Holy Blood, Holy Grail (41 page)

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If there was actually an exodus of Benjamites from Palestine, one might hope to find some vestigial record of it. In Greek myth one does. There is the legend of King Belus’s son, one Danaus, who arrives in Greece, with his daughters, by ship. His daughters are said to have introduced the cult of the Mother Goddess, which became the established cult of the Arcadians. According to Robert Graves, the Danaus myth records the arrival in the Peloponnesus of “colonists from Palestine’.”

Graves states that King Belus is in fact Baal, or Bel or perhaps Belial from the Old

Testament. It is also worthy of note that one of the clans of the Tribe of

Benjamin was the clan of Bela.

In Arcadia the cult of the Mother Goddess not only prospered but survived longer than in any other part of Greece. It became associated with worship of Demeter, then of Diana or Artemis. Known regionally as Arduina, Artemis became tutelary deity of the Ardennes; and it was from the Ardennes that the Sicambrian Franks first issued into what is now France. The totem of

Artemis was the she-bear Kallisto, whose son was Arkas, the bear-child and patron of Arcadia. And Kallisto, transported to the heavens by Artemis, became the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. There might thus be something more than coincidence in the appellation “Ursus’, applied repeatedly to the Merovingian bloodline.

In any case there is other evidence, apart from mythology, suggesting a

Judaic migration to Arcadia. In classical times the region known as Arcadia was ruled by the powerful, militaristic state of Sparta. The Spartans absorbed much of the older Arcadian culture; and indeed, the legendary

Arcadian Lycaeus may in fact be identified with Lycurgus, who codified

Spartan Law. On reaching manhood, the Spartans, like the Merovingians, ascribed a special, magical significance to their hair which, like the

Merovingians, they wore long. According to one authority, “the length of hair denoted their physical vigour and became a sacred symbol. ‘4

What is more, both books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha stress the link between

Spartans and Jews. Maccabees 2 speaks of certain Jews “having embarked to go to the Lacedaemonians, in hope of finding protection there because of their kinship.”5 And Maccabees 1 states explicitly, “It has been found in writing concerning the Spartans and the Jews that they

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are brethren and are of the family of Abraham.”6 We could thus acknowledge at least the possibility of a Judaic migration to Arcadia so that the “Prieure documents’, if they could not be proved correct, could not be dismissed either. As for Semitic influence on Frankish culture, there was solid archaeological evidence. Phoenician or

Semitic trade routes traversed the whole of southern France, from Bordeaux to Marseilles and Narbonne. They also extended up the Rhone. As early as 700-600 B.C.” there were Phoenician settlements not only along the French coast but inland as well, at such sites as Carcassonne and Toulouse. Among the artefacts found at these sites were many of Semitic origin. This is hardly surprising. In the ninth century B.C. the Phoenician kings of Tyre had intermarried with the kings of Israel and Judah, thus establishing a dynastic alliance that would have engendered a close contact between their respective peoples.

The sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the destruction of the Temple, prompted a massive exodus of Jews from the Holy Land. Thus the city of

Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, included a Jewish community.

Certain cities in southern France Arles, for example, Lunel and Narbonne provided a haven for Jewish refugees around the same time.

And yet the influx of Judaic peoples into Europe, and especially France, predated the fall of Jerusalem in the first century. In fact it had been in progress from before the Christian era. Between 106 and 48 B.C. a Jewish colony was established in Rome. Not long after another such colony was founded far up the Rhine, at Cologne. Certain Roman legions included contingents of Jewish slaves, who accompanied their masters all over

Europe. Many of these slaves eventually won, purchased or, in some other fashion, obtained their freedom and formed communities.

