Holy Blood, Holy Grail (40 page)

What can one do if one is a king without a kingdom? Perhaps find a kingdom,

Or create a kingdom. The most precious kingdom in the entire world Palestine, the Holy Land, the soil trodden by Jesus himself. Would not the ruler of such a kingdom be comparable to any in Europe? And would he not, in presiding over that most sacred of earthly sites, obtain sweet revenge on the Church which betrayed his ancestors four centuries

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From the work of Henri Lobineau (Henri de Unoncourt)

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MATIEUOE- sTEP~EIB~EN d Ell^I The Elusive Mystery

Gradually certain pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. If

Godfroi was of Merovingian blood, a number of seemingly disconnected fragments ceased to be disconnected and assumed a coherent continuity.

We could thus explain the emphasis accorded such apparently disparate elements as the Merovingian dynasty and the Crusades, Dagobert II and Godfroi,

RennesleChateau, the Knights Templar, the house of Lorraine, the Prieure de

Sion. We could even trace the Merovingian bloodlines up to the present day to Alain Poher, to Henri de Montpezat (consort of the queen of Denmark), to Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, to Otto von Habsburg, titular duke of

Lorraine and king of Jerusalem.

And yet the really crucial question continued to elude us. We still could not see why the Merovingian bloodline should be so inexplicably important today. We still could not see why its claim should be in any way relevant to contemporary affairs, or why it should command the allegiance of so many distinguished men through the centuries. We still could not see why a modern Merovingian monarchy, however technically legitimate it might be, warranted such urgent endorsement.

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Quite clearly we were overlooking something. 10 The Exiled Tribe Could there be something special about the Merovingian bloodline something more than an academic, technical legitimacy? Could there really be something which, in some way, might genuinely matter to people today? Could there be something that might affect, perhaps even alter, existing social, political or religious institutions? These questions continued to nag at us. As yet, however, there appeared to be no answer to them.

Once again we sifted through the compilation of “Prieure documents’, and especially the all-important Dossiers secrets. We re-read passages which had meant nothing to us before. Now they made sense, but they did not serve to explain the mystery, nor to answer what had now become the critical questions. On the other hand there were other passages whose relevance was still unclear to us. These passages by no means resolved the enigma: but, if nothing else, they set us thinking along certain lines lines which eventually proved to be of paramount significance.

As we had already discovered, the Merovingians themselves, according to their own chroniclers, claimed descent from ancient Troy. But according to certain of the “Prieure documents’ the Merovingian pedigree was older than the siege of Troy. According to certain of the Prieure documents’, the

Merovingian pedigree could in fact be traced back to the Old Testament.

Among the genealogies in the Dossiers secrets, for example, there were numerous footnotes and annotations. Many of these referred

specifically to one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel, the Tribe of Benjamin. One such reference cites, and emphasises, three Biblical passages -Deuteronomy 33,

Joshua 18 and judges 20 and 21.

Deuteronomy 33 contains the blessing pronounced by Moses on the

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patriarchs of each of the twelve tribes. Of Benjamin, Moses says,

“The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by him; and the Lord shall cover him all the day long, and he shall dwell between his shoulders.” (33:12) In other words Benjamin and his descendants were singled out for a very special and exalted blessing. That much, at any rate, was clear. We were, of course, puzzled by the promise of the Lord dwelling ‘between Benjamin’s shoulders’. Should we associate it with the legendary

Merovingian birthmark the red cross between the shoulders? The connection seemed somewhat far-fetched. On the other hand, there were other clearer similarities between Benjamin in the Old Testament and the subject of our investigation. According to Robert Graves, for example, the day sacred to

Benjamin was December 23rd’ - Dagobert’s feast day. Among the three clans which comprised the Tribe of Benjamin, there was the clan of Ahiram which might in some obscure way pertain to Hiram, builder of the Temple of Solomon and central figure in Masonic tradition. Hiram’s most devoted disciple, moreover, was named Benoni; and Benoni, interestingly enough, was the name originally conferred upon the infant Benjamin by his mother, Rachel, before she died.

The second Biblical reference in the Dossiers secrets, to Joshua 18, is rather more clear. It deals with the arrival of Moses’s people in the

Promised Land and the apportionment to each of the twelve tribes of particular tracts of territory. According to this apportionment, the territory of the Tribe of Benjamin included what subsequently became the sacred city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, in other words, even before it became the capital of David and Solomon, was the allocated birthright of the Tribe of Benjamin. According to Joshua 18:28, the birthright of the Benjamites encompassed “Zelah, Eleph and Jebusi, which is Jerusalem, Gibeath and

Kirjath; fourteen cities with their villages. This is the inheritance of the children of Benjamin according to their families.”

The third Biblical passage cited by the Dossiers secrets involves a fairly complex sequipnce of events. A Levite, travelling through Benjamite territory, is assaulted, and his concubine ravished, by worshippers of

Belial a variant of the Sumerian Mother Goddess, known as Ishtar by the

Babylonians and Astarte by the Phoenicians.

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Calling representatives of the twelve tribes to witness, the Levite demands vengeance for the atrocity; and at a council, the Benjamites are instructed to deliver the malefactors to justice. One might expect the Benjamites to comply readily. For some reason, however, they do not, and undertake, by force of arms, to protect the “sons of Belial’.

