THE PRIORY OF SION
Jesus, Freemasons, Extraterrestrials, The Gnomes of
Black Israelites and Noon Blue Apples
by Robert Anton Wilson
from GNOSIS Issue #6: Secret Societies (Winter 1987-'88)
_______________
return to RAW Fans
The Priory of Sion first came to the attention of
Americans with the publication in 1981 of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, a book so sensational and
wildly speculative that many readers decided to believe nothing in it. Some
even doubted the existence of the Priory of Sion, the
alleged 800-year old secret society which is the main topic of the book. Other,
of course, were eager to swallow everything in Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
and there is now a wide subculture, mostly in occult and witchy
circles, who fervently believe that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and their
descendents are alive and well in various royal families of Europe; the allies
or
Personally, I did not have an immediate yes-or-no reaction to this new
Christian "heresy." I have long believed that Aristotelian either/or
logic is inadequate to deal with the "real," or sensory, or
existential, world (since such logic only applies to the abstractions or
fictions created by Jesuits, Randroids, Marxists and
other metaphysicians). I therefore did not believe or reject all of Holy
Blood, Holy Grail as a lump or package deal. I wondered how much of it
could be verified and how much of it could be refuted and how much would remain
at least temporarily in the "maybe" state of quantum particles - like
a coin tossed in the air and tumbling about before coming down to rest in a
definitive Heads or Tails position.
In checking out the historical scenario of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I
found that the largest part of it belongs in the Maybe category. That is, most
of it is speculation that can neither be proven or disproven by any of the techniques recognized by historians
who attempt to practice scientific method. Of course, there are "high
Maybes" and "low Maybes." The genealogies relating the von
Hapsburgs or Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to the Merovingian kings of the
dark ages seem to be high Maybes; although there is a certain degree of
uncertainty in all gene pools, the intermarriages of European royalty have been
zealously documented for many centuries (since property and inheritance are
involved in determining who was the son of which royal house). Dozens and
scores of other matters-such as the membership of Sir Isaac Newton in the
alleged Priory - are very low Maybes; the arguments cited by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh are neither conclusive nor even
plausible, and amount to what the chaps at M.I.T. call "hand waving."
The attempted genealogical links further back, from the Merovingians
to Jesus of Nazareth, are even lower Maybes and without exaggeration can be
called wild guessing.
I decided to investigate other books on the Priory of Sion
mystery in search of further data, if there was any to be found and if the
whole saga was not made up almost entirely of "hand waving." Since I
have dozens of other interests, I have not devoted the whole of the past six
years to studying this question, but I have done a lot of reading, much of it
in books not available in the
The Gnomes of
The European literature on the Priory of Sion is much
more voluminous than is realized by those who have only read Holy Blood,
Holy Grail. It is also much more diverse and, as you will shortly see,
various authors have attempted to expose or explain the Priory with a variety
of theories, some of which make the Jesus/Magdalene bloodline story rather tame
by comparison.
To begin with a source that is merely speculative, mysterious, and a bit
sinister, but at least makes sense - before plunging into the books that are
very, very, very mysterious wildly speculative and make no sense at all - in 1973
there appeared in Basel, Switzerland, Les Dessows d'une Ambition Politique by a
Swiss journalist named Mattieu Paoli. The thesis of
this book was fairly mundane, with only a few eldritch touches. Paoli had
discovered the existence of a secret Freemasonic society of some sort made up
of French intellectuals and aristocrats, because some of the literature of this
secretive group was being distributed within
Another shady rumor about the Grand Loge Alpina -
which is worth pursuing a bit, since Paoli first discovered the French secret
society through its connection with the GLA - is that the GLA has heavily
infiltrated the Vatican Bank, in collaboration with the definitely criminal and
conspiratorial P2 (or Propaganda due), the Italian "Freemasonic"
group which controlled the Italian secret police in the 1970s, took money from
both the CIA and KGB (and apparently double-crossed both), had over 900 agents
in other branches of the Italian government and has been accused of every
possible felony from massive bank fraud to assassination and terrorism, to
laundering Mafia drug money through the Vatican Bank and its affiliates, to
plotting a fascist coup. The source of the claim that the Grand Loge Alpina infiltrated the Vatican Bank and aided or abetted
the dirty dealings of P2 is David Yallop's
sensational book, In God's Name, which is accurate as far as I have been
able to check it but contains literally hundreds of assertions which cannot be
checked because Yallop claims he cannot divulge his
sources without risking their lives. A large part of Yallop's
book, therefore, also remains, for non-Aristotelians like me, in the quantum
"maybe" state. (For the curious: two books dealing with the frauds
and felonies of the Vatican Bank and their links with P2 and the Mafia, which
document all their claims and do not quote unidentified sources, are Richard Hammer's
The Vatican Connection and Penny Lernoux's In Banks
We Trust.)
