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T H E R E N N E S – L E
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P A R K PAGE 3 T H E P L
A N T A R D S U B P L O T |
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PAGES (Just click on the page you wish to go
to): Page 1—Abandon
All Hope: Introduction to a Hermeneutical Hell Page 2—“The
Saunière Episode” Who Wrote It? Page 3—The
Plantard Subplot Page 4—The
Lincoln Story & Its Aftermath Page 5—
Puzzling Pieces of the Story Page 6—Summing
Up Page 7—Links
& Sources All pages are best viewed by monitors set to 1024 X 768
resolution. |
The thing that is so interesting about “The Plantard Subplot” is that it tried so hard to become the
main plot, which caused a lot of people to take their eye off the real main
plot and get side-tracked in conspiracy theories. Plantard’s “Priory
of Sion” and attempt to establish Merovingian roots for his family appear to
have been pure grafts upon “The Saunière Episode,” but was it simply or
entirely that? And was Plantard himself really attempting that or were people
putting words in his mouth and misrepresenting him? Was Plantard
simply lost in a fantasy of his own making, or did he have such fantasies
because there was a basis for them in family history and thus others had forced
this upon him?
Not easy
to tell, even at this late date, for it can always be supposed that when the
secret agenda of powerful people went awry, they, typically, covered their
tracks by making somebody else the scapegoat and by discrediting the very
people who represented them. Or perhaps
even a few of them sacrificed themselves to ridicule and convictions of
fraudulence rather than reveal their secret.
Did not the leadership of the Knights Templar take that route? We are staring down a bottomless pit of
possibilities for intrigue here, which is no doubt why thriller novelists like
Dan Brown have moved in on this material.
A further difficulty is that we live in a benighted time in which people
have come to believe that fiction is the opposite of fact, when of course
fiction can be a higher order of fact and in the hands of the great fictionalizers always is.
Which is why Leonardo is so plausible as the
inventor of a “Da Vinci Code.”
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G É R A R D D E S È D E
& “T H E
C O N S P I R A C Y” |
First, before the Plantard or
Priory of Sion conspiracy kicked in, a small contribution was made by a
professor from Paris, J.
Cholet, who undertook excavations in Saunière’s church in 1959, even
though the “Cholet Report” asserting that nothing of significance was found was
not published until 2000. There must
have been talk about the dig, which undoubtedly got out. But how helpful are the reports of those who do not find any
treasure? The surprise would be if they told us they did
find something! If they reported finding
something, it would launch a stampede!
Anyway, how thorough was
So too with a book, Treasures of
the World (1962), by a “Robert
Charroux” (real name Robert-Joseph Grugeau?), a known treasure-hunter and author of several
other such books, who snooped around Rennes-le-Château from 1956 (or 1958?) on
with a metal detector without finding anything. Or so he said, but,
again, since when did
treasure-hunters become reliable on this score? For one thing, apparently
the mountain the village is on, as with surrounding mountains, is honeycombed
with natural cave tunnels, such as the one under the Tour Magdala, not
to mention the presence of many ancient, played-out mines and their man-made
tunnels in the area around, and Charroux did not
claim to have investigated every tunnel and cave, and, for another, he simply
may have been trying to discourage other treasure-hunters. And of
course his findings say nothing about “treasure” that would be non-metallic! There’s also the possibility, recently raised
by Douzet, that the treasure Saunière discovered was
not at
A “conspiracy” that had been building
behind the scenes was made manifest when in 1967 there appeared a rather
unreliable book, Le Trésor Maudit
(The Accursed Treasure), by a man named Gérard de Sède, who already had a reputation of confusing “fact”
with “fiction” in his treatment of Gisors in The Templars Are
Among Us (1962). A recent English
translation of The Accursed Treasure lists Sophie de Sède as his
”collaborator,” an unfortunate choice of words given the association with
“fraudulence” and “conspiracy.” De Sède,
when checked later by another investigator (Henry Lincoln), was charged with
just guessing at some of the facts or with having been misled or not fully
informed about them by others whose mouthpiece he was (although to what degrees
he was being “used” and knew he was being “used” are open
questions).
{By the way, it’s amazing that the
English translation by Bill Kersey makes no allusion to this charge, and De
Sède and his translators have done no updating or made any attempt to refute
the charge. This is all the stranger
since De Sède has apparently given interviews in which he acknowledges a
considerable degree of fraudulence in the information fed to him by the Plantard camp.
Another curiosity is that certain photographs that appeared in the
original have been removed, perhaps precisely because they were charged with
being misleading or inaccurately labeled.
But recently Douzet has called our attention
to the curiosity that the
supposedly ill-informed De Sède apparently knew about “Saunière’s model,”
his strange, unorthodox model of the area reputed to be that of Jesus’
crucifixion and entombment, reporting it in his book The Gold of Rennes,
long before the existence of this model was known to others, thus making us
wonder about the characterization of De Sède as “used” or “misinformed. Whatever the case there, De Sède was also
ahead of everyone in seeing the
Blue Apples phenomenon (alluded to in one of the parchment codes) in
Saunière’s church as the result of a projection of sunlight through a stained
glass window, if that is indeed what it refers to and is not just a Masonic or
other kind of joke. Doubt is cast upon
this, however, by the contention of Patrick Mensior
in Pegase that this blue apples
phenomenon was the consequence of the stained glass windows installed in 1887 by Saunière
(specifically the one depicting the raising of Lazarus), which raises the
question of what a reference to “blue apples” was doing in a document
supposedly dating from the 1780s, since the phenomenon apparently did not exist
until 1887!! It’s stuff like this that
raises more suspicions than the raising of Lazarus! Of course it’s possible that Saunière’s new
window was a copy of an older window that needed to be replaced, but can that
be established? De Sède also knew about
the “Mass Books” and came to conclusions about them the opposite of Bedu, thinking them fake or coded because Saunière could
not possibly have said so many masses.
Finally, in Still Spins the Spider
of Rennes-le-Château, translator Bill Kersey more than once expresses his
admiration for De Sède’s “objectivity” as a researcher, a word I would never
think to apply here, but we need to keep open the possibility that there’s more
to De Sède than meets the eye. That De
Sède died early in 2004 just means that he now has passed totally into the
world of myth and is now subject only to its very flexible laws.
