Geometric Revelations

Tracy Twyman interviews co-author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Henry Lincoln

Henry Lincoln began his career as an actor, but turned to screenwriting early on, pumping out hundreds of dramatic scripts for television. He was especially adept at writing scripts for historical documentaries, such as Nostradamus, The Tomb of Akhehnaton, and The Man in the Iron Mask, which he wrote for BBC Chronicle. In 1972, he wrote his first documentary about Rennes-le-Chateau, France, The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem...?, which set him off on the pursuit of the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau.

It is the story of a poor parish priest, Berenger Sauniere, stationed in a tiny hilltop village in Southern France, whose alleged discovery of a set of encoded parchments inside his church purportedly lead to him gaining immense wealth from a source as yet unknown. Said to have been discovered in the late 1800s, the parchments supposedly contained, encoded within them, secrets of a historical and theological nature - secrets which threatened the very foundation of the Catholic Church. Sauniere is believed to have in turn encoded these secrets into the bizarre renovations he commissioned for his church, which stands today as a testament to the forbidden knowledge he had allegedly gained. The priest is said to have died a heretic, and was denied Final Unction on his deathbed.

Lincoln's investigation of this strange enigma led to the production of two more documentaries for BBC Chronicle: The Priest the Painter and the Devil in 1974, and The Shadow of the Templars in 1979. In 1982, Lincoln and two co-authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, published the international bestseller, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, followed in 1986 by international bestseller, The Messianic Legacy. In both of these books, the authors laid the groundwork for the theory that the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, and the secret encoded within Sauniere's parchments, pertained to a sacred bloodline.

This was the bloodline of the Merovingian kings of France, who, according to the theory, were the blood descendants of Jesus Christ. In this version of the story, Christ had not died on the cross, but lived on to father a royal dynasty in France with his wife, Mary Magdalen. This, then, was Sauniere's secret, and this secret was apparently being preserved and passed down through the ages by a shadowy secret society called the Priory of Sion, a group shrouded in the mystique of conspiracy and the occult. Describing themselves as both "Catholic Traditionalists" and "a Hermetic Freemasonry", the Priory of Sion had the air of an elite mystical order with unorthodox  political aspirations and friends in high places. It boasted a pedigree dating back to the Middle Ages, and purported to have once been the parent organization of the notorious Knights Templar. The Priory publicly proclaimed its allegiance to the surviving remnants of the Merovingian bloodline, and its then-Grand Master, Pierre Plantard, proclaimed himself the world's most direct descendant of the last Merovingian king, Dagobert II.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy presented a new perspective on Christianity, earning the authors international fame, and not a little controversy. Rennes-le-Chateau became a Mecca for treasure seekers, convinced that the source of Sauniere's wealth was something that he discovered hidden underground somewhere in the surrounding environs. After all, the encoded message of one of Sauniere's parchments did say, "To Dagobert II, king, and to Sion belongs this treasure ..."  But Henry Lincoln was convinced that he had already discovered the real treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau back in 1979. It was an almost mathematically perfect pentagram, shaped out of the five mountain peaks which surround Rennes-le-Chateau. And this perfectly mathematical geometry, Lincoln soon learned, could be found throughout the Aude Valley surrounding the village, indicated by churches, chateaux, and other important monuments. Lincoln was able to graph out onto a map a network of pentagrams and hexagrams, laid out upon a grid pattern, all perfectly geometric and made with even measurements of something called the "Megalithic Yard." 

As the name denotes, this was the measurement used by the ancients when creating megalithic monuments like Stonehenge. Obviously, this geometry had been put there by someone quite deliberately, and at least originally, by someone in the remote past. Lincoln embarked upon a journey to thoroughly explore these mysteries, which has so far resulted in two books, The Holy Place and Key to the Sacred Pattern, as well as two video documentaries, The Secret: Investigating the Rennes-le-Chateau Mystery with Henry Lincoln, and Henry Lincoln's Guide to Rennes-le-Chateau and the Aude Valley, both distributed by Illuminated Word. A new book released last year, The Templars' Secret Island, was co-written by Erling Haagensen, and pertains to a similar pattern of geometry found on the Danish island of Bornholm.

 

The Interview

TT:  Your opinion is that the geometry of the landscape is the most important thing about Rennes-le-Chateau, right?

