THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln
Cape £8.95


THE following is, roughly and briefly, the argument of this book. The Knights Templar were founded as the military and executive arm of a secret organisation known as the Prieure de Sion. Though the Knights were disbanded between 1307 and 1314, after charges of heterodoxy, corruption and sexual irregularities had been made to stick, the Prieure de Sion has continued quietly to function as an organisation whose aim is to restore the Merovingian dynasty to France and to other European countries besides.

This dynasty claims divine right of rule on the grounds that the widow and offspring of Jesus Christ left Palestine after his crucifixion, settled in the South of France, and sustained their lineage through inter-marriage with the royal house of the Franks, thus engendering the Merovingian dynasty.

In AD 496 the Church of Rome made a pact with the Merovingians, guaranteeing the perpetuation of their rule, but eventually broke the pact when it colluded in the assassination of Dagobert. The Carolingian usurpation sought legitimacy through marriage into the deposed house, but the true survival of the line, and the fulfilment of one of its aims, was ensured by the descendants of Dagobert, one of whom was Godfroi de Bouillon, who, taking Jerusalem in 1099, regained the heritage conferred by the Old Testament on the House of David.

The authors offer some things as historical fact, others as legitimate speculation. That Christ married and had children is a thesis that Christians may reasonably reject only on lack of evidence: there is no blasphemy in the image of Christ as a married man. The writers of this work are prepared, which few others would be, to name his bride. She was, they think, the Magdalene, no virgin, far from it, but the true Notre Dame of the Gothic cathedrals – ‘those majestic stone replicas of the womb . . . shrines to Jesus's consort, rather than to his mother’. She was the grail, or vessel of Christ's blood. Alternatively, there was no grail: the sangraal is the sang royal: the title of the book is a pleonasm.

The fact of the Prieure's continuing existence is vouched for by certain ‘Dossiers Secrets,’ ascribed to Henri Lobineau, a man of very obscure identity whose name, indeed, may be that of a Paris street. These contain a list of Grand Masters, among whom are Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. Our authors find a plausible liaison between the father of gravity and the Languedocian Camisards, gnostics and neo-Cathars suppressed by Rome and looking for refuge in Restoration London. They, presumably, passed the Merovingian secret on to the greatest thinker, ad occulist, of the day.

Of Cocteau our authors say ‘A most unlikely candidate,’ and one agrees at once. Drugtaker, pederast, minor poet, collaborator – what has he to do with the blood of Christ? We are asked to consider the occult symbolism of ‘Orphée’ and ‘The Eagle Has Two Heads’ and examine the Rosicrucian decor of the church of Notre Dame de France, just off Leicester Square, all Cocteau's work. There is another church in Villefranche, a few kilometres from where I write, which has the same weird crucifixion.

As for Debussy – well, he was tied up with occultists, meaning men like Mallarme and the author of ‘Axel’. But the authors are wrong in thinking that he proposed an opera on ‘Axel’ which his death in 1918 frustrated. He composed one scene in 1888 and then suppressed it. He did not ‘set’ ‘L'Après-Midi d'un Faun’ [sic] by the ‘enigmatic magus of French symbolist poetry’: he merely evoked its mood in an orchestral prelude.

Too many of the reasons adduced to justify qualification for Grand Mastership are impressionistic. The authors seem to want to believe.

All the Grand Masters took the name John, and Cocteau appears as Jean XXIII. Cardinal Roncalli, assuming the pontificate during Cocteau's seigneury, also took the name John XXIII – name and number of an antipope who abdicated in 1415, hence flavoured with anathema. Why? Was Roncalli really a member of the Rose-Croix, concerned with having an identity of name and ordinal in both the Vatican and the Prieure? He revised the Church's attitude to secret societies, lifting the ban on Freemasonry. This meant, presumably, that there was no harm in helping along the benign Merovingian conspiracy. He stressed, in an apostolic letter of 1960, the redemptive powers of Christ's blood and this, think the authors, rendered otiose a belief in his resurrection. There are some dangerous things embedded in this book, and here is one of them.

The whole business –the ‘quest’, as they term it – began when Mr Lincoln, in 1972, made a BBC television film about Bérenger Saunière, curé of Rennes-le-Château in the Pyrenees, and his mysterious wealth. This area is Knights Templar country, with a church devoted to Mary Magdalene that, so Saunière discovered, had coded messages hidden under its altar-stone. One of them said; A DAGOBERT H ROI ET A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LA MORT. Was Saunière's suddenly acquired wealth the treasure referred to? With the young American novelist Richard Leigh and the New Zealand psychologist Michael Baigent – who came to England to do research on the Knights Templar – Henry Lincoln got down to the inquiries which resulted in this book.

It will seem to some a crackpot enterprise, but these young men are no fools: they have learning, energy, enthusiasm tempered by scepticism. If their material had been presented in a blockbuster novel like Irving Wallace's ‘The Word’, or cooled into a structuralist game, it might have been easier to take. One needs a lateral approach, facing the findings head on is embarrassing.

For what is the authors' conclusion? We're hungry for belief, but we don't want either a Führer or a Billy Graham, rather ‘a species of wise and benign spiritual figure, a “priest-king” in whom man-kind can safely repose its trust... Such an atmosphere would seem eminently conducive to the Prieure de Sion's objectives… How might the advent of Jesus's lineal descendant be interpreted? To a receptive audience, it might be a kind of Second Coming.’

So we await the banners of the re-arisen Merovingian line, the new knights, or the consuming fire of a Christian ayatollah, with the Redeemer's blood in his arteries. It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel. Perhaps Irving Wallace or Morris West, is already writing it.