Well,
back to the argument, who was using De Sède, if that’s an accurate
characterization?
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T H
E P L A N T A R D P R I O R Y |
The story is that a mysterious Parisian
of aristocratic bearing (but actually a common vestryman?), Pierre Plantard de St. Clair (1920-2000), a.k.a. Pierre de
France, among other pseudonyms, was later discovered to be De Sède’s
puppet-master, who got De Sède started by, supposedly, showing him Saunière’s coded parchments
in 1964. (But how Plantard explained coming into
possession of them is not clear, although it has been suggested that a young
linguist at St. Sulpice in Paris named Émile Hoffet who assisted in
their decoding in Saunière's time made copies of them and somehow those got to Plantard. The
originals are now supposedly secreted in some bank in
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[Breaking News! Paul Smith has published on his
website two 1989 articles from Vaincre
(To Conquer), the Priory of Sion’s house
organ, both of which suggest a
radically different origin for the Priory.
In these Plantard himself, on the occasion
of his brief retaking of the grandmastership of the
Priory in 1989, is quoted as saying that the Priory does NOT have ancient
roots but rather dates from either the 17th C. or the 18th
C. In an interview of Plantard by Noel Pinot published in April of 1989, Plantard says that “the PRIORY OF SION was founded on 19 September 1738 in
Rennes-le-Château by Francois d’Hautpoul and
Jean-Paul Negre.
If there are any connections pre-dating this then we are certainly not
aware of them.” In an article
apparently written by Plantard’s son, Thomas, then
grandmaster of the Priory, published in September of 1989, it says that “the
Priory of Sion dates from 17 January 1681, with, as founder,
Jean-Timoleon Negri D’Ables, and with the participation of Blaise D’Hautpoul (+1694), and
Abbé Andre-Hercule de Fleury
(+ 1743).” Just before that, it says
that “The origins of the Priory of Sion are actually quite modest. The Priory stems from Razes and is only a
more or less direct successor of the Children of |
Of course it’s possible Plantard himself was doing some guessing because he didn’t
know the whole truth. One rather
charitable view of the Priory, in fact, by those who still believe this
society’s claim of ancient roots (or was this claim made for them
by those who wanted it to be true?), is that, precisely because they do
not themselves know the full truth of their inheritance, they have been using
others to do their research for them.
Clever dogs!
It’s also possible that the
“conspirators” were simply inept at what they were attempting, which was to
build on Charroux’s and Corbu’s
tales and stitch that together with other, mostly mythic or legendary material
in order to pursue their own grand scheme, a method that had some plausibility
because their goals had points of contact with Saunière’s supposed goals—both
seemed to be interested in restoring the monarchy, at least, and both may also
have been part of an esoteric, chivalric Catholicism (and thus the irony of
their being thought in league with “proper heretics,” for their “heresy” may
have been on the opposite side).
Discrepancies in the dating of material and of events cited in the
material that Plantard et al published anonymously or
pseudonymously and then deposited in the Bibliothéque National contributes to the impression of ineptitude, although it
may be that jugglers Plantard et al simply had too
many balls in the air at once and couldn’t keep track of them all.
Another possibility is that the
Priory were (and are) just jokesters, deliberately and laughingly leading us
into the Hermeneutical Hell we now occupy.
De Sède’s quoting of surrealist André Breton’s “The imaginary is something that tends to
become true” (99) is not comforting, for it suggests a playfulness with
reality that can’t help but make one suspicious. Even if there was no joking involved, it
leads one to wonder if “the conspirators” were trying to make Life imitate Art. Which, admittedly, has worked many times
over the centuries, possibly even explaining Christianity itself. The strategy is ingenious—start with a design
in your head, convince people that the design is to be found in life, and then voila!,
there it is, the imaginary has become true as people create the thing they
wished for. That’s what the debunkers
think happened in this case, that Plantard inserted
his family into a genealogy of blue-blood descent that validated extravagant
claims and then persuaded others that it was genuine. And that he also made it seem the Priory was
ancient and had at least hundreds or thousands of members when in truth it may
have been an ad hoc society of one, for the most part, albeit with
assistance from a few (duped? Or duping?) collaborators from time to time.
Whatever the case, Plantard made it appear that he knew a good deal about both
Rennes-le-Château and Saunière and his Secret, but not because of Corbu or Charroux or any other
sources. Supposedly Plantard’s
grandfather had known Saunière personally, and the Priory had known
about this place and had been passing its Secret down for centuries.
{The Plantards, as descendants of local nobility,
supposedly, are said to own considerable land in the area, including Mt. Blanchefort, but Smith, while not directly disputing this,
quotes a researcher who has found the Plantards to
have peasant background, and Plantard’s circumstances
throughout his life seem to have been modest enough, based on addresses given
and jobs taken, and none of the addresses are from the Rennes area. Of course the two reports wouldn’t
necessarily contradict, since plenty of aristocrats have slid down the social
and money ladder over the centuries, especially since democracy became
popular. But can’t the ownership of land be clearly
established? Putnam and Wood present
the possibility that while Plantard owned land in the
area, it was purchased only after he made many trips to the area in the 1950s
investigating the local lore, as if testing it for compatibility with his grand
ambition. And one plot of land purchased
was on the top of
Of course the debunkers believe the
Priory just made up a story to fit the facts, to take advantage of Corbu’s and Charroux’s accounts
of Saunière’s supposed discovery. That
is, the Priory didn’t make up Saunière and his getting rich or doing strange
things in Rennes-le-Château—those are facts of the case that remain
regardless—but some think Plantard and the Priory
simply took advantage of those facts to perpetrate a hoax. Why would they do that? Perhaps because they were latter-day Dadaists
playing postmodern games with Truth, or because their monarchist ambitions
exceeded their grasp, or for some other reason we’ll never know because we’ll
never be able to believe any “confession” by erstwhile members, for
reasons I’ll soon get to.
