Holy Blood, Holy Grail (21 page)

Newton’s companions. Like Newton, he displayed a sympathetic interest in the Camisards - a sect of Cathar-like heretics then suffering persecution in southern France, and a kind of cause celebre for Fatio de Duillier.

By 1710 Ramsay was in Cambrai and on intimate terms with the mystical philosopher Fenelon, formerly cure of Saint Sulpice which, even at that time, was a bastion of rather questionable orthodoxy. It is not known precisely when Ramsay made Charles Radclyffe’s acquaintance, but by the 1720s he was closely affiliated with the Jacobite cause. For a time he even served as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tutor.

Despite his Jacobite connections, Ramsay returned to England in 1729 where notwithstanding an apparent lack of appropriate qualifications he was promptly admitted to the Royal Society. He also became a member of a rather more obscure institution called the Gentleman’s Club of Spalding. This ‘club’ included men like Desaguliers, Alexander Pope and, until his death in 1727, Isaac Newton.

By 1730 Ramsay was back in France and increasingly active on behalf of

Freemasonry. He is on record as having attended lodge meetings with a number of notable figures, including Desaguliers. And he received

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special patronage from the Tour dAuvergne family, the viscounts of Turenne and dukes of

Bouillon who, three-quarters of a century before, had been related to Frederick of the Palatinate. In Ramsay’s time the duke of Bouillon was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and among the most prominent figures in

Freemasonry. He conferred an estate and a town-house on Ramsay, whom he also appointed tutor to his son.

In 1737 Ramsay delivered his famous “Oration’ - a lengthy disquisition on the history of Freemasonry, which subsequently became a seminal document for the ‘craft’ .”4 On the basis of this “Oration’ Ramsay became the preeminent Masonic spokesman of his age. Our research convinced us, however, that the real voice behind Ramsay was that of Charles Radclyffe who presided over the lodge at which Ramsay delivered his discourse and who appeared again, in 1743, as chief signatory at Ramsay’s funeral. But if

Radclyffe was the power behind Ramsay, it would seem to have been Ramsay who constituted the link between Radclyffe and Newton.

Despite Radclyffe’s premature death in 1746, the seeds he had sown in Europe continued to bear fruit. Early in the 1750s a new ambassador of

Freemasonry appeared a German named Karl Gottlieb von Hund. Hund claimed to have been initiated in 1742 - a year before Ramsay’s death, four years before Radclyffe’s. At his initiation, he claimed, he had been introduced to a new system of Freemasonry, confided to him by

‘unknown superiors’.”5

These ‘unknown superiors’, Hund maintained, were closely associated with the Jacobite cause. Indeed, he even believed at first that the man who presided over his initiation was Bonnie Prince Charlie. And although this proved not to be the case, Hund remained convinced that the unidentified personage in question was intimately connected with the

“Young Pretender’.

It seems reasonable to suppose that the man who actually presided was Charles Radclyffe.

The system of Freemasonry to which Hund was introduced a further extension of the “Scottish Rite’was subsequently called “Strict Observance’. Its name derived from the oath it demanded, an oath of unswerving, unquestioning obedience to the mysterious ‘unknown superiors’.

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And the basic tenet of the “Strict Observance’ was that it had descended directly from the Knights Templar, some of whom had purportedly survived the purge of 1307-14 and perpetuated their Order in

Scotland.

We were already familiar with this claim. On the basis of our own research we could allow it some truth. A contingent of Templars had allegedly fought on Robert Bruce’s side at the Battle of Bannockburn.

Because the Papal Bull dissolving the Templars was never promulgated in Scotland, the Order was never officially suppressed there. And we ourselves had located what seemed to be a Templar graveyard in Argyllshire. The earliest of the stones in this graveyard dated from the thirteenth century, the later ones from the eighteenth. The earlier stones bore certain unique carvings and incised symbols identical to those found at known Templar preceptories in England and France. The later stones combined these symbols with specifically Masonic motifs, attesting thereby to some sort of fusion. It was thus not impossible, we concluded, that the Order had indeed perpetuated itself in the trackless wilderness of medieval Argyll -maintaining a clandestine existence, gradually secular ising itself and becoming associated with both

Masonic guilds and the prevailing clan system.

