Artists are initiates who teach through their work. The paintings have a ‘higher vibration’ that is recognized by other initiates.
Anonymous Priory of Sion member
Itrust art more than I trust history. Art is capable of providing an alternative way to record information through symbols and images that will survive the bias and censorship suffered by historical accounts.
The arts, especially painting, literature, and to some extent music, are an obvious place to record secrets. They are a platform for encoding symbolic meaning and messages that will endure indefinitely. The arts are generally a protected medium that survives well in private collections and museums, innocuously populating the walls of wealthy abodes.
At many times in history art has been a means to hide ideas in plain view. The symbolism in paintings is a perfect medium for heresy as it can portray political and religious ideas beneath imagery that is seemingly innocent. For example, the works of Hieronymus Bosch were hung in Catholic churches while blatantly depicting Catholic priests as fools. Author Lynda Harris in The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch makes an excellent case for Bosch being a Cathar heretic.
In art all iconography is heresy to some extent. By homogenizing the likeness of God into an image of a man we have set limits to the idea of God. As a man he cannot be the underlying force that connects all life in the universe. The Muslim tradition of not depicting Allah or his creations would serve us well here as it prevents a physical image coming instantly to mind and demands that we actually reach for a sense of knowing the divine.
The mysteries of the Priory of Sion have often manifested in the arts and can be seen in the works of notable figures who are considered to have been aligned to their cause. Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Poussin, Jules Verne, and Jean Cocteau all carried on the tradition of the Gothic cathedral-builders and incorporated the Hermetic sciences into their works.
The artists themselves need not be adepts, and many have simply worked to order for their patrons, so in all cases of creativity we would do well to consider where the money came from. However, Leonardo painted according to his own inspired knowledge while others such as Poussin may have benefited from more ‘hands-on’ direction.
Apart from being used to encode and protect knowledge, art can also have the power to impact upon society by seeding it with ideas both old and new. A good artist is capable of capturing the public imagination, creating and facilitating changes they perceive as coming. Creativity traditionally acts as an expression of the higher self – the divine and true creation that seeks to build upon and update the information that has come before.
To the initiate, the space between the simple urge to create and a contrived concept gives rise to the idea of ‘complete art’; that is, art that draws on all sources, not just itself. Like the Renaissance thinker, informed by science, spirituality, politics, history, mythology and psychology, ‘complete art’ should engage and reflect humanity at every level of being. Examples of meaningful art and architecture can be seen in the occult geometry of the great cathedrals, the Kabbalistic languages and the paintings of many great artists. Hermetic thought has influenced many notable painters from the Renaissance to the Surrealists.
A follower of André Breton (see Surrealism and the Occult) wrote that the artist should at all times ‘keep their left eye on the telescope and their right eye on the microscope’. Such advice allows the Hermetic axiom of ‘as above, so below’ to be kept plainly in view.
The symbols used in art can be transformative to the individual who looks upon them with the right understanding. At a time when books were hand-copied and pictures were limited to church windows and the homes of the wealthy, symbolism was recognized as a universal language that had the potential to speak directly to the psyche. Today we are bombarded with visual information in print and electronic media and we are so overwhelmed that our ability to read the depth of a symbol drains from our eyes. We have become unused to having to work at reading and to viewing pictures with our fullest attention and respect. With this our ability to engage with symbols has declined, degrading them to simple icons or signs with no depth of meaning. But symbols have the potential to hold power and can affect us deeply, as a national flag stirs the emotions of a patriot.
Symbolism is a language that functions on three levels: the archetypal, the personal and the intentional. As an archetype, a symbol can be used as a psychological tool to communicate often complex ideas by reducing them to simple pictograms, such as a mandala. The intended level of meaning is that which the author aimed to convey. This is not always apparent and is prone to cultural and historical influence. The personal interpretation is the level of meaning that we bring to a symbol when we view it from our own standpoint. In this way a symbol can be adapted to suit the needs of those who use it.
Ultimately we have to strip away the many interpretations and conclude what symbols mean in the context we find them. The encapsulated form of a symbol can be experienced as a ‘short cut’ to an underlying concept in all its depth and ramifications, but it also acts as a barrier to those who only consider it superficially.