HL: It is the only thing which is demonstrable and provable. 

TT: How do you think the geometry got there? Was it a human agent, or a natural formation?

HL: What are you trying to say?

TT: I'm just asking, "Who put it there and for what purpose?"

HL:  It's actually a lot more of a complex question than you realize. It would appear that at some point in the remote past - and we don't know when that is, but probably a time which saw the construction of the great megaliths like Stonehenge and Carnac. Sometime 'round about then somebody noticed the configuration in the mountains, which are natural. So having been aware that you have this pentagonal structure in the mountains, this automatically endows the place with what one would label "holiness."  It is "As above, so below."  It is the mirror on Earth of the goddess in the heavens. It is a sacred place. Once that had been noticed, then the additional geometry was structured around it.

So the original thing was a natural placement of five - or actually six - mountain peaks which formed a near-perfect pentagon. Now I have a qualification about the natural quality of the mountains, because one of my ways of approach is to ask the sort of questions which the normal academic mind will not approach. I am inclined to look with the eyes of a child. Not in a childish way, but with the eyes of a child, and look for simplicity. And one of the questions to be asked about this extraordinary phenomenon of mountains in a perfect geometric form is apparently stupid. Is it possible that somebody could have built the mountains? Now, most people wouldn't even consider the question. It does seem stupid, doesn't it?

TT:  I don't think so. 

HL:  How would you answer that question?

TT: I would just say that the odds of that happening naturally are so astronomical. I mean, it's like believing that Mt. Rushmore is natural, or something.

HL: So you are now saying that there has to be some "supernormal agency" at work?

TT:  I'm saying that it didn't just happen by itself. It was consciously created.

HL: Well, following the way that most people would interpret that language (1), what I would say is absolutely not. Nothing that we are confronting with Rennes-le-Chateau and its associated phenomena is anything other than within the capabilities of normal intelligent human beings. Homo sapiens, nothing else. You have a near-perfect configuration of mountains. It is not beyond the capability of homo sapiens actually to construct an artificial high point  in order to perfect the geometry. You only have to look at the size of Silbury Hill, for instance, which we all know is man-made, or the Great Pyramid. So it is possible that the actual high spots which indicate the pentagon of mountains could have been refined, as it were, though I think that the original mountains in their natural state were already sufficiently close for it to be astronomically unlikely to have originated by chance. But it did. Then around that natural formation, people began to construct a geometric layout.

A thousand years later, perhaps, we eventually come to that period, in the 12th century, when the geometry is now being laid out in the Baltic. And there it is very consciously done, and with much, much more precision. It's a development of what was begun at Rennes-le-Chateau and is now extended at Bornholm. Have you read The Secret Island? In there I am talking about absolute accuracy. Because at Rennes-le-Chateau we are not talking about absolute accuracy. I used words like 'exact' in The Holy Place and Key to the Sacred Pattern in an unscientific way. When you come to The Secret Island, we are being much more exact, because we are not measuring lines on a map anymore, which is what we were doing in the early days.

You know, on a map, even with the finest line I can draw I'm still covering ten meters on the ground. An intersection of two lines could be anything up to almost 20 meters. Consequently we are not talking about anything anywhere near perfection. But now we've gone beyond that. I'll give you one of my favorite sentences about it. I'm talking about a piece of geometry which they'd laid out on Bornholm, which is a circle defined in the English measure, and it is 56 English miles in circumference. Now, I had to say, of course, it isn't absolutely accurate. 

TT: How far off is it?

HL: "The discrepancy", I wrote on the page, "however, over 56 miles, is slightly less than the diameter of this full stop." That is exact. Now we are not guessing anymore. We have exact coordinates with which we are working. We did not choose the coordinates. The Danish Bureau of Land Surveying chose certain places as trig points. We have those points fixed to the millimeter. And they chose all the fifteen churches on the island. So those people who accuse us of choosing the structures which suit our argument and ignoring the ones that don't are talking gibberish. There are fifteen churches, and we use them all. Four of them are circular, so you measure to the exact center of the circle.

