THE TEMPLAR REVELATION
AN INTERVIEW WITH LYNN PICKNET AND CLIVE PRINCE
(This was an article written originally for the magazine ENIGMA,but soon after I completed the piece the mag folded!!! So here,for posterity,is the full interview)
We all love a mystery,but when that mystery encompasses religion,faith,sex magick and heresy some ones toes are bound to be stepped on ,and in the past the stepee has had the power to set the stepper alight.In their new book "The Templar Revelation : Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ" (Bantam Press £17.99) Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have delved into a host of enigmae,asking some very pertinent questions about the motives of the early Christian founders and the heretical veneration of Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist ,by way of suppressed movements,censored religious texts and modern secret societies.
Lynn was Deputy Editor of the well known 80's publication "The Unexplained" and is well known for her TV and radio appearances. Clive is an accredited investigator for the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) and is an authority on the occult and secret societies.Their last book "The Turin Shroud : in Whose Image" detailed their theory that Leonardo Da Vinci was responsible for the manufacture of the Shroud and was the head of an underground heretical sect.Their controversial conclusions led tto them being expelled from the British Society for the Turin Shroud,in Lynns case forcibly. I met them in in Londons posh ST. John Wood and began by asking about the Knights Templar themselves.
THE WARRIOR MONKS
Enigma : One of the main areas of focus in the book is the early history of heretical and secret societies in Europe ,especially the Knights Templar.Perhaps you could tell us who they actually were and who they might be in modern times.
Lynn : Who they might be in modern times is not really part of our brief or part of the book but we have to say first off that although the title of the book is ""The Templar Revelation" and obviuosly we do look at the Templar because they are part of the wider picture of "heresy" in Europe over the centuries they are only part of the picture .They are not "it".
Clive: They were certainly guardians of important secrets that came through the Western Esoteric tradition but it involves many other groups as well who were either associated with or derived from them.To answer the question The Knights Templar were an order founded during the Crusades sometime in the early 12th century.It's a matter of controversy exactly when.Obstensibly they were to protect the pilgrims on the route to Jerusalem
Although they were Knights the were also a monastic order so they were literally warrior monks.They would take holy vows but would also train to fight and they were very well trained .After their foundation they grew and became immensely wealthy,wealthier than most of the countries of Europe at that time.They actually founded the first banking system and were just hugely influential and owned lots of property.They owned most of the stuff around here ( St. Johns Wood,London ) back in the Middle Ages .Then in 1307 ,on Friday the 13th of October ,in France the Templars,on the orders of the King,were all arrested,rounded up and imprisoned .Many of them were tortured,some were executed and after a few years to-ing and fro-ing the Pope officially dissolved the Order and dispersed their property ,so the Order was forbidden.It was done on the grounds of heresy,that they were devil worshippers and sodomites and there's been ahuge debate since then as to weather that was just an excuse to get at their money or weather there is any substance to these stories and weather the Order in fact survived.
Many researchers have found that, within their cover story of being essentially Christian monks protecting Pilgrims ,the Knights Templar did go out looking for knowledge os all kinds,esoteric and occult included.They had contact with the Arabs in the middle East and learnt alot of things from them so they were the preservers of secrets that they had learned and one of the questions for us was if that was so then what happened to the knowledge they had when the Order was suppressed?Did that knowledge go on ?
Enigma: If they were simple,but hard,monks how did they amass so much money?
Lynn: Partly they managed to do that because they developed what we know call the banking system.They had the first cheque and credit system so when you have that kind of hold on people it goes a long way.
Clive : Also when anybody joined the order,and there was a lot of prestige attached to anyone actually taking the vows,they would have to hand over all their property.After a few years the Pope backed them and gave them special privileges .All the Kings and nobles of Europe fell over themselves to give them money and land just to keep favour with them,so they got vast monies and land .Because they were the best fighting force people would hire them to ship goods and money say if someone wanted to ship money from England to Jerusalem they would hand it over to the Order here and they would transport the goods and take a cut along the way.
Enigma : If the theory that they were banned because the authorities wanted their material wealth is actually a red herring ,what were the true nature of the heresies involved,apart from the usual good stuff like devil worship and sodomy?
