Holy Blood, Holy Grail Read online

  THE INTRIGUE

  In February 1972 The Lost Treasure of Jersualem?, the first of our three films on Saunière and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, was shown. The film made no controversial assertions; it simply told the "basic story" as it has been recounted in the preceding pages. Nor was there any speculation about an "explosive secret" or high-level blackmail. It is also worth mentioning that the film did not cite Émile Hoffet, the young clerical scholar in Paris to whom Saunière confided his parchments, by name.

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, we received a deluge of mail. Some of it offered intriguing speculative suggestions. Some of it was complimentary. Some of it was dotty. Of all these letters, one, which the writer did not wish us to publicize, seemed to warrant special attention. It came from a retired Anglican priest and seemed a curious and provocative non sequitur. Our correspondent wrote with categorical certainty and authority. He made his assertions baldly and definitively, with no elaboration and with apparent indifference as to whether we believed him or not. The "treasure," he declared flatly, did not involve gold or precious stones. On the contrary, it consisted of "incontrovertible proof" that the Crucifixion was a fraud and that Jesus was alive as late as A.D. 45.

  This claim sounded flagrantly absurd. What, even to a convinced atheist, could possibly comprise "incontrovertible proof" that Jesus survived the Crucifixion? We were unable to imagine anything that could not be disbelieved or repudiated—that would comprise not only "proof," but "proof" that was truly "incontrovertible." At the same time the sheer extravagance of the assertion begged for clarification and elaboration. The writer of the letter had provided a return address. At the earliest opportunity we drove to see him and attempted to interview him.

  In person he was rather more reticent than he had been in his letter and seemed to regret having written to us in the first place. He refused to expand upon his reference to "incontrovertible proof" and volunteered only one additional fragment of information. This "proof," he said, or its existence at any rate, had been divulged to him by another Anglican cleric, Canon Alfred Leslie Lilley.

  Lilley, who died in 1940, had published widely and was not unknown. During much of his life he had maintained contacts with the Catholic Modernist movement based primarily at Saint Sulpice in Paris. In his youth Lilley had worked in Paris and had been acquainted with Émile Hoffet. The trail had come full circle. Given a connection between Lilley and Hoffet, the claims of the priest, however preposterous, could not be summarily dismissed.

  Similar evidence of a monumental secret was forthcoming when we began to research the life of Nicolas Poussin, the great seventeenth-century painter whose name recurred throughout Sauniere’s story. In 1656 Poussin, who was living in Rome at the time, had received a visit from the Abbé Louis Fouquet, brother of Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances to Louis XIV of France. From Rome the abbé dispatched a letter to his brother describing his meeting with Poussin. Part of this letter is worth quoting.

  He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail—things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever rediscover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.7

  Neither historians nor biographers of Poussin or Fouquet have ever been able satisfactorily to explain this letter, which clearly alludes to some mysterious matter of immense import. Not long after receiving it Nicolas Fouquet was arrested and imprisoned for the duration of his life. According to certain accounts he was held strictly incommunicado—and some historians regard him as a likely candidate for the Man in the Iron Mask. In the meantime the whole of his correspondence was confiscated by Louis XIV, who inspected all of it personally. In the years that followed the king went determinedly out of his way to obtain the original of Poussin’s painting, "Les Bergers d’Arcadie." When he at last succeeded it was sequestered in his private apartments at Versailles.

  Whatever its artistic greatness, the painting would seem to be innocent enough. In the foreground three shepherds and a shepherdess are gathered about a large antique tomb contemplating the inscription in the weathered stone: "ET IN ARCADIA EGO." In the background looms a rugged, mountainous landscape of the sort generally associated with Poussin. According to Anthony Blunt, as well as other Poussin experts, this landscape was wholly mythical, a product of the painter’s imagination. In the early 1970s, however, an actual tomb was located, identical to the one in the painting—identical in setting, dimensions, proportions, shape, surrounding vegetation, even in the circular outcrop of rock on which one of Poussin’s shepherds rests his foot. This actual tomb stands on the outskirts of a village called Arques—approximately six miles from Rennes-le-Chateau and three miles from the Chateau of Blanchefort. If one stands before the sepulchre, the vista is virtually indistinguishable from that in the painting. And then it becomes apparent that one of the peaks in the background of the painting is Rennes-le-Château.

  There is no indication of the age of the tomb. It may, of course, have been erected quite recently—but how did its builders ever locate a setting that matches so precisely that of the painting? In fact it would seem to have been standing in Poussin’s time, and "Les Bergers d’Arcadie" would seem to be a faithful rendering of the actual site. According to the peasants in the vicinity the tomb has been there for as long as they, their parents, and grandparents can remember. And there is said to be specific mention of it in a mémoire dating from 1709.8

  According to records in the village of Arques the land on which the tomb stands belonged, until his death in the 1950s, to an American, one Louis Lawrence of Boston, Massachusetts. In the 1920s Mr. Lawrence opened the sepulchre and found it empty. His wife and mother-in-law were later buried in it.

