producing and disseminating it, implicitly attest to something of immense but as yet unexplained importance.

  Not surprisingly the affair has served to whet the appetites of many independent researchers like ourselves, whose works have added to the body of material available. The original material, however, seems to have issued from a single specific source. Someone clearly has a vested interest in "promoting" Rennes-le-Château, in drawing public attention to the story, in generating publicity and further investigation. Whatever else it might be, this vested interest does not appear to be financial. On the contrary, it would appear to be more in the order of propaganda—propaganda that establishes credibility for something. And whoever the individuals responsible for this propaganda may be, they have endeavored to focus spotlights on certain issues while keeping themselves scrupulously in the shadows.

  Since 1956 a quantity of relevant material has been deliberately and systematically "leaked" in a piecemeal fashion, fragment by fragment. Most of these fragments purport, implicitly or explicitly, to issue from some "privileged" or "inside" source. Most contain additional information, which supplements what was known before and thus contributes to the overall jigsaw. Neither the import nor the meaning of the overall jigsaw has yet been made clear, however. Instead, every new snippet of information has done more to intensify than to dispel the mystery. The result has been an ever-proliferating network of seductive allusions, provocative hints, suggestive cross-references and connections. In confronting the welter of data now available, the reader may well feel he is being toyed with—or being ingeniously and skillfully led from conclusion to conclusion by successive carrots dangled before his nose. And underlying it all is the constant, pervasive intimation of a secret—a secret of monumental and explosive proportions.

  The material disseminated since 1956 has taken a number of forms. Some of it has appeared in popular, even best-selling books, more or less sensational, more or less cryptically teasing. Thus, for example, Gérard de Sède has produced a sequence of works on such apparently divergent topics as the Cathars, the Templars, the Merovingian dynasty, the Rose-Croix, Saunière, and Rennes-le-Château. In these works, M. de Sède is often arch, coy, deliberately mystifying, and coquettishly evasive. His tone implies constantly that he knows more than he is saying—perhaps a device for concealing that he does not know as much as he pretends. But his books contain enough verifiable details to forge a link between their respective themes. Whatever else one may think of M. de Sède, he effectively establishes that the diverse subjects to which he addresses himself somehow overlap and are interconnected.

  On the other hand, we could not but suspect that M. de Sède’s work drew heavily on information provided by an informant—and indeed, M. de Sède more or less acknowledges as much himself. Quite by accident, we learned who this informant was. In 1971, when we embarked on our first BBC film on Rennes-le-Château, we wrote to M. de Sède’s Paris publisher for certain visual material. The photographs we requested were sent to us. Each of them, on the back, was stamped "Plantard." At that time the name meant little enough to us. But the appendix to one of M. de Sède’s books consisted of an interview with one Pierre Plantard. And we subsequently obtained evidence that certain of M. de Sède’s works have been heavily influenced by Pierre Plantard. Eventually Pierre Plantard began to emerge as one of the dominant figures in our investigation.

  The information disseminated since 1956 has not always been contained in as popular and accessible a form as M. de Sède’s. Some of it has appeared in weighty tomes diametrically opposed to M. de Sède’s journalistic approach. One such work was produced by René Descadeillas, former director of the municipal library of Carcassonne. M. Descadeillas’ book is strenuously antisensational. Devoted to the history of R
ennes-le-Château and its environs, it contains a plethora of social and economic minutiae—for example, the births, deaths, marriages, finances, taxes, and public works between the years 1730 and 1820.1 On the whole it could not possibly differ more from the mass-market books of M. de Sède— which M. Descadeillas elsewhere subjects to scathing criticism.2

