Priory of Sion
Based on Wikipedia: Priory of Sion
The Greatest Literary Hoax of Twentieth-Century France
In 2003, Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code sold tens of millions of copies by revealing a shocking secret: an ancient organization called the Priory of Sion had been protecting the bloodline of Jesus Christ for nearly a thousand years. Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton had served as its Grand Masters. The Knights Templar were its military arm. It was all true, Brown's characters insisted, citing real documents housed in the French National Library.
There was just one problem. The whole thing was a con job, dreamed up by a French draftsman with a criminal record and delusions of grandeur.
The Priory of Sion was not founded in Jerusalem during the Crusades. It was founded in 1956, in a social housing apartment in a small French town near the Swiss border. Its purpose was not to guard sacred bloodlines but to advocate for tenants' rights and complain about local real estate developers. And the "ancient documents" proving its medieval origins? They were forgeries, planted in libraries by the same man who created the organization in the first place.
This is the story of Pierre Plantard, a man who spent decades constructing an elaborate fantasy in which he was the rightful king of France, and how that fantasy escaped his control to become one of the most successful pseudohistorical myths of modern times.
A Con Artist's Origin Story
Pierre Plantard was born in 1920 and spent much of his life on the margins of French society. He had a talent for grandiose schemes and a weakness for getting caught. By 1953, he had already served a six-month prison sentence for fraud. But Plantard had bigger ambitions than petty crime. He wanted to be important. He wanted to be powerful. Most of all, he wanted to be recognized as someone special.
In the years following World War II, France was home to a thriving subculture of esotericists, occultists, and monarchists who believed that secret societies had shaped European history for centuries. Plantard wanted in. More than that, he wanted to lead.
So on May 7, 1956, Plantard and three associates registered a new organization with the French government. They called it the Priory of Sion, named after Mont Sion, a hill near the town of Annemasse where they hoped to establish a spiritual retreat center. The full title was even grander: "Chivalry of Catholic Rules and Institutions of Independent and Traditionalist Union." This mouthful of words formed the acronym CIRCUIT, which became the name of their newsletter.
The paperwork described an organization devoted to Catholic charitable works, teaching truth, defending the weak, and helping the Church. The reality was considerably more mundane.
The Newsletter Nobody Asked For
The actual Priory of Sion bore almost no resemblance to its stated goals. Rather than engaging in chivalric good deeds, Plantard and his associates published a newsletter that read like a community bulletin for disgruntled apartment dwellers. CIRCUIT described itself as an "organisation for the defence of the rights and the freedom of affordable housing." Its twelve issues, published throughout 1956, attacked local real estate developers, took sides in council elections, and promoted Plantard as president of the local tenants' association.
This was not the stuff of medieval legend.
The organization sputtered along for a few months before effectively dying. André Bonhomme, who had been listed as president, wanted nothing more to do with it. By late 1956, the Priory of Sion had ceased any meaningful activity. Under French law, it became dormant, and technically speaking, it still is. No one alive today has legal authority to use its name.
But Plantard was not finished. He had merely been warming up.
The Reinvention Begins
Starting in the early 1960s, Plantard began telling a very different story about the Priory of Sion. The humble tenants' advocacy group from Annemasse was reborn as something far more dramatic: a secret society founded during the First Crusade, charged with protecting a sacred bloodline and guiding the destiny of Europe from the shadows.
According to Plantard's new mythology, the Priory of Sion had been established in 1099 by Godfrey of Bouillon, a leader of the First Crusade, on Mount Zion near Jerusalem. It had operated in secret for nearly nine hundred years, counting among its Grand Masters some of the greatest minds in Western history. It had created the Knights Templar as its public face and military wing. And it had one overriding purpose: to restore the Merovingian dynasty to the throne of France.
The Merovingians were a real dynasty that ruled the Franks from roughly 457 to 751 AD. They had been defunct for over a thousand years. But Plantard claimed to have discovered evidence that their bloodline had survived in secret, and that he himself was the rightful heir to this ancient royal lineage.
This was not merely historical revisionism. It was an entirely invented history, constructed piece by piece with forged documents, planted evidence, and breathtaking audacity.