Symbols can acquire layers of meaning over time. This is often the case in art, where different artists may reproduce an idea at different times. Hermetic symbolism, psychological imagery and religious subversion can develop in meaning as they are communicated through the ages. These ideas can be as simple as the colour of the clothing on figures portrayed on the canvas. In Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego (The Shepherds of Arcadia) the shepherds’ robes could represent the influence of different planets, giving the work an astrological meaning (see the plates section for a reproduction of this painting). And at one point in history there was a confusion over Mary Magdalene wearing blue and white – colours traditionally used to depict the mother of Jesus – that eventually prompted a papal decree to prevent this from continuing, lest Mary Magdalene should encroach on the power and influence of the Virgin.
Conversely, in both of Caravaggio’s depictions of the Madonna and Child, Mary is wearing red, usually the symbolic dress of Mary Magdalene.
In 1656, the Abbé Fouquet wrote to his brother:
‘He [Poussin] and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail – things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever discover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.’
The artist Nicolas Poussin was initially brought to our attention by the parchments circulated by the Priory of Sion in the 1970s. Henry Lincoln decoded two parchments back in the 1970s, having discovered them in a French publication called The Accursed Treasure by Gérard de Sède. De Sède claimed that the parchments were among Father Saunière’s discoveries at Rennes-le-Château and Sion has since supported this, while admitting that the texts have been modified in more recent times. Once decoded, one of the parchments revealed a message that begins: ‘Shepherdess no temptation, Poussin and Teniers hold the key’.
Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego was already central to the Rennes-le-Château mystery since it was claimed that when Saunière visited Paris he purchased a copy of this painting from the Louvre. Painted during the early 1640s, it shows three shepherds and a shepherdess contemplating a tomb in a landscape setting. One of the shepherds is kneeling to indicate a Latin inscription on the tomb that reads ET IN ARCADIA EGO.
In the early 1980s the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail were directed to similarities between the tomb in the painting and an actual tomb at Les Pontils near Rennes-le-Château. The superstructure of the tomb was destroyed when the local landowner grew weary of trespassers examining it, but the setting remains intact. There are some questions as to whether this tomb existed before Poussin’s painting but as yet no earlier maps have been published. I know Sion is in possession of a hand-drawn map of the region that contains the older place names but as yet they have not released this for examination.
Some also argue that Poussin was never in the region, but Sion maintains that Poussin undertook several pilgrimages while travelling between France and Italy. As mentioned in the chapter on pilgrimage it was common practice for artists and poets of the time to undertake the journey to Santiago de Compostela via the region of Rennes-le-Château.
The shape of the tomb at Les Pontils was certainly identical to the one in the painting but deciding if the tombs are literally one and the same remains a matter of personal judgment. Irrespective of this, we can see that Poussin is still directing us to this area from the striking similarities in the landscape. In the background of his painting are three hills, which match Pech Cardou, Blanchefort and Rennes-le-Château in the distance when seen from the tomb at Les Pontils.
If the visible part of the Les Pontils tomb was destroyed, what lay beneath it remains and is highly intriguing. The position of the tomb is somewhat unusual as it was situated on top of a mound beside a river and a main road, where it would attract attention. The mound itself is more rock than soil so makes little sense to tunnel so far into it, yet when it was opened in the 1970s a shaft of some depth was discovered. I have heard claims that this shaft also leads to another exit from the tomb, and it is odd to have a tomb fitted with a back door. It was also visible in photographs of the uncovered tomb that a small pulley had been installed, which leads us to conclude that the tomb served another function at some point in its history. It may be that the pulley and tunnel are recent additions, for instance the French Resistance could have stored munitions there during the Second World War.
Furthermore, the location of the tomb is exactly on the ‘Rose Line’ that runs parallel to the Paris Meridian and so may serve as a marker of some kind. Its prominence certainly makes it a useful landmark.
