Holy Blood, Holy Grail (22 page)

Laboulsse-Rochefort, also produced another work, The Lovers To Eleonore.

On the title page there appears, without any explanation, the motto “Et in

Arcadia Ego’.

Nodier’s literary and esoteric activities were quite clearly pertinent to our investigation. But there was another aspect of his career which was, if anything, more pertinent still. For Nodier, from his childhood, was deeply involved in secret societies. As early as 1790,

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for instance, at the age of ten he is known to have been involved in a group called the

Philadelphes.”8 Around 1793 he created another group or perhaps an inner circle of the first -which included one of the subsequent plotters against

Napoleon. A charter dated 1797 attests to the foundation of yet another group also called the Philadelphes in that year.”9 In the library of

Besani~on there is a cryptic essay composed and recited to this group by one of Nodier’s closest friends. It is entitled Le Berger Arcadien ou Premiere

Accents dune Flute Champetre (“The Arcadian Shepherd Sounds the First Accents of a Rustic Flute’).z

In Paris in 1802 Nodier wrote of his affiliation with a secret society which he described as “Biblical and Pythagorean’.” Then, in 1816, he published anonymously one of his most curious and influential works, A

History of Secret Societies in the Army under Napoleon. In this book Nodier is deliberately ambiguous. He does not clarify definitively whether he is writing pure fiction or pure fact. If anything, he implies, the book is a species of thinly disguised allegory of actual historical occurrences. In any case it develops a comprehensive philosophy of secret societies. And it credits such societies with a number of historical accomplishments, including the downfall of Napoleon. There are a great many secret societies in operation, Nodier declares. But there is one, he adds, that takes precedence over all others, that in fact presides over all the others.

According to Nodier, this ‘supreme’ secret society is called the Philadelphes. At the same time, however, he speaks of “the oath which binds me to the Philadelphes and which forbids me to make them known under their social name ‘.21 Nevertheless, there is a hint of Sion in an address which

Nodier quotes. It was supposedly made to an assembly of Philadelphes by one of the plotters against Napoleon. The man in question is speaking of his newly born son: He is too young to engage himself to you by the oath of Annibal; but remember I have named him Eliacin, and that I delegate to him the guard of the temple and the altar, if I should die ere I have seen fall from his throne the last of the oppressors of Jerusalem .z3

Nodier’s book burst on the scene when fear of secret societies had

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assumed virtually pathological proportions. Such societies were often blamed for instigating the French

Revolution; and the atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe was similar, in many respects, to that of the “McCarthy Era’ in the United States during the 1950s. People saw, or imagined they saw, conspiracies everywhere.

Witch-hunts abounded. Every public disturbance, every minor disruption, every untoward occurrence was attributed to ‘subversive activity’ to the work of highly organised clandestine organisations working insidiously behind the scenes, eroding the fabric of established institutions, perpetrating all manner of devious sabotage.

This mentality engendered measures of extreme repression. And the repression, directed often at a fictitious threat, in turn engendered real opponents, real groups of subversive conspirators who would form themselves in accordance with the fictitious blueprints. Even as figments of the imagination, secret societies fostered a pervasive paranoia in the upper echelons of government; and this paranoia frequently accomplished more than any secret society itself could possibly have done. There is no question that the myth of the secret society, if not the secret society itself, played a major role in nineteenth century European history. And one of the chief architects of that myth, and possibly of a reality behind it, was Charles Nodier.z4

Debussy and the Rose-Croix

The trends to which Nodier gave expression a fascination with secret societies and a renewed interest in the esoteric continued to gain influence and adherents throughout the nineteenth century. Both trends reached a peak in the Paris of the fin de siecle the milieu of Claude Debussy, Sion’s alleged Grand Master when Berenger Sauniere, in 1891, discovered the mysterious parchments at Rennes-leChateau.

Debussy seems to have made Victor Hugo’s acquaintance through the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. Subsequently he set a number of Hugo’s works to music.

He also became an integral member of the symbolist circles which, by the last decade of the century, had come to dominate Parisian cultural life.

