The Priory of Sion, the
Protocols of Sion, the Seed of David, the King of the Jews, and the Masonic
Kingdom

By Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh,
& Henry Lincoln

One of the most persuasive testimonials we found to the existance and
activities of the Prieure de Sion dated from the late nineteenth century.
The testimonial in question is well enough known - but it is not
recognised as a testimonial. On the contrary it has always been associated
with more sinister things. It has played a notorious role in recent
history and still tends to arouse such violent emotions, bitter
antagonisms and gruesome memories that most writers are happy to dismiss
it out of hand. To the extent that this testimonial has contributed
significantly to human prejudice and suffering, such a reaction is
perfectly understandable. But if the testitmonial has been criminally
misused, our researches convinced us that it has also been seriously
misunderstood.

The role of Rasputin at the court of
Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia is more or less generally known. It is
not generally known, however, that there were influential, even powerful
esoteric enclaves at the Russian court long before Rasputin. During the
1890's and 1900's one such enclave formed itself around an individual
known as Monsieur Philippe, and around his mentor, who made periodic
visits to the imperial court at Petersburg. And Monsier Phillippe's mentor
was none other than the man called Papus - the French esotericist
associated with Jules Doinel (founder of the neo-Cathar church in the
Languedoc.), Peladan (who claimed to have discovered Jesus's tomb), Emma
Calve and Claude Debussy. In a word, the 'French occult revival' of the
late nineteenth century had not only spread to Petersburg. It's
representatives also enjoyed the privledged status of personal confidants
to the czar and czarina.

However, the esoteric enclave of Papus and Monsieur Philippe
was actively opposed by certain other powerful interests - the Grand
Duchess Elizabeth, for example, who was intent on installing her own
favourites in proximity to the imperial throne. One of the grand duchess's
favourites was a rather contemptible individual known to posterity under
the pseudonym of Sergie Nilus. Sometime around 1903 Nilus presented a
highly controversial document to the czar - a document that supposedly
bore witness to a dangerous conspiracy. but if Nilus expected the czar's
gratitude for his disclosure, he must have been grievously disapointed.
The czar declared the document to be an outrageous fabrication, and
ordered all copies of it to be destroyed. And Nilus was banished from the
court in disgrace.

Of course the document - or, at any rate, a
copy of it - survived. In 1903 it was serialised in a newspaper but failed
to attract any interest. In 1905 it was published again - this time as an
appendix to a book by a distinguished mystical, Vladimir Soloviov. At this
point it began to attract attention. In the years that followed it became
one of the single most infamous documents of the twentieth century.

The document in question was a tract, or, more strictly
speaking, a purported social and political programme. It has appeared
under a variety of slightly differing titles, the most common of which is
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols allegedly
issued from specifically Jewish sources. And for a great many anti-Semites
at the time they were convincing proof of an 'international Jewish
conspiracy'. In 1919, for example, they were distributed to troops of the
White Russian Army - and these troops, during the next two years,
massacred some 60,000 Jews who were held responsible for the 1917
Revolution. by 1919 the Protocols were also being circulated by
Alfred Rosenberg, later the chief racial theoretician and propagandist for
the National Socialist Party in Germany. In Mein Kampf Hitler used
the Protocols to fuel his own fanatical prejudices, and is said to
have believed unquestioningly in their authenticity. In England the
Protocols were immediately accorded credence by the Morning
Post. Even The Times, in 1921, took them seriously and only
later admitted its error. Experts today at least in their present form,
are a vicious and insidious forgery. Nevertheless, they are still being
circulated - in Latin America, in Spain, even in Britain - as anti-Semitic
propaganda.

The Protocols propound in outline a
blueprint for nothing less than total world domination. On first reading
they would seem to be the Machiavellian programme - a kind of inter-office
memo, so to speak - for a group of individuals determined to impose a new
world order, with themselves as supreme despots. The text advocates a
many-tentacled hydra-headed conspiracy dedicated to disorder and anarchy,
to toppling certain existing regimes, infiltrating Freemasonry and other
such organisations, and eventually seizing absolute control of the Western
world's social, political and economic institutions. And the anonymous
authors of the Protocols declare explicitly that they
'stage-managed' whole peoples 'according to a political plan which no one
has so much as guessed at in the course of many centuries'.

To a modern reader the Protocols might seem
to have been devised by some ficticious organisation like SPECTRE - James
Bond's adversary in Ian Fleming's novels. When they were first publicised,
however, the Protocols were alleged to have been composed at an
International Judaic Congress which convened in Basle in 1897. This
allegation has long since been disproved. The earliest copies of the
Protocols, for example, are known to have been written in French -
and the 1897 Congress in Basle did not include a single French delegate.
Moreover, a copy of the Protocols is known to have been in
circulation as early as 1884 - a full thirteen years before the Basle
Congress met. The 1884 copy of the Protocols surfaced in the hands
of a member of a Masonic lodge - the same lodge of which Papus was a
member and subsequently Grand Master. Moreover, it was in this same lodge
that the tradition of Ormus had first appeared - the legendary Egyptian
sage who amalgamated pagan and Christian mysteries and founded the
Rose-Croix.

Modern scholars have established in fact
that the Protocols, in their published form, are based at least in
part on a satirical work written and printed in Geneva in 1864, The work
was composed as an attack on Napoleon III by a man named Maurice Joly, who
was subsequently imprisoned. Joly is said to have been a member of a Rose
Croix order. Whether this is true or not, he was a friend of Vicor Hugo;
and Hugo, who shared Joly's antipathy to Napoleon III, was a member of a
Rose-Croix order.