In consequence there are many specifically Semitic place names scattered about France. Some of them are situated squarely in the Old Merovingian heartland. A few kilometres from Stenay, for example, on the fringe of the

Forest of Woevres where Dagobert was assassinated, there is a village called Baalon. Between Stenay and Orval, there is a town called Avioth. And the mountain of Sion in Lorraine “la colline inspiree’ was originally

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Mount Semita.” Again then, while we could not prove the claims in the

“Prieure documents’, we could not discount them either. Certainly there was enough evidence to render them at least plausible. We were compelled to acknowledge that the

“Prieure documents’ might be correct that the Merovingians, and the various noble families descended from them, might have stemmed from Semitic sources.

But could this, we wondered, really be all there was to the story? Could this really be the portentous secret which had engendered so much fuss and intrigue, so much machination and mystery, so much controversy and conflict through the centuries? Merely another lost tribe legend?

And even if it were not legend but true, could it really explain the motivation of the

Prieure de Sion and the claim of the Merovingian dynasty? Could it really explain the adherence of men like Leonardo and Newton or the activities of the houses of Guise and Lorraine, the covert endeavours of the Compagnie du

Saint-Sacrement, the elusive secrets of “Scottish Rite’ Freemasonry?

Obviously not. Why should descent from the Tribe of Benjamin constitute so explosive a secret? And, perhaps most crucially, why should descent from the Tribe of Benjamin matter today? How could it possibly clarify the

Prieure de Sion’s present-day activities and objectives?

If our inquiry involved vested interests that were specifically Semitic or

Judaic, moreover, why did it involve so many components of a specifically, even fervently, Christian character? The pact between Clovis and the Roman

Church, for example; the avowed Christianity of Godfroi de Bouillon and the conquest of Jerusalem; the heretical, perhaps, but none the less Christian thought of the Cathars and Knights Templar; pious

institutions like the

Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement; Freemasonry that was “Hermetic, aristocratic and Christian’, and the implication of so many Christian ecclesiastics, from high ranking princes of the Church to local village cures like Boudet and Sauniere?

It might be that the Merovingians were ultimately of Judaic origin, but if this were so it seemed to us essentially incidental. Whatever the real secret underlying our investigation it appeared to be inextricably associated not with Old Testament Judaism, but with Christianity. In

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short, the Tribe of Benjamin for the moment, at least -seemed to be a red herring. However important it might be, there was something of even greater importance involved. We were still overlooking something.

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Three The Bloodline

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11 The Holy Grail

What might we have been overlooking? Or, alternatively, what might we have been seeking in the wrong place? Was there perhaps some fragment that had been before our eyes all along which, for one reason or another, we had failed to notice? As far as we could determine, we had overlooked no item, no data of accepted historical scholarship.

But might there be something else -something that lay “beyond the pale’ of documented history, the concrete facts to which we had endeavoured to confine ourselves?

Certainly there was one motif, admittedly fabulous, which had threaded itself through our investigation, recurring repeatedly, with insistent and intriguing consistency. This as the mysterious object known as the Holy

Grail. By their contemporaries, for-example, the Cathars were believed to have been in possession of the Grail. The Templars, too, were often regarded as the Grail’s custodians; and the Grail romances had originally issued from the court of the count of Champagne, who was intimately associated with the foundation of the Knights Templar. When the Templars were suppressed, moreover, the bizarre heads they supposedly worshipped enjoyed, according to the official Inquisition reports, many of the attributes traditionally ascribed to the Grail

-providing sustenance, for example, and imbuing the land with fertility.

In the course of our investigation we had run across the Grail in numerous other contexts as well. Some had been relatively recent, such as the occult circles of Josephin Peladan and Claude Debussy at the end of the nineteenth century. Others were considerably older. Godfroi de Bouillon, for instance, was descended according to medieval legend and folklore from Lohengrin, the

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Knight of the Swan; and Lohengrin, in the romances, was the son of Perceval or Parzival, protagonist of all the early Grail stories.

Guillem de Gellone, moreover, ruler of the medieval principality in southern France during the reign of Charlemagne, was the hero of a poem by Wolfram von

Eschenbach, most important of the Grail chroniclers. Indeed, the Guillem in

Wolfram’s poem was said to have been associated in some way with the mysterious “Grail family’.