  In addition to published books, including some that have been published privately, there have been a number of articles in newspapers and magazines. There have been interviews with various individuals claiming to be conversant with one or another facet of the mystery. But the most interesting and important information has not, for the most part, appeared in book form. Most of it has surfaced elsewhere— in documents and pamphlets not intended for general circulation. Many of these documents and pamphlets have been deposited, in limited, privately printed editions, at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. They seem to have been produced very cheaply. Some, in fact, are mere typewritten pages photo-offset and reproduced on an office duplicator. Even more than the marketed works, this material seems to have come from the same source. By means of cryptic asides and footnotes pertaining to Saunière, Rennes-le-Château, Poussin, the Merovingian dynasty, and other themes, each piece of it complements, enlarges on, and confirms the others. In most cases the material is of uncertain authorship, appearing under a variety of transparent, even "cute" pseudonyms—Madeleine Blancassal, for example, Nicolas Beaucéan, Jean Delaude, and Antoine l’Ermite. "Madeleine," of course, refers to Marie-Madeleine, the Magdalen, to whom the church at Rennes-le-Château is dedicated and to whom Saunière consecrated his tower, the Tour Magdala. "Blancassal" is formed from the names of two small rivers that converge near the village of Rennes-les-Bains—the Blanque and the Sals. "Beaucéan" is a variation of "Beauséant," the official battle cry and battle standard of the Knights Templar. "Jean Delaude" is "Jean de l’Aude" or "John of the Aude," the department in which Rennes-le-Château is situated. And "Antoine l’Ermite" is Saint Anthony the Hermit, whose statue adorns the church at Rennes-le-Château and whose feast day is January 17—the date on Marie de Blanchefort’s tombstone and the date on which Saunière suffered his fatal stroke.

  The work ascribed to Madeleine Blancassal is entitled Les descendants merovingiens et l’énigme du Razès wisigoth (The Merovingian Descendants and the Enigma of the Visigoth Razès)—Razès being the old name for Saunière’s region. According to its title page this work was originally published in German and translated into French by Walter Celse-Nazaire—another pseudonym compounded from Saints Celse and Nazaire, to whom the church at Rennes-les-Bains is dedicated. And according to the title page the publisher of the work was the Grand Loge Alpina, the supreme Masonic lodge of Switzerland—the Swiss equivalent of grand lodge in Britain or grand orient in France. There is no indication as to why a modern Masonic lodge should display such interest in the mystery surrounding an obscure nineteenth-century French priest and the history of his parish a century and a half ago. One of our colleagues and an independent researcher both questioned Alpina officials. They disclaimed all knowledge not only of the work’s publication but also of its existence. Yet an independent researcher claims personally to have seen the work on the shelves of Alpina’s library.3 And subsequently we discovered that the Alpina imprint appeared on two other pamphlets as well.

  Of all the privately published documents deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the most important is a compilation of papers entitled collectively Dossiers secrets (Secret Dossiers). Catalogued under Number 4° lm 1 249, this compilation is now on microfiche. Until recently, however, it comprised a thin, nondescript volume, a species of folder with stiff covers that contained a loose assemblage of ostensibly unrelated items—news clippings, letters pasted to backing sheets, pamphlets, numerous genealogical trees, and the odd printed page apparently extracted from the body of some other work. Periodically some of the individual pages would be removed. At different times other pages would be freshly inserted. On certain pages additions and corrections would sometimes be made in a minuscule longhand. At a later date these pages would be replaced by new ones, printed and incorporating all previous emendations.

  The bulk of the Dossiers, which consist of genealogical trees, is ascribed to one Henri Lobineau, whose name appears on the title page. Two additional items in the folder declare that Henri Lobineau is yet another pseudonym—derived perhaps from a street, the rue Lobineau, which runs outside Saint Sulpice in Paris—and that the genealogies are actually the work of a man named Leo Schidlof, an Austrian historian and antiquarian who purportedly lived in Switzerland and died in 1966. On the basis of this information we undertook to learn what we could about Leo Schidlof.

  In 1978 we managed to locate Leo Schidlof’s daughter, who was living in England. Her father, she said, was indeed Austrian. He was not a genealogist, a historian, or an antiquarian, however, but an expert and dealer in miniatures who had written two works on the subject. In 1948 he had settled in London, where he lived until his death in Vienna in 1966—the year and place specified in the Dossiers secrets.

  Miss Schidlof vehemently maintained that her father had never had any interest in genealogies, the Merovingian dynasty, or mysterious goings-on in the south of France. And yet, she continued, certain people obviously believed he had. During the 1960s, for example, he had received numerous letters and telephone calls from unidentified individuals in both Europe and the United States who wished to meet with him and discuss matters of which he had no knowledge whatever. On his death in 1966 there was another barrage of messages, most of them inquiring about his papers.