A digression about Freemasonry itself is probably obligatory at this time.
Contrary to popular impressions, Freemasons do not belong to one global
brotherhood with a unified system of dogma and ritual. The world is, in fact,
full of Freemasonic lodges that do not recognize other Freemasonic lodges as
"Fellow Craft" or "real Freemasons" at all.
There are two types of split within the Freemasonic brotherhood - political and
metaphysical. The political split dates back to the French Revolution, when all
Freemasonic groups were anti-Papist and "radical" (inclined to
replace absolute monarchy with either Constitutional monarchy or with a
Republican or even Democratic form of government). This radical spirit began to
splinter when British Freemasons saw the Continental lodges moving too far to
the Left, and arranged that, in the U.K. at least, the Grandmaster of all Craft
lodges would always be a member of the Royal Family, thereby guaranteeing a
conservative flavor to the Grand Lodge and other Anglo-dominated Craft groups
such as Scottish Rite and the Royal Arch. Most Continental lodges, however, are
still basically radical (e.g. the Grand Orient Lodge in
The metaphysical split occurs within both the conservative and radical Craft
groups. It divides Freemasons into those who, on one hand, joined Freemasonry
for practical purposes (business contacts or covert political action) and only
give lip service to the "mystical" goals of Freemasonry without
knowing or caring much about what those "mystical" goals are; and, on
the other hand, the "occult" lodges which practice Freemasonry quite
consciously as a system of initiation similar to the ancient Mystery schools,
Gnosticism or Sufism. To make things more complicated, some see the initiatory
rituals of the Craft leading to pantheism or even a kind of transcendental
humanism, while others see the rituals as leading back to a more traditional
theism or even theocracy. To know that the Priory of Sion
is Freemasonic or an offshoot of Freemasonry is not really to know much about
its actual inner tradition.
Freemasonry has been repeatedly condemned by the
The Rights and Privileges of Low-Cost Housing
Returning to Mattieu Paoli and his discovery of the
links between the Grand Loge Alpina and the unknown
French Freemasons: M. Paoli's attempts to learn more about the latter group
read like comic opera - but so does much of this epic. The French group had a
magazine (limited in circulation only to its own members and those of the Grand
Loge Alpina.) It was called Circuit, and, although
Paoli does not make much of this, the cover of the first issue he saw depicted
a map of
At this point readers of normal skepticism will begin to share my suspicion
that the Priory of Sion at least has its own brand of
humor. In fact, the very name Priory of Sion may be
intended to spread panic among those weird people who still believe in the
Elders of Zion conspiracy. Paoli eventually tracked down the publication
offices of Circuit. It was produced, not at the fictitious Committee to Secure
the Rights and Privileges of Low Cost Housing, but at the very real and
powerful Committee for Public Safety of the de Gaulle government in
Paoli, who had noted that de Gaulle had contributed an article to Circuit,
found other reasons to suspect that the de Gaulle government was aware of, and
sympathetic to, the goals of a shadowy Freemasonic lodge called the Priory of Sion - which, by then, he had determined was the real group
behind the masquerade of the Committee to Secure the Rights and Privileges of
Low Cost Housing. The rest of Paoli's book is devoted to demonstrating that the
Priory wielded considerable power in Gaullist and conservative circles; Paoli
speculates, backed by fairly plausible evidence and inference, that the Priory
intends some major shift to the Right in French and possibly European politics,
or some form of Christian Socialism to rival and undermine the spread of
Marxism.