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These circles were sometimes illustrious, sometimes odd, sometimes both. They included the young cleric Rmile Hoffet and Emma Calve through whom Debussy came to meet

Sauniere. There was also the enigmatic magus of French symbolist poetry,

Stephane Mallarme one of whose masterpieces, L’Apres-Midi dun Faune, Debussy set to music. There was the symbolist playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Merovingian drama, Pelleas et Me1isande, Debussy turned into a world-famous opera. There was the flamboyant Comte Philippe Auguste

Villiers de 1”Isle-Adam, whose “Rosicrucian’ play, Axel, became a bible for the entire Symbolist Movement. Although his death in 1918 prevented its completion, Debussy began to compose a libretto for Villiers’s occult drama, intending to turn it, too, into an opera.

Among his other associates were the luminaries who attended Mallarme’s famous Tuesday night soirees Oscar

Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Stefan George, Paul Valery, the young Andre Gide and

Marcel Proust.

In themselves Debussy’s and Mallarme circles were steeped in esoterica.

At the same time, they overlapped circles that were more esoteric still. Thus

Debussy consorted with virtually all the most prominent names in the so-called French ‘occult revival’. One of these was the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, an intimate of Emma Calve and founder of the so-called

Cabalistic Order of the Rose Croix A second was Jules Bois, a notorious satanist, another intimate of Emma Calve and a friend of MacGregor Mathers.

Prompted by Jules Bois, Mathers established the most famous British occult society of the period, the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Another occultist of Debussy’s acquaintance was Doctor Gerard Encausse better known as Papus,zs under which name he published what is still considered one of the definitive works on the Tarot. Papus was not only a member of numerous esoteric orders and societies, but also a confidant of the czar and czarina, Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia.

And among Papus’s closest associates was a name which had already figured in our inquiry that of Jules Doinel. In 1890 Doinel had become librarian at Carcassonne and established a neo-Cathar church in the Languedoc in which he and

Papus functioned as bishops. Doinel in fact proclaimed himself Gnostic

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bishop of Mirepoix, which included the parish of Montsegur, and of Alet, which included the parish of Rennes- leChateau.

Doinel’s church was supposedly consecrated by an eastern bishop in Paris at the home, interestingly enough, of Lady Caithness, wife of the earl of

Caithness, Lord James Sinclair. In retrospect this church seems to have been merely another innocuous sect or cult, like so many of the fin de siecle. At the time, however, it caused considerable alarm in official quarters. A special report was prepared for the Holy Office of the Vatican on the “resurgence of Cathar tendencies’. And the pope issued and explicit condemnation of Doinel’s institution, which he militantly denounced as a new manifestation of ‘the ancient Albigensian heresy’.

Notwithstanding the Vatican’s condemnation, Doinel, by the mid-1890s, was active in Sauniere’s home territory and at precisely the time that the cure of Rennes-leChateau began to flaunt his wealth. The two men may well have been introduced by Debussy. Or by Emma Calve. Or by the Abbe Henri

Boudet cure of Rennes-les-Bains, best friend of Sauniere and colleague of

Doinel in the Society of Arts and Sciences of Carcassonne.

One of the closest of Debussy’s occult contacts was Josephin Peladan another friend of Papus and, predictably enough, another intimate of Emma

Calve. In 1889 Peladan embarked on a visit to the Holy Land. When he returned he claimed to have discovered Jesus’s tomb not at the traditional site of the Holy Sepulchre but under the Mosque of Omar, formerly part of the Templars’ enclave. In the words of an

enthusiastic admirer, Pc1adan’s alleged discovery was ‘so astonishing that at any other era it would have shaken the Catholic world to its foundations’.ze Neither

Peladan nor his associates, however, volunteered any indication of how

Jesus’s tomb could have been so definitively identified and verified as such, nor why its discovery should necessarily shake the Catholic world unless, of course, it contained something significant, controversial, perhaps even explosive. In any case, Peladan did not elaborate on his purported discovery. But though a self-professed Catholic, he nevertheless insisted on Jesus’s mortality.