The pedigree Hund claimed for the “Strict Observance’ did not, therefore, seem to us altogether improbable. To his own embarrassment and subsequent disgrace, however, he was unable to elaborate further on his new system of

Freemasonry. As a result his contemporaries dismissed him as a charlatan, and accused him of having fabricated the story of his initiation, his meeting with ‘unknown superiors’, his mandate to disseminate the “Strict

Observance’. To these charges Hund could only reply that his ‘unknown superiors’ had inexplicably abandoned him. They had promised to contact him again and give him further instructions, he protested, but they had never done so. To the end of his life he affirmed his integrity, maintaining he had been deserted by his original sponsors who, he insisted, had actually existed.

The more we considered Hund’s assertions, the more plausible they sounded and he appeared to have been a hapless victim not so much of deliberate betrayal as of circumstances beyond everyone’s control. For

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according to his own account, Hund had been initiated in 1742, when the Jacobites were still a powerful political force in continental affairs. By 1746, however,

Radclyffe was dead. So were many of his colleagues, while others were in prison or exile as far away, in some cases, as North America. If Hund’s ‘unknown superiors’ failed to reestablish contact with their protege, the omission does not seem to have been voluntary.

The fact that Hund was abandoned immediately after the collapse of the Jacobite cause would seem, if anything, to confirm his story.

There is another fragment of evidence which lends credence not only to

Hund’s claims but to the “Prieure documents’ as well. This evidence is a list of Grand Masters of the Knights Templar, which Hund insisted he had obtained from his ‘unknown superiors’. ‘6 On the basis of our own research, we had concluded that the list of Templar Grand Masters in the Dossiers secrets was accurate so accurate, in fact, that it appeared to derive from ‘inside information’. Save for the spelling of a single surname, the list Hund produced agreed with the one in the Dossiers secret. In shot,

Hund had somehow obtained a list of Templar Grand Masters more accurate than any other known at the time. Moreover, he obtained it when many documents on which we relied charters, deeds, proclamations were still sequestered in the Vatican and unobtainable. This would seem to confirm that Hund’s story of ‘unknown superiors’ was not a fabrication. It would also seem to indicate that those ‘unknown superiors’ were extraordinarily knowledgeable about the Order of the Temple more knowledgeable than they could possibly have been without access to ‘privileged sources’.

In any case, despite the charges levelled against him Hund was not left completely friendless. After the collapse of the Jacobite cause he found a sympathetic patron, and a close companion, in no less a person than the

Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Emperor at this time was FranQois, Duke of Lorraine who, by his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1735, had linked the houses of Habsburg and Lorraine and inaugurated the

Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty. And according to the “Prieure documents’, it was

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Francois’s brother, Charles de Lorraine, who succeeded Radclyffe as Sion’s Grand Master.

Fran(~ois was the first European prince to become a Mason and to publicise his Masonic affiliations. He was initiated in 1731 at the Hague a bastion of esoteric activity since “Rosicrucian’ circles had installed themselves there during the Thirty Years War. And the man who presided over Francois’s initiation was jean Desaguliers, intimate associate of Newton, Ramsay and

Radclyffe. Shortly after his initiation moreover, Franqois embarked for a lengthy stay in England. Here he became a member of that innocuous-sounding institution, the Gentleman’s Club of Spalding.

In the years that followed, Franqois de Lorraine was probably more responsible than any other European potentate for the spread of Freemasonry. His court at Vienna became, in a sense, Europe’s Masonic capital, and a centre for a broad spectrum of other esoteric interests as well. FranQois himself was a practising alchemist, with an alchemical laboratory in the imperial palace, the Hofburg. On the death of the last

Medici he became grand duke of Tuscany, and deftly thwarted the Inquisition’s harassment of Freemasons in Florence. Through Franqois,

Charles Radclyffe, who had founded the first Masonic lodge on the continent, left a durable legacy.