It is probably only a coincidence, but I cannot resist adding that Paoli was
later shot as a spy in
Extraterretrials and Rains Of Frogs
Also in 1973 appeared La Race Fabuleuse by
Gerard de Sede – a book which, if you are willing to
believe it, explains the Star of David and the spaceship which Paoli had noted
on the cover of Circuit. In a word, La Race Fabuleuse
is the kind of book loved by those who are wild about von Daniken
and Velikovsky. It deals with a secret society -
never called the Priory of Sion explicitly, although
de Sede later admitted to Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh (the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail that he was
indeed writing about the Priory in La Race Fabuleuse.
By and large, the book deals with unsolved mysteries of French history and is
full of intriguing puzzles and novel ideas.
For instance, the town of
Then de Sede does explain; alas, his source cannot be
revealed and is hidden behind the title and initial, "Marquis de B."
Marquis de B can neither confirm nor deny that de Sede
is quoting him correctly because he (the Marquis) was murdered in the Ardennes
forest, just like Dagobert II, and on the anniversary
of Dagobert's death - December 23, 1971. Anyway, if
you are still with me, the reason Dagobert and the
mysterious Marquis were murdered is that they both belonged to a secret Society
made up of persons descended from the Tribe of Benjamin in ancient Judea; and
the Tribe of Benjamin was not exactly like the orthodox Hebrews at all. In
fact, the Tribe of Benjamin intermarried with extraterrestrials from Sirius,
became superhuman due to this exotic genetic strain, and then migrated to
Greece, and then to France…
Whether or not one is inclined to believe a yarn like that on the basis of the
weird data offered, what is even more intriguing about La Race Fabuleuse is that, even if one believes in these
Jewish-extraterrestrial French nobles, that theory
only explains some of the historical enigmas de Sede
has presented to us. What about those frogs falling out of the sky at Stenay, and why are two forests named after bear goddesses
made part of de Sede's narrative, and who the help
are the gang that keeps murdering off these Supermen, and why can't the
Supermen protect themselves better? (For that matter, the head of Satan on the
coat of arms of Stenay, with which the book begins,
is never explained either.)
As the French themselves say, it gives one ferociously to think.
Treasure, Codes and Moon Blue Apples
In a later book, L' Or de Rennes-le-Chateau, de Sede
does not answer any of these questions, but provides us with more wild theories
and even more strange data. Briefly, a priest manuscripts
in an old church in the Provencal town of
"TO DAGOBERT II. KING, AND TO SION BELONGS THIS
TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD..SHEPHERDESS, NO TEMPTATION,
THAT POUSSIN, TENIERS, HOLD THE KEY, PEACE 681. BY THE CROSS AND THIS
HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE-OR DESTROY-THIS DAEMON GUARDIAN AT NOON. BLUE APPLES."
The conjunction of Dagobert and Sion,
of course, seems to authenticate the medieval origin the Priory claims for
itself (although nobody, to my knowledge, has carbon-dated the Sauniere parchment, which might be a late forgery.) I
cordially invite you make what you can of the rest of the secret message.
Cabalists are especially likely to find something of interest in the 681.
Others will be emotionally drawn to conjecture about the "daemon" and
the "horse" (not house) of God. Personally, I am aesthetically fond
of the noon blue apples as a topic for speculation when I can't get to sleep at
night...
The damned thing about this is that there may indeed have the priest who found
the parchment, Father Sauniere, became quite wealthy
by unknown means, and that has kept "the mystery of
Rennes-le-Chateau" a topic of keen interest among French conspiracy buffs
and puzzle addicts for nearly a hundred years now.
Later, however, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh were to
offer another explanation of Father Sauniere's
wealth. But I will come to that…
Surrealism and Catholic Traditionalism
This is as good a place as any to mention the short
and undated Le Cercle d' Ulysse
by Jean Delaude. This pamphlet does not bother us
with demons, horses of God or frogs falling from the sky, and doesn't have a
single noon blue apple. It states bluntly that the Priory of Sion is a conservative Catholic secret society devoted
principally to the cause of making Archbishop Lefebvre the next Pope. Delaude also claims that the Grandmaster of the Priory is
the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget
(Lefebvre's leading disciple), who succeeded the surrealist poet Jean Cocteau,
who had been Grandmaster until 1963. (Holy Blood, Holy Grail produces
documentary evidence that Cocteau was indeed a Grandmaster of the Priory or, at
least - one suspects everything at this point - that somebody did a good job of
forging Cocteau's name on a Priory document.)
