Holy Blood, Holy Grail (19 page)

We therefore embarked on a lengthy and detailed study of the alleged Grand

Masters their biographies, activities and accomplishments. In conducting this study we tried, as far as we could, to subject each name on the list to certain critical questions: 1)

Was there any personal contact, direct or indirect, between each alleged Grand Master, his immediate predecessor and immediate successor? 2) Was there any affiliation, by blood or otherwise, between each alleged

Grand Master and the families who figured in the genealogies of the

“Prieure documents’ with any of the families of purported Merovingian descent, and especially the ducal house of Lorraine? 3) Was each alleged Grand Master in any way connected with

Rennes-leChateau, Gisors, Stenay, Saint Sulpice or any of the other sites that had recurred in the course of our previous investigation? 4)

If Sion defined itself as an “Hermetic freemasonry’, did each alleged Grand Master display a predisposition towards Hermetic thought or an involvement with secret societies?

Although information on the alleged Grand Masters before 1400 was difficult, sometimes impossible to obtain, our investigation of the later figures yield some astonishing results and consistency. Many of them were associated, in one way or another, with one or more of the

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sites that seemed to be relevant Rennes-leChateau, Gisors, Stenay or Saint Sulpice. Most of the names on the list were either allied by blood to the house of Lorraine or associated with it in some other fashion; even Robert Fludd, for example, served as tutor to the sons of the duke of Lorraine. From Nicolas Flamel on, every name on the list, without exception, was steeped in Hermetic thought, and often also associated with secret societies even men whom one would not readily associate with such things, like Boyle and Newton. And with only one exception, each alleged

Grand Master had some contact sometimes direct, sometimes through close mutual friends with those who preceded and succeeded him. As far as we could determine, there was only one apparent ‘break in the chain’. And even this which seems to have occurred around the French Revolution, between

Maximilian of Lorraine and Charles Nodier is not by any means conclusive.

In the context of this chapter it is not feasible to discuss each alleged

Grand Master in detail. Some of the more obscure figures assume significance only against the background of a given age, and to explain this significance fully would entail lengthy digressions into forgotten byways of history. In the case of the more famous names, it would be impossible to do them justice in a few pages. In consequence the relevant biographical material on the alleged Grand Masters and the connections between them have been consigned to an appendix (see pp. 441-65). The present chapter will dwell on broader social and cultural developments, in which a succession of alleged Grand Masters played a collective part. It was in such social and cultural developments that our research seemed to yield a discernible trace of the Prieure de Sion’s hand.

Rene d’Anjou

Although little known today, Rene d’Anjou - “Good King Rene’ as he was the years immediately preceding the Renaissance. Born in 1408, during his life he came to hold an awesome array of titles. Among the most important were count of Bar, count of Provence, count of Piedmont,

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count of Guise, duke of Calabria, duke of Anjou, duke of Lorraine, king of Hungary, king of Naples and Sicily, king of

Aragon, Valencia, Majorca and Sardinia -and, perhaps most resonant of all, king of Jerusalem. This last was, of course, purely titular.

Nevertheless it invoked a continuity extending back to Godfroi de Bouillon, and was acknowledged by other European potentates. One of Rene’s daughters,

Marguerite d’Anjou, in 1445 married Henry VI of England and played a prominent role in the Wars of the Roses.

In its earlier phases Rene d’Anjou’s career seems to have been in some obscure way associated with that of Jeanne d’Arc. As far as is known,

Jeanne was born in the town of Domremy, in the duchy of Bar, making her

Rene’s subject. She first impressed herself on history in 1429, when she appeared at the fortress of Vaucouleurs, a few miles up the Meuse from

Domremy. Presenting herself to the commandant of the fortress, she announced her

‘divine mission’ to save France from the English invaders and ensure that the dauphin, subsequently Charles VII, was crowned king. In order to perform this mission, she would have had to join the dauphin at his court at Chinon, on the Loire, far to the south-west.

But she did not request a passage to Chinon of the commandant at Vaucouleurs; she requested a special audience with the duke of Lorraine Rene’s father-in-law and great uncle.

