Holy Blood, Holy Grail (13 page)

The material disseminated since 1956 has taken a number of forms. Some of it has appeared in popular, even best-selling books, more or less sensational, more or less cryptically teasing. Thus, for example, Gerard de

Sede has produced a sequence of works on such apparently divergent topics as the Cathars, the Templars, the Merovingian dynasty, the Rose-Croix,

Sauniere and Rennes-leChateau. In these works, M. de Sede is often arch, coy, deliberately mystifying and coquettishly evasive. His tone implies constantly that he knows more than he is saying perhaps a device for concealing that he does not know as much as he pretends. But his books contain enough verifiable details to forge a link between their respective themes. Whatever else one may think of M. de Sede, he effectively establishes that the diverse subjects to which he addresses himself somehow overlap and are interconnected.

On the other hand, we could not but suspect that M. de Sede’s work drew heavily on information provided by an informant and indeed, M. de Sede more or less acknowledges as much himself. Quite by accident, we learned who this informant was. In 1971, when we embarked on our first BBC film on

Rennes-leChateau, we wrote to M. de Sede’s Paris publisher for certain visual material.

The photographs we requested were accordingly posted to us. Each of them, on the back, was stamped “Plantard’. At that time the name meant little enough to us. But the appendix to one of M.

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de Sede’s books consisted of an interview with one Pierre Plantard.

And we subsequently obtained evidence that Pierre

Plantard had been involved with certain of M. de Sede’s works.

Eventually

Pierre Plantard began to emerge as one of the dominant figures in our investigation.

The information disseminated since 1956 has not always been contained in as popular and accessible a form as M. de Sede’s. Some of it has appeared in weighty, daunting, even pedantic tomes, diametrically opposed to M. de

Sede’s journalistic approach. One such work was produced by Rene Descadeillas, former Director of the Municipal Library of Carcassonne.

M. Descadeillas’s book is strenuously anti-sensational. Devoted to the history of Rennes-leChateau and its environs, it contains a plethora of social and economic minutiae for example, the births, deaths, marriages” finances, taxes and public works between the years 1730 and 1820.” On the whole, it could not possibly differ more from the mass-market books of M. de Sede which M. Descadeillas elsewhere subjects to scathing criticism.2

In addition to published books, including some which have been published privately, there have been a number of articles in newspapers and magazines. There have been interviews with various individuals claiming to be conversant with one or another facet of the mystery. But the most interesting rind important information has not, for the most part, appeared in book form. Most of it has surfaced elsewhere in documents and pamphlets not intended for general circulation. Many of these documents and pamphlets have been deposited, in limited, privately printed editions, at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

They seem to have been produced very cheaply. Some, in fact, are mere typewritten pages, photo offset and reproduced on an office duplicator.

Even more than the marketed works, this body of ephemera seems to have issued from the same source. By means of cryptic asides and footnotes pertaining to Sauniere, Rennes-leChateau,

Poussin, the Merovingian dynasty and other themes, each piece of it complements, enlarges on and confirms the others. In most cases the ephemera is of uncertain authorship, appearing under a variety of transparent, even ‘cute’ pseudonyms Madeleine Blancassal, for example,

Nicolas Beaucean, Jean Delaude and Antoine 1”Ermite.

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”Madeleine’, of course, refers to Marie-Madeleine, the Magdalene, to whom the church at Rennes-leChateau is dedicated and to whom Sauniere consecrated his tower, the Tour Magdala. “Blancassal’ is formed from the names of two small rivers that converge near the village of Rennes-les-Bains the Blanque and the Sals. “Beaucean’ is a variation of “Beauseant’, the official battle-cry and battle-standard of the Knights Templar. “Jean

Delaude’ is “Jean de 1”Aude’ or “John of the Aude’, the department in which

Rennes-leChateau is situated. And “Antoine 1”Ermite’ is Saint Anthony the

Hermit, whose statue adorns the church at Rennes-leChateau and whose feast day is January 17th -the date on Marie de Blanchefort’s tombstone and the date on which Sauniere suffered his fatal stroke.

