The Grail Mystery Takes A New Turn

The Rennes-le-Chateau mystery which was the centrepiece of the Holy Blood Holy Grail, the bestseller which launched an entire genre of speculative-history literature, has just taken a left turn. This is with publicity over the UK paperback publication of City Of Secrets: The Extraordinary True Story Of The Woman Who Found Herself At The Heart Of The Grail, by the novelist and biographer Patrice Chaplin. Oddly, a web search shows the book is not actually new, as press coverage implies, but evidently publication of a new UK paperback edition May 25th has just brought it to the notice of those who keep an eye on the Rennes mystery.
Because of her marriage to the son of film star Charlie Chaplin (who spent his last years in Europe), the British-born and now London-resident author lived in Europe as well as Hollywood and was part of a circle of artists like Umberto Eco, Dali and Debussy. (These two of course were named in various dubious documents quoted by HBHG etc as Grand Masters of the notional ‘Priory Of Sion’). She was also the lover of a Spaniard 'initiate' of a secret society, who told her the secret the Rennes-le-Chateau priest Sauniere was involved with so she could write a book about it, before the secret was lost forever. For Chaplin is a professional writer of long standing whose work has sometimes dealt with occult matters. Her writing includes a journey-into-death fable called Siesta, a novel which may have been inspired by her appearing in films by Jean Cocteau (a friend of her lover Jose), for the story has shades of his classic version of the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld, Orphee. A decade before the 1999 Bruce Willis film The Sixth Sense, her 1979 novel was filmed starring Ellen Barkin as a woman who doesn't understand she's dead; she journeys through Spain meeting former acquaintances who give her certain clues leading her finally to realise she is in an underworld limbo.
After he had a near-death experience, Chaplin’s lover Jose gave her certain information he and his fellow members wanted passed on. Chaplin says the Rennes secrets are related those of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical text which supposedly contains codes concealing powerful occult numbers (such as 22), which in this case were used as building dimensions for purpose-built towers. She documents how the Tour Magdala (Tower of Mary Magdalene) the priest Sauniere financed outside Rennes was a copy of one built by a private group in the Spanish city of Girona.

This eastern-Pyrenean town near the French border south of Rennes-le-Chateau area is the ancient Catalan capital where she took up residence, this being the "city of secrets" the book’s title refers to. (She says she was followed by men-in-black type state security agents acting on behalf of the secret society, and photos she was given were doctored in a way that would have discredited her book.) With its grail traditions and ancient Jewish quarter containing a famous mediaeval school studying the Kabbalah, it was a centre of mystical studies until 1492, when the Spanish crown with the backing of the Church ordered all Jews out of Spain, ending the ‘Golden Age’ of learning.
She says the towers formed a triangular alignment with St Sulpice in Paris (the church in The Da Vinci Code) a mystical triangle known as ‘the Golden Cut.’ The towers were used to obtain magnetic energies for a ritual that allowed them to visit other dimensions. This, she said, is the real Grail: a two-hour-long ritual of recited texts enabling someone to pass through a trans-dimensional portal to enlightenment. But if you are not spiritually fit, you could go mad or die, which is what she suggest happened to some of Sauniere's helpers. The key to ‘activating’ the Grail was a large stone called the Sun Stone.
The Rennes priest Sauniere himself visited for twenty years, being secretly paid by (wait for it) the Rosicrucian Order and the Bilderberg Group. The Rosicrucians, or Order Of The Rosy Cross, are of course often named in conspiracy literature, usually as the ones who took over the secrets of the Knights Templar when the Church suppressed them in 1307. The Bilderberg Group are a top-echelon secretive business-conference formation, who along with the Illuminati (the subject of Dan Brown's next novel) are the conspiracy theorists' favourite prime suspect. But Chaplin’s lover, who she says was also a Freemason of the Scottish Rite, and other members of this private society (not the Priory of Sion but the "Friends Of Ancient Girona") fell into strife as one by one their age group began to die off. They couldn’t agree whom to give their secrets or artefacts to - the Bilderberg people, the Freemasons, or the Church, eventually hiding them on a mountain that lies in a straight line between the two towers. The mountain is the sacred centre of Catalonia, where the summer solstice is celebrated. On it is a monastery dedicated to St Sulpice (again, shades of Da Vinci Code here, and the alleged “Rosy Cross” line) … and, says Chaplin, an invisible gateway to another dimension where lie powers that could destroy the planet as we know it.
… So we have a modern secret society with associated celebrity names protecting a mighty grail secret, clues in an ancient text whose study is forbidden to women, containing a secret code used in the dimensions of sacred buildings, a bit of suppression by the Catholic Church, and an ultimate power which “in the wrong hands …would have cast the world as we know it into darkness.”
Sounds to me like there's a bestseller and a movie there to rival The Da Vinci Code.