In deference to her request, Jeanne was granted an audience with the duke at his capital in Nancy. When she arrived there, Rene d’Anjou is known to have been present. And when the duke of Lorraine asked her what she wished, she replied explicitly, in words that have constantly perplexed historians, “Your son fin-law], a horse and some good men to take me into France ‘.4

Both at the time and later, speculation was rife about the nature of Rene’s connection with Jeanne. According to some sources, probably inaccurate, the two were lovers. But the fact remains that they knew each other, and that

Rene was present when Jeanne first embarked on her mission. Moreover, contemporary chroniclers maintain that when Jeanne departed for the Dauphin’s court at Chinon, Rene accompanied her. And not only that.

The same chroniclers assert that Rene was actually present at her side during the siege of Orleans.” In the centuries that followed a

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systematic attempt seems to have been made to expunge all trace of Rene’s possible role in Jeanne’s life. Yet Rene’s later biographers cannot account for his whereabouts or activities between 1429 and 1431 the apex of Jeanne’s career. It is usually and tacitly assumed that he was vegetating at the ducal court in Nancy, but there is no evidence to support this assumption.

Circumstances argue that Rene did accompany Jeanne to Chinon. For if there was any one dominant personality at Chinon at the time, that personality was Iolande d’Anjou. It was Iolande who provided the febrile, weak willed dauphin with incessant transfusions of morale. It was Iolande who inexplicably appointed herself Jeanne’s official patroness and sponsor. It was Iolande who overcame the court’s resistance to the visionary girl and obtained authorisation for her to accompany the army to Orleans. It was

Iolande who convinced the dauphin that Jeanne might indeed be the saviour she claimed to be. It was Iolande who contrived the dauphin’s marriage to her own daughter. And Iolande was Rene d’Anjou’s mother.

As we studied these details, we became increasingly convinced, like many modern historians, that something was being enacted behind the scenes some intricate, high-level intrigue, or audacious design. The more we examined it, the more Jeanne d’Arc’s meteoric career began to suggest a ‘put- up job’ as if someone, exploiting popular legends of a

‘virgin from

Lorraine’ and playing ingeniously on mass psychology, had engineered and orchestrated the Maid of Orleans’s so-called mission. This did not, of course, presuppose the existence of a secret society. But it rendered the existence of such a society decidedly more plausible. And if such a society did exist, the man presiding over it might well have been, Rene d’Anjou.

Rene and the Theme of Arcadia

If Rene was associated with Jeanne d’Arc, his later career, for the most part, was distinctly less bellicose. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rene was less a warrior than a courtier. In this respect he was misplaced in his own age; he was, in short, a man ahead

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of his time, anticipating the cultured Italian princes of the Renaissance. An extremely literate person, he wrote prolifically and illuminated his own books. He composed poetry and mystical allegories, as well as compendiums of tournament rules. He sought to promote the advancement of knowledge and at one time employed Christopher Columbus. He was steeped in esoteric tradition, and his court included a Jewish astrologer, Cabalist and physician known as jean de Saint-Remy.

According to a number of accounts, Jean de Saint-Remy was the grandfather of Nostradamus, the famous sixteenth-century prophet who was also to figure in our story.

Rene’s interests included chivalry and the Arthurian and Grail romances.

Indeed he seems to have had a particular preoccupation with the Grail.

He is said to have taken great pride in a magnificent cup of red porphyry, which, he asserted, had been used at the wedding at Cana. He had obtained it, he claimed, at Marseilles where the Magdalene, according to tradition, landed with the Grail. Other chroniclers speak of a cup in

Rene’s possession -perhaps the same one which bore a mysterious inscription incised into the rim:

Qui bien beurra

Dieu voira.

Qui beurra tout dune baleine

Voita Dieu et la Madeleine.s

(He who drinks well Will see God. He who quaffs at a single draught Will see God and the Magdalene.)

