Priory of Sion

Priory of Sion

The Prieuré de Sion ([pʁi.jœ.ʁe də sjɔ̃]), translated as Priory of Sion, was a fraternal organisation founded and dissolved in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard in his failed attempt to create a prestigious neo-chivalric order. In the 1960s, Plantard began claiming that his self-styled order was the latest front for a secret society founded by crusading knight Godfrey of Bouillon, on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, under the guise of the historical monastic order of the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion. As a framework for his grandiose assertion of being both the Great Monarch prophesied by Nostradamus and a Merovingian pretender, Plantard further claimed the Priory of Sion was engaged in a centuries-long benevolent conspiracy to install a secret bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe. To Plantard's surprise, all of his claims were fused with the notion of a Jesus bloodline and popularised by the authors of the 1982 speculative nonfiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, whose conclusions would later be borrowed by Dan Brown for his 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code.After attracting varying degrees of public attention from the late 1960s to the 1980s, the mythical history of the Priory of Sion was exposed as a ludibrium — an elaborate hoax in the form of an esoteric puzzle — created by Plantard as part of his unsuccessful stratagem to become a respected, influential and wealthy player in French esotericist and monarchist circles. Pieces of evidence presented in support of the historical existence and activities of the Priory of Sion before 1956, such as the so-called Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau, were discovered to have been forged and then planted in various locations around France by Plantard and his accomplices.Despite the "Priory of Sion mysteries" having been exhaustively debunked by journalists and scholars as France's greatest 20th-century literary hoax, many conspiracy theorists still persist in believing that the Priory of Sion was a millennium-old cabal concealing a religiously subversive secret. A few independent researchers outside of academia claim, based on alleged insider information, that the Priory of Sion continues to operate as a conspiratorial secret society to this day. Some skeptics express concern that the proliferation and popularity of pseudohistorical books, websites and films inspired by the Priory of Sion hoax contribute to the problem of unfounded conspiracy theories becoming mainstream; while others are troubled by how these works romanticize the ideologies of antisemitism.

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