  When preparing the first of our BBC films on Rcnnes-le-Château, we spent a morning shooting footage of the tomb. We broke off for lunch and returned some three hours later. During our absence a crude and violent attempt had been made to smash into the sepulchre.

  If there was once an inscription on the actual tomb, it had long since been weathered away. As for the inscription on the tomb in Poussin’s painting, it would seem to be conventionally elegiac—Death announcing his somber presence even in Arcadia, the idyllic pastoral paradise of classical myth. And yet the inscription is curious because it lacks a verb. Literally translated, it reads:

  AND IN ARCADIA I...

  Why should the verb be missing? Perhaps for a philosophical reason— to preclude all tense, all indication of past, present, or future, and thereby to imply something eternal? Or perhaps for a reason of a more practical nature.

  The codes in the parchments found by Saunière had relied heavily on anagrams, on the transposition and rearrangement of letters. Could "ET IN ARCADIA EGO" also perhaps be an anagram? Could the verb have been omitted so that the inscription would consist only of certain precise letters? One of our television viewers, in writing to us, suggested that this might indeed be so—and then rearranged the letters into a coherent Latin statement. The result was:

  I TEGO ARCANA DEI

  (BEGONE! I CONCEAL THE SECRETS OF GOD.)

  We were pleased and intrigued by this ingenious exercise. We did not realize at the time how extraordinarily appropriate the resulting admonition was.

  2

  The Cathars and the Great Heresy

  We began our investigation at a point with which we already had a certain familiarity—the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and the crusade it provoked in the thirteenth century. We were already aware that the Cathars figured somehow in the mystery surrounding Saunière and Rennes-le-Château. In the first place the medieval heretics had been numerous in the village and its environs, which suffered brutally during the course of the Albigensian Crusade. Indeed, the whole history of the region is soa
ked in Cathar blood, and the residues of that blood, along with much bitterness, persist to the present day. Many peasants in the area now, with no inquisitors to fall upon them, openly proclaim Cathar sympathies. There is even a Cathar church and a so-called Cathar pope who, until his death in 1978, lived in the village of Arques.

  We knew that Saunière had immersed himself in the history and folklore of his native soil. He could not possibly have avoided contact with Cathar thought and traditions. He could not have been unaware that Rennes-le-Chateau was an important town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and something of a Cathar bastion.

  Saunière must also have been familiar with the numerous legends attached to the Cathars. He must have known of the rumors connecting them with that fabulous object, the Holy Grail. And if Richard Wagner, in quest of something pertaining to the Grail, did indeed visit Rennes-le-Château, Saunière could not have been ignorant of that fact either.

  In 1890, moreover, a man named Jules Doinel became librarian at Carcassonne and established a neo-Cathar church.1. Doinel himself wrote prolifically on Cathar thought and by 1896 had become a prominent member of a local cultural organization, the Society of Arts and Sciences of Carcassonne. In 1898 he was elected its secretary. This society included a number of Saunière’s associates, among them his best friend, the Abbé Henri Boudet. And Doinel’s own personal circle included Emma Calve. It is therefore very probable that Doinel and Saunière were acquainted.

  There is a further and more provocative reason for linking the Cathars with the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. In one of the parchments found by Saunière the text is sprinkled with a handful of small letters—eight, to be precise—quite deliberately different from all the others. Three of the letters are toward the top of the page, five toward the bottom. These eight letters have only to be read in sequence for them to spell out two words—"REX MUNDI." This is unmistakably a Cathar term, immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Cathar thought.

  Given these facts, it seemed reasonable enough to commence our investigation with the Cathars. We therefore began to research them, their beliefs and traditions, their history and milieu in detail. Our inquiry opened new dimensions of mystery and generated a number of tantalizing questions.

  THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

  In 1209 an army of some thirty thousand knights and foot soldiers from northern Europe descended like a whirlwind on the Languedoc— the mountainous northeastern foothills of the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. In the ensuing war the whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed, towns and cities were razed, a whole population was put to the sword. This extermination occurred on so vast, so terrible a scale that it may well constitute the first case of "genocide" in modern European history. In the town of Béziers alone, for example, at least fifteen thousand men, women, and children were slaughtered wholesale—many of them in the sanctuary of the church itself. When an officer inquired of the Pope’s represen- tative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was, "Kill them all. God will recognize His own." This quotation, though widely reported, may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, it typifies the fanatical zeal and bloodlust with which the atrocities were perpetrated. The same papal representative, writing to Innocent III in Rome, announced proudly that "neither age nor sex nor status was spared."

  After Béziers the invading army swept through the whole of the Languedoc. Perpignan fell, Narbonne fell, Carcassonne fell, Toulouse fell. And wherever the victors passed, they left a trail of blood, death, and carnage in their wake.

  This war, which lasted for nearly forty years, is now known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was a crusade in the true sense of the word.