It would not be inaccurate to regard Rene d’Anjou as a major impetus behind the phenomenon now called the Renaissance. By virtue of his numerous

Italian possessions he spent some years in Italy; and through his intimate friendship with the ruling Sforza family of Milan he established contact with the Medicis of Florence. There is good reason to believe that it was largely Rene’s influence which prompted Cosimo de’ Medici to embark on a series of ambitious projects projects

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destined to transform Western civilisation. In 1439, while Rene was resident in Italy, Cosimo de’ Medici began sending his agents all over the world in quest of ancient manuscripts. Then, in 1444, Cosimo founded Europe’s first public library, the Library of San

Marco, and thus began to challenge the Church’s long monopoly of learning.

At Cosimo’s express commission, the corpus of Platonic, Neo-Platonic, Pythagorean, Gnostic and Hermetic thought found its way into translation for the first time and became readily accessible. Cosimo also instructed the University of Florence to begin teaching Greek, for the first time in

Europe for some seven hundred years. And he undertook to create an academy of Pythagorean and Platonic studies. Cosimo’s academy quickly generated a multitude of similar institutions throughout the Italian peninsula, which became bastions of Western esoteric tradition. And from them the high culture of the Renaissance began to blossom.

Rene d’Anjou not only contributed in some measure to the formation of the academies, but also seems to have conferred upon them one of their favourite symbolic themes that of Arcadia. Certainly it is in Rene’s own career that the motif of Arcadia appears to have made its debut in post-Christian Western culture. In 1449, for example, at his court of

Tarascon, Rene staged a series of pas dames curious hybrid amalgams of tournament and masque, in which knights tilted against each other and, at the same time, performed a species of drama or play. One of Rene’s most famous pas dames was called “The Pas dAmes of the Shepherdess’. Played by his mistress at the time, the “Shepherdess’ was an explicitly Arcadian figure, embodying both romantic and philosophical attributes. She presided over a tourney in which knights assumed allegorical identities representing conflicting values and ideas. The event was a singular fusion of the pastoral Arcadian romance with the pageantry of the Round Table and the mysteries of the Holy Grail.

Arcadia figures elsewhere in Rene’s work as well. It is frequently denoted by a fountain or a tombstone, both of which are associated with an underground stream. This stream is usually equated with the river Alpheus the central river in the actual geographical Arcadia in Greece,

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which flows underground and is said to surface again at the Fountain of Arethusa in Sicily. From the most remote antiquity to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan’, the river Alpheus has been deemed sacred. Its very name derives from the same root as the Greek word “Alpha’, meaning ‘first’ or ‘source’.

For Rene, the motif of an underground stream seems to have been extremely rich in symbolic and allegorical resonances. Among other things. it would appear to connote the ‘underground’ esoteric tradition of Pythagorean,

Gnostic, Cabalistic and Hermetic thought. But it might also connote something more than a general corpus of teachings, perhaps some very specific factual information a ‘secret’ of some sort, transmitted in clandestine fashion from generation to generation. And it might connote an unacknowledged and thus ‘subterranean’ bloodline.

In the Italian academies the image of the ‘underground stream’ appears to have been invested with all these levels of meaning. And it recurs consistently so much so, indeed, that the academies themselves have often been labelled “Arcadian’. Thus, in 1502, a major work was published, a long poem entitled Arcadia, by Jacopo Sannazaro and Rene d’Anjou’s Italian entourage of some years before included one Jacques Sannazar, probably the poet’s father. In 1553 Sannazaro’s poem was translated into French. It was dedicated, interestingly enough, to the cardinal of Unoncourt ancestor of the twentiethcentury count of Unoncourt who compiled the genealogies in the “Prieure documents’.

During the sixteenth century Arcadia and the ‘underground stream’ became a prominent cultural fashion. In England they inspired Sir Philip Sidney’s most important work, Arcadia.” In Italy they inspired such illustrious figures as Torquato ‘lasso whose masterpiece, Jerusalem Delivered, deals with the capture of the Holy City by Godfroi de Bouillon. By the seventeenth century the motif of Arcadia had culminated in Nicolas Poussin and “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’.

The more we explored the matter, the more apparent it became that something - a tradition of some sort, a hierarchy of values or attitudes, perhaps a specific body of information was constantly being intimated by the ‘underground stream’. This image seems to have