Priory of Sion Was a XX Century Hoax

A very successful hoax, actually – one of the most successful (if not the most successful). It fooled many millions of common folks and dozens (if not hundreds) of supposedly professional historians.

It became the foundation of two mega-bestsellers (Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Da Vinci Code), dozens of other bestsellers, one blockbuster movie (Da Vinci Code) and the whole new genre (in books and movies) of “alternative religious history”.

Priory of Sion was not a complete hoax because it was a real organization. It was founded in France and dissolved in 1956 by Pierre Plantard in his failed attempt to create a prestigious neo-chivalric order. It was dissolved almost immediately after that… but it was only the beginning. 

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 monastic order of the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion (the latter was real).

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.

By itself, it was not enough – not by a long shot – to propel Priory of Sion and its founder to global fame… but to Plantard’s surprise, his astonishing claims were somehow fused with the notion of a Jesus bloodline.

The latter is a myth (all evidence points to exactly the opposite) that Jesus got married, had children and his bloodline (House of Jesus) has persisted, possibly even to the present time.

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 hoax created by Plantard. However, many conspiracy theorists still believe that the Priory of Sion was a millennium-old cabal concealing a religiously subversive secret.

As part of the hoax, Plantard and his associates forged documents that alleged that… the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar were two fronts of one organization with the same leadership until 1188. Obviously, it is pure fiction as there is no evidence that it was the case.