Charles Nodier and His Circle

Compared to the important cultural and political figures who preceded him, compared even to a man like Charles Radclyffe, Charles Nodier seemed a most unlikely choice for Grand Master. We knew him primarily as a kind of literary curiosity a relatively minor belle-lettrist, a somewhat garrulous essayist, a second-rate novelist and short-story writer in the bizarre tradition of E. T. A. Hoffmann and, later, Edgar Allan Poe. In his own time, however, Nodier was regarded as a major cultural figure, and his influence was enormous.

Moreover, he proved to be connected with our inquiry in a number of surprising ways.

By 1824 Nodier was already a literary celebrity. In that year he was

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appointed the chief librarian at the Arsenal Library, the major French depository for medieval and specifically occult manuscripts. Among its various treasures the Arsenal was said to have contained the alchemical works of Nicolas Flamel the medieval alchemist listed as one of Sion’s earlier Grand Masters. The Arsenal also contained the library of Cardinal Richelieu an exhaustive collection of works on magical, Cabalistic and Hermetic thought. And there were other treasures, too. On the outbreak of the French Revolution monasteries throughout the country had been plundered, and all books and manuscripts sent to Paris for storage. Then in 1810 Napoleon, as part of his ambition to create a definitive world library, confiscated and brought to Paris almost the entire archive of the Vatican. There were more than three thousand cases of material, some of which all the documents pertaining to the Templars, for example -had been specifically requested. Although some of these papers were subsequently returned to Rome, a great many remained in France. And it was material of this sort -occult books and manuscripts, works plundered from monasteries and the archive of the Vatican that passed through the hands of Nodier and his associates. Methodically they sifted it, catalogued it, explored it.

Among Nodier’s colleagues in this task were Eliphas Levi and Jean Baptiste

Pitois, who adopted the nom de plume of Paul Christian. The works of these two men, over the years that followed, engendered a major renaissance of interest in esoterica. It is to these two men, and to Charles Nodier, their mentor, that the French “occult revival’ of the nineteenth century, as it has been called, can ultimately be traced.

Indeed, Pitois’s History and

Practice of Magic became a bible for nineteenth-century students of the arcane. Recently re-issued in English translation complete with its original dedication to Nodier it is now a coveted work among modern students of the occult.

During his tenure at the Arsenal Nodier continued to write and publish prolifically. Among the most important of his later works is a massive, lavishly illustrated, multi-volume opus of antiquarian interest, devoted to sites of particular consequence in ancient France.

In this monumental compendium Nodier devoted considerable space to the

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Merovingian epoch a fact all the more striking in that no one at the time displayed the least interest in the

Merovingians. There are also lengthy sections on the Templars, and there is a special article on Gisors including a detailed account of the mysterious ‘cutting of the elm’ in 1188, which, according to the “Prieure documents’, marked the separation between the Knights Templar and the Prieure de Sion.”

At the same time Nodier was more than a librarian and a writer. He was also a gregarious, egocentric and flamboyant individual who constantly sought the centre of attention and did not hesitate to exaggerate his own importance. In his quarters at the Arsenal Library he inaugurated a salon which established him as one of the most influential and prestigious ‘aesthetic potentates’ of the epoch. By the time of his death in 1845, he had served as mentor for a whole generation many of whom quite eclipsed him in their subsequent achievements. For example, Nodier’s chief disciple and closest friend was the young Victor Hugo Sion’s next Grand Master according to the “Prieure documents’. There was Franqois-Rene de

Chateaubriand who made a special pilgrimage to Poussin’s tomb in Rome and had a stone erected there bearing a reproduction of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’. There were Balzac, Delacroix, Dumas pere, Lamartine, Musset,

Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval and Alfred de Vigny. Like the poets and painters of the Renaissance, these men often drew heavily on esoteric, and especially Hermetic, tradition. They also incorporated in their works a number of motifs, themes, references and allusions to the mystery which, for us, commenced with Sauniere and

Rennes-leChateau. In 1832, for instance, a book was published entitled A Journey to Rennes-les-Bains, which speaks at length of a legendary treasure associated with Blanchefort and Rennes-leChateau. The author of this obscure book, Auguste de