While the noon blue apples have a Cocteauean or
surrealist flavor to them, it does appear that the Sauniere
parchment really did exist at least as early as the 1890s, so I reject the
theory proposed by my wife at this point, which is that the Priory is the last
and greatest of all surrealist pranks. No: Cocteau may have given his own
flavor to the enterprise, but the Priory clearly has a pre-Cocteau origin, even
if it doesn't necessarily date back to copulation between ancient Benjaminites and UFOnauts from
Sirius. (Still: it was Cocteau who said "The poet must always be a shady
character" and "One must run faster than beauty, even if it seems one
is running away from it." I find these remarks helpful in trying to intuit
what the hell the Priory is really all about.)
As for Archbishop Lefebvre and the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget – linked to the Priory by Delaude, remember? - these are two extremely right-wing
gentlemen indeed, leaders of what is called the Catholic Traditionalist
movement, and many have not been shy about hurling the word "fascist"
at them (Oddly, Lefebvre was a member of the pro-fascist Action Francaise group in the 1930s, but Ducaud-Bourget
was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in the 1940s.) For our purposes Lefebvre
and Ducaud-Bourget can be characterized as the
leaders of that very conservative faction of the Catholic church, not yet
excommunicated, which is in such total rebellion against the
"Liberalism" (as they see it) of the Vatican that their lack of
excommunication may be the most interesting (and enigmatic) thing about them.
Archbishop Lefebvre has long proclaimed that "Freemasons and
Satanists" have taken over the
Father Juan Krolm, the chap who tried to kill Pope
John Paul II (JP-II) at
According to Father Malachi Martin, S.J. - another heretic - Archbishop Lefebvre
was responsible for sending inflammatory documents to the previous Pope, JP-I
(the one whose death has aroused more conspiracy theories than anybody's since
that of John F. Kennedy). In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church,
Father Martin says this Lefebvre material included documentation of Freemasonic
affiliations of various Cardinals, together with sexual scandal, including
photos of some
Whatever one thinks of that speculation, and the claims about the
"murder" of JP-I attributed to unnamed sources in Yallop's
In God's Name, there is no doubt that Mino Pecorelli,
editor of the expose newspaper L'Osservatore
Politico, did send JP-I a list of P2 and Grand Loge Alpina
members on the staff of the Vatican Bank just before that Pontiff's sudden
demise. What happened to Pecorelli leaves little room
for speculation. He was shot dead on a street in
The Sex Life of the Late Redeemer
For the sake of the few who haven't read the much-discussed Holy Blood, Holy
Grail, it is well to review a few of the counter-claims of the egregious work.
The authors, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, argue that,
while Paoli may have been an independent investigator, de Sede
and Delaude appear to be members of the Priory of Sion and that their works are not intended to reveal much
of the truth but just to arouse curiosity, controversy and mystery, and also to
prepare the intellectual climate in France for whatever astounding political or
religious revolution the Priory intends in the near future. Specifically, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh claim there is no evidence that
Archbishop Lefebvre and his right-wing crowd have any link with the Priory;
they assert that that asserted linkage is a Priory joke at Lefebvre's expense.
They also reject the extraterrestrial yarn, and replace it with their own
lovely yarn that the Priory is descended from Jesus and his unacknowledged
bride, Mary Magdalene.
It is worth mentioning at this point that the alleged romantic alliance between
Jesus and Magdalene is not the invention of Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh. The Gnostic gospels - all as early and historically as
plausible as the orthodox gospels – imply such a relationship several times,
and Jesus is described as kissing Magdalene romantically in one celebrated
text. It is also true that celibacy was regarded by orthodox Jews of Jesus's time much as it is regarded in the post-Freudian
world of today: namely, as a rather kinky, unmanly and somewhat reverse
life-style. Finally, Jesus is called "Rabbi" even in the orthodox
gospels and no man could be a rabbi in orthodox
The shock that orthodox Christians feel at the concept of Jesus as husband and
father is distinctly odd in historical perspective. The leaders of the other
major patriarchal religions - Zoroaster, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius
- were all family men. As for the pagan gods: some were family men, but some
were also notorious fornicators. Christian sex-denial is a very strange and
eccentric departure from the norms of world religion, in which fertility is
generally considered sacred and venerated as one of the main manifestations of
divine grace and beauty.