That's what the Danish Government Bureau of Land Surveying did. They measured to the cross upon the top of the church, which is over the exact geometric center. They were not looking for accuracy. They were merely fixing points. When we did the measurement mathematically using the coordinates - I won't give you names, because they would be useless, but there were churches A, B, and C. The geometry implied that the distance from church A to B should be the same as the distance from church A to C. The discrepancy over seven English miles is actually just over four and a half inches.

We have to remember that when the trig points were chosen, they were not looking for the accuracy of the measure, they were just measuring to a point on the cross. If I had said to them, "Will you move two inches either way on each cross", you would have had zero discrepancy. So there is no discrepancy in the geometry as laid out in the 12th century. Now academic historians tell us that we did not have the capability to do this. And my response to this is that it is a very feeble argument to say that it cannot be, if you use that argument against the statement "it is."  So the mere fact that they did it demonstrates the capability, and that is why the geometry of Rennes-le-Chateau and Bornholm is an important discovery: because it sheds a new light on the capabilities of our ancestors. 

TT: So in order for all of this geometry to be laid out, it would have to take place over several centuries, or thousands of years, right?

HL:  No, in Bornholm (I dislike speculating, but...) it would have been done in a matter of a few years, ten or fifteen years, maybe.

TT:  Well, I'm just saying that if the same sort of geometry is laid out in all these different places...

HL:  They're using the same measurement system, and they're separating the churches by the same distances. Therefore we are talking about a body of hidden knowledge. This moves into a contentious area in which people like to get into mumbo jumbo, and I don't. It would unquestionably have been considered dangerous knowledge over a thousand years ago. You'll have to remember that Galileo was shown torture instruments when he insisted that the Earth went around the Sun. It was dangerous knowledge. And consequently, this knowledge, which has been handed down over the generations, was always kept as privileged information, solis sacerdotibus - only for the initiated. 

They were perfectly capable of laying out the geometry a thousand years ago, and I can demonstrate how.  They would have laid out the Bornholm geometry in a matter of a few years, though it's been a sacred placed since megalithic times.  There are over a thousand standing stones on the island, and the churches incorporate many of them into their actual structure.  So churches, as is the case in general, have been superimposed on previously sacred sites.  In the sixth century a bishop was saying to his flock, "Will you please cease performing pagan practices at sacred groves, rocks, and places where three track ways meet?" And these we find in the geometry. The churches now use the original pagan sacred sites, so the church has preserved what it was attempting to obliterate. 

TT: So the people who built these things in the Middle Ages were perpetuating a cult from Megalithic times? 

HL:  No, not a cult.  That immediately colors the language.  It's knowledge.  You can't call mathematics or microbiology a cult.  It's scientific knowledge, which needs to be handed down.  You'll have to remember, they didn't have books they didn't have libraries, they didn't have universities.  You have to teach in some way and preserve the information.  That's why Bornholm, I suspect, was used.  It was laid out as a teaching aid.  We're talking about the work of homo sapiens., nothing more nor less.  What we don't know, necessarily, is their reasons for doing it, although I do have my ideas.

TT: Well, that's what I was about to get to next.  What are your ideas?

HL:  When you ask me for a hypothesis, you're asking me to make a guess.  And I say, your guess is as good as mine. 

TT:  But you wouldn't be this interested in it if you didn't have some idea, right?

HL:  Well, of course, it's inevitable when you've been researching a subject for about 20 or 30 years.  You do have ideas.  But they are only ideas, and my ideas have no validity whatsoever.  They're just my guesses.  They're informed guesses, but they are only my guesses.  There are too many people in my sort of position who go around telling people what is the truth.  I don't.  I know nothing but my ignorance. 

TT:  You've said before that in Rennes-le-Chateau, for instance, and in the surrounding area, the geometry forms a sort of temple.

HL: Because the pentagon of mountains is the mirror on Earth of the goddess in the heavens, it is therefore a sacred place.  Now we must not impose our 20th century attitudes on what our ancestors thought.  I once was discussing a particular aspect of this with a Danish academic, and he said it was rubbish.  And I said, "But it doesn't matter whether you think it's rubbish. They didn't."  And that's what matters, because their actions were affected by their beliefs, and consequently we must take seriously what they thought.  We can't say, "It's rubbish."  We must say, "They thought it wasn't, and therefore their actions need to be considered in relation to that belief."  Therefore we must take their beliefs seriously, or we will never understand what they were trying to do. 