  Whatever the affair in which Miss Schidlof’s father had become unwittingly embroiled, it seemed to have struck a sensitive chord with the American government. In 1946—a decade before the Dossiers secrets are said to have been compiled—Leo Schidlof applied for a visa to enter the United States. The application was refused on grounds of suspected espionage or some other form of clandestine activity. Eventually the matter seems to have been sorted out, the visa issued, and Leo Schidlof was admitted to the States. It may all have been a typical bureaucratic mix-up. But Miss Schidlof seemed to suspect that it was somehow connected with the arcane preoccupations so perplexingly ascribed to her father.

  Miss Schidlof’s story gave us pause. The refusal of an American visa might well have been more than coincidental, for there were among the papers in the Dossiers secrets references that linked the name Leo Schidlof with some sort of international espionage. In the meantime, however, a new pamphlet had appeared in Paris—which, during the months that followed, was confirmed by other sources. According to this pamphlet the elusive Henri Lobineau was not Leo Schidlof after all, but a French aristocrat of distinguished lineage, Comte Henri de Lénoncourt.

  The question of Lobineau’s real identity was not the only enigma associated with the Dossiers secrets. There was also an item that referred to "Leo Schidlof’s leather briefcase." This briefcase supposedly contained a number of secret papers relating to Rennes-le-Château between 1600 and 1800. Shortly after Schidlof’s death the briefcase was said to have passed into the hands of a courier, a certain Fakhar ul Islam—who, in February 1967, was to rendezvous in East Germany with an "agent delegated by Geneva" and entrust it to him. Before the transaction could be effected, however, Fakhar ul Islam was reportedly expelled from East Germany and returned to Paris "to await further orders." On February 20, 1967, his body was found on the railway tracks at Melun, having been hurled from the Paris-Geneva express. The briefcase had supposedly vanished.

  We set out to check this lurid story as far as we could. A series of articles in French newspapers of February 21 did confirm most of it. 4 A decapitated body had indeed been found on the tracks at Melun. It was identified as that of a young Pakistani named Fakhar al-Islam. For reasons that remained obscure the dead man had been expelled from East Germany and was traveling from Paris to Geneva— engaged, it appeared, in some form of espionage. According to the newspaper reports the
authorities suspected foul play and the affair was being investigated by the DST (Directory of Territorial Surveillance, or Counterespionage).

  On the other hand, the newspapers made no mention of Leo Schidlof, a leather briefcase, or anything else that might connect the occurrence with the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. As a result we found ourselves confronted with a number of questions. On the one hand, it was possible that Fakhar ul Islam’s death was linked with Rennes-le-Château—that the item in the Dossiers secrets in fact drew upon "inside information" inaccessible to the newspapers. On the other hand the item in the Dossiers secrets might have been deliberate and spurious mystification. One need only find any unexplained or suspicious death and ascribe it, after the fact, to one’s own hobby horse. But if this were indeed the case, what was the purpose of the exercise? Why should someone deliberately try to create an atmosphere of sinister intrigue around Rennes-le-Château? What might be gained by the creation of such an atmosphere? And who might gain from it?

  These questions perplexed us all the more because Fakhar ul Islam’s death was not, apparently, an isolated occurrence. Less than a month later another privately printed work was deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was called Le Serpent rouge (The Red Serpent) and dated, symbolically and significantly enough, January 17. Its title page ascribed it to three authors—Pierre Feugère, Louis Saint-Maxent, and Gaston de Koker.

  Le Serpent rouge is a singular work. It contains one Merovingian genealogy and two maps of France in Merovingian times, along with a cursory commentary. It also contains a ground plan of Saint Sulpice in Paris, which delineates the chapels of the church’s various saints. But the bulk of the text consists of thirteen short prose poems of impressive literary quality—many of them reminiscent of the work of Rimbaud. Each of these prose poems is no more than a paragraph long, and each corresponds to a sign of the zodiac—a zodiac of thirteen signs, with the thirteenth, Ophiuchus or the Serpent Holder, inserted between Scorpio and Sagittarius.