It can thus be proved conclusively that the
Protocols did not issue from the Judaic Congress at Basle in 1897.
That being so, the obvious question is whence they did issue. Modern
scholars have dismissed them as a total forgery, a wholly spurious
document concocted by anti-Semitic interests intent in discrediting
Judaism. And yet the Protocols themselves argue strongly against
such a conclusion. They contain, for example, a number of enigmatic
references - references that are clearly not Judaic. but these references
are so clearly not Judaic that they cannot plausibly have been fabricated
by a forger either. No anti-Semitic forger with even a modicum of
intelligence would possibly have concocted such references in order to
discredit Judaism. For no one would have believed these references to be
of Judaic origin.

Thus for instance, the text of the Protocols
ends with a single statement, 'Signed by the representatives of Sion of
the 33rd Degree'.

Why would an anti-Semitic forger have made
up such a statement? Why would he not have attempted to incriminate all
Jews, rather than just a few - the few who constitute 'the representatives
of Sion of the 33rd Degree'? Why would he not declare that the document
was signed by, say, the representatives of the international Jewish
conspiracy'. If anything, it would seem to refer to something specifically
Masonic. And the 33rd Degree in Freemasonry is that of the so-called
'Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite' which emerges mysteriously out of
French Freemasonry in the mid eighteenth century.

The Protocols contain other even more
flagrant anomalies. The text speaks repeatedly, for example, of the advent
of a 'Masonic Kingdom', and a 'King of the blood of Sion', who will
preside over this 'Masonic Kingdom'. It asserts that the future king will
be of the 'dynastic roots of King David'. It affirms that 'the King of the
Jews will be the real Pope' and 'the patriarch of an international
church'. And it concludes in a most cryptic fashion, 'Certain members of
the seed of David will prepare the Kings and their heirs... Only the King
and the three who stood sponsor for him will know what is coming'.

As an expression of Judaic thought, real or fabricated, such
statements are blatantly absurd. Since Biblical times no king has figured
in Judiac tradition, and the very principle of kingship has become utterly
irrelevent. The concept of a king would have been as meaningless to Jews
of 1897 as it would be to Jews today; and no forger can have been ignorant
of this fact. Indeed the references quoted would appear to be more
Christian than Judaic. Folr the last two millennia the only 'King of the
Jews' has been Jesus himself - and Jesus, according to the Gospels, was of
the 'dynastic roots of David'. If one is fabricating a document and
ascribing it to a Jewish conspiracy, why include such patently Christian
echoes? Why speak of so specificallly and uniquely Christian a concept as
a pope? Why speak of an 'international church' rather than an
international synagogue or an international temple? And why include the
enigmatic allusion to 'the King and the three who stood sponsor' - which
is less suggestive of Judaism and Christianity than it is of the secret
societies of Johann Valentin Andrea and Charles Nodier? If the
Protocols issued wholly from a propagandist's anti-Semitic
imagination, it is difficult to imagine a propagandist so inept, or so
ignorant and uninformed.

On the basis of prolonged and systematic
research, we reached certain conclusions about the Protocols of the
Elders of Sion. They are as follows.

1) There was an original text on which the
published version the Protocols was based. This original text was
not a forgery. On the contrary it was authentic. But it had nothing
whatever to do with Judaism or an 'international Jewish conspiracy'. It
was issued rather from some Masonic organisation or Masonically oriented
secret society which incorporated the word 'Sion'.

2) The original text on thich the published version of the
Protocols was based need not have been provocative or inflammatory
in its language. But it may well have included a programme for gaining
power, for infiltrating Freemasonry, for controlling social, political and
economic institutions. Such a programme would have been perfectly in
keeping with the secret societies of the Renaisance, as well as with the
Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement and the institutions of Andrea and Nodier.

3) The original text on which the published
version of the Protocols was based fell into the hands of Sergei
Nilus. Nilus did not first intend it to discredit Judaism. On the
contrary, he brought it to the czar with the intention of discrediting the
esoteric enclave at the imperial court - the enclave of Papus, Monsier
Philippe and others who were members of the secret society in question.
Before doing so, he almost certainly doctored the language, rendering it
far more venemous and inflammatory than it initially was. When the czar
spurned him, Nilus then released the Protocols in their doctored
form for publication. They had failed in their primary objective of
compromising Papus and Monsieur Philippe. But they might still serve a
secondary purpose - that of fostering anti-Semitism. Although Nilus's
chief targets had been Papus and Monsieur Philipe, he was hostile to
Judaism as well.

4) The published version of the Protocols is not,
therefore, a totally fabricated text. It is rather a radically altered
text. But despite the alterations certain vestiges of the original version
can be discerned - as in a palimpsest, or as in passages of the Bible.
These vestiges - which referred to a king, a pope, an international
church, and to Sion - probably meant little or nothing to Nilus. He
certainly would not have invented them himself. But if they were already
there, he would have had no reason, given his ignorance, to excise them.
And while such vestiges might have been irrelevent to Judaism, they might
have been extremely relevent to a secret society. As we learned
subsequently, they were - and still are - of paramount importance to the
Prieure de Sion.

The Holy Blood and the Holy
Grail
Pages 198 - 203
Random House 1982, 1996
Michael Baigent,
Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln

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