So for them, the pentacle was looked upon, as Professor Cornford said, with little less than awe and reverence.  It was a magical figure. And it mirrored on Earth the goddess in the heavens.  The movements of Venus, "As above, so below", consequently defined a pentacle on the Earth in the form of mountains.  This made it a sacred place.  Venus was equated with the Magdalen.  Rennes-le-Chateau's church is dedicated to the Magdalen. 

TT:  You found all of these Golden Mean proportions in the landscape around Rennes-le-Chateau -

HL: Inevitable, because you are dealing with a pentagon.  You cannot separate the pentagon from the golden section.  The pentagon is essentially a golden section figure.  That's why it's sacred.  That's why it's the divine proportion. 

TT: Have you found any Fibonacci spirals in the landscape?

HL:  Well, inevitably, again, if you are dealing with the pentagon, you are dealing with the Fibonacci series.  You can't avoid it.  They are interlocked.

TT: I just wondered, for instance, if churches were laid out in that particular shape. 

HL: There are churches laid out in pentagonal form, hexagonal form, and so on.  You can't avoid eventually coming across the Fibonacci series, particularly when you're dealing with the pentagon. 

TT: Have you compared the geometry of Rennes-le-Chateau to the geometry of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem?

HL: I'm beginning to look at the Temple Mount, and there are unquestionable similarities.  They are using the same measure in Jerusalem.  It works there, and interestingly enough, the distance from Bornholm to Rennes-le-Chateau to Jerusalem gives you an isosceles triangle in round English miles.  That's really quite spectacular.  So there is inevitably work to be done, both in Jerusalem and in Egypt as well.

TT:  So if you can find the same geometry, and demonstrate that it was there thousands of years ago too, in all of these places all over the world, that indicates that the civilization which did this was a global civilization, right?

HL: There was a body of knowledge which was widely disseminated.  I'm sure we'll find it in China too. I haven't looked. It's time that the academic world removed its blinkers. Fortunately its now beginning to do that, and people are beginning to research these things. I suspect we will now find evidence of a knowledge which was widely disseminated around the globe at some point in the remote past. I can't go any further than that, but I've opened the door.  I'm getting old.  It's time that the next generation took over. I've opened the door. Go through it. There you go.

TT: Do you think that all of this stuff would have come out if you hadn't written about it?

HL: I don't know. I suppose that somebody would have stumbled upon it before. The knowledge is there. The knowledge has been there.  It certainly was there in the 1100s when Bornholm was laid out, and I suspect that it was still there at the beginning of the 20th century when Sauniere was doing his constructions. There are certain things to indicate that he must have been aware of the geometric structure in the landscape, but it's not proof. There are just indications because of the placement of some of his structures. They conform to the geometry in a way that's highly unlikely to be coincidental. So if that knowledge is around, one can understand why it might have been kept as privileged information in the Middle Ages, but it's a little more difficult to understand why it still is in the 20th and 21st centuries. I suspect that there are people who know a great deal more about it than I do, because I've just been laboring quietly and trying to drag it into the light. I don't know why the information remains "secret." My response to that questions probably denotes less about my knowledge and more about my ignorance. 

TT: So, are you not interested at all in talking about the Priory of Sion?

HL: The Priory of Sion I know nothing whatsoever about. It is purely hearsay. We don't know whether it ever existed in the form which Mr. Plantard suggested, or not. We only have their word on it.

TT: But didn't these people - Pierre Plantard and some of the others - give you information that was very useful to you?

HL: No.

TT: No? None?

HL: Nothing that would have contributed towards where I've got, no. 

TT: Gerard de Sede - was he involved with them?

HL:  His reliability is made fairly clear by the fact that he offered to sell me the treasure discovered by Berenger Sauniere. 

TT: For how much?

Hl:  We didn't get around to discussing that.  Have you not read the account to that in Key to the Sacred Pattern?

TT: I have, but honestly, it's been a couple of years.

HL: Yeah, well then you should re-read it. It's quite amusing. Especially as he's been wheeled out as one of the experts. Re-read what I have to say. It's only about two or three pages in Key to the Sacred Pattern. And I reproduce his letter. It's quite funny. I ignored it. You see, this also demonstrates my attitude. When I received the letter - "Dear Mr. Lincoln, I've just heard you're making your second film, so I'm offering you pictures of the treasure" - most people would begin to slaver at the chops and jump up and down with excitement. I merely sent him a letter saying "Tell me more." 