Manufacturing Evidence
A claim this outlandish needed proof. So Plantard created some.
Working with his friend Philippe de Chérisey, Plantard fabricated a series of documents designed to establish the ancient pedigree of the Priory of Sion. The most famous of these were called the Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau, or "Secret Files of Henri Lobineau." They contained elaborate genealogies tracing the Merovingian bloodline through the centuries, lists of supposed Grand Masters of the Priory, and various cryptic allusions to great mysteries hidden in plain sight.
Plantard and de Chérisey deposited these forgeries in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French National Library in Paris. Because the library accepts deposits from the public, the presence of documents there carries an air of official legitimacy. Researchers who later stumbled upon these papers could be forgiven for thinking they had discovered genuine historical records.
The forgers also created fake medieval parchments, supposedly discovered by a nineteenth-century priest named Bérenger Saunière in a church in the village of Rennes-le-Château. This part of the story was itself borrowed from an earlier hoax. In the 1950s, a man named Noël Corbu had spread rumors that Saunière had found ancient parchments containing clues to hidden treasure. Plantard and de Chérisey simply adapted this legend for their own purposes.
The parchments they created contained encrypted messages that, when decoded, referred to the Priory of Sion and the Merovingian bloodline. One read: "To Dagobert II, King, and to Sion belongs this treasure and he is there dead." Dagobert II was a real Merovingian king, assassinated in the seventh century. The message hinted that his descendants had survived in secret, guarding some great treasure, presumably their own royal blood.
There was just one problem with the forgeries. The Latin text in the parchments had been copied from scholarly editions of the Bible published in 1889 and 1895. Documents that were supposed to be centuries old contained text that could not have existed before the late nineteenth century.
The Books That Spread the Myth
Plantard needed help spreading his story beyond the small circles of French occultists who were his natural audience. He found it in Gérard de Sède, a writer interested in mysteries and alternative history.
In 1967, de Sède published a book called L'or de Rennes, which translates roughly as "The Gold of Rennes." It told the story of Bérenger Saunière and the mysterious parchments, implying that the priest had discovered something of enormous significance. The book included reproductions of the forged parchments, though not the decoded messages hidden within them. It became popular in France and attracted attention from readers fascinated by mysteries and conspiracies.
One of those readers was Henry Lincoln, an English television writer. In 1969, Lincoln discovered one of the encrypted messages in the parchments and became convinced he had stumbled onto something important. He produced three documentaries for BBC Two's Chronicle series between 1972 and 1979, exploring what he called the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château.
The documentaries were enormously popular. They generated thousands of letters from viewers eager to learn more. Lincoln decided to dig deeper.
This is where the hoax took on a life of its own.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
Lincoln joined forces with two other researchers, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, to investigate the Priory of Sion more thoroughly. They found the Dossiers Secrets in the French National Library, apparently confirming the ancient lineage that Plantard claimed. They did not realize these documents had been forged and planted by Plantard himself.
In 1982, they published The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a book that presented the myths of the Priory of Sion as established fact. But they went much further than Plantard ever had. Where Plantard claimed the Merovingians were descended from the biblical Tribe of Benjamin, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh proposed something far more sensational: the Merovingians were the descendants of Jesus Christ himself, through a bloodline preserved by Mary Magdalene.
The Priory of Sion, they argued, had been protecting this bloodline for nearly two thousand years. The Holy Grail of medieval legend was not a cup at all. The word "Grail" derived from "Sangreal," which could be read as "Sang Real," meaning "Royal Blood." The entire apparatus of Arthurian romance was actually a coded message about the survival of Christ's descendants.
This was not what Plantard had intended. He had wanted to be recognized as the heir to the Merovingian dynasty and perhaps someday claim the throne of France. He had not claimed to be descended from Jesus Christ. But the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had fused his invented history with their own speculations about early Christianity, creating a myth far more provocative than anything Plantard had imagined.
The book was a massive bestseller. It was also, from beginning to end, built on a foundation of forgeries and wishful thinking.
The Hoax Unravels
Even as the Priory of Sion myth spread around the world, researchers were uncovering the truth.
