Prieuré de Sion
Prieuré de Sion (from French prieuré : " Priorat ", "Monastery" and Sion : " Zion "), or Brotherhood of Mount Zion , is the name of various, sometimes fictitious, associations. It is said that a secret lodge of this name was founded by Godfrey of Bouillon in Jerusalem during the First Crusade . Celebrities like Leonardo da Vinci , Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo are said to have been among its secret members. This version is based on forged documents that the French monarchist Pierre Plantard circulated in order to add a background to the association of the same name, which he founded in Annemasse in the Haute-Savoie department in 1956. The idea of such a secret society has been taken up by numerous authors and media since the late 1960s and enriched with further ideas from the field of modern esotericism and conspiracy theories . Today it is considered refuted.
The Prieuré de Sion from 1956
The Prieuré de Sion association was officially founded by Pierre Plantard on May 7, 1956 by depositing the statutes in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois in Haute-Savoie. The name "Sion" is supposed to be borrowed from a place name of the region, Sion-les-Mines or Mont Sion, but should also evoke the biblical mountain Zion (French "Sion") from the beginning , which was already referred to in the previous one At that time associations such as the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame of Sion founded by Théodore Ratisbonne in 1843 . Plantard acted as general secretary when his association was founded; his co-founders were André Bonhomme (president), Jean Deleaval (vice president) and Armand Defago (treasurer). The association had the additional title Chevalerie d'Institutions et Règles Catholiques d'Union Independante et Traditionaliste with the abbreviation CIRCUIT and published a total of twelve issues of a magazine of the same name. According to the statutes, the purposes of the association included mutual education and support for its members, support for the Roman Catholic Church and help for the weak and the oppressed.
The "Plantard Dossiers"
The Plantard dossiers, also known as Dossiers secrets d'Henri Lobineau (Secret Dossiers of Henri Lobineau) after one of their plays , are a total of six documents that Plantard wrote in the 1960s with the help of the writer, actor and humorist Philippe de Chérisey fabricated and deposited in the years 1964-1967 as anonymous donations in the Paris National Library. These dossiers also included a fictional genealogy of descendants of the Merovingian royal family, from which Plantard also derived a claim to the royal throne for himself, as well as pieces relating to the idea of a mysterious Merovingian treasure or Templar treasure in southern France, which Robert Charroux and others had previously used Rennes-le-Château village . One of these parchments was copied from a reproduction of the Codex Bezae pictured in an 1895 book.
The impact of the Plantard dossiers
Plantard and Chérisey were in contact with Gérard de Sède , who had already become known with books on Templars and Cathars and, citing the Plantard dossiers, had published several books on the treasure of Rennes-le-Château since 1967. The first, Le trésor maudit de Rennes-le-Château (The Cursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château), inspired the British actor and author Henry Lincoln to write books and television documentaries on the subject in the 1970s . Together with the American writer Richard Leigh and the New Zealand journalist Michael Baigent published Lincoln in 1982, the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail ( The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail ), which extended the mythical genealogy more about the idea of the "bloodline of Jesus": according to this, Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene are said to have been married and had physical descendants, including the Merovingian kings, and from their name "Sangreal" (French sang réal , "royal blood") the idea of the Holy Grail (French. saint grail ). This book made in turn one of the templates for the novel The Da Vinci Code ( The Da Vinci Code , 2003), and the parallels between the two books were the occasion of a worldwide recognized plagiarism process. Even Umberto Eco uses in his novel Foucault's Pendulum the "treasure" of Rennes-le-Château on, but in a satirical way.
The unmasking of Plantard
The journalist Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who belonged to the Plantards Circle of Friends, fell out with this circle in 1983/84 and, based on letters from Plantard, Chérisey and Sède, brought internals and details of the history of the dossiers to the public. Plantard then tried to gain new credibility by bringing up a modified version of the history of origin, according to which the Prieuré was founded in Rennes-le-Château in 1681. He also put together a new list of grandmasters, this time including Roger-Patrice Pelat , a French businessman and friend of François Mitterrand . After Pelat was investigated into a financial affair in February 1989 and he died shortly afterwards, Plantard was also interrogated in the course of further investigations and a house search was carried out. During the interrogations, Plantard is said to have admitted his inventions and denied the existence of a Prieuré de Sion lodge.
Plantard himself no longer represented his ideas publicly, but in literature and popular culture they are an integral part of conspiracy theories, in which Plantard's confessions are also interpreted as a strategy to conceal the actual historical truth.
literature
Critical literature
- Marie-France Etchegoin, Frédéric Lenoir: The Secret of the Da Vinci Code. Truth and Fiction in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Piper, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-492-24630-3 .
- Matthias Wörther: Jesus is a fraud matter. Michael Baigents and other conspiracy theories put to the test. echter, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-429-02821-3 .
Representative of the conspiracy theory
- Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh:
- The Holy Grail and its heirs . Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach, 1982, ISBN 3-404-60182-3 .
- The grail. The secret work of the brotherhood . Tosa Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85492-614-6 .
Films on the subject
- The History of a Mystery , BBC 1996
- Terra X - The Da Vinci Code , 2005