The result is a bitter and bloody war between the Benjamites and the remaining eleven tribes. In the course of hostilities a curse is pronounced by the latter on any man who gives his daughter to a Beni amite. When the war is over, however, and the

Benjamites virtually exterminated, the victorious Israelites repent of their malediction which, however, cannot be retracted:

Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife. And the people came to the house of God, and abode there till even before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore; And said, O Lord God of Israel, why is this come to pass in

Israel, that there should be today one tribe lacking in Isreal?

(Judges 21:1-3)

A few verses later, the lament is repeated:

And the children of Israel repented them for Benjamin their brother, and said, There is one tribe cut off from Israel this day. How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing we have sworn by the Lord that we will not give them of our daughters to wives? (Judges 21:6-7)

And yet again:

And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. Then the elders of the congregation said,

How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? And they said, There must be an inheritance for them that be escaped out of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed out of

Israel. Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife to

Benjamin. (Judges 21:15-18)

Confronted by the possible extinction of an entire tribe, the elders

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quickly devise a solution. At Shiloh, in Bethel, there is to be a festival shortly; and the women of Shiloh -whose menfolk had remained neutral in the war are to be considered fair game. The surviving Benjamites are instructed to go to Shiloh and wait in ambush in the vineyards. When the women of the town congregate to dance in the forthcoming festival, the Benjamites are to pounce upon them and take them to wife.

It is not at all clear why the Dossiers secrets insist on calling attention to this passage. But whatever the reason, the Benjamites, so far as

Biblical history is concerned, are clearly important. Despite the devastation of the war, they quickly recover in prestige, if not in numbers. Indeed, they recover so well that in 1

Samuel they furnish Israel with her first king, Saul.

Whatever recovery the Benjamites may have made, however, the Dossiers secrets imply that the war over the followers of Belial was a crucial turning point. 1t would seem that in the wake of this conflict many, if not most, Benjamites went into exile. Thus, there is a portentous note in the

Dossiers secrets, in capital letters:

ONE DAY THE DESCENDANTS OF BENJAMIN LEFT THEIR

COUNTRY; CERTAIN REMAINED; TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER

GODFROI VI [DE BOUILLON] BECAME KING OF JERUSALEM AND

FOUNDED THE ORDRE DE SION.Z

At first there appeared to be no connection between these apparent non sequiturs. When we assembled the diverse and fragmentary references in the

Dossiers secrets, however, a coherent story began to emerge. According to this account’ most Benjamites did go into exile. Their exile supposedly took them to Greece, to the central Peloponnese to Arcadia, in short, where they supposedly became aligned with the Arcadian royal line. Towards the advent of the Christian era, they are then said to have migrated up the

Danube and the Rhine, intermarrying with certain Teutonic tribes and eventually engendering the Sicambrian Franks the immediate forebears of the Merovingians.

According to the “Prieure documents’, then, the Merovingians were descended, via Arcadia, from the Tribe of Benjamin. In other words the

Merovingians, as well as their subsequent descendants the bloodlines of

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Plantard and Lorraine, for example were ultimately of Map 8Judaea, Showing the only Avenue of Escape for the Tribe of Benjamin

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Semitic or Israelite origin. And if Jerusalem was indeed the hereditary birthright of the Benjamites, Godfroi de Bouillon, in marching on the Holy

City, would in fact have been reclaiming his ancient and rightful heritage.

Again it is significant that Godfroi, alone among the august Western princes who embarked on the First Crusade, disposed of all his property before his departure -implying thereby that he did not intend to return to Europe.

Needless to say, we had no way of ascertaining whether the Merovingians were of Benjamite origin or not. The information in the “Prieure documents’, such as it was, related to too remote; too obscure a past, for which no confirmation, no records of any sort could be obtained.

But the assertions were neither particularly unique nor particularly new. On the countrary they had been around, in the form of vague rumours and nebulous traditions, for a long time. To cite but one instance, Proust draws upon them in his opus; and more recently, the novelist jean d’Ormesson suggests a Judaic origin for certain noble French families. And in 1965 Roger

Peyrefitte, who seems to like scandal ising his countrymen, did so with resounding eclat in a novel affirming all French and most European nobility to be ultimately Judaic.

In fact the argument, although unprovable, is not altogether implausible, nor are the exile and migration ascribed to the Tribe of Benjamin in the “Prieure documents’. The Tribe of Benjamin took up arms on behalf of the followers of Belial a form of the Mother Goddess often associated with images of a bull or calf. There is reason to believe that the Benjamites themselves revered the same deity. Indeed, it is possible that the worship of the Golden Calf in Exodus the subject, significantly enough, of one of

Poussin’s most famous paintings may have been a specifically Benjamite ritual.

Following their war against the other eleven tribes of Israel, Benjamites fleeing into exile would, of necessity, have had to flee westwards, towards the Phoenician coast. The Phoenicians possessed ships capable of transporting large numbers of refugees. And they would have been obvious allies for fugitive Benjamites for they, too, worshipped the Mother Goddess in the form of Astarte, Queen of Heaven.