Di dalam bukunya yang berdimensi luar biasa lebar, mewah, pake kertas yang licin dan full ilustrasi ini, mbak Sangeet Duchane menjelaskan bahwa sejarah Priory tak terlepas dari HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL, terbagi menjadi 3 periode klaim pendirian, dan dimulai dari sebuah organisasi bernama Alpha Galates, yang juga telah disinggung secara ringkas oleh Jim Marrs dalam bukunya RULE BY SECRECY. Berikut ini kutipan dari teks aslinya.
HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL
Most of information about the Priory of Sion appears to come from the Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. In fact, Brown is so impressed by these authors that the name of his villain in the novel, Leigh Teabing, is probably based on their names; Leigh is from Robert Leigh, [Catatan saya: teks aslinya memang Robert Leigh, mungkin mba Sangeet Duchane atau editor bukunya salah ketik. Yang benar Richard Leigh.] and Teabing is an anagram of Baigent. Their 1982 book was an international best-seller and received both acclaim and extensive criticism.
Their history of the Priory of Sion differs slightly from Dan Brown’s version. Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims the Priory was a continuation of an eleventh-century organization in Jerusalem called the Chevaliers de l’Ordre de Notre Dame de Sion.[1. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell, 1983), 113] The authors said they found evidence that such an order did exist and continued in France after the Christians were driven out of Jerusalem. The European order, however, was called the Prieure de Sion, and there is no evidence that it was a continuation of the order in Jerusalem of a different name. In 1619 the property of the Prieure was taken away and given to the Jesuits because the monks were no longer following their own rule, were neglecting divine service, and were failing to maintain the property.[2. Ibid., 165]
In 1956 a modern organization by the name Prieuré de Sion was formed in France, and in the 1960s information purporting to be about that organization was placed in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Most of the information is contained in the “Prieuré documents” written under blatantly false names and with nonexistent publishers. In some cases the writer or writers have apparently taken news about mysterious death and worked them into the Priory story, trying to give the impression that the Priory is surrounded by intrigue. Nevertheless, these documents form the primary “evidence” to support the theories of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and consequently The Da Vinci Code.
The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail admitted that the documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale could have been faked, but said they believed the story was true. Nonetheless, their researches led them back to one person as the source of the stories about the Priory and related legends.
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The War Years
Plantard’s character was called into question when it was revealed that far from being the Resistance-supporting patriot of World War II that Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln had represented him to be, Plantard had been an ultraconservative supporter of the Vichy regime and the Nazis during the war. In 1940 he wrote a letter to Field Marshall Pétain, the French Head of State in Vichy, under the name Varran de Vérestra. The letter urged Pétain to end “the war started by the Jews” and “put an immediate stop to this terrible ‘Masonic and Jewish’ conspiracy.” He warned Pétain that a revolution was imminent, and claimed to have a hundred men under his command who would fight in response to orders from Pétain.
Pétain was sufficiently concerned by the letter to have the writer investigated. A 1941 police report revealed that the writer was Pierre Plantard, a twenty-one-year-old who lived with his mother in a two-room apartment in Paris. His father, a butler, had died in an accident and had left a small income to his wife, on which she supported herself and Pierre. In 1937 Pierre had helped to form an anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic organization of about one hundred members. Plantard boasted of having links to numerous politicians and was believed to run more or less fictitious groups in hopes of attracting government attention. The police dismissed Plantard as an unstable attention seeker.
In 1942 Plantard, then calling himself Pierre of France, formed an organization called Alpha Galates (the First Gauls), which was to support the Vichy government, and to “eradicate from [the soul of Fatherland] the dominant pathogens, the hate-filled resentments and the false dogmas such as secularism, godlessness, and the corrupt principles of the old democratic Judaeo-freemasonry.” In a later statement in 1942, Plantard said, “I want Hitler’s Germany to know that every obstacle to our plans does harm to him also, for it is the resistance put up by freemasonry that is undermining German might.” Plantard also indicated that his organization was a continuation of the Knights Templar. [5. Minutes of meeting of Alpha Gelates dated December 27, 1942, http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id86.html]
The First Priory of Sion
After the war and the German defeat, Plantard redefined Alpha Galates as an organization to help youth who had suffered under the Germans. A police report of the new organization revealed that Plantard had been imprisoned for four months by the Vichy government for setting up organizations and publishing various documents without permissions. [6. Police report dated May 1954, http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id172.html] Plantard would later portray himself as someone beaten and tortured as a Resistance fighter helping the Jews. The 1945 police report describe Plantard as “an odd young man who has gone off his rails.”
