The Priory of Sion hoax

Dan Brown’s best-known novel was founded on a myth, but it was a myth which he appeared to believe to be true despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The Da Vinci Code

Readers of Dan Brown’s well-known 2003 novel “The Da Vinci Code” soon become aware that the plot centres on the activities of a secret occult organisation known the “The Priory of Sion”. A murder takes place in the Louvre, Paris, the victim being the Priory’s Grand Master. As the story unfolds we are told that this society has existed for hundreds of years, its mission being to guard the secrets of the origins of Christianity, and in particular the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had descendants who are alive today. Previous Grand Masters had included Leonardo Da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton.

It is clear from Brown’s preface to the book that he regarded the Priory of Sion as being a historical entity, dating from 1099. He cited as his main source the 1983 book “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” by Michael Baigent et al, who claimed to have first-hand evidence of the Priory’s existence and history from its current Grand Master.

Mere invention

However, the whole edifice was to come crashing down in 1993 with an admission in court by a French occultist, Pierre Plantard (1920-2000), that the Priory of Sion was entirely fictional and existed nowhere except inside his own head. This admission seems to have escaped the notice of Dan Brown, whose bestseller appeared ten years later!

The Priory of Sion was invented in 1956 as an attempt to link Roman Catholicism with occultism. Plantard was a right-wing Frenchman (from south-west France) with Fascist sympathies, who had previously, in 1940, created a secret society called Alpha Galates and had served time in prison for so doing.

The Priory of Sion appears to have been an attempt to revive Alpha Galates. Plantard claimed that it was a large organisation with a hierarchy of membership levels that could be obtained for certain sums of money. However, this was all a con and Plantard served another prison sentence for fraud.

Undaunted, Plantard continued to advance the cause of the Priory despite the fact that, for much of its existence, he was the sole member. He came across another fraudster, Noel Corbu, who had invented a mysterious past for a restaurant he was opening at Rennes-le-Chateau near the French Pyrenees. Plantard determined to do the same for the Priory and concocted the history that deceived firstly Michael Baigent and then Dan Brown.

The web of legends and half-history that Plantard wove included the Albigensian “heretics” of the 13^th century, the Merovingian rulers of first millennium France, the 18^th century German “Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross” and much more besides. Documents were forged that claimed to back up his claims, and it was these that eventually landed Plantard in court.

In 1984 Plantard tried to put an end to the Priory but then tried again in 1989 with a new set of claims which got him nowhere.

Believing in the myth

Despite all the evidence that the Priory of Sion was founded on nothing but the imagination of a fantasist and convicted fraudster, many people have fallen victim to believing the whole story. As with many such cases, people will believe what they want to believe, however flimsy the evidence.

The fact that fictions such as the Priory of Sion have achieved such wide notice and attracted much credibility should serve as a warning that other, more widely accepted, beliefs in what cannot be proven should also be looked at far more critically. However, once a mind is firmly closed to reason it is very difficult to re-open it!

© John Welford

How myths evolve: the example of Lord Dufferin

Myths are extremely powerful. They have given rise to most of the world’s religions and have thus played a massive role in the history of every country on the planet. But when it comes to determining how close the myth is to truth, huge difficulties arise. In one sense, this does not matter – what is important is how many people believe the myth to be true or are unwilling to dig too deeply in case their prejudices prove to be ill-founded.

An example of how a myth can arise and be widely accepted, but can also be seen to be based largely on fantasy, is the story of Lord Dufferin and his apparent saving from a terrible death.

Lord Dufferin was a British diplomat who – so the story goes – was having a break in 1883 at a country house in Ireland. One night he heard a noise outside and went to investigate. He saw a man staggering across the lawn as he carried what turned out to be a coffin. The man’s face was contorted with hate and utterly loathsome. Lord Dufferin stepped forward to confront the man and walked right through him, after which the man and the coffin disappeared.

When Lord Dufferin told the people who lived at the house what had happened, none of them could give him a clue as to what he might have seen. There were no local ghosts who fitted the bill, and the man’s description meant nothing to anyone.

The story now moved on ten years, to when Lord Dufferin was British Ambassador to France. He attended a reception at a hotel in Paris, where the main event took place on the top floor and nearly everyone used a lift to get there from the entrance hall.

Lord Dufferin and his secretary joined the queue for the lift and eventually reached the head of it. However, when the lift doors opened, Lord Dufferin was horrified to see that the lift operator was the same man that he had seen carrying a coffin across an Irish lawn, ten years before. He refused to get into the lift and pulled his secretary back as well. The crowded lift ascended but, when nearly at the top, the cables broke and the lift plunged all the down, killing everyone on board, including the lift attendant.