Be that as it may, at this point two suspicions cross a mind as baroque as
mine. First, if certain books in French may be Priory propaganda disguised to
look like outside investigations, as Baigent, Lincoln
and Leigh claim, could their own Holy Blood, Holy Grail be more such
propaganda, similarly disguised? And second, why do the authors, like de Sede, drag in many subjects which
do not fit their own solution to the mysteries? Are they hinting or blandly
raising smoke screens or are they just disorganized in their thinking? (For
instance, they spend almost as much space as de Sede
on the bear-goddesses of Greece and France, but this has no logical connection
with their Jesus/Magdalene theory any more than it has with de Sede's Sirius theory. They also spend a lot of time on Poussin's painting, The Shepherds of Arcadia, without ever
really explaining its importance, although I think perhaps they are hinting
that the grave in the painting is that of the son of Jesus and Magdalene, who
evidently died in Rennes-le-Chateau in southern
Concretely, at least Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh did
manage to get an interview with a member of the Priory of Sion,
and one who even admitted he was the Grandmaster of the whole lodge. This was
the shadowy Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair whom some
of you may remember co-managed the Committee for Public Safety (under de
Gaulle) from the office where the Priory's magazine, Circuit, was
published. M. Plantard was marvelously esoteric in
his conversation with Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh. He
neither confirmed nor denied their theory that he is descended from Jesus and
Magdalene. He explained that the "treasure" in the Father Sauniere parchment was "spiritual" rather than
"material" and added the helpful (or deliberately obscure) comment
that this spiritual treasure "belongs to Israel" and will be returned
there "at the proper time."
Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh think the
"treasure" is the royal bloodline of David and Jesus, which flows in
the veins of M. Plantard and his young son…
Bankers, Anarchists and the Hollow Earth
Since Holy Blood, Holy Grail appeared in 1981, Baigent,
Lincoln and Leigh brought forth in England, in 1986, The Messianic Legacy,
a book which attempts to
The door, in short, was closed in the faces of the investigators and they were
left out in the cold trying to make what they could out of the gnomic
utterances M. Plantard had granted them. Some of his
leads, however, did allow them to document, rather convincingly, that the
Priory of Sion is not an exclusively French/Swiss
product but has powerful branches in England and the U.S., seemingly linked to
parts of the banking industry… which reminds one of Paoli's linkage between the
Priory and Swiss banking, leading to grubby and sordid notions of what sort of
mystery we are actually exploring here.
For those who find International Banking Conspiracies too corny (or too right
wing), there is always the alternative of Michael Lamy's
Jules Verne: Initiate et Initateur
(1984). According to M. Lamy, Veme
was not only an initiate of the Priory of Sion but of
the Bavarian Illuminati as well, and the Priory itself is, in many respects, a
regrouping and a new false front for the Illuminati. The Priory's politics are Orleanist, which Lamy clarifies
as "aristocratic-anarchistic" - i.e. Nietzschean.
(Think of Verne's characteristic heroes.) The real delight, however, is the
secret of Rennes-le-Chateau, the mysterious town where Father Sauniere found the parchment about Dagobert,
Sion, the treasure and those noon blue apples, and
where there is a grave that looks like the one in Poussin's
enigmatic painting.
The secret is - ready? - that the earth is hollow, of course (didn't you always
suspect it?) and that in a Church at Rennes-le-Chateau is a secret door leading
down to the underworld, which is inhabited by a race of immortal superhumans. You see? Verne hinted at this, various times,
in several of his novels.
Actually, the church mentioned by Lamy really exists
and even if nobody else has found the hidden door leading down to the hollow
earth, it is certainly one of the weirdest churches in Christendom. Among other
things, it has a motto over the door saying `THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE." It
also has, among the Stations of the Cross, one showing a child clad in what
might be Scottish plaid among the crowd watching Jesus carry his cross. Another
Station can be interpreted as showing conspirators removing the late Redeemer
from the grave during the night, as if to fake the Resurrection. You will be
delighted to know that this church is officially dedicated to Mary Magdalene.
