The Messianic Muddle of Plantard the Pretender

The Messianic Legacy, at least in the edition I own, boldly declares itself to be “the controversial sequel to the bestselling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail“, and it is very much a sequel: it makes some fumbling attempts to cobble together some novel thesis and contribution of its own, but all it succeeds in doing is ploughing deeper into the intellectual cul-de-sacs that authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln had wander off down in the course of compiling the previous book. Having already become lost in the deep weeds, The Messianic Legacy marks the point where the start floundering.

Although I went over the background already in my review of the previous book, I think it is worth restating here in order to understand the context The Messianic Legacy exists in. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, Bérenger Saunière was the local priest of Rennes-le-Château, a picturesque hilltop village in the Languedoc region of France. It is generally accepted that Saunière was running some sort of Mass-by-mail-order scam which earned him an unusual amount of money, to the point where the Church authorities got wind of it and suspended him from his ecclesiastical duties.

Some time later, in the 1950s, restauranteur Noël Corbu had come into possession of Saunière’s home, the Villa Bethania, and turned it into the hotel. To drum up business, Corbu began circulating a rumour that Saunière’s wealth was in some respect related to mysterious documents he had discovered in the local church. In the early iteration of the story, the concept was that there was great treasure hidden in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château, perhaps part of the lost horde of Blanche of Castile, which Saunière had discovered a portion of. This snowballed into a treasure-hunting fad centred on the town, and in the 1960s it came to the attention of a group of hoaxers, perhaps the most significant member of which in terms of his commitment to the joke and the way he inserted himself into the story was one Pierre Plantard.

The Hotel Hoax and the Wholly Fooled

Infamously ripped off wholesale by Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a comfortingly silly work of conspiracy theory. The book has its roots in the work of actor and Doctor Who screenwriter Henry Lincoln, who on holiday in France in 1969 came across Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château, a book by Gérard de Sède discussing an enigma surrounding a small town in the Languedoc region of southern France.

Fascinated, Lincoln would go on to produce three documentary films for the BBC’s Chronicle strand discussing the mystery – The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem? in 1972, The Painter, the Priest and the Devil in 1974, and The Shadow of the Templars in 1979 – with these films being the first time the English-speaking world was exposed to the mystery. Each time, Lincoln would revise and deepen his proposed answer to the enigma, as he perceived yet further hidden depths to the story. Joined by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, his investigations would eventually see the release of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982.