Lord Dufferin tried to find out who the lift attendant was, but nobody knew. The hotel had only employed him as a casual worker, and nobody ever came forward to claim the body.

And so the tale stood, as a classic ghost story involving a ghastly apparition that saved a man’s life. Although the lift accident was in 1893, it was not until 1920 that an account appeared in print. It was included in a paper written a French psychologist named De Maratray and then in a book entitled “Death and its Mystery” by a French astronomer named Flammarion.

So it must have been a true story, then?

Neither De Maratray nor Flammarion had checked their facts. Had they done so, they would have discovered that the lift accident had actually occurred in 1878, which was five years before Lord Dufferin’s supposed Irish vision. The accident had nothing to do with a diplomatic reception, and Lord Dufferin was in Canada at the time!

It appears that a similar story was first told in 1892, involving a woman who had a dream in which a hearse stopped outside her house and she was asked by its driver “Are you not ready yet?”. This question was asked by a lift attendant when she paused as she was about to enter, which she then refused to do. As you might expect, the lift crashed and the man was killed.

This story was told by another unreliable raconteur but that did not stop it doing the rounds and growing in the telling.

One variation was regularly told by a certain Lord Dufferin, who knew full well that he had nothing to do with it. He told it to an impressionable young nephew, but put himself into the story. The nephew believed everything he heard, having no reason to doubt his uncle’s story. He grew up to be a well-known writer, his name being Harold Nicholson.

Nicholson also passed the story on, with Lord Dufferin as the main character, and one of the people who heard Nicholson’s version was De Maratray, the French psychologist.

And so the myth was born. So many myths start in very similar fashion!

© John Welford

The Samoan legend of Tuifiti and Sina

The people of Savai’i, the largest of the islands of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, tell a story about an eel named Tuifiti and a beautiful girl called Sina.

Tuifiti was enchanted by Sina’s beauty and he swam to where she was so that he could admire her all day. She caught him in a calabash gourd and fed him so that he grew bigger and bigger. Indeed, he could not stop growing, and grew so large that he eventually became a nuisance to her and she tried to get rid of him.

Tuifiti went to a gathering of the island elders and told them that he loved Sina so much that he could not live without her. He therefore knew that he was going to die, but he did not want his death to be in vain. He told the elders that, when he was dead, they should cut off his head and bury it in the ground in front of Sina’s house. A tree would grow that would be a blessing to her, because its leaves could be woven together to provide shelter when the sun was too hot and its fruit would provide drink when she was thirsty. Every time she did this she would be kissing him.

And that was how the first coconut tree came to be!

© John Welford

Titanic and Olympic - were the ships switched?

Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, but did you know that some people believe that it was not the Titanic that hit the iceberg, but her sister ship, the Olympic?

The two great liners

The White Star Line was a large company that excelled in commissioning and running ocean-going liners, particularly to take advantage of the trans-Atlantic trade that grew during the 19^th century as millions of Europeans sought a new life in the Americas.

In 1907 they commissioned two new liners to be built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, to be called Olympic and Titanic – all the ships of the White Star Line had names ending in “ic”. These were each to be twice the size of any ship in the existing fleet run by the company, with Olympic weighing in at 45,000 tons and Titanic at 46,000 tons – although a third ship, the Britannnic which entered service as a wartime hospital ship in 1915, would be even larger at 48,000 tons.

Olympic was the first to be completed – in 1910 – and she entered service in April 1911.

The unfortunate Olympic

Olympic did not have a smooth early life. On 20^th September 1911 she hit a Royal Navy ship, HMS Hawke, in the Solent near Southampton. The damage done to the ship was such that she had no choice but to return to Belfast for repairs, where she sat alongside the nearly complete Titanic (see photo).

The damage was so extensive that the shipbuilders now had a real problem – should they finish work on Titanic or switch their attention to Olympic? The White Star Line would clearly lose a considerable amount of money if the much-vaunted entry into service of Titanic had to be delayed, and the prospect of having neither ship afloat was one that they wanted to avoid if at all possible.

Another problem was that the Navy refused to accept blame for the Olympic’s collision, and the insurers were not willing to meet the costs of the repairs until the matter was settled. The White Star Line could see their profits disappearing fast.

Were the ships switched at Belfast?