DVC Plagiarism V Copyright Verdict, The Problem Continues

The UK Court Of Appeal has ruled against HBHG co-authors Baignent and Leigh in their suit against DVC publishers Random House, saying that copyright law only protects text, rather than ideas, themes, or structures. As one judge put it, copyright does not "extend to clothing information, facts, ideas, theories and themes with exclusive property rights, so as to enable the claimants to monopolise historical research or knowledge and prevent the legitimate use of historical and biographical material, theories propounded, general arguments deployed, or general hypotheses suggested (whether they are sound or not) or general themes written about."

This is more strongly worded than might be expected (appeal courts supposedly rule on the fairness of the original trial, rather than retrying the case). But I can’t think of anyone who would actually be surprised at this ruling outside of the defendants themselves (not sure whether to include their lawyers in that or not). The general reaction will be one of relief, over an end to the prospect of copycat (if that’s the right word) suits of the 'you stole your film script from my history textbook' sort. This was more of a danger than it might appear, for plagiarism is a broader concept than copyright. It was really plagiarism the two HBHG authors were referring to in their claim when they said the whole ‘architecture’ of their work had been copied. Plagiarism is a major offence in the academic world whose integrity depends on independent individual research efforts. But in journalism, plagiarism is a way of life. Freelancers are always complaining about this when they send ideas in to TV producers, and legal actions have been brought and settled over this. But it seems it’s only when someone is found to copy specific details they will lose a legal action.
There have been several high-profile plagiarism cases in the past year where novels have been withdrawn after someone noticed a familiar sentence from Grahame Greene or Jane Austen or George Orwell, and it snowballed from there, as other online researchers joined the game of spot-the-plagiarism. Experienced biographers like Lady Antonia Fraser say they invent insignificant but telling details as part of a literary ‘sting’ setup to catch out copycats, the same way dictionary publishers do with an invented word, or the Ordnance Survey catches out other map publishers by putting imaginary roads on their maps. One academic biographer set up a sting when he heard a bestselling writer was being commissioned to produce, within a year, a massive biography of Poet Laureate John Betjeman for his centenary. Suspecting his own work over many years would be plundered, he quickly planted a fake letter on the newcomer, and then publicised the sting.

The key legal point here is that the detail is an original invention, and not a fact. It’s possible that if the HBHG authors had concentrated more on specific details rather than broad structural similarities they themselves could not decide on (changing their claim particulars midway), the outcome might have been different. Baignent and Leigh said in a statement today: "We feel that today is an ominous one for those who wish to research a book of their own and come up with their own theories. It is a carte blanche for those who would rather not bother, but simply take another author's ideas and adapt them."