Father Sauniere, who was responsible for these
un-Papist details of decor, was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light
in Paris, a group which at various times also included Gerard Encausse and Aleister Crowley. Encausse, under the pen-name "Papus,"
wrote one of the most influential modern books on Tarot; he later went to
The Illuminati and the Knights of
I'm sorry, but at this point I cannot resist throwing in one of those odd
coincidences that I keep stumbling upon in researching secret societies. Holy
Blood, Holy Grail claims, with some evidence, that Father Saunier's weird church in Rennes-le Chateau (near an old
Knights Templar fortification, by the way) was built with money's the eccentric
priest received from the Archduke Ferdinand von Hapsburg (who, they also claim,
gave the other money that led the town to believe Sauniere
had found a treasure). A hundred years earlier, the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg
legalized Freemasonry in Austria, abolished Catholic schools which he replaced
with modern secular (or non- denominational) schools and was the hero of
Beethoven's first major work, the Emperor Joeseph
Cantata, in which he is hailed as "bringer of light" and "foe of
darkness and superstition." According to Maynard Solomon's biography,
Beethoven, the Illuminati paid Ludwig to write that bit of music propaganda for
the von Hapsburg "Illuminated Monarch" (as he was often called). It
almost makes one wonder if the von Hapsburgs are kingpins in some occult group
at least two centuries old, as the Priorty books
imply.
Of course, Holy Blood, Holy Grail includes genealogies which allege that
the von Hapsburgs are descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. However, the
connection is through Dagobert and the Merovingians, so if you would rather believe de Sede's thesis, the von Hapsburgs are actually descended
from ancient Hebrews and extraterrestrials from Sirius. Whichever theory you
prefer, or even if you doubt both of them, it is interesting that the von
Hapsburgs have held the honorary title of Kings of Jerusalem for nearly 800
years.
The current scion of the clan, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, is President of the
League for the United States of Europe, a group which has played a large role
in creating the European parliament and is steadily working toward greater
unity between the European nations. He is also a member of - hold your breath –
the Bilderbergers, which gives him two odd links with
Bernhard of the
On the other hand, Dr. von Hapsburg is known as a fervent anti-Communist and is
a Knight of Malta - i.e. an officer of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
(SMOM), the most right-wing of all Catholic secret societies.
Other known members of SMOM have included Franz von Papen (the man who
persuaded President von Hindenberg to make Hitler the
Chancellor of Germany), William Casey (the CIA chief who died during the Irangate hearings), General Richard Gehlen
(Hitler's Chief of Intelligence who later became director of covert operations
in Soviet Russia for the CIA), General Alexander Haig, Alexandre
de Marenches (former chief of French intelligence),
William F. Buckley Jr., Clare Booth Luce (who was, of course, a Dame, rather
than a Knight, of Malta), Licio Gelli
(founder of the P2 conspiracy which laundered cocaine money for the CIA's
favorite Latin American dictators by way of the Cisalpine Overseas Bank whose
board of directors included Vatican bank chief Bishop Paul Marcinkus),
the late Roberto Calvi of Banco
Ambrosiano, who co-owned the Cisalpine Bank and was
so mysteriously found hanging from a bridge in London on June 18, 1982, and the
late Michele Sindona, lawyer for the Mafia and
manager of Vatican financial affairs in the U.S., who was convicted of 65
counts of bank fraud in New York, convicted of murdering a bank examiner in
Rome, and died in prison while awaiting trial on further charges relating to
the P2 bombings in Italy in the 1970s. (See Lernoux's
In Banks We Trust for details on P2, the CIA and
the banking industry. See Covert Action Information Bulletin No. 25, Winter 1986 for more on SMOM and its role as
Lest the naive begin to think all this makes some kind of sense in terms of a
rational paradigm involving Catholic and other conservative interests plotting
to accomplish rational political-economic goals that seem desirable to them,
every part of this jigsaw except the Knights of Malta is hostile to the
Jungian and Rastafarian Connections?
The Cult of the Black Virgin, by Ean Begg, leads us further from clarity and deeper, much
deeper, into the murk. To begin with, Begg 's biography on the back of the book informs us that he is
a former Dominican monk and currently a Jungian psychotherapist – a suggestive
background for a man who has written the most philosophically dense Priory of Sion book to appear thus far. Basically, Begg deals with one of the great unsolved mysteries in
European archaeology and in Catholic history - the existence of well over 400
statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary in European churches, in which "the
Mother of God" (as Catholics call her) is clearly and unambiguously
depicted as Black or Negroid.