He told me more in a letter which I received a week later saying he was offering me sound film of the treasure discovered by Berenger Sauniere. He gave me a telephone number to call him to arrange the selling of the film to the BBC. And I merely filed it into a pocket, because I knew that it was a fake. So since I've exposed him in the perpetration of fraud, I pay no attention to anything he says. He's merely repeating what he's been told, and I have underlined that many times in Key to the Sacred Pattern. The information he was giving me was quite often distorted, because he was merely passing on what he had been told. 

TT:  By who? By the Priory?

HL:  I don't know who the Priory are. By M. Plantard, probably. I can be slightly more definitive in using that name because I know that the illustrations which were provided for me by Gerard de Sede all had the name "Plantard" in purple rubber stamp on the back. And that was the first time I had encountered the name "Plantard."  So I know that Plantard was the source for De Sede's information. 

TT: Well, didn't they give you some information about pentagonal geometry?

HL: No, I found the geometry! It was when M. Plantard, at my very first meeting with him, said to me, "The parchments were fakes, and they were faked by Cherisey", who was seated right next to me. My response was to say, "No, M. Plantard", which was not the response he expected. Because I had already found the pentagon in the parchment, and therefore I knew that there was a lot more to that document then had so far been talked about.

I found the geometry in the parchment, and then in the Poussin painting. Then I went to Christopher Cornford, who is the professor at the Royal College of Arts who did the geometric analysis, and he established that the geometry was pentagonal. And then, on Christopher Cornford's advice, I looked at the landscape. I then discovered the pentagon of mountains. So all of the pentagonal geometry was an original discovery by me. It did not come from the Priory. When I suggested to M. Plantard that the secret was in some sense geometric, he was hesitant about it. I got this on film. I did this quite deliberately. I asked him the question about the geometry, and I said, "It is pentagonal."  It threw him completely. He wasn't expecting that question, and he said, "I can't talk to you about that." 

TT:  So did he seem surprised because it was the first time that he had heard of it, or was he surprised that you had figured it out?

HL:  I asked myself the same question. Was he surprised because I'd discovered it, or was he surprised because he didn't know it was there?  "I don't know", is the answer to that question. 

TT: So they told you that the parchments were a fake, and you knew that that they weren't, or that there was definitely something there.

HL:  It depends on what you mean by "fake."  The word going around is that they had been concocted for a ten minute television program. Having found the depth and the subtlety of the geometry concealed within the parchment, I knew that there was no way that they had been concocted for a ten minute television program. Added to which, I had talked to British Intelligence, who had examined the cipher, and said it was the most complex cipher they'd ever seen. It would have taken months of work to prepare, and it was utterly unbreakable. So I knew that the parchments had a lot more to them than that. That doesn't mean to say that, as some people insist, they were concocted in the 1950s. It doesn't matter a damn whether they were concocted in the 1950s. We don't know when they were concocted. What matters is the content. 

TT:  Is there anything that would convince you that it would be worthwhile to excavate the ground beneath Rennes-le-Chateau? Is there any possible evidence that could come along and change your mind about that? 

HL:  No. I can't think of anything that would be worth excavating. If you want a chest full of golden jewels, that's ultimately banal. It's of no interest whatsoever. It doesn't teach us anything. What we have is a greater treasure, which is a body of secret knowledge. And you can't dig that up out of the ground.

TT: Do you ever talk to Baigent and Leigh anymore?

HL: No. We have nothing to talk about anymore. We finished with The Messianic Legacy, which was the exploration of all that historical background of the secret society business, which was becoming more speculative. The publishers wanted a third book, to which I said, "I have nothing more to say on the subject." So Baigent and Leigh wrote The Temple and the Lodge, and I essentially retired from it at that stage, but sat down and pondered. It was at this point that I realized that the geometry was really all there was that was tangible. So I turned my attention to it again, and we've had another ten or twenty years of work since then. But that's down my own line. Baigent and Leigh know nothing of Rennes-le-Chateau as such. Richard Leigh, to my knowledge, has never even visited the village. I took Baigent down there once or twice so we could take photographs, but I don't know if he's ever been back. So about the village and the geometry they know nothing, and therefore I have no cause to speak to them at all. 

