Priory of Sion

From TinWiki.org

The Priory of Sion, also known as Prieuré de Sion, is an alleged secret society that was actually founded in 1956. It started in France and became to be known as an influential cabal with conspiracies surrounding it. The Priory of Sion was given much attention when, a man by the name of Pierre Plantard went public with a story of not only being in the Priory of Sion, but also having Royal descent. The claims were exumed to be a hoax and the Priory of Sion faded into the background.

1 Actual
2 Disbanded
3 Plantard and the hoax
4 Plantard's hoax finale
5 External links
6 Relevant discussion threads

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Actual

In 1956 the Priory of Sion was established within the French town of Annemasse. The exact date of 20 July 1956 was when the Priory of Sion was registered as an association. This registration was necessary due to the fact that French law deemed all associations needed a registration through the government. The founders chose to use Sion due to a hill south of Annemasse known as 'Mont Sion'. The founders themselves were Pierre Plantard (known as "Chyren"), André Bonhomme (known as "Stanis Bellas"), Jean Delaval, and Armand Defago standing as the only members of the Priory at that time.

The members collaborated to publish a journal entitled Circuit. Circuit was an acronym standing for Chevalerie d'Institutions et Règles Catholiques d'Union Independante et Traditionaliste. Translated into english the acronym CIRCUIT means, "Knighthood of Catholic Rule and Institution and of Independent Traditionalist Union."

Plantard's council flat housed the offices of the Priory of Sion and its journal 'syndicate'. The first issue of Circuit is dated 27 May 1956 (twelve numbers of the journal appeared in all). The French Fourth Republic had political instabilities, thus the agenda of the journal was looked upon as suspicious by local authorities. Truth be told, a portion of the articles took a political position in the local Council elections. Other articles critiqued and bashed property developers of Annemasse. These viewpoints did not match what the Priory of Sion had originally claimed to set off to do. Article VII of the Statutes says that its members are expected, "to carry out good deeds, to help the Catholic Church, teach the truth, defend the weak and the oppressed".

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Disbanded

During the month of October in 1956 the Priory of Sion went its separate ways and there was no more Priory. There were no activities since then, as declared by the Sub-Prefecture. The Priory's state of being was know as "dormant". Despite this, the Priory of Sion had a revival by Plantard between 1962 and 1993, although this was a ficticious reform. French law states that ensuing references to the Priory have no legal relation to that of the 1956 Priory and no one other than the original signed members are entitled to use its name in an official capacity. André Bonhomme, an original member, officially resigned in 1973 when Pierre Plantard began using the Priory of Sion for his agenda.

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Plantard and the hoax

Pierre Plantard had an agenda that incorporated the Priory of Sion for his own benefit. Plantard wanted the Priory to be influential, and originally hoped that the Priory of Sion would become an influential political tool that would restore chivalry and monarchy. Plantard hoped that this restoration would aid his claim to being a pretender to the throne of France. It was between the years 1961 and 1984 that Plantard concocted a faux lineage in the Priory to the effect of an Abbey of Sion resemblance. During the First Crusade, the Abbey of Sion was founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, later to be controlled under the Jesuits. The Abbey of Sion has no correlation to the Priory of Sion, that is a misassumption. However, it was through that little known fact that Plantard was able to skew the public view and claim that the 1956 Priory if Sion was linked to the Abbey of Sion.

Of course Plantard need to have proper documentation of all this in order to make his claims come to life. Thus, Plantard schemed, with his friend Philippe de Cherisey, to forge documents pertaining to the Priory of Sion. Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau or "Secret Dossiers of Henri Lobineau", was a piece of forged literature that Plantard used to back his mystical fantasies. Medieval parchments, also forged, were written out by de Cherisey to house encrypted messages about the Priory of Sion, ultimately aiding Plantards claims. Plantard planted these documents at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris [a.k.a. the National Library of France]. The story arranged claimed that Father Bérenger Saunière had supposedly discovered these seemingly ancient parchments inside of a pillar while renovating his church in Rennes-le-Château in the 19th Century. The story and existence of the parchments was intended to prove Plantard's claims about the Priory of Sion being a medieval society, as opposed to a recently aquired association. In 1967, an author, conspiring with Plantard, wrote a couple of books entitled L'Or de Rennes [The Gold of Rennes] and Le Tresor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château [The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château]. Included within the literature were copies of the "retrieved" articles [actually never reproduced], without any translation. Some of the people included in the false lineage of the Priory were: Sir Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, Karl Marx, and even some U.S. Presidents. Despite the list, all documentation of the "new-found" Priory of Sion was found to be a fraud.

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Plantard's hoax finale

Plantard, de Cherisey, and de Sede each wrote over 100 letters to one another that confirm their conspiracy. The letters housed the information of how the three would defend their allegations if criticized, and how their allegations would variate in order to keep the snowballed lies rolling. Jean-Luc Chaumeil aquired all the letters, within their respective envelopes, and used these, along with Plantards documents, in order to scribe a document that would disclose the trail of lies Plantard and his comrads conceived. After Chaumeil's exploiting books, he too disbanded from the Priory of Sion in the late 1970s. Later a letter retrieved from the Sub-Prefecture of St. Julien-en-Genevois alluded to Plantards criminal conviction of being a con man.

In 1993, Plantard struck again by going to a judge and accussing Thierry Jean-Pierre of being a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion [during an unrelated case involving Jean-Pierre]. The judge ordered Plantards house be searched. This dug-up the documents forged by Plantard. In court Plantard came clean and admitted to his fickle conspiracy. So once again Plantard was found to be a fraud.

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