Of course, the disciples of Marcus Garvey in general, and the Rastafarians in
particular, argue that Jesus and his family (and the ancient Israelites in
general) were Black; but these statues are not a Rastafarian propaganda
project. Most of the Black Virgins in European churches have existed for
several hundred years and some seemingly have been around since at least the
birth of Christianity. You will not be surprised to learn that Ean Begg attributes them to the
Priory of Sion, which he holds is at least as old as
the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail claimed in their wildest passages.
Why did the Priory go around planting evidence that Jesus's
mother was Black? If they wanted to implant some proto-Rastafarian racial doctrines
about "God's chosen people" being Black, why didn't they make Jesus
and Joseph and the disciples Black, too, while they were about it? Begg does not answer these questions. In fact, he does not
answer any questions, but raises more questions instead. He spends a lot of
time quoting familiar arguments that the Black Virgins were originally idols of
the Egyptian goddess, Isis, which the Christians co-opted; but he shows that
this doesn't explain all the Black Virgins, many of which were created in recent
centuries and not imported from
Begg goes on to give us an especially tender version
of Jung's theory of the Anima - the Ideal Female image in every male psyche -
and tells us legends in which Isis and Mary Magdalene function as incarnations
of the Anima. He seems to be hinting at the theory that Magdalene was the wife
of Jesus, but he never states that explicitly. He also implies, repeatedly,
that the Black Virgins are not Virgins at all but portray Magdalene, an aspect
of the Anima which he suggests a more important to Western man than the Virgin
archetype. Many digressions deal with the Tarot, which Begg
tries to persuade us is chiefly a guide to the inner mysteries of the Priory of
Sion. (Encausse and
After taking us all around Robin Hood's barn, Begg
leaves us with two strong impressions or hints: we need to understand Jung and
we need to understand Sufism. Somehow, Jung, who considered himself a Gnostic,
and Sufism, which some claim is an Eastern branch of Gnosticism, are the true keys to the Black Virgins and to the Priory of Sion's ultimate mission on this planet. Many hints seem to
imply broadly that Begg writes not as an outsider but
as an initiate of the Priory's mysteries.
It is of some interest that Begg confirms the claim
of the new book by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh (The
Messianic Legacy) that M. Plantard de Saint-Clair
is no longer the Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion
and that the identity of the current Grandmaster is not to be revealed to the
profane.
Atlantis and the Vagina of Nuit
The latest and most remarkable book in this whole bizarre area is Genisis by David Wood. That is not a misprint but a Joycean or hermetic pun; we are back again to the
Magdalene-Isis connection. Wood is the kind of writer who usually deals with ley lines, and he has gone over the area around
Rennes-le-Chateau drawing lines and making diagrams like a pixilated
Pythagoras. What he has found is that the Church of Mary Magdalene is connected
in a complex pattern with every other major church or primitive megalith in the
area and the lines connecting them make up a pattern which Mr. Wood calls
"the vagina of Nuit." It looks about as much
like a vagina to me as Ronald Reagan looks like the Guggenheim Museum in New
York; but I am of the cynical school of cartographers who believe any seven
spots can be connected into a ley-line pattern if you
use a small enough map and a thick enough pencil. Mr. Wood,
however finds staggering revelations in the genitalia of this early Egyptian
sky-goddess.
It is impossible to give a coherent account of the argument of Genisis for the same reason it is hopeless to
try to explain Dali's Debris of on Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse
Biting a Telephone a Rationalist. Isis is one aspect of the Earth Mother, and Nuit is another aspect, and for some reason the Knights
Templar, who were accused of sodomy by the Church, did not really commit sodomy
but instead cut off their penises and saved them in special chalices (for
reasons that make sense to Mr. Wood but not to me), and this somehow or other
proves that France was originally colonized from Atlantis, and the human race
as a whole (not just some royal families) is of partly extraterrestrial origin,
having been the product of interbreeding between proto-humans and the Space
Brothers who appear as the sons of God in Genesis, and the genetic engineer who
raised us above the animal to the human level got himself included in the
Bible, much maligned, as Satan, and… well, it gets wilder and hairier as it
goes along.