Were these intrusions of the Grail into our inquiry, and others like them, merely random and coincidental? Or was there a continuity underlying and connecting them a continuity which, in some unimaginable way, did link our inquiry to the Grail, whatever the Grail might really be? At this point, we were confronted by a staggering question. Could the Grail be something more than pure fantasy? Could it actually have existed in some sense? Could there really have been such a thing as the Holy Grail? Or something concrete, at any rate, for which the Holy Grail was employed as a symbol?

The question was certainly exciting and provocative -to say the least.

At the same time it threatened to take us too far afield, into spheres of spurious speculation. It did, however, serve to direct our attention to the

Grail romances themselves. And in themselves the Grail romances posed a number of perplexing and distinctly relevant conundrums.

It is generally assumed that the Holy Grail relates in some way to Jesus.

According to some traditions, it was the cup from which Jesus and his disciples drank at the Last Supper. According to other traditions, it was the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught Jesus’s blood as he hung on the cross. According to other traditions still, the Grail was both of these.

But if the Grail was so intimately associated with Jesus, or if it did indeed exist, why was there no reference to it whatever for more than a thousand years? Where was it during all that time? Why did it not figure in earlier literature, folklore or tradition? Why should something of such intense relevance and immediacy to Christendom remain buried for as long as it apparently did?

More provocatively still, why should the Grail finally surface precisely when it did at the very peak of the Crusades? Was it

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coincidence that this enigmatic object, ostensibly non-existent for ten centuries, should assume the status it did at the very time it did when the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem was in its full glory, when the Templars were at the apex of their power, when the

Cathar heresy was gaining a momentum which actually threatened to displace the creed of Rome? Was this convergence of circumstances truly coincidental?

Or was there some link between them?

Inundated and somewhat daunted by questions of this kind, we turned our attention to the Grail romances. Only by examining these “fantasies’ closely could we hope to determine whether their recurrence in our inquiry was indeed coincidental, or the manifestation of a pattern a pattern which might, in some way, prove significant.

The Legend of the Holy Grail

Most twentieth-century scholarship concurs in the belief that the Grail romances rest ultimately on a pagan foundation a ritual connected with the cycle of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the year. In its most primordial origins it would appear to involve a vegetation cult, closely related in form to, if not directly derived from those of Tammuz, Attis, Adonis and Osiris in the Middle East. Thus, in both Irish and Welsh mythology, there are repeated references to death, rebirth and renewal, as well as to a similar regenerative process in the land sterility and fertility. The theme is central to the anonymous fourteenth-century English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And in the Mabinogion, a compilation of Welsh legends roughly contemporary with the Grail romances though obviously drawing on much earlier material, there is a mysterious

“cauldron of rebirth’ in which dead warriors, thrown at nightfall, are resurrected the following morning. This cauldron is often associated with a giant hero named Bran. Bran also possessed a platter and ‘whatever food one wished thereon was instantly obtained’ -

a property also sometimes ascribed to the Grail. At the end of his life, moreover, Bran was supposedly decapitated and his head placed, as a sort of talisman, in London.

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Here it was said to perform a number of magical functions not only ensuring fertility of the land but also, by some occult power, repelling invaders.

Many of these motifs were subsequently incorporated into the Grail romances. There is no question that Bran, with his cauldron and platter, contributed something to later conceptions of the Grail. And Bran’s head shares attributes not only with the Grail, but also with the heads allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar.

The pagan foundation for the Grail romances has been exhaustively explored by scholars, from Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough up to the present.

But during the mid to late twelfth century the originally pagan foundation for the Grail romances underwent a curious and extremely important transformation. In some obscure way that has eluded the investigation of researchers, the Grail became very uniquely and specifically associated with Christianity and with a rather unorthodox form of Christianity at that. On the basis of some elusive amalgamation, the Grail became inextricably linked with Jesus. And there seems to have been something more involved than a facile grafting of pagan and Christian traditions.