The work ascribed to Madeleine Blancassal is entitled Les Descendants merovingiens et 1’enigme du Razes wisigoth (“The Merovingian Descendants and the Enigma of the Visigoth Razes’) Razes being the old name for

Sauniere’s region. According to its title page, this work was originally published in German and translated into French by Walter Celse-Nazaire another pseudonym compounded from Saints Celse and Nazaire, to whom the church at Rennes-les-Bains is dedicated. And according to the title page, the publisher of the work was the Grande Loge Alpina, the supreme Masonic lodge of Switzerland -the Swiss equivalent of Grand Lodge in Britain or

Grand Orient in France. There is no indication as to why a modern Masonic lodge should display such interest in the mystery surrounding an obscure nineteenth-century French priest and the history of his parish a millennium and a half ago. One of our colleagues and an independent researcher both questioned Alpina officials. They disclaimed all knowledge not only of the work’s publication, but also of its existence. Yet an independent researcher claims personally to have seen the work on the shelves of

Alpina’s library.3 And subsequently we discovered that the Alpina imprint appeared on two other pamphlets as well.

Of all the privately published documents deposited in the

Bibliotheque

Nationale, the most important is a compilation of papers entitled collectively Dossiers secrets (“Secret Dossiers’). Catalogued under

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numberlm’ 249, this compilation is now on microfiche. Until recently, however, it comprised a thin, nondescript volume, a species of folder with stiff covers which contained a loose assemblage of ostensibly unrelated items news clippings, letters pasted to backing-sheets, pamphlets, numerous genealogical trees and the odd printed page apparently extracted from the body of some other work. Periodically some of the individual pages would be removed. At different times other pages would be freshly inserted. On certain pages additions and corrections would sometimes be made in a minuscule longhand. At a later date, these pages would be replaced by new ones, printed and incorporating all previous emendations.

The bulk of the Dossiers, which consists of genealogical trees, is ascribed to one Henri Lobineau, whose name appears on the title page.

Two additional items in the folder declare that Henri Lobineau is yet another pseudonym derived perhaps from a street, the Rue Lobineau, which runs outside Saint

Sulpice in Paris and that the genealogies are actually the work of a man named Leo Schidlof, an Austrian historian and antiquarian who purportedly lived in Switzerland and died in 1966. On the basis of this information we undertook to learn what we could about Leo Schidlof.

In 1978 we managed to locate Leo Schidlof’s daughter, who was living in

England. Her father, she said, was indeed Austrian. He was not a genealogist, historian or antiquarian, however, but an expert and dealer in miniatures, who had written two works on the subject. In 1948 he had settled in London, where he lived until his death in Vienna in 1966 the year and place specified in the Dossiers secrets.

Miss Schidlof vehemently maintained that her father had never had any interest in genealogies, the Merovingian dynasty, or mysterious goings-on in the south of France. And yet, she continued, certain people obviously believed he had. During the 1960s, for example, he had received numerous letters and telephone calls from unidentified individuals in both Europe and the United States, who wished to meet with him and discuss matters of which he had no knowledge whatever. On

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his death in 1966 there was another barrage of messages, most of them inquiring about his papers.

Whatever the affair in which Miss Schidlof’s father had become unwittingly embroiled, it seemed to have struck a sensitive chord with the American government. In 1946 -a decade before the Dossiers secrets are said to have been compiled Leo Schidlof applied for a visa to enter the United States.

The application was refused, on grounds of suspected espionage or some other form of clandestine activity. Eventually the matter seems to have been sorted out, the visa issued and Leo Schidlof was admitted to the

States. It may all have been a typical bureaucratic mix-up. But Miss

Schidlof seemed to suspect that it was somehow connected with the arcane preoccupations so perplexingly ascribed to her father.

Miss Schidlof’s story gave us pause. The refusal of an American visa might well have been more than coincidental, for there were, among the papers in the Dossiers secrets, references that linked the name Leo Schidlof with some sort of international espionage. In the meantime, however, a new pamphlet had appeared in Paris which, during the months that followed, was confirmed by other sources. According to this pamphlet the elusive

Henri Lobineau was not Leo Schidlof after all, but a French aristocrat of distinguished lineage, Comte Henri de Lenoncourt.