What ambition
did the Priory declare? Plantard’s ulterior motives, if not joking ones, apparently
featured either the restoration of the monarchy in France (with himself or his
son as king?) and possibly the establishing of a United States of Europe on
some sort of chivalric model based on Atlantean
sources, as updated by esoteric Catholicism, and on modern socialism, or, as he
himself once insisted, just the recognition of ancient royal lineage, for Plantard seems to have claimed to be directly descended
from the Merovingian kings, the first kings of France (or the Franks), who in
turn may have claimed literal Davidic descent. [Apparently, French kings
have for many centuries claimed a symbolic Davidic descent, but not a
literal one.] That is, he claimed for the Plantards a
significant Jewish royal descent. If he did
(and it wasn’t just De Sède or someone else playing with the idea), did he
understand what this meant, given the anti-Jewishness
of some of his early publications?
What is the most significant Jewish
descent of all, as far as
The principal threat here of course
seems to be to the Catholic Church and its notion that its apostolic succession
represents Jesus. Since the popes are
not blood relatives of Jesus, they are thus not considered by the Priory of
Sion (as imagined by
the popular story!!) as legitimate heirs of the True Priesthood, nor
do they have the True Cross. In Jesus’
presumed marriage and fatherhood is a further challenge to the Church’s rule of
celibacy for priests, one that has been posed before by Eastern Orthodoxy,
whose priests marry in accordance with precedents of the earliest of Christian
churches, and of course subsequently by Protestantism. In short, as their secret intentions are
read by this popular account, the Priory of the popular story is implying that the Catholic Church is
the real heresy. Just as
the Cathars did in times gone by. Dy-no-mite! And thus the justification for the idea that
Saunière’s wealth came from blackmailing the Church. Well, we know that the Church has in just the
last fifty years paid out millions of dollars to settle claims against
pedophile priests in a futile attempt to keep the scandal quiet, so the
blackmail theory gains some credibility from that. They’ve done it before.
The reason Catholics have thought the
Church not heretical and its enemies are is, according to skeptics, that
“history is written by the winners.”
That is, the Church, with the help of the Emperor Constantine and later
enforcers (such as the Inquisition), did such a good job of squashing its
rivals and editing or destroying their documents that history eventually
reflected only its version of the truth.
Early in the Fourth Century A.D., it was by no means certain that the
Church’s version of Christianity would be the one that prevailed in the West,
but by the end of that century the balance had been tipped well in its favor by
Constantine’s politically-motivated edict making its version the
official state religion and a ruthless persecution of those henceforth declared
“heretics.” The Church did not face
another serious challenge until its schism with Eastern Orthodoxy was finalized
in 1054 (just 5 years before Saunière’s church was dedicated to the
Magdalene!), and in the same century the Cathars and
similar “heresies” began to gather large number of adherents in the West (the
Languedoc being a hotbed of “heresy”), largely in response to the corruption
and worldliness of the Church. And at
times there have been people within the Church itself who wanted radical
change. The question is whether Plantard
was among those who were working within the Church through esoteric Catholicism
to re-establish its authority or those who were attempting to subvert it with a
rival claim to the throne of Peter (such as posed by the fact that the original
Christian church, in Jerusalem, was led by Jesus’ brother James, who apparently
kicked Paul and Pauline Christianity out of the original church).
The popular story believes in the
latter case, that Plantard was working for a cause
counter to the Church, so let’s continue with that, leaving the alternative for
later. It supposes that Plantard claimed to be descended from people who were among
the first to be declared “heretics” by the Church, which ironically would
include Jesus’ own descendants, since, by this account, they did not agree with
Church doctrine or the Church’s characterization of Jesus as “The Redeemer.” The “heretics” knew the truth, that Jesus, not divine but
divinely inspired, came not to redeem but to reveal, that he was an
especially adept adept who came to reveal to others
“The Way” to a saving adepthood (one of Plantard’s pseudonyms, by the way, was “
For example, note that Plantard’s putative full last name ends in “St. Clair.” which became “Sinclair” in Scotland and clues us to matters of
Scottish descent as well, for much of the mostly hidden holy royal family fled
north, the story goes,
in centuries past, and Scotland may in fact contain the family with the most
direct descent. Those who wish to
investigate the Scottish angle should start, perhaps, with Rosslyn Chapel, south of
One way to understand all this is as
the movements through history of a counterculture,
which while often pretending in public to be mainstream orthodox was
sometimes, when its cover was blown, forced to go underground and
occasionally change its name. But at
times it was more public and had the power it sought within its grasp, such as
during the period of “La Fronde,” when the House of
In the popular version of the
Rennes-le-Château story, the Priory of Sion often finds itself associated with
the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Rosicrucians,
and the whole historically-verified Hermetic/ Alchemical/ Pythagorean/
Cabalistic/ Gnostic tradition in general, with its Egyptian/Atlantean
roots. Whatever differences exist(ed) among these groups, together they add up to an often underground counterculture
emphasizing a special Wisdom as man’s salvation, achieved without benefit of
priests. The True Cross is not a
redemptive cross, this tradition says, but a symbol of the intersection of
universal, harmonizing forces in the individual when personally connected to
the Divine through application of a specific, inherited sacred Wisdom. Thus a major question, in the popular
version, is whether Plantard’s Priory, assuming that
it was the “real” Priory, was interested in far more than a restoration of the
monarchy or a recognition of the continuation of Holy Blood. The grandest conception of the Priory is that the
reason they wanted to be restored to power is that they would bring with
them, not just Holy Blood, but special knowledge of ancient, peace-making,
civilization-building Wisdom, much-needed in a world on the brink of suicide. But again,
“Hell is paved with good intentions.”
Well, inasmuch as Saunière was,
publicly at least, anti-republican himself, it’s possible even on the surface
that there’s some
connection between the Big Secret he supposedly uncovered and the monarchist
goals of the hierarchical Priory of Sion, grafted on or not. Of course if Saunière was simply a simoniac selling salvation, then the debunkers are right
that Saunière and the Priory were unconnected, but that doesn’t mean they
didn’t think alike on the issue of restoring the monarchy (albeit an
“heretical” branch of it, if the Jewish-rooted Merovingians
of the popular interpretation of them were involved!). At any rate, the Priory (or the story of
them) made it seem that they were connected. Which is a possibility if the Priory really
exists as an historically significant secret society, as the True Believers
think, and is not, as the debunkers think, just an ad hoc committee to
restore Plantard or someone else of bogus Merovingian
descent to the monarchy. That is, if
they weren’t just joking about that.