Henry Lincoln studied Poussin’s canvas for his book The Holy Place published in the 1980s. He concluded that it was constructed around a pentagram and that this pentagram can be outlined on the landscape with points linking Rennes-le-Château, Blanchefort and the Château des Templiers at Le Bézu. Even ardent critics of our mystery have conceded that this vast pentagram is accurate across these peaks. But as I remarked earlier, it is difficult to draw conclusions from this as the hills have been in place since the Pyrenees first rose from the sea (see Chapter 7).
A number of other authors and researchers have made use of the geometry found in this painting while some have brought their own designs to bear on the canvas and this has also been covered in the earlier chapter.
The content of Poussin’s painting is open to further interpretation. For example, the kneeling shepherd points to the inscription on the tomb and this action can be found in the Masonic 17th (Rose+Croix) Degree when the initiate kneels in front of an altar and points to letters representing faith, hope and charity.
The Latin inscription itself, ET IN ARCADIA EGO, has no single definitive translation but roughly means ‘I too was in Arcadia’ with the ‘I’ usually presumed to mean death, owing to the inscription being on a tomb. The sense would be that even in idyllic Arcadia there is death. However, as we have seen from previous chapters, there is some scope for interpreting the ‘I’ to be a specific historical figure who is actually buried in the region.
Sion claims that the phrase can also be read as ET IN ARCADIA ERGO SUM, (‘And in Arcadia therefore I am’), commenting that ‘The interchangeable nature of ego and ergo is a much used form of coded Kabbalah.’ I believe that Sion members use this phrase as a form of greeting and response when meeting other members.
Arcadia itself is a specific region of Greece but also symbolizes a place and a time of perfection, a kind of paradise or Eden, and an idea very much in keeping with the French rural idyll. In mythology Arcadia was the birthplace of Pan, the god of shepherds and flocks. The psychology of the mythic land before humankind’s ‘Fall’ from innocence should not be ignored.
The alchemists Paracelsus (1493–1541) and Gerhard Dorn (c1530–1584) used ‘Elysium’, a term equivalent to ‘Arcadia’, to refer to an original state of being. Paracelsus describes metals in their purest form as eleuseria metalla, ‘paradisial metals’. Elysium is the paradise of Greco-Roman antiquity, much the same as Eden or Arcadia. This original state can be applied to metals, to the body and to the unconscious. In the alchemical process, the false structure is dissolved to allow the true nature to emerge. Dorn also made much of the separation of the soul from the blood, and refers to how the alchemist may kill the sick in order to save them. This is reminiscent of how the blood of Jesus, through symbolic self-sacrifice, seeps into the earth and revives Adam to his state prior to the Fall from paradise.
The Arcadia region is often represented in art as containing either a tomb or a fountain, but both mean a place where the subterranean comes to the surface. The fountain is symbolic of the ‘underground stream’ of knowledge that has been passed down through the ages. The name itself, Arcadia, is also linked etymologically to arca and to arc and ark. The arc motif returns many times in the mystery and through the application of the Hermetic ‘green’ language (see page 82) it can be seen to have many meanings. Importantly the area is close to the Paris Meridian and the ‘Rose Line’ and although these are pictured as straight lines, due to the curvature of the earth they are in reality both arcs.
Other levels of interpretation lead to the Pole Star, which is also known as the ‘Star of Arcady’ because the son of Callisto was called Arcas. The arc theme continues with the word ‘ark’, meaning a sacred container. The artist Poussin chose for his personal seal the image of a man holding an ark. It is an unusual design, as if he carried the sum of all life on earth. The ark motif has evolved through history from the Egyptian arks paraded to celebrate the annual flooding of the Nile and containing statuettes of the Egyptian gods. This symbol was transformed into the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments, the essence of the teachings of Yahweh. Noah’s Ark is the same word in the sense of a vessel that carried the essence of all life on earth.
The figures in Poussin’s painting are a shepherdess and three shepherds. The hand of the shepherdess rests affectionately on the shoulder of one of the young men. This was pointed out to me by Nic Haywood as being akin to portraits of the Virgin and Child and is intended to indicate a mother and her son.