For what it is worth, I can comment that Aleister
Crowley – once a member of the same Hermetic Brotherhood of Light that included
Father Sauniere - believed that the world was
astrologically predestined to experience a revival of the worship of Nuit.
And the Beat Goes on...
Before attempting to conclude or summarize all this, I have two personal
anecdotes to add to the tale. The first is a report from Frederic Lehrman, the dean of
The papers were not in code, like those found by Father Sauniere
in the 1890s and they did not deal with Merovingian kings or noon blue apples.
They were stories from a German newspaper dated 1904 and did not refer in any
way to any of the subjects connected to the Priory in any previous literature.
Perhaps some joker placed those old German news clippings in the statue to
bewilder the next researcher. (But how would a casual joker guess that a statue
was hollow?) Perhaps the Priory did it as another of their merry pranks.
Perhaps there really is some deep code in those news stories and the young man
will find it reveals the secret of the Alchemical Furnace or who shot Kennedy,
or where Moses was when the light went out, or something like that.
My second anecdote is even more ambiguous. At a seminar in Hof-am-Frankenwald in
On the grounds that maybe Fritz really was a member of the Priory of Sion and not a put-on artist, I paid very close attention
to everything he said during the seminar weekend. He was pro-Green (in
Due to my unfortunate sense of humor and my inclination to mischief, I tried a
little test on Fritz when the weekend was over. When I shook his hand, I formed
a certain series of grips and whispered a formula I shall here hide behind the
metathesis, "Bob Saw Jupiter's Moons." He looked startled and
responded with the correct counter-sign and the words I shall disguise as
"Tuba Concerto." I cannot say more about this for reasons of
discretion, but I can vouch for Fritz's initiation into one of the higher
levels of orthodox Freemasonry or else into one of the "occult"
Freemasonic lodges that share these grips and magick
formulae. This adds some credibility to his claim of membership in the Priory
of Sion, or at least to some personal knowledge of
the Priory. (Even if he belonged to a different occult lodge, those grips would
entitle him to visit in any occult Freemasonic lodge on the Continent, and
would probably get him into Priory meetings.)
In conclusion, I think we have a high B.S. factor in all the public revelations
about the Priory of Sion. I offer five alternative
theories which all make sense to me at various times, although I am far from
totally convinced by any of them.
1. The Priory is a left-wing occult group in the tradition of the Grand Orient
lodge and the Illuminati. Its intent is to overthrow the political power of the
Christianity. Its long-range politics (within this model) are still mysterious.
Gnostic cults have varied from theocratic autocracy and downright tyranny to
Dionysian and or Discordian anarchism.
2. The Priory is, like P2 in
3. The Priory really is a front for Archbishop Lefebvre and Catholic
Traditionalism. It intends to abolish Liberalism, Rationalism, Socialism and
Modernism in general, and usher us back into the medieval world of an absolute
Papacy and no more damned heretics anywhere. All the seeming evidence that
appears to contradict this is part of a smoke screen and intended to dupe those
who would not otherwise cooperate in such a reactionary program.
4. The Priory is made up of Totally Enlightened Beings who happen to be very
rich bankers and love art and artists. They enjoy playing mindfuck
games on other, un-Enlightened financiers and on groups that imagine they are
Enlightened but aren't.
5. What we have here is just another commercial "conspiracy," or
"affinity group," with an unusually Continental flavor of art and
culture about it. Cocteau 's membership seems well
documented; almost as well documented is that of Claude Debussy, the composer;
Malraux could hardly have been ignorant of what was going on in the office he
shared with Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. By and
large, Continental politicians and businessmen are more "cultured" and
"intellectual" than their American counterparts, and think it
prestigious rather than "queer" to have artists among their friends:
Europe does not share the American delusion that artistic/philosophical
interests are unmasculine and make one unfit for positions
of power. The Priory of Sion might be what the
Bohemian Club could have become if
Whichever theory you prefer, or if you like a sixth theory of your own, the
whole Priory of Sion saga seems to shed a new and (I
would say) surrealist or psychedelic light on the famous remark by Ishmael
Reed: "The history of the world is the history of the warfare between
secret societies."
Robert Anton Wilson is the author of numerous books including the Historical
Illuminatus Chronicles, The New Inquisition,
and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press,
______________________
originally posted to alt.fan.rawilson
by Mike @ www.everythingisnt.com
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