In 1890 Peladan founded a new order the Order of the Catholic

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Rose-Croix, the Temple and the Grail. And this order, unlike the other Rose-Croix institutions of the period, somehow escaped papal condemnation. In the meantime, P61adan turned his attention increasingly to the arts. The artist, he declared, should be ‘a knight in armour, eagerly engaged in the symbolic quest for the Holy Grail’.

And in adherence to this principle, P61adan embarked on a fully fledged aesthetic crusade. It took the form of a highly publici sed series of annual exhibitions, known as the Salon de la Rose + Croix whose avowed purpose was ‘to ruin realism, reform Latin taste and create a school of idealist art’. To that end certain themes and subjects were autocratically and summarily rejected as unworthy ‘no matter how well executed, even if perfectly’. The list of rejected themes and subjects included ‘prosaic’ history painting, patriotic and military painting, representations of contemporary life, portraits, rustic scenes and ‘alt landscapes except those composed in the manner of Poussin’.2’

Nor did P61adan confine himself to painting. On the contrary, he attempted to promulgate his aesthetic in music and the theatre as well. He formed his own theatre company, which performed specially composed works on such subjects as Orpheus, the Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece, the “Mystery of the Rose-Croix’ and the “Mystery of the Grail’. One of the regular promoters and patrons of these productions was Claude Debussy.

Among Peladan’s and Debussy’s other associates was Maurice Barres who, as a young man, had been involved in a “Rose-Croix’ circle with Victor Hugo.

In 1912 Barres published his most famous novel, La Colline inspiree (“The

Inspired Mount’). Certain modern commentators have suggested that his work is in fact a thinly disguised allegory of Berenger Sauniere and Rennes-leChateau. Certainly there are parallels which would seem too striking to be wholly coincidental. But Barres does not situate his narrative in Rennes-leChateau, or any other place in the Languedoc. On the contrary, the ‘inspired mount’ of the title is a mountain surmounted by a village in Lorraine, And the village is the old pilgrimage centre of Sion.

Jean Cocteau

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More than Charles Radclyffe, more than Charles Nodier, Jean Cocteau seemed to us a most unlikely candidate for the Grand Mastership of an influential secret society. In Radclyffe’s and Nodier’s cases, however, our investigation had yielded certain connections of considerable interest. In Cocteau’s we discovered very few.

Certainly he was raised in a milieu close to the “corridors of power’ his family were politically prominent and his uncle was an important diplomat.

But Cocteau, at least ostensibly, abandoned this world, leaving home at the age of fifteen and plunging into the seedy sub-culture of Marseilles. By 1908 he had established himself in bohemian artistic circles. In his early twenties he became associated with Proust, Gide and Maurice Barres. He was also a close friend of Victor Hugo’s great-grandson, jean, with whom he embarked on assorted excursions into spiritualism and the occult. He quickly became versed in esoterica; and Hermetic thinking shaped not only much of his work, but also his entire aesthetic. By 1912, if not earlier, he had begun to consort with Debussy, to whom he alludes frequently, if noncommittally in his journals. In 1926 he designed the set for a production of the opera Pelleas et Me1isande because, according to one commentator, he was “unable to resist linking his name for all time to that of Claude Debussy’.

Cocteau’s private life which included bouts of drug addiction and a sequence of homosexual affairs was notoriously erratic. This has fostered an image of him as a volatile and recklessly irresponsible individual. In fact, however, he was always acutely conscious of his public persona; and whatever his personal escapades, he would not let them impede his access to people of influence and power. As he himself admitted, he had always craved public recognition, honour, esteem, even admission to the Academie

Franqaise. And he made a point of conforming sufficiently to assure him of the status he sought. Thus he was never far removed from prominent figures like Jacques Maritain and Andre Malraux. Although never ostensibly interested in politics, he denounced the Vichy government during the war and seems to have been quietly in league with the Resistance. In 1949 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of

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Honour. In 1958 he was invited by de Gaulle’s brother to make a public address on the general subject of

France. It is not the kind of role one generally attributes to Cocteau, but he appears to have played it frequently enough and to have relished doing so.