Jesus was described as the ‘Good Shepherd’ and if you believe Mary Magdalene to be his bride she then automatically takes on the role of shepherdess, especially with regard to disseminating his teachings. The shepherdess and her lover mentioned in the Bible in the Song of Songs is also thought by some to be about Mary and Jesus (see Starbird), although the Song of Songs is much earlier than Jesus’ time, being in the Hebrew Old Testament.
Sion affirms that when Mary went to Gaul via Greece, ‘she was to be far from alone; other family members would embark on the relatively short journey too’. These relations account for the remaining shepherds.
This is evidenced by St James, the brother of Jesus, whose foot rests on the cornerstone rock. The same figure can also be seen in other paintings by Poussin, for example Extreme Unction also shows St James with his foot on the cornerstone. There are two versions and a sketch with the cornerstone present in all three but the version with the shield in the background is the clearest. Jesus’ brother headed the early Church in Jerusalem and this could be seen as James standing in opposition to the ‘rock’ of St Peter and later St Paul, on which the Roman Catholic Church was founded. There was indeed a split between the Jerusalem Church under James, and Paul, who wanted to relax some tenets of the Jewish faith in order to give the teachings of Jesus (as he understood them) a greater appeal to Greeks and other pagans. For example, they would not be required to be circumcised nor to avoid certain foods. Paul won. On the other hand, Jewish sources record that James and others were executed by stoning in 62CE on the orders of the high priest Ananus.
If we take this shepherdess to be Mary it opens up various avenues of interest. She was known to be of the tribe of Benjamin, many of whom were probably exiled to the region of Arcadia in Greece, which was also the legendary place of origin of the Frankish kings. The painting can therefore be seen as a depiction of the bloodlines, showing its progress via the tribe of Benjamin in Arcadia, and from Jesus and Mary Magdalene through the Franks and Merovingians to the hills of the Languedoc.
It should also be noted that Poussin made an earlier version of the Et in Arcadia Ego theme. This painting includes a skull with a slot cut into it and a bee resting on the cranium. The slot is in keeping with the ritualized slot that was cut into the skulls of Merovingian kings and the bee is a symbol of the royal line of Egyptian pharaohs, who saw the hive as a mirror for their society.
However, while many researchers focus on the Et in Arcadia Ego paintings there is a far more obvious work by Poussin regarding the relationship of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
In the Louvre, in the adjacent room to the later of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego paintings, hangs his depiction of Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery, an episode recounted in the gospel of John (7.53–8.11). The gospel text does not actually name the woman, but a long artistic tradition identified the adultress with Mary Magdalene – a tradition ultimately based on the false allegation that Mary was a sexual sinner whom Jesus forgave (see page 206). In this painting Jesus and Mary Magdalene stand facing each other in the foreground. Between them, in the background, is a woman holding a child and clearly pregnant with a second. As Jesus points to the adulteress his finger rests on the mother in the background, who is at the centre of the painting. The clothes of the mother are blue and white in the style of the Virgin Mary, which as mentioned previously, also appeared in art worn by Mary Magdalene until the Church forbade it. It is unlikely that the mother figure is a symbol of moral correctness with which we should compare the adulteress, since the purpose of this biblical scene was to teach people not to judge others. An alternative is that by having Jesus point at both the mother and the Magdalene he is telling us that they are one and the same. It is further evidence that Poussin was party to the secret of the bloodline and gives credibility to his place in the Rennes-le-Château mystery.
The painting St Anthony and St Paul in the Desert by David Teniers the Younger (1610–90) was mentioned in the chapter on the Temple. Like Poussin’s second Et in Arcadia Ego it was alluded to in the parchments released by Sion during the 1960s. The painting works on many levels and although Poussin’s work has been made synonymous with the Rennes affair the Teniers work is equally revealing.
The original painting is believed to be in a private collection in Spain, having been sold at auction in 1923 and subsequently hidden from public view. A search for this work will bring up references to a poor copy at Shugborough Hall in England (see below). The only accurate copy known to exist is a bromide that the Priory of Sion owned for a number of years, having instructed Nic Haywood to procure it. Nic loaned the bromide to me and it is reproduced in the plates section of this book.
