They call themselves the Prieur de Sion – the Priory of Sion. They are based here in France and attract powerful members from all over Europe. In fact, they are one of the oldest surviving secret societies on earth.
Membership
The Priory’s membership has included some of history’s most cultured individuals: men like Botticelli, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci presided over the Priory between 1510 and 1519 as the brotherhood’s Grand Master.
Sacred feminine
The Priory has a well-documented history of reverence for the sacred feminine. They are known as the guardians of an ancient secret. One that made them immeasurably powerful. The identities of living Priory members are kept extremely secret.
The Priory’s tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church ‘conned’ the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favour of the masculine.
The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.
History of Priory and Secret Documents
The brotherhood’s history spanned more than a millennium… an astonishing chronicle of secrets, blackmail, betrayal, and even brutal torture at the hands of an angry Pope.
The Priory of Sion was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a French king named Godefroi de Bouillon, immediately after he had conquered the city. King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret a secret that had been in his family since the time of Christ. Fearing his secret might be lost when he died, he founded a secret brotherhood the Priory of Sion and charged them with protecting his secret by quietly passing it on from generation to generation. During their years in Jerusalem, the Priory learned of a stash of hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod’s temple, which had been built atop the earlier ruins of Solomon’s Temple. These documents, they believed, corroborated Godefroi’s powerful secret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing to get them.
The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered from the rubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die. In order to retrieve the documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm a group of nine knights called the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, more commonly known as the Knights Templar. Almost everyone on earth had heard of them, at least abstractedly. For academics, the Templars’ history was a precarious world where fact, lore, and misinformation had become so intertwined that extracting a pristine truth was almost impossible. Nowadays, Langdon hesitated even to mention the Knights Templar while lecturing because it invariably led to a barrage of convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories.
The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which the Templars ran their mission. Their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents from beneath the ruins of the temple.
Nobody knows for sure whether they found them or not, but the one thing on which all academics agree is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins… something that made them wealthy and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
Knights were in the Holy Land during the Second Crusade and told King Baldwin II that they were there to protect Christian pilgrims on the roadways. Although unpaid and sworn to poverty, the Knights told the king they required basic shelter and requested his permission to take up residence in the stables under the ruins of the temple. King Baldwin granted the soldiers’ request, and the Knights took up their meager residence inside the devastated shrine. The odd choice of lodging had been anything but random. The Knights believed the documents the Priory sought were buried deep under the ruins beneath the Holy of Holies, a sacred chamber where God Himself was believed to reside. Literally, the very center of the Jewish faith. For almost a decade, the nine Knights lived in the ruins, excavating in total secrecy through solid rock.
Did they find something? They certainly did. It had taken nine years, but the Knights had finally found what they had been searching for. They took the treasure from the temple and travelled to Europe, where their influence seemed to solidify overnight.
Nobody was certain whether the Knights had blackmailed the Vatican or whether the Church simply tried to buy the Knights’ silence, but Pope Innocent II immediately issued an unprecedented papal bull that afforded the Knights Templar limitless power and declared them “a law unto themselves” an autonomous army independent of all interference from kings and prelates, both religious and political.
With their new carte blanche from the Vatican, the Knights Templar expanded at a staggering rate, both in numbers and political force, amassing vast estates in over a dozen countries. They began extending credit to bankrupt royals and charging interest in return, thereby establishing modern banking and broadening their wealth and influence still further.
Tragedy
By the 1300s, the Vatican sanction had helped the Knights amass so much power that Pope Clement V decided that something had to be done. Working in concert with France‘s King Philippe IV, the Pope devised an ingeniously planned sting operation to quash the Templars and seize their treasure, thus taking control of the secrets held over the Vatican. In a military maneuver worthy of the CIA, Pope Clement issued secret sealed orders to be opened simultaneously by his soldiers all across Europe on Friday, October 13 of 1307.
At dawn on the thirteenth, the documents were unsealed and their appalling contents revealed. Clement’s letter claimed that God had visited him in a vision and warned him that the Knights Templar were heretics guilty of devil worship, homosexuality, defiling the cross, sodomy, and other blasphemous behavior. Pope Clement had been asked by God to cleanse the earth by rounding up all the Knights and torturing them until they confessed their crimes against God. Clement’s Machiavellian operation came off with clockwork precision. On that day, countless Knights were captured, tortured mercilessly, and finally burned at the stake as heretics. Echoes of the tragedy still resonated in modern culture; to this day, Friday the thirteenth was considered unlucky.
Survival
Fraternities of Templars do still exist today, under a variety of names. Despite Clement’s false charges and best efforts to eradicate them, the Knights had powerful allies, and some managed to escape the Vatican purges. The Templars’ potent treasure trove of documents, which had apparently been their source of power, was Clement’s true objective, but it slipped through his fingers. The documents had long since been entrusted to the Templars’ shadowy architects, the Priory of Sion, whose veil of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican‘s onslaught. As the Vatican closed in, the Priory smuggled their documents from a Paris preceptory by night onto Templar ships in La Rochelle.
Where did the documents go?
That mystery’s answer is known only to the Priory of Sion. Because the documents remain the source of constant investigation and speculation even today, they are believed to have been moved and rehidden several times. Current speculation places the documents somewhere in the United Kingdom.
For a thousand years, legends of this secret have been passed on. The entire collection of documents, its power, and the secret it reveals have become known by a single name Sangreal. Hundreds of books have been written about it, and few mysteries have caused as much interest among historians as the Sangreal.
Does the word have anything to do with the French word sang or Spanish sangre meaning ‘blood’? Blood was the backbone of the Sangreal. The legend is complicated, but the important thing to remember is that the Priory guards the proof, and is purportedly awaiting the right moment in history to reveal the truth.
The word Sangreal is an ancient word. It has evolved over the years into another term… a more modern name.” He paused. “When I tell you its modern name, you’ll realize you already know a lot about it. In fact, almost everyone on earth has heard the story of the Sangreal.
Holy Grail
Holy Grail is the literal meaning of Sangreal. The phrase derives from the French Sangraal, which evolved to Sangreal, and was eventually split into two words, San Greal. Holy Grail.
The Sangreal documents are only half of the Holy Grail treasure. They are buried with the Grail itself… and reveal its true meaning. The documents gave the Knights Templar so much power because the pages revealed the true nature of the Grail.
The true nature of the Grail? The Holy Grail, people had thought, was the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper and with which Joseph of Arimathea later caught His blood at the crucifixion.
According to the Priory of Sion, the Holy Grail is not a cup at all. They claim the Grail legend that of a chalice is actually an ingeniously conceived allegory. That is, that the Grail story uses the chalice as a metaphor for something else, something far more powerful.
The Holy Grail is arguably the most sought-after treasure in human history. The Grail has spawned legends, wars, and lifelong quests. Does it make sense that it is merely a cup? If so, then certainly other relics should generate similar or greater interest the Crown of Thorns, the True Cross of the Crucifixion, the Titulus and yet, they do not. Throughout history, the Holy Grail has been the most special.
[The Series continues]
