The Priory of Sion: Fact, Fiction and the Illuminati

Few modern secret-society claims have had as much cultural influence, relative to the weakness of the evidence on which they rest, as the alleged Priory of Sion. The Priory is, in the modern myth, an ancient esoteric order founded in 1099 by Godfrey of Bouillon, supposedly the first ruler of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and allegedly continuing, in secret, through a long line of supposed Grand Masters down to the 20th century. The Priory is, in the most-cited version of the modern legend, the guardian of a “bloodline” that allegedly derives from Jesus Christ and from Mary Magdalene, and is the principal node in a chain of esoteric transmission that allegedly runs from the Knights Templar through the medieval Cathars, through the alleged founders of modern Freemasonry, and ultimately into the modern world. The actual Priory of Sion, on the historical record, is a small, legitimate Catholic fraternity that was founded in 1956 and dissolved in 1957. The “ancient” Priory is a literary forgery. To understand the difference, it is necessary to understand the history of the claim, the documents on which it was based, and the social context in which the myth was created.

The Priory’s Claimed History

The Priory of Sion, in the modern claim, was founded in 1099, in the wake of the First Crusade, by a small group of knights who wished to preserve a secret knowledge allegedly derived from the Holy Land. The Priory is said to have remained in continuous existence, in secret, through the medieval and early modern periods, with a long line of Grand Masters including, in the most cited lists, the Renaissance figures Leonardo da Vinci, the court painter Nicolas Poussin, the alchemist Fulcanelli, the poet and occultist Robert Ambelain, and the early 20th-century priest Bérenger Saunière. The alleged Grand Masters are said to have maintained the Priory through a series of “sleeper” periods, in which the order had no functioning Grand Master, and “active” periods, in which the alleged esoteric work of the order continued.

The claimed history was, for most of the 20th century, treated as a respectable if speculative fringe theory. The 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, and the 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, brought the theory to a mass audience. The 2004 Da Vinci Code film, with Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, brought the theory to an even larger audience.

The 1960s French Forgeries

The historical Priory of Sion, on the documentary record, is a small Catholic fraternal society founded in 1956 by the French aristocrat and right-wing political activist Pierre Plantard, and dissolved by Plantard himself in 1957. The “ancient” Priory, the supposed society with a history going back to 1099, is a fabrication created by Plantard and a small group of associates in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The fabrication was carried out through a series of forged documents, including so-called dossiers secrets (“secret dossiers”) allegedly deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The dossiers claimed to list, with documentary proof, the Grand Masters of the Priory back to 1099. The dossiers were, on close examination, shown to be modern forgeries, written on modern paper, with modern inks, and using several phrases that did not exist before the 20th century. The forgery was exposed, in detail, by the French police in 1993, and the principal forger, Pierre Plantard, was arrested on charges of fraud and forgery. Plantard died in 2000 without ever fully admitting to the forgery, although the documents in the case are unambiguous.

The exposure of the forgery is documented in several published works, including Marie-France Etchegoin and René Weiss’s Le trésor de Rennes-le-Château (1969) and the French historian Paul Saussez’s analysis of the documents. The exposure is, in the academic literature, considered definitive. The Priory of Sion, in the form in which it is most often discussed, is, on the documentary record, a fabrication.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code

The 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, and the 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, are the two works that brought the Priory claim to a global mass audience. The 1982 book is a serious but uncritical work of speculative history. The book presents, in a journalistic and well-researched style, the claim that the Priory of Sion is a real ancient order, that the Grand Masters listed in the secret dossiers are real historical figures, and that the “bloodline” allegedly preserved by the Priory is a real historical phenomenon. The book does not, prove any of these claims; the authors themselves, in their later statements, conceded that the book is a work of speculation.

The 2003 Da Vinci Code novel, by the American writer Dan Brown, took the speculative claims of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and built a thriller around them. The novel’s central claim — that the Priory of Sion is a real ancient order, that the “Holy Grail” is in fact a metaphor for a real bloodline, and that the alleged descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene are living in modern France — became, in the years after the novel’s publication, a fixture of popular culture. The 2004 film, with Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, and Ian McKellen, was a major commercial success, and the museum at Rennes-le-Château, the village in the French Pyrenees where the alleged priest Bérenger Saunière lived, became a major tourist destination.

What Modern Scholarship Says

Modern scholarship on the Priory of Sion is, on the whole, settled. The “ancient” Priory, the alleged order with a history going back to 1099, is, on the documentary record, a forgery. The historical Priory, the small Catholic fraternal society founded in 1956, is a real but unimportant organisation. The alleged “bloodline” that the Priory is said to preserve is not, on the historical record, a real bloodline, and the alleged descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene are not, on the historical record, a real family. The 1982 book The Holy Blood, Holy Grail is, in the academic literature, a work of uncritical speculation. The 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code is a work of popular fiction that draws on the speculative claims of the 1982 book.

The scholarship is, in the words of one historian, “the most thoroughly exposed literary hoax of the 20th century.” The Priory of Sion is, in the modern academic literature, a useful case study in the way that the modern conspiracy mind constructs and disseminates historical claims.

The Illuminati Connection

The Priory of Sion, on the documentary record, is not connected to the historical Bavarian Illuminati. The two organisations have no documented overlap in membership, no documented overlap in ritual, and no documented overlap in goals. The Priory is, in the historical record, a small, briefly existing Catholic fraternity of the mid-20th century. The Illuminati, in the historical record, is a small, briefly existing Bavarian order of the late 18th century. The two are connected, in the modern conspiracy imagination, by the theory of an alleged continuous esoteric tradition, but they are not, in any documented sense, connected historically.

The connection is, in this sense, a product of the modern conspiracy mind rather than a description of any historical reality. The Priory is, in the modern myth, one of the principal “links” in the alleged chain of transmission from the medieval Templars to the modern world. The chain is, one of the most popular organising frames of the modern Illuminati myth. The most accurate description of the chain is that it is a literary construction of the late 20th century, drawing on 19th-century occult speculation, on the fabricated documents of the 1960s French forgeries, and on the broader appetite of modern popular culture for secret histories.