Even though the painting clearly shows a crucifix on the table, the bromide was wrongly catalogued as Elijah and Elisha being fed by the Raven, a scene from the Old Testament. This mislabelling would appear to have been a deliberate attempt to hide the work from the public eye. What it actually shows is St Paul the Hermit (not Paul the apostle) and St Anthony beside a table in the foreground with a raven that is bringing them bread. On and around the table are objects such as a skull, a book and an hourglass. In the background are a hilltop town and a shepherdess.
A skull and an hourglass are recorded as being present on tables during Rosicrucian meetings in the 17th century (as referred to by Christopher McIntosh in The Rosicrucians), and with the cross and book form the requirements for a ‘chamber of reflection’ like the one in the church at Rennes-le-Château (see page 101). As the painting pre-dates the Masonic Rose+Croix Degree it can be seen as an authentic reference to an earlier Rosicrucian movement.
Like Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds, the figures in Teniers’ painting are set against the backdrop of a real location in the region of Rennes-le-Château. Nic Haywood drew my attention to ‘the clifftop building in the Teniers composition’. One possible candidate is L’Hermitage (‘The Hermitage’), to the south of Rennes-les-Bains, but the clifftop town is more in keeping with Rennes-le-Château itself. This would place the painting to the southwest of the village. Looking across the landscape this would form the southwest corner of the hidden temple, while Poussin’s painting shows the northeast corner.
The account of a raven bringing bread to feed a hermit exists in the Bible, where a raven feeds Elijah in the Old Testament (1 Kings 17.4–5). This image appears again in St Jerome’s The Life of St Paul the Hermit, his account of St Paul and St Anthony the Great in the desert. The prophets Elijah and Elisha are said by Sion to have had an alchemical teacher-pupil relationship that mirrors that of Paul and Anthony. A statue of St Anthony the Great appears in the church at Rennes-le-Château and his feast day is January 17. The raven is a symbol of the opening stage of the alchemical process, nigredo or blackening.
Through the gift of bread, Teniers performs an interesting sleight of hand by linking the scene to a saint who took bread to feed a hermit. The saint is depicted as a shepherdess in the background of Teniers’ and her name is St Roseline.
St Roseline or Rosilyn de Villeneuve was born in 1263 at Arcs in southeast Provence. Her feast day is January 17 and roses are her symbol. Sion recounted her legend and her symbolic importance:
‘The name Rosilyn has been a Kabbalistic godsend, for the fact that [her name encodes] the ‘Line of Secret Places’ [the ‘Rose Line’] and that this saint was local to the Languedoc region. Having secretly given bread to a cave-dwelling hermit, she was challenged by her father while en route with more supplies concealed in her folded apron. On surrendering she allowed the apron to fall open but, as the legend informs us, no bread dropped to the ground, only a cascade of fresh roses!’
Recognizing this to be a miracle, her father, the lord of Arcs, instructed his kitchen staff to provide food for the poor from that day onward. In adult life Roseline became a nun and was known for having visions. When her brother, a Crusader knight, escaped his captors he claimed to have followed visions of Roseline surrounded by roses to find his way home. She died on January 17, 1329, and her body is said to remain uncorrupted.
Roseline was a nobleman’s daughter, but her depiction as a shepherdess in Teniers’ painting links it thematically to Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds.
There are a number of statues of St Roseline in the Rennes-le-Château region including one at the church of Espéraza, which is in the same style as the statues at Rennes-le-Château. Father Boudet, the incumbent of Rennes-les-Bains at the end of the 19th century, placed Espéraza at the centre of a circle of churches in his book The True Language of the Celts and the Stone Circle of Rennes-les-Bains (see page 110). The name Roseline also represents the ‘Rose Line’ that runs parallel to the Paris Meridian and passes near Rennes-le-Château.
Both Poussin’s and Teniers’ paintings work on many levels and relate to more than one aspect of the Rennes-le-Château mystery. Their presence can be clearly discerned in the Rose+Croix Degree of Freemasonry and therefore relate to the idea of initiation through the landscape. The pentagram structure of Poussin’s later Et in Arcadia Ego echoes Henry Lincoln’s ‘landscape geometry’ and the composition also evokes the bloodline and the Arcadian links to Mary Magdalene’s tribe. The presence of Mary as the shepherdess in the company of her family also alludes to the bloodline by challenging us to question who lies in the tomb and to consider the meaning of ‘the place where the underground stream emerges’.