This is when the intriguing thought emerges of whether the White Star Line performed a clever trick to get themselves out of trouble. Suppose the Titanic was lost at sea – surely there would be nothing to prevent the insurers paying out on that occasion. But suppose that the ship that was actually lost was in fact the already damaged Olympic? White Star would still have a perfect ship to trade with – namely the Titanic.

The plot – if there was one – was therefore to switch the nameplates of the two ships and make a few cosmetic changes so that people would think that the ship that began its maiden voyage on 10^th April 1912 was the Titanic when in fact it was the partially repaired Olympic.

The idea would have been to stage an emergency in mid-Atlantic, safely offload the passengers, then scuttle the ship. White Star would then claim all the insurance money after this undisputed calamity and have a seaworthy ship – namely the real Titanic masquerading as the Olympic – with the prospect of the even larger Britannic to come along in a few years’ time.

As we all know, things didn’t turn out that way. The ship (whichever it was) sailed off into the Atlantic but encountered a real emergency when it hit an iceberg with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

Could it have happened?

It seems highly unlikely! For one thing, how could the “safe” scuttling of the ship possibly have worked? If the idea was to offload the passengers in mid-ocean, this could only have been done by shuttling them across in lifeboats to rescue ships, given that the lifeboat capacity of the ship was less than half that of the number of people who would have been on board.

There would therefore have had to be other ships reasonably close at hand to accept the offloaded passengers. So would White Star have included other ship’s captains in the plot so that they would have been primed to arrive at a pre-arranged location?

If not, the event would need to have been arranged at a place where there was a reasonable prospect of other shipping being reasonably close by, which presumably must therefore have been further on in the voyage than the point at which the real disaster took place.

 It would also have inadvisable to stage the “accident” at a point where other ships were close enough to witness what was really going on. It would appear that the plotters would really have been trusting to luck to find a suitable spot.

Apart from that, it would not have possible to disguise one ship as another at Belfast without a huge number of people being aware of what was going on. Even years after the disaster, nobody who worked at Belfast ever admitted to being part of a fraud, so the chances are that no fraud took place.

It sounds like an interesting story, but no more than that. Besides, the wreck of the Titanic has since been found on the bed of the Atlantic, and it is abundantly clear that it is the Titanic and not the
Olympic pretending to be the Titanic!

As for the Olympic, she remained in service with White Star until 1935. The ship was already seaworthy before the maiden voyage of Titanic, and was actually making an eastbound crossing at the same time that Titanic was heading west, but the ships were too far apart for Olympic to come to Titanic’s aid.

Had there really been a plot to swindle the insurers, would White Star not have arranged matters so that their two ships, of similar size, were able to keep the whole thing “between themselves”, by “Titanic” coming to “Olympic’s” aid, thus lessening any risk of detection?

In other words, as conspiracy theories go, this one is a non-starter!

© John Welford

Why a red dragon is the symbol of Wales

The flag of Wales is dominated by a handsome red dragon. Why? According to the 12^th century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth it all goes back to the legends surrounding King Arthur and Merlin.

The story, as told by Geoffrey, concerns Vortigern, who may have been a Celtic king who ruled in central England and Wales in the 5^th century AD. The name translates as “supreme leader” so it may be more of a title that applied to a succession of kings rather than to just one man. However, Geoffrey was happy to assume that Vortigern was one person.

According to Geoffrey, Vortigern tried to build a strong fortress tower in Snowdonia. However, all the work done during the day was reduced to ruins every night. The druids advised him that the only way to make the building secure was to sacrifice a “fatherless child”, because the child’s blood in the tower’s foundations would ensure that it never fell down.

A young boy was found who fitted the bill, because he was the product of a demon and a princess. However, before he could be killed he spoke up and said that he knew why the tower kept falling down.

This was because, deep down below the tower, was a pool of water in which there was a huge stone chest, and in this chest two dragons were constantly fighting each other. The vibrations caused by their nightly battles were what undermined the tower.

Vortigern ordered his men to dig down and, sure enough, they found the chest and opened it. The two dragons, one red and one white, flew out and continued their fight in the air. The red dragon won the battle and killed the white dragon.

The boy explained that the white dragon represented the Saxons from overseas who would invade the country and threaten the Celtic Britons. The red dragon represented the Celts of Wales who would stand against the invaders and hold them back for a time.

The boy said that his name was Merlin. He prophesied that Vortigern would be killed but a greater king, named Arthur, would follow in his place. Arthur would bear the symbol of the red dragon on the crest of his helmet.

And that is why the symbol of Wales has, ever since, been the red dragon!

© John Welford