  3 Languedoc of the Cathars

  It had been called by the Pope himself. Its participants wore a cross on their tunics, like crusaders in Palestine. And the rewards were the same as they were for crusaders in the Holy Land—remission of all sins, an expiation of penances, an assured place in Heaven, and all the booty one could plunder. In this crusade, moreover, one did not even have to cross the sea. And in accordance with feudal law one was obliged to fight for no more than forty days—assuming, of course, that one had no interest in plunder.

  By the time the crusade was over, the Languedoc had been utterly transformed, plunged back into the barbarity that characterized the rest of Europe. Why? For what had all this havoc, brutality, and devastation occurred?

  At the beginning of the thirteenth century the area now known as the Languedoc was not officially a part of France. It was an independent principality whose language, culture, and political institutions had less in common with the north than they had with Spain—with the kingdoms of Léon, Aragón, and Castile. The principality was ruled by a handful of noble families, chief of whom were the counts of Toulouse and the powerful house of Trencavel. And within the confines of this principality there flourished a culture which, at the time, was the most advanced and sophisticated in Christendom, with the possible exception of Byzantium.

  The Languedoc had much in common with Byzantium. Learning, for example, was highly esteemed, as it was not in northern Europe. Philosophy and other intellectual activities flourished; poetry and courtly love were extolled; Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew were enthusiastically studied; and at Lunel and Narbonne, schools devoted to the Cabala—the ancient esoteric tradition of Judaism—were thriving. Even the nobility was literate and literary, at a time when most northern nobles could not even sign their names.

  Like Byzantium, too, the Languedoc practiced a civilized, easygoing religious tolerance—in contrast to the fanatical zeal that characterized other parts of Europe. Trends in Islamic and Judaic thought, for instance, were imported through maritime commercial centers like Marseilles or made their way across the Pyrenees from Spain. At the same time the Roman Church enjoyed no very high esteem; Roman clerics in the Languedoc, by virtue of their notorious corruption, succeeded primarily in alienating the populace. There were churches, for example, in which no Mass had been said for more than thirty years. Many priests ignored their parishioners and ran businesses or large estates. One archbishop of Narbonne never even visited his diocese.

  Whatever the corruption of the church, the Languedoc had reached an apex of culture that would not be seen in Europe again until the Renaissance. But, as in Byzantium, there were elements of complacency, decadence, and tragic weakness that rendered the region unprepared for the onslaught subsequently unleashed upon it. For some time both the northern European nobility and the Roman Church had been aware of this vulnerability and were eager to exploit it. The northern nobility had for many years coveted the wealth and luxury of the Languedoc. And the Church was interested for its own reasons. In the first place its authority in the region was slack. And while culture flourished in the Languedoc, something else flourished as well—the major heresy of medieval Christendom.

  In the words of Church authorities the Languedoc was "infected" by the Albigensian heresy, "the foul leprosy of the south." And although the adherents of this heresy were essentially nonviolent, they constituted a severe threat to Roman authority, the most severe threat, indeed, that Rome would experience until three centuries later when the teachings of Martin Luther launched the Reformation. By 1200 there was a very real prospect of this heresy displacing Roman Catholicism as the dominant form of Christianity in the Languedoc. And what was more ominous still in the Church’s eyes, it was already radiating out to other parts of Europe, especially to urban centers in Germany, Flanders, and Champagne.

  The heretics were known by a variety of names. In 1165 they had been condemned by an ecclesiastical council at the Languedoc town of Albi. For this reason, or perhaps because Albi continued to be one of their centers, they were often called Albigensians. On other occasions they were called Cathars or Cathares or Cathari. Not infrequently they were also branded or stigmatized with the names of much earlier heresies—Arian, Marcionite, and Manichaean.

  "Albigensian" and "Cathar" were essentially ge
neric names. In other words they did not refer to a single coherent church, like that of Rome, with a fixed, codified, and definitive body of doctrine and theology. The heretics in question comprised a multitude of diverse sects—many under the direction of an independent leader whose followers would assume his name. And while these sects may have held to certain principles, they diverged radically from one another in details. Moreover, much of our information about the heretics derives from ecclesiastical sources like the Inquisition. To form a picture of them from such sources is like trying to form a picture of, say, the French Resistance from the reports of the SS and Gestapo. It is therefore virtually impossible to present a coherent and definitive summary of what actually constituted "Cathar thought."

  In general the Cathars subscribed to a doctrine of reincarnation and to a recognition of the feminine principle in religion. Indeed, the preachers and teachers of Cathar congregations were of both sexes. At the same time the Cathars rejected the orthodox Catholic Church and denied the validity of all clerical hierarchies, all official and ordained intercessors between man and God. At the core of this position lay an important Cathar tenet—the repudiation of "faith," at least as the Church insisted on it. In the place of "faith" accepted at second hand, the Cathars insisted on direct and personal knowledge, a religious or mystical experience apprehended at first hand. This experience has been called gnosis, from the Greek word for "knowledge," and for the Cathars it took precedence over all creeds and dogma. Given such an emphasis on direct personal contact with God, priests, bishops, and other clerical authorities became superfluous.