Within a few years, Plantard married and moved to a ton called Annemasse in the Haute Savoie region in France. In 1954 he was imprisoned for six months on a conviction for fraud, though no more details are available. [7. Paul Smith, ”Pierre Plantard’s Judicial Archives and Criminal Conviction,”http://Priory-of-sion.com/psp/id30.html]
In 1956, Plantard and a few associates formed an organization called the Prieuré de Sion, the Priory of Sion, which has named after a nearby hill called Mont Sion. Its purpose was to support an opposition candidate for the local council elections, and to advocate on the issue of low-cost housing. [8. Paul Smith, “Pierre Plantard Profile” (1956) http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id84.html] The organization was disbanded when Plantard was arrested again, this time for “détournement de mineurs,” or corruption of minors. He was convicted and served another year in prison.
The Second Priory of Sion
After 1960, Plantard revived the Priory of Sion, claiming it was created by Godfroi de Bouillon in the eleventh century. This story may have been influenced by a tale told by Roger Lhomoy, the former warden of the château of Gisors, where a treasure was supposed to have been found. When French researchers contacted the original 1956 members of the Priory, none of them knew anything about the ancient origins or any of Plantard story. [9. Paul Smith, http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id78.html] Around this time, Plantard met Noel Corbu, who would inspire him to launch his new career as pretender to the throne of France.
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The Third Priory of Sion
In 1989 Plantard tried to stage a comeback as the Grand Master of the Priory, claiming that the Grand Master between the death of de Chérisey in 1985 and 1989 was Patrice Pelat, a former close friend of Françhois Mitterand, who had just committed to suicide because of a financial scandal.
Plantard claimed that the documents on which the entire theory of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had been based were fraudulent and created by a man named Philippe Toscan under the influence of LSD, though some of the documents and much of their contents can be linked to Plantard. Plantard also claimed the story of the Priory formed by Godfroi de Bouillon was completely false. The Priory of Sion, he said, was founded on September 19, 1738, in Rennes-le-Château by Françhois d’Hautpol and Jean-Paul de Nègre. Leonardo da Vinci was never a Grand Master, and the Priory was never linked to the Knights Templar. [14. Noel Pinot, “An Interview with Pierre Plantard,” Vaincre (April 1989), http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id132.html]
The new Priory, which Plantard proclaimed at that time, was really based, he said, on the immense energy of the Black Rock situated close to the summit of Château de Blanchefort. Plantard admitted that his claim to have the treasure of the Jerusalem Temple was a fraud, but that fraud had, he said, only created to prevent people from digging near the Black Rock. [15. Smith, “Plantard Chronology” (1987), http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id22.html] By 1990 Plantard was saying that he had never claimed to be the rightful king of France or a descendant of Jesus, and that was all a hoax by the author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.[16. Pierre Plantard, “The Merovingian Myth,” Vaincre (April 11, 1990), http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id22.html] He was of the line of Sigisbert IV, but not the direct descendant. The direct descendant was Otto von Habsburg. [17. Ibid.] When contacted by Paul Smith, von Habsburg knew nothing of this. [18. “Letter from Otto von Habsburg about Bérenger Saunière” (1983), http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id44.html]
Plantard fabrications came back to haunt him in 1993, when an investigation was instigated into the death of Patrice Pelat and the securities scandal that precipitated his suicide. Because Plantard had claimed Pelat was a Priory Grand Master, he was called as a witness, detained, and questioned for forty-eight hours.
His house was searched, and several purported Priory documents were found that called Plantard the “true King of France.” Plantard admitted that he had invented the whole story, and the investigating judge reprimanded Plantard for playing games and released him. That seemed to be the end of the game for seventy-three-year-old Plantard, who never claimed to be connected to the Priory of Sion again. He died in 2000.
Dikutip dari Sangeet Duchane, BEYOND THE DA VINCI CODE: 128-135, dengan beberapa penyesuaian dan pemotongan.
Perhatikan, kalimat-kalimat dalam [ ] merupakan catatan kaki dari teks asli, dengan nomor urut sesuai teks aslinya, atau catatan dari saya (pengutip) yang tidak terdapat dalam buku aslinya, sedangkan tanda … adalah sub bab maupun paragraf yang dilewati (dipenggal).
Tambahan catatan: beberapa alamat website yang tercantum dalam kutipan di atas sudah tidak lagi aktif (mss/s7)
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