It is not by chance that both the Poussin and Teniers paintings are represented at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England. Shugborough brings together many of the themes in this mystery and it is also the home of the Anson family, earls of Lichfield.
Patrick Anson, fifth earl of Lichfield, a renowned photographer and cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, agreed to meet me and Bruce Burgess in 2005 during the making of the documentary Bloodline. Sadly, before the meeting could take place, Lord Lichfield died suddenly of what was diagnosed as a cerebral haemorrhage. The meeting had been arranged by a representative of the Priory of Sion, who later suggested that a toxin might have been used to induce such an event. During our research we discovered that four other members of the Priory of Sion were thought to have died in the same manner.
The Shugborough estate has so many works of art and sculpture that pertain to the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château and the Priory of Sion that this is unlikely to be a coincidence. In the grounds of Shugborough Hall stands a stone monument representing Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego in reverse and, as I mentioned, the house is also home to a copy of St Anthony and St Paul in the Desert by Teniers the Younger.
The ‘shepherds’ monument was added to an existing stone archway along with a number of other structures in the gardens that give the impression of being part of a wider design, such as a route of initiation. The monument depicts an identical scene to the one in Poussin’s painting with the figures standing beside a tomb but in reverse, an effect that appears in alchemy as mirroring. It also bears this inscription, which has so far managed to elude definitive translation:
O.U.S.A.V.V.A.V.
D. M.
The full stops clearly give the impression that we are reading a set of initials. According to Jocelyn Godwin’s analysis of the Hypnerotimachia Poliphili, a 15th-century romance, the initials D. M. on sculptures of this kind generally stand for Dis Manibus (‘to the Shades’), an old Roman devotional statement.
This is also a standard code format for Freemasons who have long employed the use of verbum dismissum, the blanking of words following the first letter. Many Masonic books, for example, use the term G.A.O.T.U. in place of their title for God, the ‘Grand Architect Of The Universe’.
According to Nic Haywood the code on the monument is still in use at this time so cannot be revealed. I doubt it exists in everyday Freemasonry or it would long ago have leaked into the public domain. According to Nic,
‘The most important esoteric clue to the Shugborough monument is that of the ceiling design of the dining room, built at the same time depicts Isis and Serapis (a late form of Osiris) in roundels, clearly identified by their attributes, a sistrum and a corn-measure or shibboleth.’
A sistrum is a kind of metal rattle used in rituals, while the ‘shibboleth’ is a sheath of corn. But it is also a word used to mean a secret password in Masonic rituals.
The elements of the mystery at Shugborough Hall can be drawn together as a complete understanding of the bloodline in art and architecture.
The exiled tribe of Benjamin came to Arcadia in Greece, a place depicted by Poussin’s painting. Arcadia was also the ancient home of the Sicambrian Franks, the ethnic group from which the Merovingians emerged, and through the clues in the art and architecture of Shugborough Hall we are expected to link the two.
In the tomb of the Merovingian king Childeric a golden bull’s head was discovered. According to the Bible, the tribe of Benjamin also idolatrously worshipped the Golden Calf, as depicted in Poussin’s painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf. This includes dancers who are a mirror images of those in his Dance to the Music of Time, which itself is based upon Guido Reni’ s Aurora, as is the ceiling of Shugborough Hall.
We have begun to see how the many forms of symbols can be used to transmit information. They form a universal language used by secret societies and artists to convey messages to those who can read them.
Symbols must be contemplated to reveal their inner nature.
Just as a poet reduces a vast concept to a few lines, a complex idea can be reduced to a single symbol or geometrical shape. Symbols can also appear on the cusp of the conscious and unconscious. They form the boundaries of language, where the most complex concept is transformed into the simplest of images.
The images we are examining reverberate through the many levels of consciousness and lead us toward the inner teachings of Sion: alchemy and, ultimately, gnosis.