As for the timing of the Priory leaks, the popular view
is that Plantard and the Priory were simply reacting
to the collapse of the French Empire in the 1950s and the Suez Crisis, and
fearing civil war if a strong hand did not take over (which is why they backed DeGaulle, who then betrayed them by giving Algeria
independence). They made it seem,
however, that they had broader interests in the formation of a United States of
Europe under a constitutional monarchy and suggested that they had a better
vision for a world that had just been through the horror of WWII and seemed
headed for the even greater horror of a nuclear WWIII. That is, they made it seem that what principally motivated their
revealing of a family secret kept for centuries was the world’s desperate need
for wiser leadership, and what could be better than a Priest-King with the
blood of Jesus in him who had access to esoteric Wisdom?
It’s important to understand that the
Priory members of the popular version were not common, garden-variety
monarchists. The “real” Plantard Priory may
have been, but not the Priory of the popular version. These were monarchists who thought their
candidate’s blood was the blood of Jesus and that they were thus justified in
attempting what Jesus attempted, to establish the
To begin with, if Plantard,
or any other Merovingian pretender, thought having the blood of Jesus in him
made him automatically fit to be Priest-King of Europe, or whatever, how is this any different from the
Nazis’ delusions about the superiority of “Nordic blood”? And as for the theocracy the Priory was
planning, the likes of the Iranian Ayatollahs, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden
have once again demonstrated the ancient truth that the real Great Satan is theocracy. Theocracy has again and again proved to be
absolutely the world’s worst, most tyrannical form of government, because its
assumptions about life tend to be so preposterous that it always needs coercion
to gain assent. Thus the often cozy relationship
between the Church and the fascists of the Twentieth Century, just as the
Church historically used thugs whenever “heretics” needed to be squashed. [By the way, for conclusive proof that
Hitler and the Nazis grew directly out of right-wing Christianity, see Richard Steigmann-Galls’ The
Holy Reich. See also a movie called
“ .” ]
At any rate, as Pierre Plantard is now dead, it would seem to be up to his son,
Thomas, now in his forties perhaps, to follow through on this grand vision. Plantard may have
had his son in mind all along. It’s
reported that Plantard lived with his widowed mother
for a long time before finally having a child with a second wife, and we may be
looking at nothing more here than fatherly, and perhaps grandmotherly, ambition
for the fruit of his aged loins. Is there any connection between
the date of Thomas’ birth and the date at which Plantard
supposedly began trying to connect himself with Merovingian ancestry --1961?
At any rate, we might have a Doubting Thomas on our hands, if the son questions
his father’s ambition. But Paul Smith
reports, in “Pierre Plantard and the Priory of Sion
Chronology,” that a Thomas Plantard was Grand Master
of the Priory of Sion in 1990 and that he published something in a revived Vaincre, so perhaps the Priory dream is still alive
with Thomas, not doubting at all. And
the breaking news above very much supports that.
Another possibility, if one wishes to
rescue the belief in the historical mission of the Priory (and assuming that Plantard is part of that mission), is that Plantard may simply have been ambivalent. Perhaps he had received from his family this
idea that he carried the blood of Jesus and a call to live up to that, but did
he simultaneously feel a reluctance to play the fool? “We are made fools for Christ’s sake,” said
There are major discrepancies in the Priory’s story,
and this is where Paul Smith’s website is helpful, although his certainty that Plantard was a complete charlatan may be questioned. I wish it were that simple. Consider the fact that Jesus was supposedly
crucified for being such a charlatan.
For another, one
does not become a charlatan for no reason, nor does one obligate one’s
son to a fraudulent life for no reason.
And, too, there are degrees of charlatanism. Plantard
may have taken seriously his descent from the Merovingians,
perhaps because his family did, which would mean that his “charlatanism” was
confined to the means he used to get others to believe in that descent, the end
justifying the means, in his mind. Or
if his “Merovingian blood” was pure fantasy, and he knew that, then one wonders
at the motivation and drive that led him to the perpetration of one of the
great hoaxes of all time. And at the
lucky but inspired guess that connected him with Rennes-le-Château in such a
convincing way. But of course we’re talking about the Plantard of the popular story, which may have little or
nothing to do with the real Plantard!
First, let’s consider a discrepancy that
presents itself to anyone capable of simple logic, without help from the sort
of historical research Paul Smith and his French sources have done, in the contradiction between the
Jewish inheritance that, in the popular story, Plantard
was claiming through his Merovingian descent and the virulent anti-Jewishness found in some of his publications. Even the popular version reports that Plantard during WWII, supposedly active in the Resistance,
published a journal that occasionally gave vent to extreme right-wing views,
including anti-Jewishness (see note on why
the term “anti-Semitism” is euphemistic nonsense and should no longer be
used as a substitute for “anti-Jewishness,” and then
return. Mark
your spot). There are two reasons why this
doesn’t add up. First, if Plantard was truly descended from the Merovingians,
then that made him partly Jewish, according to the argument that the Merovingians were descended from Jesus. Secondly, according to a different argument
that Plantard himself seemed to believe in, the Merovingians were said to be descended from the lost tribe
of Benjamin, in which case they, and maybe Plantard,
were totally Jewish. But if the Benjamite
origin is accepted, then why would the introduction of Jewish “blood” into the Merovingians by intermarriage with the line of Jesus matter
to them? Well, probably because it was
the best of both worlds, the best of two lines of Jewish descent, one being
Davidic. Jewishness
through Jesus was a trump card to play.