This is what we're interested in of course.As I said earlier they are just part of the overall heretical picture of the history of Europe and we discerned among them and the other groups a pagan background..One of the Templars titles wa Knight of Christ and it comes as a great surprise to delve a bit and discover that they weren't very Christian at all .Your average rank and file Templar probably was a devout Christian ,never had any pagan thoughts whatsoever,but the inner circle ,the ones at the top certainly had mystical ideas many of which came from the East and their dealings with the Holy Land and their contact with the Arabs.One of the main things that intrigued us was an extreme reverence for John the Baptist >For example he's their patron Saint,which is fair enough,but it was taken to extremes with them.
They were even accused of worshipping a severed head and this accusation crops up time and time again where their inner circle are concerned .In some way the severed head prophesied or gave them information or some kind of mystical knowledge.Again there's the fairly obvious link with John the Baptist and interestingly enough St. Johns Wood is named after Johnthe Baptist because of the Templar connection. They didn't seem too keen on Jesus himself and they used the term "Christ" in quite a clever way as a cover for another person.The other thing is that every body thinks of these "Warrior Monks" as mens men in fact had a great reverence for the feminine.Again this is a sort of pagan mystical feel for "The Goddess" which was expressed in various ways.Certainly at the time the Templars of the suppression were known to show great reverence for statues of Black Maddonas and Black Virgins ,which we and other researchers have discerned as hiding a pagan Goddess worshipping cult.
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
The other historical figure that plays a large part in your book is Mary Magdalene....
Lynn: We were intrigued by what we had discovered as part of our previous book on Leonardo and the Turin Shroud and that was an underground movement that involved Leonardo and possibly others of his status over the centuries throughout Europe.This movement had these two strands: a reverence for Mary Magdalene which quite clearly (there's really no two ways about this) masked a cult of old-fashioned pagan goddess worship but at the same time the same people showed excessive elevation of John the Baptist and superficially this makes no sense at all.As we delved further we realized it wasn't that peculiar at all.
Clive : Other researchers have looked into the Magdalene cult and there's quite a lot written about it but what we found was that many people had realized this pagan goddess worship association but nobody had tried to take that any further and explain why.On the other side everyone recognizes that Mary Magdalene had an important relationship with Jesus and there is a huge contradiction there.What intrigued us was the question of why did this important character from the New Testament,whom some say may have been Jesus' wife or lover ,have all these pagan associations?What implications does that hold for Jesus and what he was teaching,the whole New Testament message?Not so much work has been done on John the Baptist.It's recognized that he was important to the Templars and the way we approached the book was to look at the underground traditions concerning those two figures then actually go back to the New Testament and look at the latest scholarship regarding it
.The surprising thing is that everything ties in together very well. One of the connections between the two characters is that in the New Testament both of them seem to have been censored ,they're very minor characters.They were obviously important at the time.
Lyn: It's as if they were far too well known to have been edited out completely but they have been marginalised.
Clive : These are the two characters who the people who wrote the Gospels really weren't comfortable with and tried to marginalise whenever they could.If that is so then there's got to be something that the writers were hiding.
Lynn : And also when you think about it both of them officiated at a very important ritual in the life of Jesus:John the Baptist,we are told,at the beginning of Jesus' ministry baptised him with the Holy Spirit descending and all of that,and at the end of his life the Magdalene anointed him ,"Christening" him,making him Christ just before his death ,burial and resurrection.None of the common images of those two people convey that they had any authority because they were bestowing some kind of blessing on Jesus.This is not coincidental:The Church and the Gospel writers worked hard at getting these marginalised images together.They've succeeded.Most of us don't see Mary or John as being authoritative or magnificent at all.
Clive : There's a huge debate amongst scholars ,and it's never really been decided,as to when the Gospels were written and who wrote them.Those four books only became the official four to be included in the New Testament by a vote that was taken in the third century at the Council of Nicea where there were many many Gospels,some of which were written maybe in the year 200 and were essentially works of fiction and some of which were as valid as the four that we have now.This settled on the way that Jesus would be depicted .It's where it was decided that Jesus was divine.Prior to this many people believed that he was great teacher and prophet not necessarily that he was the Son of God .They had to iron out their official policy and they took votes on a lot of things and decided on the texts that fitted the lines that they'd chosen and the rest were out.