The question of Lobineau’s real identity was not the only enigma associated with the Dossiers secrets. There was also an item which referred to “Leo

Schidlof’s leather briefcase’. This briefcase supposedly contained a number of secret papers relating to Rennes-leChateau between 1600 and 1800.

Shortly after Schidlof’s death, the briefcase was said to have passed into the hands of a courier, a certain Fakhar ul Islam who, in February 1967, was to rendezvous in East Germany with an ‘agent delegated by Geneva’ and entrust it to him. Before the’ transaction could be effected, however,

Fakhar ul Islam was reportedly expelled from East Germany and returned to

Paris “to await further orders’. On February 20th, 1967, his body was found on the railway tracks at Melun, having been hurled from the Paris-Geneva express. The briefcase had supposedly vanished.

We set out to check this lurid story as far as we could. A series of

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articles in French newspapers of February 21st did confirm most of it.” A decapitated body had indeed been found on the tracks at Melun.

It was identified as that of a young Pakistani named Fakhar ul Islam. For reasons that remained obscure, the dead man had been expelled from East Germany and was travelling from Paris to Geneva engaged, it appeared, in some form of espionage.

According to the newspaper reports, the authorities suspected foul play, and the affair was being investigated by the DST (Directory of Territorial Surveillance, or CounterEspionage).

On the other hand, the newspapers made no mention of Leo Schidlof, a leather briefcase or anything else that might connect the occurrence with the mystery of RennesleChateau. As a result, we found ourselves confronted with a number of questions. On the one hand, it was possible that Fakhar ul

Islam’s death was linked with Rennes-leChateau that, the item in the Dossiers secrets in fact drew upon “inside information’ inaccessible to the newspapers.

On the other hand the item in the Dossiers secrets might have been deliberate and spurious mystification. One need only find any unexplained or suspicious death and ascribe it, after the fact, to one’s own hobby-horse. But if this were indeed the case, what was the purpose of the exercise? Why should someone deliberately try to create an atmosphere of sinister intrigue around Rennes-leChateau? What might be gained by the creation of such an atmosphere? And who might gain from it?

These questions perplexed us all the more because Fakhar ul Islam’s death was not, apparently, an isolated occurrence. Less than a month later another privately printed work was deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

It was called Le Serpent rouge (“The Red Serpent’) and dated, symbolically and significantly enough, January 17th. Its title page ascribed it to three authors Pierre Feugere, Louis Saint-Maxent and Gaston de Koker.

Le Serpent rouge is a singular work. It contains one Merovingian genealogy and two maps of France in Merovingian times, along with a cursory commentary. It also contains a ground plan of Saint Sulpice in Paris, which delineates the chapels of the church’s various saints.

But the bulk of the text consists of thirteen short prose poems of

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impressive literary quality many of them reminiscent of the work of and each corresponds to a sign of the Zodiac a zodiac of thirteen signs, with the thirteenth, Ophiuchus or the Serpent

Holder, inserted between Scorpio and Sagittarius.

Narrated in the first person, the thirteen prose poems are a type of symbolic: or allegorical pilgrimage, commencing with Aquarius and ending with Capricorn which, as the text explicitly states, presides over

January 17th. In the otherwise cryptic text there are familiar references -to the Blanchefort family, to the decorations in the church at

Rennes-leChateau, to some of Sauniere’s inscriptions there, to Poussin and the painting of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’, to the motto on the tomb,

“Et in

Arcadia Ego’. At one point, there is mention of a red snake, “cited in the parchments’, uncoiling across the centuries an explicit allusion, it would seem, to a bloodline or a lineage. And for the astrological sign of

Leo, there is an enigmatic paragraph worth quoting in its entirety: From she whom I desire to liberate, there wafts towards me the fragrance of the perfume which impregnates the Sepulchre. Formerly, some named her:

Isis, queen of all sources benevolent. COME UNTO ME ALL YE WHO

SUFFER

AND

ARE AFFLICTED, AND I SHALL GIVE YE REST. To others, she is MAGDALENE, of the celebrated vase filled with healing balm. The initiated know her true name: NOTRE