The option is to accept the idea that Plantard
didn’t care about the descent from Jesus and perhaps thought that was
extraneous. Either way, that still
leaves him claiming Jewish descent. So
was Plantard’s early anti-Jewishness
as expressed in publications an act to fool the Nazis, as those attempting to
rescue the Plantard Priory have proposed? [See a thorough accounting of this in Dagobert's Revenge, Vol
5, No. 1, by Tracy Twyman]. If so, it didn’t work, for he was denounced by
even more radical anti-Jewish groups and imprisoned by the Nazis for several
months, which is often cited as to Plantard’s
credit. Anti-Jewish rhetoric is
considerably toned down or absent altogether from Plantard’s
post-War pronouncements, though there are still references to the need for
“cleansing”
A possible answer could be that the
idea of having “Jewish blood” hadn’t occurred to him yet or hadn’t been
revealed to him by his family at the time that he was vilifying Jews. The notion that he was of Merovingian descent
may have been late-blooming. Or, if one
dismisses the notion of the Merovingians as Benjamite, perhaps the best answer is in the
ambivalence expressed throughout Catholic Europe through all the centuries in
its veneration of a Jew as God and simultaneously its constant drumbeat of
Church-sponsored anti-Jewish propaganda against “the killers of Christ,” which
resulted in Europeans of almost all countries gladly shipping Jews off to the
Nazis, with Pope Pius XII in silent collusion.
Hitler’s favorite play, by the way, was the Vatican-sanctioned,
viciously anti-Jewish Passion Play at
One could go on pointing to obvious
discrepancies in Plantard’s and the Priory’s account
of things, but let’s save time by directly citing the evidence Paul Smith has
collected that both were out and out frauds.
Smith’s website systematically demolishes all attempts to rescue Plantard’s reputation and the notion that Plantard’s Priory of Sion had deep historical roots. [Except lately Smith has
published articles (see excerpts above) from relatively recent Vaincres that support historical roots less deep but deeper than he elsewhere
claims, so keep that contradiction in mind!] You should read the detail
for yourself beginning at http://smithpp0.tripod.com/psp/id23.html,
but I will attempt a summary. [This
case is, as said, now better argued in Putnam and Wood’s book, but let’s give
Smith his due as the originator.]
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P L A
N T A R D ‘ S P R I O R Y D E B U N K E D |
Much
of Paul Smith’s case is based on the debunking testimony of Jean-Luc Chaumeil, a French Jew, supposedly, who seemed
to be one of Plantard’s chief lieutenants, but who
upon discovering Plantard’s anti-Jewish roots
completely turned on him and presumed to expose him as a fraud. Smith cites Chaumeil’s
claim, for instance, that a 1945 Secret Service report (they had been
investigating Plantard’s pre-Priory “Alpha Galates” organization since 1942, at the request of the
Nazis!)) lists Pierre and Raulo Amélie
Plantard as Plantard’s
parents. It goes on to assert that as a
young adult Pierre Jr. seems to have been dependent on his mother, who survived
on a pension derived from the death of her husband, “killed in a work
accident.” The unemployed young Plantard is also said to have been the sexton for the
parish of
Whatever the truth of this, it seems
that Plantard (down-at-heels aristocracy or peasant
stock or bourgeoisie or some combination?), born in 1920 and living with
his widowed mother in Paris, was as a teenager (and as Hitler’s storm troopers
were gathering momentum in the next country over) an ardent nationalist,
monarchist, and orthodox Catholic but interested as well in esoteric, occult,
pre-Christian traditions that gradually he tied to his right-wing views, easy
enough to do because many of these traditions are monarchist in their
allegiance to the idea of a savior-king and their call for a chivalric order
that will restore nobility to Europe.
This is why Heinrich Himmler had no trouble adapting the same occult,
mythic material to the Nazi cause. Many of Europe’s fascists had no trouble
accommodating the fascist leadership model to a certain heroic monarchist
tradition, for they saw themselves as knightly orders bent on redeeming a
“lost” society, corrupted by Jews and Masons.
And French monarchist tradition had from the time of Clovis I (Fifth
Century) so thoroughly connected state with church and symbolically identified
the King with Christ the King that the young Plantard
just took all that for granted. Plantard was accused by more than one associate of mythomania, and it’s understandable how his circumstances
contributed to that and made him not all that unusual in a
But
what caused the young Plantard to begin to take
political action?
Smith says it was the election of Leon Blum, a Jew, as the first
socialist Prime Minister of
The “French National Association”
failing as well, in 1942 Plantard joined and soon
became the leader of an Hermetic group called “Alpha Galates” (“The
First Gauls”), which based its program on Celtic myth
that found the origins of Gallic chivalry in survivals from Atlantis! This group aimed to put its Fatherland to
rights by, as member Jean Falloux (real name Francis Sadot) put it, “eradicating from its soul the dominant
pathogens, the hate-filled resentments and the false dogmas such as secularism,
godlessness and the corrupt principles of the old democratic Judaeo-freemasonry.”
The group’s publication, Vaincre (To
Conquer), was full of such right-wing vitriol, and Plantard
seems to have been its editor and chief contributor. Ironically, however, because it was
insufficiently Nazi in its sympathies, it was denounced by even more extreme
publications, which led to Plantard’s imprisonment by
the Nazis. His imprisonment, that is, was not for heroically
opposing Nazi principles but because he preferred to see those principles
applied by French fascists rather
than German. (Another irony is
that the Jean Falloux cited above later was denounced
by Plantard for disloyalty and expunged from the
society, an example of the splintering effect that always seems to be attendant
upon the gathering of ideologues.)
The only hiccup in Smith’s account of
Plantard’s Alpha Galates
days occurs when we hear that Plantard’s mentor was the Count de Moncharville,
supposedly head of Alpha Galates before Plantard, and read the count’s essays, as published by
Alpha Galates, “The East and the West.” This may all have been invented by Plantard after the fact, as Smith insists, including the
notion that there was an Alpha Galates before Plantard joined it, but there’s nothing conclusive to
support that. (And lately Paul Smith has
published documents that make it appear that he now accepts the Count as not
just a Plantard fabrication and as in some sense Plantard’s mentor.
Confusion is caused on this website when Smith does not announce changes
in his position; he just changes, without necessarily making his present
position consistent with documents posted that represent positions he’s held in
the past.)