Letters exchanged between Plantard, de Chérisey, and de Sède during the 1960s made clear that all three knew they were perpetrating a hoax. More than a hundred of these letters survive, complete with their original envelopes, in the possession of French researcher Jean-Luc Chaumeil. They discuss strategies for deflecting criticism, plans for inventing new evidence, and schemes to keep the hoax alive in the face of skeptical questions.
Journalists and scholars traced the genealogies in the Dossiers Secrets and found them to be fabrications. They identified the sources from which the forged parchments had been copied. They documented Plantard's criminal history and his long record of failed schemes to gain influence and prestige.
In 1993, Plantard's fantasy finally collapsed entirely. A French judge investigating a financial scandal subpoenaed Plantard after documents naming him as the true King of France surfaced in connection with the case. Under oath, Plantard admitted that he had made it all up. The Priory of Sion was his invention. The ancient history was fiction. The documents were forgeries.
Plantard died in 2000, his dream of becoming king forever unrealized.
The Myth That Would Not Die
By the time Plantard confessed, it was too late. The Priory of Sion had taken on a life independent of its creator.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail remained in print and continued to find new readers. The myth inspired countless other books, websites, and documentaries. And in 2003, Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code, which borrowed liberally from the theories of Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh while presenting them in the form of a thriller.
The Da Vinci Code sold over eighty million copies worldwide. It was adapted into a major motion picture. It sparked fierce debates about the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity. It turned the Priory of Sion into a household name.
The novel's opening page declared: "The Priory of Sion, a European secret society founded in 1099, is a real organization." This was presented as fact, not fiction. Readers who knew nothing about Pierre Plantard or the forged documents had no reason to doubt it.
The success of The Da Vinci Code prompted new investigations into the Priory of Sion, and journalists and historians once again documented the hoax in exhaustive detail. But for many readers, the debunking came too late. The story was too good, too thrilling, too satisfying to abandon simply because it happened to be false.
Why People Want to Believe
The persistence of the Priory of Sion myth reveals something important about how conspiracy theories work. People do not believe in conspiracies simply because they lack information. Often, they believe because the conspiracy offers something that ordinary reality does not.
The Priory of Sion story promises that history has a hidden meaning, that secret forces are at work behind the scenes, and that those who discover the truth gain access to special knowledge unavailable to ordinary people. It suggests that the familiar narratives of religion and politics are facades concealing a deeper reality. It offers the excitement of mystery and the satisfaction of being among the initiated few who understand what is really going on.
These are powerful attractions. They are also, in this case, entirely imaginary.
Some researchers worry about what it means when pseudohistorical myths become mainstream entertainment. The line between fiction and reality blurs. Ideas that began as the inventions of a convicted fraudster circulate as plausible alternative histories. Reactionary ideologies, dressed up in the romance of ancient secrets and noble bloodlines, gain new audiences who might never have encountered them otherwise.
The Priory of Sion began as one man's attempt to make himself important. It became France's greatest twentieth-century literary hoax. And it remains a cautionary tale about the ease with which invented history can capture the public imagination and refuse to let go.
What Remains
Today, the original Priory of Sion still exists on paper, dormant in the files of a French government office. No one alive has legal authority to revive it. The documents that supposedly proved its ancient origins have been thoroughly debunked. The man who created it is dead.
Yet the myth endures. Books continue to be written about it. Websites speculate about its ongoing activities. A few true believers insist, despite all evidence, that the Priory of Sion is real and still operates in secret, guarding its sacred mysteries from a world that refuses to understand.
They are wrong. But they are not going away.
The Priory of Sion is perhaps the most successful hoax ever perpetrated by a single individual. Pierre Plantard wanted to be king. He failed. But he created something that has outlived him, a lie so compelling that millions of people have chosen to believe it rather than accept the far less interesting truth.
In that sense, perhaps he succeeded after all. Not as the rightful heir to the Merovingian dynasty, but as the author of a fiction that changed how millions of people think about history, religion, and the nature of secret power. The real Priory of Sion may have been nothing more than a tenants' association in a social housing complex. But the idea of the Priory of Sion has become something far more enduring: a testament to humanity's endless appetite for mystery, meaning, and the allure of hidden truth.