The most important ones for us was the collection that became known as the Gnostic Gospels which were hidden in Egypt in a place called Nag Hammadi at about the same time as the Council of Nicea and the Council didn't like the concept of Gnosis because they were establishing a Church.
Lynn: The word Gnosis means knowledge and the implication is that any and every individual can have personal knowledge of the divine:you don't need a priest to tell you,you don't need anybody to intercede for you.Basically the idea is that you have a divine spark and this reaches to the divine and you can communicate and this of course is complete anathema to the Church and all it's power and all the implications thereof.
Clive : In the Gnostic Gospels Mary Magdalene is extremely important.John the Baptist doesn't playa large part in those texts but work has been done by scholars in this century which established that John the Baptist had his own following and that following was essentially Gnostic.When you start looking at suppressed material,things the Church didn't like ,you've got both Mary and John being important figures.
You theorize that Mary and Jesus may have had connections with Egyptian Mysticism...
Clive : What our research shows is the reason why the Gospel writers were so uncomfortable with her and that is that she holds the key to what Jesus' true religion was .Our argument ,and I we think it's supported by so much evidence that it's hard to deny,is that the whole thing is really about preaching the Egyptian religion,that's where Christianity came from ,not Jewish roots.The person that holds thekey to that is Mary Magdalene and the act of anointing,because these were all things from the Mystery Cults that were around in Egypt and the Mediterranean at that period .Many things that Jesus did,like the raising of Lazarus and the Last Supper are featured in the Mystery schools,they're not Jewish at all.
The anointing fits into the ancient Egyptian religious practice of the sexual initiatrix bestowing authority on the priest through her authority as priestess through a sexual ritual.
Lynn: Also it is remarkable that when you read the story of the Resurrection of Jesus and what was said by the characters and what happened when they me you see it's virtually word for word from the Isis and Osiris Mystery play .Osiris was killed by his wicked rival and Isis mourned him and then through her sexual magick raised him and he died on a Friday and three days later rose from the dead and it's so simmilar.Some commentators say that this shows that the story was added later to appease the pagans who became Christians but we're turning that on it's head and saying actually that's not the reason it's in there;it's there because Jesus and Mary Magdalene were pagans and they were consciously enacting aspects of the rituals.One of our earliest questions was where did John the Baptist get baptism from?
Not a lot of people were going round doing it,it was something that he did that was remarkable and again it's not a Jewish practice.Again all you had to do was look across the border in Egypt and they'd been using baptism as we know it for centuries in the temples of Isis.The people were called to repent and confess their sins and were then baptized anew in the Goddess .It's fascinating tto us that modern Christians are deliberately kept in ignorance by the Church when scholars have long known of the connections between the Jesus movement and the Egyptians.
Clive :This is what underground groups have taught for centuries:that Jesus was part of the Isis/Osiris religion and that he wasn't anything to do with Judaism.The latest scholarship on the New Testament backs up what these groups have been saying which then establishes that those groups must have been saying it because it was handed down to them through the centuries so they must stretch back to the origins of what we call Christianity.
RENNES OLD IRON
Another enduring mystery : what is the story of Rennes le Chateau and how does it connect with the other themes in the book?
Lynn : We didn't want to put it in the book because it's something of a cliché amongst similar researchers but in the end we had to go there literally and figuratively because it's part of the sorry of the Magdalene cult. Briefly Berenger Sauniere was a priest of Renne le Chateau in France .He went there in 1885 and to cut a long story short although he was a penniless priest n the back nd beyond having apparently discovered something during excavations in the church there ,which is dedicated to Mary Magdalene,he became phenomenally rich virtually overnight. He entertained on a massive scale,never leaving the village apart from a few trips here and there .Again it's a very murky and convoluted story .Some of the people who visited him there were amazing considering that he was just a backwoods priest : there was a Hapsburg archduke,a famous Paris opera singer and all manner of people went there for some reason,it was like a magnet to them but it was very secret.
All we know for certain is that this is what happend.He fell out of favour with the Church for some reason and although they tried to get him to leave the village he never did and he died there in 1917.The story has a accrued a great deal of myth rumour .What was behind this,what he found there was the big question.
Clive : To be honest we don't put forward a complete answer to the mystery but we do pick up some parts of the story that haven't received that much attention and we've made some new discoveries connected with Sauniere.So many of the themes concerning the underground occult tradition come together in the story of Renne le Chateau the most important one being the focus on Mary Magdalene and Sauniere certainly seems to have been a part of this underground stream that had this devotion to Mary.We can speculate as to how that devotion might have turned into monetary gain but it appears to us that he was looking for something in that area that was connected to Mary or to her cult.He was actually a very bright man who seems to have been in the area researching something connected to the legends that Mary lived in the area and his money seems to have come about from the fact that he was being paid by outside agencies .There may have been priests involved in this research but Suaniere is the best remembered,possibly because it suited people to have it that way.There is also evidence to suggest that he was connected to a Masonic order that claimed descent from the Knights Templar.We can debate as to whether that claim is genuine or not but it was an order that we were interested in from the Johanitte tradition of reverence for John the Baptist.
You've already said that the Priory of Sion wasn't really part of the brief but you do drop some fairly big hints that it's still an active order with an active membership even now.What's the connection between the Priory and the thrust of your book?
Clive : A lot of the original research that lead to this was a result of he contacts that we made during the writing of our previous book on Leonard and the Turin Shroud.It drew attention to that society because it's very controversial and whether it actually exists outside if a couple of people in France that decided to create this society for reasons best known to themselves..... some people think that it's one huge joke,the point of which has escaped everyone.In a way the people who put that point of view do have a case but we've found that the society do seem to have some inside knowledge about things,some knowledge that they wouldn't have if they were just a bunch of jokers.They're a very "tricksy" organisation in that they put little hints out and not really explain it but draw attention to certain things that as researchers we picked up on,even though they could be huge red herrings.We've come to no great conclusions about them ;we know from our experience and contacts with them that they are not just a handful of Frenchmen who've made up this joke ;it's larger and more influential than that.As to what's really going on we have no more idea than anybody else.
Lynn : If they are who they claim to be ,with the long history that entails,they are obviously a major part of the heretical tradition... Who do they claim to be?
Clive :They seem to get people to make claims on their behalf which they neither confirm nor deny because they first came to attention in the early 80's due to the book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" which argued that the organization was founded to protect the descendants of the French Kings and restore them to the throne,but these were only claims made on their behalf,which they have since completely repudiated,although most of the evidence came from the society.They do this all the time.Our conclusion is that the Priory of Sion is a front for some other more established order.We think it's the semi - public face of one of the orders that came from this Johannite tradition,which is what they say in their own literature although no one seems to have picked up on that aspect. It sometimes seems that they want to know who's out there looking into this stuff because if you get to a certain point as a result of the hints they place then they want to know who you are.......
Lynn : They definitely check people out,keep tabs on people.Our first contact the infamous Giovanni got in touch after he'd been listening to my radio broadcasts apparently for some time and when we asked him why did he pick up on us he replied "I like your style.." .They're quite quirky.
Clive : The Priory of Sion,whoever they may be,have certainly been the major promoters of the Renne le Chateau story and if it hadn't been for them it wouldn't have become the huge well known mystery that it it has.You can actually see that they've done this for some reason,and it includes adding elements to the mythology of it which still gives important clues but are literally un-true and in some ways the story will attract researchers and anyone who's interested will pass through that village at some point and this gives the Priory a chance to work out who knows what,who's on the right lines and who's not .As researchers you always have to be on your guard for mis-information.People could be watching and saying that these people are on the right lines so we'll feed them material that leads them somewhere else.
That sounds very similar to the way the intelligence agencies handle the UFO game...
Lynn : Yes,but that's a whole other story !