At any rate, the count, advertised as
“Professor of Law at the
Plantard then seemingly drifted around a bit
in the post-War world, until the rapid dissolution of the French empire abroad,
beginning in the 50s, may have spurred him into further action. According to Paul Smith, Plantard
in the mid-50s was employed as a draftsman in Annemasse (in the
French Alps, just south of
Whatever, this effort seems to have
collapsed in 1957, possibly because Plantard had been
arrested and tried for pedophilia or kidnapping of a child. This charge was made later by the supposedly
Jewish ex-member of the Priory of Sion, Jean-Luc Chaumeil, whose rather incoherent
letters to Paul Smith are now carried on Smith’s website at http://smithpp0.tripod.com/psp/id98.html. Henry Lincoln chose to disregard this charge
as a “vicious libel.” {And
in the winter of 2002-3 there was a big hullabaloo on the-daily-grail@yahoogroups.com over
this, largely between Paul Smith and “Stella Maris” (presumably a Robin Crookshank Hilton), in which it is suggested that Chaumeil is about to retract his charge and rebut his
letters to Paul Smith in which the charge was made; and he’s doing this,
supposedly, because investigators have backed him into a corner with documents
and other evidence that suggests he at least misrepresented the case, if not
outright lied about it. And Chaumeil may not be Jewish after all. More to come, no doubt!} But even if it is true that Plantard was at one time arrested and tried for some sort
of sexual deviance regarding children (assuming that this is not just a smear), this
does not affect Plantard’s (or the story’s)
insistence that he was of Merovingian descent.
In fact, it ironically makes that pedigree more likely, since the
inbreeding of aristocrats has long been suspected as a cause of degeneracy
among them. A sexually perverse Plantard
is, ironically, a more credible Merovingian! One would like to believe that this matter
could be settled by producing official documents of the arrest and conviction
of Plantard, but even if such were produced (and
French libel law apparently dictates against that, or is that a red herring?),
there would be cause to wonder if they were doctored or invented for the
occasion [And now it’s being argued that the
original documents were misunderstood because the French law pertaining was
incorrectly cited].
(Keep in mind
throughout this debunking account that we’re relying on documents and
testimonies that are assumed to be genuine but which an organization as
theoretically clever and omnipresent and dissembling as the Priory, or whoever
might be behind them or might be using them, could easily forge or arrange,
especially in this age of identity theft.
As for the later Priory, Smith reports that one of its members, Jean-Luc
Chaumeil, a French Jew, supposedly, who became
suspicious of Plantard in the mid-70s, had his
father, high up in the French Police Force, assist in investigating Plantard and subsequently broke with Plantard
upon discovering his Vichy, anti-Jewish past, but all this needed was the
discrediting of Plantard by such official
investigations to make the case for cover-up.
As the French establishment is notorious for its cover-ups, secret
plots, and mysterious double dealings, this is made to order for my case of
postmodern relativism! And in this age
of identity theft and document manipulation by “officials,” public records are
no longer conclusive proof of anything.
Furthermore, of course the original members now disavow any
notion that Plantard’s original Piory
was “serious” or had any of the goals later attributed to it! If they’re genuine, they can’t do anything but insist that they
weren’t genuine. Covering
one’s trail or tail is always the first rule of any sincere secret society. ).
Then, in 1961, according to this debunking account
but confirmed by True Believers as well, Plantard began depositing (or
having others deposit) in various official libraries, under various pseudonyms
(Henri Lobineau being his favorite, starting in
1961), documents
that he would later use in building his connection with Rennes-le-Château and
his case for royal ancestors. Smith
notes that as Plantard “was once a professional
draughtsman, it could not have been too difficult for him to create genealogies
through the application of a stencil-kit—genealogies that were part of a
developing system of belief involving the historical fiction of the Priory of
Sion.” But, as Smith further notes, Plantard did not make any attempt to connect with
Rennes-le-Château until 1964,
after the publication of Robert Charroux’s book
brought Rennes to his attention and he apparently went on to find Corbu’s account and see enough possibilities in that to revive the Priory of Sion
as an active organization with different membership in a different part of
France. Before making this connection,
however, in 1961 Plantard apparently met Gérard de
Sède and persuaded him to cite him, Plantard,
as an expert on Gisors (where the Templars
are supposed to have broken with the Priory in 1188) in De Sède’s book, The Templars Are Among Us, thus “resulting in the early
historical fiction of the Priory of Sion being publicized in a big way for the
first time.” When Plantard
discovered the possibilities of weaving the Priory of Sion together with the
Rennes-le-Château mystery in or about 1964, say the debunkers, he abandoned Gisors and showed what were presumed to be Saunière’s coded
parchments to De Sède, convincing him to research Rennes-le-Château and write
that story up in The Accursed Treasure.
And off we go into a world where the subplot attempts to become the main
plot.
Interestingly, Smith’s account of Plantard makes him a soul brother of Smith’s Saunière,
which is why Smith has no trouble in seeing much of the priest’s church and
estate as expressive of the politics of the extreme and rather unscrupulous
right wing in reaction to the secularizing assertions of Republican
France. The ironic outcome of Smith’s
debunking is to show how these two men could very well have been co-conspirators,
had they been contemporaries, even though he’s convinced there’s no real
connection between them. Well, the
connection would be spiritual, obviously.
And that would be why Plantard was able to
exploit a connection for so long.
And that’s why there was plausibility
to the Priory’s account of the parchments Saunière supposedly found, until that
was called into question by insider revelations as to the true authorship. Although Abbé Bigou,
the priest of Marie de Blanchefort, the last of the
local aristocratic family that passed “the secret” down, is supposed to be the
author and hider of the parchments (either in 1781 when Marie died or in 1791,
shortly before he fled to Sabadell, Spain?) that Saunière supposedly found in
1891, Smith makes much of the fact that an accomplice of Plantard’s,
the Marquis de Chérisey, has confessed to being the author of the
parchments. However, De Chérisey’s account, which is
to be found on Paul Smith’s website at http://smithpp0.tripod.com/
psp/id89.html, raises more questions than it answers and all by itself makes
one wonder if it can be trusted.
Throwing even more doubt on it is a recent (July 2003) article in The Rennes Observer by Ian Campbell,
which makes an excellent case that De Chérisey could
not possibly have forged both parchments, for their handwriting and use of
Latin characters is distinctly different.
If they were forged, it seems, there were at least two different
authors.
Furthermore, surprisingly, in his
“confession” De Chérisey does not contradict the
basic story that Saunière had found documents in his church, had them
deciphered in
But how is it possible that these De Chérisey “parchments,” which so ingeniously connect with
Saunière and the history of Rennes-le-Château, not to mention all the Knights
Templar, Cathar, Gnostic,
hermetic/alchemical/astrological/Masonic connections, could have been made up
out of whole cloth in so short a time?
It is hard to believe that De Chérisey started
entirely from scratch [and see now on page 1 the
news that the Codex Bezae has been discovered to be
the source of one of the messages].
What had he heard about the original parchments on his trip to
Furthermore, this account by De Chérisey does not square with either Smith’s insinuation
elsewhere that draughtsman Plantard created the
“parchments” or with the contention from one of Smith’s “authorities” (Descadeillas) that Saunière created them, which I
will pursue below. In any case, as said,
professional code-breakers have found some of the parchment codes so complex
that they think one would have to have been a professional to pull it off, and
that might dismiss all of the above, not just duffer De Chérisey, as authors of the codes. Of course the codes might have been based on
already extant historical material capable of adaptation, as De Chérisey claimed (and such as the Codex Bezae
has been found to be), but that then opens up questions about the historical
material. [Pierre Jarnac
reports that De Chérisey told Jean-Luc Chaumeil that he took the ancient text, in uncial, at the Bibliothéque Nationale,
from a 15-volume work entitled Dictionnaire d’archéologie chretienne et de liturgie (1924-9952), published under the direction of dom Fernand Cabrol. So where did it come from? What is the
context? And how does this square with
the recent discovery that one of the coded messages was based on the Codex Bezae? If that Codex is not contained in that Dictionnaire, what then?]
In
short, that there may have been in the machinations of Plantard’s
Priory a monarchist plot at work (perhaps serious, perhaps not) doesn’t mean
that there wasn’t or isn’t something else as well. The monarchists may simply have been taking
advantage of a situation that lent itself to their cause or that was parallel
to it in some way.
And that the particular Priory of Sion Plantard
dreamed up (if that’s what he did) may be exposed as fraudulent does not
necessarily mean that there isn’t a real Priory of Sion or some secret
society that operates on much the same principles and for much the same
reasons. Etc. Etc. Etc. It is a matter
of historical record that there was some mysterious society called the Ordre de Sion situated in Jerusalem on Mt.
Sion at the same time as the Knights Templar were there and that there were
family connections between the Ordre of
Sion and the Templars. (“Sion” and “
For example, that a Priory of Sion
exists that has nothing to do with Plantard is
suggested by the 1999 publication of Weidner and Bridges’ Monument to the End of Time and a
number of other current studies. And so,
in the texts confronting us, we may have to think in terms of there being at
least THREE different Piory
of Sions.
There’s Plantard’s Priory as it existed in the
minds of people who wrote about it, there’s Plantard’s
Priory as it may have really been, and then there’s a Priory that might have
nothing to do with Plantard and that really does
exist and has the kind of reach and power imagined for Plantard’s
Priory. And now add a fourth. There’s also the possibility that while the Piory of Sion may be largely or totally a fiction, in all
its possible manifestations, nevertheless a similar organization does exist
with similar goals, as suggested by Rex Deus, by Hopkins, Simmans, and Wallace-Murphy. “Rex Deus” is their name for a widespread European family of aristocrats
with the same Merovingian, Gnostic, Hermetic, Cabalistic, Alchemical roots as
was attributed to Plantard’s Priory. However valid this claim may be, it makes the
point that there’s still plenty of potential for mystery here, and it’s of the
kind to lead to my next point.
We’ve gone far enough now to sum up
some major reasons why I
say the cancer of Postmodern Relativity is metastasizing at Rennes-le-Château.
What may make this “mystery”
impossible to solve is that one can never trust the public pronouncements,
documents, and personas of the cast of characters because, as possible
jokesters or as agents of secret agendas and/or as possessors of perhaps
dangerous, suppressed truths, most of the cast was committed to dissembling, and so
there’s no telling when they’re telling it straight and when not, and when
documents may be “planted” and when not, and when there may be even more
powerful forces operating behind the scenes, using our cast as puppets. And causing evidence to disappear!
First of all, the assumption is that often members of this
secret tradition camouflaged themselves by pretending to be the opposite
of what they were, for safety’s sake.
Down through the centuries, not a few of them came off in public as
extreme right-wingers, including Saunière and Plantard,
and who’s to say they weren’t faking it while sending coded messages to their
subversive initiates? In the case of
Saunière, every inch of his church and estate is sufficiently ambiguous to
attribute both orthodox and heretical meanings to it. In the case of Plantard,
as said, there is a fundamental contradiction between his presumed orthodoxy
and his notion of Merovingian descent, which automatically made him a Jewish
heretic, if the connection to Jesus and Mary Magdalene is granted. And the problem with the debunker’s case
against the Priory is that much of it is based on testimony from former
“co-conspirators” with Plantard who now declare the
whole thing a hoax. An interesting
seizure of timely “revisionism,” is it not?
If I were as deeply
into conspiracy as these folks earlier made it seem they were, there would be
nothing more satisfying than getting people to believe that something was a
hoax that was not, if I had a good reason for doing that. That is why people who are known liars are
not given much credence as witnesses in courts of law, even when they’re
admitting to former lying. As I say,
“abandon all hope.”
Back to safety being the reason for dissembling. Another part of the rationale for this
Secret’s coming out now rather than at some other time is not that Saunière’s
accidental discovery let the cat out of the bag and thus it might as well be
admitted to, for that cat curled back to sleep soon after his death in 1917,
rather it’s that it is only now, in these relatively enlightened times, that it
is perhaps safe to divulge “the Truth,” a Truth that is desperately needed to
save a self-destructive world. But
divulge it oh so carefully and indirectly because you never know whose secret
agents might have “contracts” on your life!