TT:  Have you talked to Plantard, Gerard de Sede, or any of those people since The Messianic Legacy?

HL: I was in touch with M. Plantard for a few years following. He used to write to me reasonably often, but I didn't always reply because I was pursuing this new line of research to which I knew he could not contribute. The Priory of Sion and all its works are of no use to me whatsoever in these new lines of research. And so essentially I just turned my back on it. There's only so much one person can do. 

TT: I was wondering why, when you guys were writing Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy, you didn't go very much into some of the things that were mentioned in the magazine Vaincre. There were a lot of articles in there about underground cities, the hollow earth, and Atlantis. You guys just sort of brushed over it.

HL:  There isn't very much in there on those sort of subjects, and in any case, that moves into the realms of pure speculation, wishful thinking and fantasy. And I have no interest in that. 

TT: Well, sure, I didn't expect you to think that these articles pertained to Rennes-le-Chateau especially, but I just thought that they demonstrated what the modern Priory of Sion was all about.

HL: Well, there were a lot of other chapters to be written in the book. I think that perhaps, if we'd had nothing better to do, and Baigent and Leigh had wanted to research it, we would've pursued it. I personally have no interest in it. 

TT: If you were to go back and redo Holy Blood, Holy Grail, or The Messianic Legacy, or any of your other books, is there anything that you would change, or that you regret doing?

HL: No, one should never regret what one's done. But the value of my earlier work is purely historical. One can look back and see how the research developed over the years, and how the ideas have changed. People say to me, "You said something in this book which you contradicted in a later book." I say, "It would be very surprising if I didn't." Because research goes on, and ideas that you have inevitably change after ten, or fifteen, or twenty years more research. It would be ludicrous if they didn't. So, yeah, none of that earlier material is of any significance as far as I'm concerned now.

TT: If you're a nonfiction writer, people will always attack you for changing your mind about something, even over a period of years. It means that you were either wrong all along, or you're wrong now.

HL: Well, if you're not going to change your mind then you might as well not start. New evidence inevitably affects the way you think. New evidence must, otherwise what's the point of looking for it? You can't know everything from the beginning, otherwise what's the point of doing research?

TT: You recently gave a speech to the Sauniere Society. I was told that you were going there to convince them to stop researching Sauniere. 

HL: There are people who want to know much more about it, and I think, "Yes, please, get on with it. Do the research. I don't want to do it. You do it."

TT: I see. I thought you were trying to get people not to look into it anymore.

HL: Oh, no no. Good heavens, it's not my place to tell people what to do and what not to do. I'm just a writer. 

TT: I'm sure you've always had this skeptical mind, but was there one thing that happened in the course of your research that turned you from the sort of "Messianic Legacy research" to the geometry, and caused you to ignore everything else? Was there one thing that changed your mind and made you decide that you weren't going to look into the other stuff anymore?

HL: Yes, I suppose, but it wasn't really one thing. As I've said, when we finished The Messianic Legacy, I didn't want to do any more. The others went on and did The Temple and the Lodge. I went back just to wrap up my files, finish with it all. And I sat down and said to myself, "What do I really know about this story after twenty years of research? Not guessing, but what do I know?" And when I began to jot down the demonstrable and provable facts, they came down to pentagons associated with the landscape. That was all I knew, and that's what made me decide to look at it more carefully. And so, having realized that I had stumbled upon something which needed explaining, I have now devoted the last how many years to researching that.

I've been making one discovery after another. Here I will make an arrogant statement:  In all of the books which have been written about Rennes-le-Chateau, and all of the speculation around it, there have been only two discoveries which were not made by me. Both of them were to do with the geometry stemming from the work which I have done. One was the geometry discovered by David Wood, and the other was the geometry discovered by Erling Haagensen, which he did independently on Bornholm. But apart from that, all the rest is speculation. The only genuine discoveries have come out of my research, David Wood's, and Erling Haagensen's.

TT: So are you planning on writing any more books or doing any more videos.