Plagiarism without specific copyrightable details being copied can still be the basis of an action, especially in today’s litigious climate. (Variety recently did an editorial saying that people in the industry are now afraid of their own Hollywood lawyers, one of whom has been trying to patent storylines.) When Robert Bolt was writing the script for David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia in 1960, he feared the most recent of Lawrence’s many biographers might bring such a suit, and got an acquaintance to agree to say, if necessary, that it was his earlier biography Bolt had drawn on for historical research. In the end, Bolt got dragged into a plagiarism hearing anyway, because when the film was restored in the late 80s, scriptwriter Michael Wilson asked Bolt for shared credit, his early script work had been shelved by the producers. Bolt refused to share credit on the basis he had never even seen anything by Wilson. Wilson went to the Writers Guild Of America arbitration committee, who ruled Wilson should get a credit on all restored prints, on the basis there were a dozen points of similarity in the structure between Wilson’s script outline and Bolt’s script. The implication was the producer had told Bolt to follow the structure which Wilson had developed, though there was no proof of this.

This is not an isolated case – something similar happened with one cause celebre case that made it to the British courts, over the cult 1970s British drama serial Rock Follies written by Howard Schuman, where a judge accepted the actresses’s claim they came up with the idea themselves, though there was no evidence, almost ruining the writer’s career. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has now been accused of murdering his collaborator on his most famous novel to cover up alleged plagiarism. In Robert Bolt’s case, he thought this an outrageous precedent when dealing with history, for it is the events themselves that provide the structure – the choice and sequence of scenes - and the sequence of historical events cannot be copyrighted. But does that mean it can still be protected by claims of plagiarism brought by other means besides copyright suits? The jury seems to be still out on that one.

Was What Sauniere Found A ‘Codex’?

Was what began the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery really Abbe Sauniere’s finding a ‘codex’ scrapbook? And did discovering this three years later inspire the 'Father of the Ghost Story'?

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Pictured: M.R. James, 'Father Of The Ghost Story', whose interest in exploring relics in historic French churches seems to have led him to a disturbing conclusion about the nature of their secrets ...

Because of the blog’s title, I thought it might be worth looking into a recent theory regarding the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau as a lost codex. The theory concerns how M.R. James, ‘the Father of the Modern Ghost Story', launched his writing career after a visit to a village in the Rennes-le-Chateau area. James was a scholar, a Cambridge academic, whose field was paleography: the study of old documents such as mediaeval manuscripts, which were often collected and bound as codices – sewn together in the manner of a scrapbook. He wrote nonfiction books on church art and architecture, and apocryphal Biblical lore. He also specialised in the ‘antiquarian ghost story.’ Old manuscripts, codexes, and other documents are often a plot springboard of MRJ’s ghost stories, used to create verisimilitude – via what The Wordsworth Companion To Literature refers to as ‘scholarly details.’ His first-ever story, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book,’ was written just after he visited a church not far from R-L-C in 1892. This spring, in Fortean Times, Nick Warren argued that the story was based on rumours then in circulation about what Abbe Sauniere had found at nearby Rennes-le-Chateau that made him rich. If this is so, the story is of interest due to its early date, contemporary with the life and times of Abbe Sauniere, and long before the now-so-familiar modern R-L-C theories appeared. Did he by chance hear the original, contemporary version regarding what Sauniere had found?
The story’s setting is an ex-cathedral church in the same region of France as Rennes-le-Chateau, St Bertrand de Comminges. The church was built by the local Bishop who became the Pope who had helped destroy the Templars, and one of whose descendants lived in R-L-C Castle. Her sepulchre, says Warren, gave Sauniere clues to the hidden treasure - whatever that was.
Could this treasure have had any link with the HBHG mystery? Was there any connection between this part of France and the Holy Lands in the post-Crucifixion period, when apostles were said to have fled to Europe, bringing holy relics? The Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote two historical accounts after he was captured during the Jewish revolt in Galilee and became a Roman citizen, said that when the pro-Roman Herod Agrippa was made king of the Jews, Rome exiled one of Herod the Great's surviving sons there in AD 39. (Herod Agrippa was Josephus’s source for much of his historical writings.) This unwanted heir was retired to the family estate in a remote part of the Roman province of Spain. The Rennes locality of course is not in modern Spain but is nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees forming the present Spanish-French border. He was exiled to the Roman colony-town of Vienne, near Lyon north of Massilia (Marseilles). Massilia was the landfall port for Palestian and other traders following the overland tin-trade route across Gaul to southwest Britain, and so is on our ‘grail trail’ in relation to Joseph of Arimatheia et al. Laurence Gardner’s 2005 book The Magdalene Legacy cites Stewart Perowne’s 1958 book The Later Herods [Ch 10, p69] as the authority on this, which itself cites Josephus’ Wars Of The Jews that both sons of Herod the Great were exiled to this area. (Josephus was the earliest writer to mention Jesus and his brother and successor James, though later manuscript alterations by church fathers are suspected. For the page references in Josephus, see the Wikipedia entry for Herod Antipas, which also explains the manuscript copyist’s France-Spain geographical confusion.) The other surviving son, Herod Antipas, who ruled Galilee at the time of the Crucifixion, was also exiled in AD 39, ending up in … St Bertrand de Comminges - the same village MRJ wrote of. This corner of France was what other writers have characterised as a ‘Jewish Princedom’, the colony building up after the massive Jewish revolt Josephus wrote of as the Jewish Wars, which ended with the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Whether any relevant relics like Galilean Biblical manuscripts came with these exiles however remains an unanswered question.
The MRJ story has a frightened local sacristan or verger gladly selling the narrator a rare scrapbook-codex of centuries-old pages, together with a plan of the cathedral encoded with magic symbols, which the now-dead Canon Alberic tried to interpret to search for lost treasure. It also has a drawing of Solomon facing down the demon or dragon who guards the Temple gold. This ‘appalling effigy’, an Old Testament demon, then materialises to the new owner of the manuscript when he takes off his crucifix. In another story, ‘The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas,’ the antiquarian storyteller deciphers a biblical code sequence hidden in the artwork of an old chapel, leading to a treasure behind a keystone, again guarded by a ghoul. In fact, most of MRJ’s subsequent stories had a similar setup. Told in the first person as if the events had actually happened to the author or to a friend of his, a travelling scholar or antiquary happens on some papers or treasure, possessing which unleashes some occult force. Usually, a shadowy figure begins to stalk him, leading to death, madness, or flight. The plot setup obviously had a great impact not only for James but for others, for his stories have never been out of print since 1904.
Nick Warren implies Sauniere had a vision of such a ghoul, commemorated in the vivid full-colour sculpture of the swarthy, red-eyed horned-demon painted wooden sculpture seen in the R-L-C church, and now on various websites [pictured], where the Latin inscription over the door says 'Terrible Is This Place.’ He speculates what Sauniere may have found was such a scrapbook-codex containing old pages with heretical (Templar?) content that would have embarrassed the Vatican, allowing him to overcome his demons, accumulate vast wealth, rebuild the church and, supposedly, leave architectural clues dotted around the landscape. While demonic hauntings do not figure much in the modern round of R-L-C books I have seen, the Templars were certainly accused of consorting with a demon whose head they worshipped. This may be why the label le tresor maudit or ‘the accursed treasure’ was used by Gerard de Sede as the title for the first of these modern books. Of course, if it was a codex-scrapbook of pages culled from old manuscripts, the question remains, what could have been there that was so frightening? Whatever the Sauniere secret was, it certainly seems to have upset the church - there's a story Sauniere was even refused absolution on his death-bed when he confessed his secrets. The Church tended to denounce heretical works as creations of the Devil, which could explain how the idea of a demon came to be associated with such a mystery.
Clive Prince & Lynn Picknett's recent The Sion Revelation [p251] notes other published authors seem to have heard rumours about the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery around this time: e.g. the Arsene Lupin novels [1907-] of Maurice Leblanc, where Lupin is in plots 'that can appear unsettling when we know the story'; and Jules Verne's 1896 adventure Clovis Dardentor, where the hero has the first name of a Merovingian king and a surname said to mean "of the descendants' gold" (using the same root as Plant-Ard). And in Huysmans’s notorious 1891 novel of Satanism in 19th-C Paris, La-Bas, the setting includes the strange Church of St Sulpice which features in The Da Vinci Code.
The controversial Dossiers Secrets, which HBHG was largely based on, refer to a curse - hence the title of de Sede's book, Le Tresor Maudit - The Accursed Treasure. (The "worst" swear-words a Catholic can utter are maudit tabernacle.) The message Henry Lincoln decoded (this is how the whole HBHG enterprise began) from the parchments reproduced in de Sede's book, A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LA MORT could be translated similarly to mean ‘At [Mt] Sion is this treasure and it is Death.’ As Prince & Picknett put it, "the treasure in some way brings death", the parchment ‘cursing the miscreant who dares steal a fragment of this treasure'. The solution to the now-famous parchment's riddle mentions both Poussin, the painter of the Arcadian scene, and a demon guardian. Les Dossiers Secrets say that the 7th-C Merovingian dynasty, on losing power to the Carolingians, hid their treasure in this area. A curse was put on it to protect it, which was what supposedly caused Sauniere to fall from grace, be put out of a job in 1910 by his Bishop, and be ordered to Rome to face charges. He had introduced 'satanic' elements into the church which his mysterious wealth had rebuilt, such as having the stations of the Cross run counter-clockwise, and the demon pictured holding up the water stoup. He also had a dog he named Faust, after the character who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mortal advantage.
Of course the motto made famous by Poussin, Et Ego In Arcadia, said to be on a tombstone Sauniere covered up, can refer to Death or any other figure one whould not expect in Arcadia. The motto appeared in an 1832 travel book on the area by a friend of Victor Hugo's, which also referred to the "Devil's treasure" being there. Another aspect suggested by Sauniere’s odd behaviour is that if the documents he found referred to some terrible secret about Christianity such as that Jesus had survived, been married, perhaps had children, then this discovery in itself would be akin to a curse, for how could a man of the church carry on with his duties while keeping such a terrible secret?
Further Reading & Viewing: If you want to explore this approach further, Nick Warren’s article ‘An Accursed Treasure’ is in Fortean Times #206 [Feb 2006 – article not archived online yet]. The magazine also carried a feature by Picknett & Prince in their July issue, #212. For a commentary on the "demonology" of "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book", see the online essay The Nature of the Beast by Helen Grant. Even if you’ve never even heard of Montague Rhodes James, you may still have come across his work via a film or TV adaptation. (On the other hand you may just think you’ve seen adaptations because his work has been so widely imitated.) The most famous film version is the 1958 classic Night Of The Demon directed by Jacques Tourner, based on MRJ’s story ‘Casting The Runes.’ (In it, an Aleister Crowley type of figure discovers the terrible price that must be paid after he conjures up a demon using an old book of spells he stole from the British Museum.) A 1989 Italian horror film scripted by Dario Argento, La Chiesa (English title The Church), was inspired by ‘The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas.’ On TV, the first seems to have been a 2-part dramatisation of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book’ directed by Tony Richardson in 1954. BBC did a famous b&w adaptation of MRJ’s tale of a dangerous Templar relic, “Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad” directed by Jonathan Miller, available on DVD from the BFI, with excerpts viewable online). From 1971-8, BBC-TV produced 5 MRJ ghost stories as part of its annual “A Ghost Story For Christmas” series, including ‘The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas’ and ‘A Warning To The Curious’. The latter is the most famous of the 5, and is available on DVD from the BFI. The stories were meant to be read aloud at social gatherings, and make natural source material for radio and talking-book adaptations, of which there are many. For links to etexts, click here [scroll down] or here. ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book’ is here, and there is a study-guide PDF to it here [right-click to download]. MRJ’s story and own visit to St Bertrand de Comminges is discussed in ‘The Jamesian Traveller’ series on the MRJ fansite, here. Fortean Times March 2007 issue says MRJ’s work came out of copyright at the end of 2006, and a ‘flurry’ of new adaptations is expected.