Well, there are murders and mysterious “accidental” deaths in
this story—De Sède’s book concludes with a considerable body count, which is
what makes the treasure “accursed”! The
Priory, incidentally, perhaps with De Sède as major contributor, added to the
body count by attributing many of its pseudonymously published documents to
authors who met with foul play, and other researchers have since added numerous
names to the list of those potentially victimized! Well, who can resist “accursed treasure”? The logic seems to be that if people are
dying in pursuit of a treasure, that means it’s authentic and significant. Cleverly done!
But in this atmosphere of paranoid
intrigue, in which the Church is imagined to operate like the Mafia (which
indeed it did at times in centuries past, and in modern times we have a Vatican
bank scandal, insurance scandal, and the mysterious, sudden death of John Paul
I to contemplate, not to mention the secret operations of the notorious Opus
Dei!), investigators find themselves in a bind—they need reliable testimony
but are unable to trust what they find because there’s always the possibility
that it’s “disinformation”
in some sort of high-stakes war going on behind the scenes. Lately there has surfaced implications that
the secret intelligence agencies of
And that is why, of course,
the debunkers dismiss all this as spy novel material. It is, but is it deliberately
so? Which reminds me to make the
point that you also can’t trust the investigators, including the debunkers,
for you never know which are in pursuit of relatively disinterested truth and
which are secretly asserting or defending an ideology or political agenda, the
truth be damned. And who, after all, is
Paul Smith? James Bond’s latest
manifestation or an agent of Spectre? Smith’s zealous and now almost automatic
insistence that it is “all myth,” based on strictly orthodox readings of
history, makes one suspect some sort of debunking machine operating behind the
scenes, all too eager to make the scandal of
A good example of how one can’t trust
the debunkers apparently occurred even as De Sède was writing his book, in
1966. He consulted a man named René Descadeillas, then keeper of the municipal library
at Carcassonne, known for his erudition regarding local lore and author of a
couple of scholarly books on Rennes-le-Château and Saunière (1962, 1964). Although De Sède borrowed heavily from Descadeillas in his facts, he was surprised to hear from Descadeillas that “Saunière was nothing but a swindler, who enjoyed
mystifying people. He was artful, but
uncultured, almost ignorant. As to the
origin of his fortune, there is no mystery about that. It was passed over to him in the form of
gifts by rich folk, who preserved their anonymity to avoid upsetting their
heirs. In addition, he took part in the
traffic in Masses. The manuscripts? He never found any. He put them together himself in order to
impress his dupes. As to the
decoration of his church, he bought it all readymade in
There are several things suspect
about Descadeillas’ summary, not the least of which
is that neither he nor his books provided any convincing proof of his debunking
charges. Assertions and inferences and speculations and unsupported
testimony are not proof. And some
assertions seem contradicted by other assertions, such as the assertion that
Saunière was “uncultured, almost ignorant” is contradicted by the assertion
that he created the parchments himself.
Some of the codes of the incredibly complex, historically allusive
parchments were not created by someone who was “uncultured, almost
ignorant.” And even if the
"parchment" messages we have today are not the originals, the incredibly
precise mathematics everywhere in evidence in the layout of Saunière’s estate
and the buildings he constructed there and their mathematically precise
relationship to other sites contradicts Descadeillas’
characterization of Saunière as “almost ignorant.” Even more telling is the fact that Descadeillas’ original debunking idea that Saunière faked
the parchments has been contradicted by later debunking “confessions” from De Chérisey that the Priory faked them! And whether it was Plantard
or De Chérisey who faked them is also open to
question. Which seems to suggest that
what is uppermost for the debunkers is that the parchments are understood as
faked, never mind who faked them. That
seems a tad obsessive. Some would see it
as panicky. Is there a counter-conspiracy? Now we’re having fun!
[Incidentally, De Chérisey’s
“confessions” remind me of a story by Sherwood Anderson entitled “I’m a Fool,”
about a boy who admits to being a certain kind of fool in order to hide the
fact that he’s an even greater fool than he wants people to know. So too a hoaxer can admit to a hoax in order
to disguise an even greater hoax, which in this case could be that the hoaxer
is lying about having lied. Why would he
do that? Perhaps because the Priory
wants to recede back into the woodwork for a while, the sense of urgency it
felt in an earlier time having passed, the European Union sufficing for now, or
perhaps realizing that it has (temporarily?) failed in its goals. You see, it’s a bottomless pit.]
It was clever of De Sède to include Descadeillas’ debunking opinion, for that created an aura
of objectivity around his investigation and openness to contrary opinions, and
even more clever that he kept his reaction to it surprisingly low-key. De Sède thought it was enough to point out
that he later learned that the doubting Descadeillas,
along with several friends, “had himself undertaken a series of excavations of
Rennes-le-Château.” (By the way,
apparently it was the Descadeillas group in 1956 that
found three male bodies with bullet wounds buried in Saunière’s garden, and an
inquest was unable to determine who they were or how this came to pass!). De Sède’s implication is that Descadeillas was just trying to decoy other treasure
hunters, but he leaves that to the reader to deduce. And so it’s also possible that Descadeillas in characterizing Saunière was just expressing
bitter disappointment in not finding anything of value. No treasure found, so Saunière must be a
fraud. A subsequent researcher, Henry
Lincoln, who met with hostility from Descadeillas
when he sought information about a certain significant local tomb (to be dealt
with later), concurs that Descadeillas’ being among
the “devoted diggers” around Rennes-le-Château at least puts all his
pronouncements under suspicion. And that
he was unaware of the tomb near Arques rather puts
into question as well his authority as an expert on the region.
So, to sum up this point, the
debunker’s case against Plantard’s Priory
(they make no attempt to deal with the possibility of another Priory)
for fraudulence is pretty convincing and may very well be “the truth,” but we
are not at the moment in any position to say that with 100% certainty,
given the points made above. And the
case against Saunière for fraudulence is considerably weaker. And so one reaches the point where one just
relaxes and enjoys the show. This
“show” really got going with the last set of authors of “The Saunière
Episode,” Henry Lincoln et al.
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