HL:  Probably. I've got more material. Inevitably there are more discoveries - a great deal more since the last book. And people had better read The Secret Island. It's not so easy to read as Key to the Sacred Pattern, but it will give you precision of geometry. And if you've got a good mathematician around, you'll be able to confirm it from the coordinates which we quote in the book.

 

Afterword
I was 17 years old when I first read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, co-authored by Henry Lincoln and based on a hypothesis largely of his device. I soon moved on to The Messianic Legacy, and then later his solo books The Holy Place and The Key to the Sacred Pattern. Those books, and the first two in particular, changed my life, and I feel that I owe a great debt to Mr. Lincoln for paving the way.

Nonetheless, there are a few points which Lincoln made that I cannot let pass without comment. First of all, I find it incongruous that a man with such a brilliant and logical mind would believe that "pure chance" brought these mountains into near-perfect geometric shape. Even he admits that this configuration is, "astronomically unlikely to have originated by chance." So why is chance, then, a more logical explanation than some form of human agency having, essentially, built the mountains? A key part of Lincoln's theory states that ancient man possessed much greater mathematical and technical ability than historians credit him with. And we know from the megaliths and cyclopean monuments built by our ancestors that they were capable of amazing feats of architectural construction, some of which have yet to be explained by modern science. Why is it so unlikely, then, for these mountains to have been placed in this configuration by these ancient technical wizards?

Another point on which Lincoln and I part is his blanket dismissal of the Priory of Sion as a source of valuable information, and in fact his complete repudiation of the contents of  Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy - the two books that made him an international celebrity and brought the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau to public light. While I don't pretend to know for a fact whether or not the modern Priory of Sion really does possess the ancient pedigree or political connections that it has boasted of, I do think that they must be the bearers of some genuine secret pertaining to Rennes-le-Chateau. After all, they were the keepers of the parchments in which Lincoln first discovered the geometry that he later applied to the landscape of Rennes-le-Chateau - the only aspect of the mystery which Lincoln considers to have any value. Whether they concocted it themselves or whether they had been preserving it since Sauniere's time, the fact remains that they were the possessors of these documents.

Furthermore, I cannot ignore the inner logic of the theories presented in the "Prieuré documents" discussed in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which largely formed the basis for the hypothesis presented in that book. The theories linking the Merovingian bloodline with the Judaic line of Christ and King David, and linking the Merovingians' descendants with the Knights Templar, the Ordre de Sion, the Rosicrucians, the Compagnie du Saint - Sacrement, the Heiron du Val d'Or, the Freemasons, the French Resistance, and the modern Priory of Sion - these theories are too logical and well-argued to ignore. I think that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, prompted by the material published by the modern Priory of Sion, properly identified a cult of heretical Christianity, linked with various secret hermetic societies throughout the centuries, and linked politically with the same influential European families throughout the centuries. They clearly established at least one facet of what the cult believed: that certain European noble bloodlines were derived from Christ, King David, and the patriarchs of the Bible. They also clearly established the connection between this cult and the region of Southern France surrounding Rennes-le-Chateau.

Whether or not the Merovingians were actually descendants of Christ, we still have evidence indicating that many powerful people throughout history have believed this, and have apparently dedicated themselves to the furtherance of a sort of "Merovingian ideal."  The Priory of Sion has claimed to be the common thread behind all of this, and in my opinion, there is as much corroboration for the existence of the Priory of Sion in history as there is for many other groups, people and events accepted as real by historians. What's more, they apparently do know something. If the Priory's own literature is to be believed, their secrets originated not with Christ, but in the antediluvian world. It just so happens that this is where our own research of the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau had lead us.

But Henry Lincoln wants no part of this, and I can respect that. He has made more than his share of amazing discoveries, and has built a solid reputation that he no doubt wishes to maintain. He is, in fact, grandfather to an entire field of research. And the things which he has discovered may someday lead to a revolution in the way historians perceive ancient man. For me, Henry Lincoln has blazed a trail, and it is my hope that I, and other researchers like me, will be able to take this study much, much further within our lifetimes. After all, Henry Lincoln himself said, "It's time for the next generation to take over. I've opened the door. Go through it."  P

 

Endnotes:
(1)  In this instance, Lincoln misinterpreted my point. I was suggesting not a supernatural agent, but a human agent performing acts not normally thought of as humanly possible, like moving mountains.

Tracy Twyman is the author of: