posted August 05, 2006 10:00 PM
Prieure de SionThe Prieure du Notre Dame du Sion, or Priory of Zion, is said to be the cabal behind many of the events that occurred at Rennes-le-Chateau. According to the Prieure's own documents, its history is long and convoluted. Its earliest roots are in some sort of Hermetic or Gnostic society led by a man named Ormus. This individual is said to have reconciled paganism and Christianity. The story of Sion only comes into focus in the Middle Ages.
In 1070, a group of monks from Calabria, Italy, led by one Prince Ursus, founded the Abbey of Orval in France near Stenay, in the Ardennes.
For about one hundred years, the Order of the Temple - Knights Templar - and Sion were apparently unified under one leadership, though they are said to have separated at the cutting of the Elm at Gisors in 1188.
In 1188 AD King Phillip II of France and King Henry II of England (with his heir Richard the Lion Hearted at his side) met on the sacred field at Gisors. This site in France was where kings had come for centuries to debate, forge alliances, and sometimes do battle. A huge elm tree in the middle of the sacred field was the central symbol - an ancient elm thought to be almost 800 years old at that time, so huge that nine men joined hand to hand could not encircle it.
Phillip and Henry were not on good terms; war between England and France was in the air, and Henry was making a claim on France. Phillip informed Henry that the elm would be cut down; Henry and Richard planned to defend it. A battle ensued, Richard was slightly wounded, the French army stormed the field with superior manpower while the English fled and took refuge in the nearby chateaux of Gisors. Phillip chopped down the elm, and retained France for himself. Henry thus did not conquer France but went home and ruled England, passing it on to Richard the Lion Heart followed by his other son, John.
I see the cutting of the elm as a metaphor for - Elm=Tree of Life. Cutting - split in the bloodline - or DNA. This was all linked to alchemy.
Other theories...
The Cutting of the Elm at Gisors did more than just split the Templars off from its parent Order, it defined the boundary line between the Plantagenets on one side, supported by the Templars, and the Capetians on the other, supported by Sion. This division would eventually produce not just the destruction of the Templars by the French King, Philip III and his puppet Pope, Clement V, but the catastrophe of the Hundred Years War between France and England.
The elm at Gisors represented the Merovingian bloodline, and the battle was about the claim to the right to rule. Henry II was the grandson of Fulk V, King of Jerusalem. But this title was bestowed through marriage to the daughter of the previous King of Jerusalem, Baldwin, who did have a direct male succession from the Merovingian Kings. Henry II's claim to France was based on obscuring the truth; his claim to blood descent was untruthful but politically worth making if the facts could be obscured. However, in a more relevant light, his son Richard did embody a true claim, because his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was descended from Charlemagne and therefore Clovis, one of the first Merovingian Kings. The Plantagenets established their Merovingian heritage only through Eleanor of Aquitaine; it was valid for Richard to make the claim (though he couldnąt because he wasnąt yet king), but not for Henry II - even though his grandfather had married the daughter of a legitimate lineal male descendant of the Merovingian line and thus became the third King of Jerusalem after Godfroi and Baldwin.
This is why King Phillip of France wanted to symbolically cut the cord for Henry and Richard: Phillip, too, was descended from Charlemagne. Only two, but more like three, females stood in the decent line between Phillip and the Merovingian Kings. (Male descent was preferred in royal successions.) He believed his claim on France was more pure than the Plantagenet usurpers. (Not true, since Eleanor's other line back through Bernard Plantevelue was probably all male.) Thus the elm at Gisors, ancient symbol of genetic branching and direct continuity, was cut as a statement to Henry II: 'Go away, France is mine!" The outward visible symbol of the vine transplanted from the Holy Land was no more. The knowledge thereafter was hidden, though preserved by the Templars and, later, by the Priory of Sion.
The Templar order was then destroyed by King Phillipe Le Bel of France, in 1307. Sion appears to have been at the nexus of two French antimonarchical movements, the Compagnie du St.-Sacrament of the 17th century - acting on behalf on the Guise-Lorraine families - and the Fronde of the 18th, as well as behind an attempt to make the Hapsburgs emperors of all Europe in the 19th - the Hieron du Val d'Or. It appears that there are vast connections between Sion and numerous sociocultural strata in European thought - Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Arthurian and Grail legends, Arcadianism, Catharism, chivalry, etc.
Yet this mysterious secret society brought itself to light in 1956 and is listed with the French directory of organizations under the subtitle "Chivalry of Catholic Rules and Institutions of the Independent and Traditionalist Union, which in French abbreviates to 'circuit' - the name of the magazine distributed internally among members. Depending on what statutes one considers, Sion either has 9,841 members in nine grades, or 1,093 members in seven, with the supreme member, the Nautonnier or Grand Master of the Order being, till 1963, Jean Cocteau.
While it is believed the head has been Pierre Plantard de St.-Clair up until recent times, he claims to have left that post in 1984, so it is not clear who runs the organization at this time. But whoever he is, he has had illustrious predecessors: Jacques DeMolay, Leonardo de Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Claude Debussy, among others! Plantard, in any case, seems to have enjoyed the ear of many influential persons in contemporary French politics - deGaulle, Marcel Lefebvre, Francois Ducaud-Bourget, Andre Malraux, and Alain Poher, and others, many of whom appear to know him from his efforts with the Resistance during the Vichy occupation. Despite its registry, however, the organization remains untraceable, its given address and number leading to dead ends which might lead one to wonder why the government never bothered to verify the information.
Some interesting things have come to light about the Prieure recently. One is that the Swiss Grand Lodge Alpina (GLA), the highest body of Swiss Freemasonry (akin to the Grand Lodge of England), may have been the recruiting body for the Prieure. But the GLA is also said by some to be the meeting place of the 'Gnomes of Zurich' who are said to be the Power Elite of Swiss bankers and international financiers. The GLA is said by David Yallop to be the body which controlled the P2 Masonic Lodge in Italy.
P2 controlled the Italian secret police in the 1970s, took money from the CIA and KGB, may have had a hand in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, had 900 agents in other branches of the Italian government and the highest positions of the Vatican, bombed a train station and tried to blame it on the Communists, used the Vatican Bank to launder Mafia drug money, fomented fascist coups in South America, and is most likely linked to the arch-conservative Knights of Malta and Opus Dei in the Vatican.) P2's Lucio Gelli may have had a role in the death of John Paul I, and perhaps even the assassination attempt on John Paul II.
One of the most interesting people to write about the Prieure may be Michael Lamy. He claims that Jules Verne was a member of both the Prieure and the Illuminati. Further, he maintains that the Prieure's politics must be understood as Orleanist, which he describes as "aristocratic, anarchistic, and Nietzchean." Perhaps it all becomes most clear when Lamy reveals to the reader that the true secret of the village of Rennes-le-Chateau is that the extinct volcano Mount Bugarach leads down into the hollow earth to a realm of supermen.
Ean Begg feels it is connected with many of the Black Virgin sites all over Europe. Certainly, if the organization's full name is the Prieure de Notre Dame du Sion, and if it is site of Orval is connected to the worship of the bear-goddess Arduina, venerated by the Sicambrian Franks of the area and their Merovingian kings, then this may be the case.
There are hints, of course, that Notre Dame is not the mother of Jesus, but Mary of Bethany AKA Magdalene a princess of the tribe of Benjamin, which is itself notorious for an outbreak of goddess-idolatry in the period of the Judges. That Mary may also be the one also known to the Gypsies of the south of France as one of the three 'Maries-de-la-Mer,' whom they call 'Sarah the Egyptian', the sun-burnt one.
http://www.crystalinks.com/prieuredesion.html