The document reflects on the enduring fascination with Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar, on the 700th anniversary of his execution. It narrates a personal journey to Paris, intertwining historical exploration with experiences in various cultural sites, particularly the Church of Saint-Sulpice, while critiquing contemporary interpretations of history as presented in popular works like Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code.' The author shares a mix of enthusiasm for archaeology and skepticism towards pseudo-history, highlighting the impact of such narratives on public perception and tourism.

1. A Knight out on the Town | Stoking the fires of conspiracy |
Chapple in Paris in 2004
Originally posted online on 4 June 2014 at rmchapple.blogspot.com
(http://rmchapple.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/a-knight-out-on-town-stoking-fires-of.html)
Just as the wave of 2014 St Patrick-related posts and tweets was coming to an end there was a
slight spike in social network posts of another kind – Jacques deMolay. March 18th 2014
marked the 700th anniversary since deMolay, the last Grand Master of the Knights
Templar was burnt to death on the orders of King Philip IV of France. Admittedly, it’s only
exactly 700 years if you ignore the changes from the Julian to Gregorian calendars etc. … but
what’s a few days between friends? In reviewing the several comments posted on my Facebook
page afterwards, I was reminded that – in some circles at least – deMolay is a character who
still excites passions. To some, he’s an anti-establishment icon who challenged the authority
of the church. To others he is seen as the head of a sinister organisation whose name is
synonymous with the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and any other group (real or imagined)
credited with pulling the strings of power behind the scenes. In a sign that he remains an
adaptable and malleable icon, it was even suggested to me that his demise might be a fitting
template for dealing with the bankers responsible for the economic downturn. One newspaper
column even suggested that this date should be reimagined as a ‘national day to remember
former members of the armed forces’.
Templars!
It’s something of an understatement to say that I’ve a bit of an obsession with the Knights
Templar. I have an early memory of watching one of Henry Lincoln’s TV documentaries in the
1970s about Rennes-le-Château and the possibilities of the Templars having been involved in

2. hiding something in that corner of France. I remember being filled with a thrill at the idea of
these apparently ‘lost’ or suppressed narratives being uncovered through historical research
and the application of imaginative reason … or at least what was being passed off as reason.
Although utterly fraudulent, I bought into it in a big way. I still have my hardback first-edition
of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail [Free PDF version available: here]. Although first-
editions of this book go for considerable amounts of money, mine is not in that league … my
copy is dog-eared, battered, and covered in my scribbled notes and underlinings. While it’s
easy to look back on the web the authors spun as a collection of inaccuracies,
misunderstandings, misinterpretations, faulty logic, poor research, and pretty much any
criticism you wish to throw at the work, it was very influential to me personally. Quite apart
from anything else, it was one of my chief childhood influences that engaged my latent interest
in history and all things ‘ancient’. Without HBHG I’d probably never have ended up in
archaeology – make of that what you will! Admittedly, taking on a more serious attitude to
history and archaeology is what eventually led to my understanding that the book – and the
entire field of popular publishing that it spawned – is an intellectually flawed endeavour. If
you want eloquent proof of the lack of robustness of this enterprise, look no further than the
BBC’s 1996 Timewatch documentary ‘The History of a Mystery’. The show amounts to a point-
by-point take-down of Andrews & Schellenberger's book The Tomb of God, and the whole
Rennes-le-Château industry with it. For all that, I still enjoy reading pseudo history and I still
spend quite a bit of time dressing up as a Templar.
The author as a Templar ... though my glasses wont fit under the helm
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about Dan Brown’s book The
Da Vinci Code [Free PDF: here]. I had originally ignored it when it was published in 2003, and
it was only when it came out in paperback the following year that I began to pay it any
attention. By that point, it had infiltrated the popular consciousness in ways that
neither HBHG and its flock of sequels and imitators had ever achieved. Even Umberto Eco’s
literary masterpiece Foucault's Pendulum – tackling much the same subject matter – never
inspired such popular flurry and book sales. In much the same way as when your favourite

3. underground band is suddenly catapulted up the charts to stardom and household-ubiquity,
some of their sheen appears to dissipate for the long-term fan. This was how it was for me. I
unexpectedly found myself surrounded by large numbers of people, all of whom had opinions
as to just what had been found by the Templars in Jerusalem, what was buried in Rennes-le-
Château, or the true origins of Freemasonry. Maybe I just hung out with the wrong people!
Like Flann O’Brien’s comment on those who spoke Irish when it was ‘neither popular nor
profitable’, I had nothing but distain for these newcomers, lately arrived to the twin fields of
esoteric investigations and heavy-to-industrial-strength pseudo-historical speculation. When
my late father finally persuaded me to accept his copy of The Da Vinci Code, I was horrified to
discover that it was a terrible disappointment – poor prose broken up by interminable lectures
from the author on all things historical and esoteric. Dull, dull, dull. I’ve never reread the book,
but in parsing sections of it to check facts for this post, I feel that my low opinion of the writing
is justified. That said, fair play to Dan Brown – I may not like his work, but I love his book
sales!
Absolutely none of this was on my mind in 2004 when my wife and I decided to head to Paris
for a holiday. Ah, those halcyon days before we became parents! We booked in for a week at
the delightfully named ‘Hotel Garden Opera’. I see that they now have a picture of the actual
building on their website. Back then, they had one photo on the website and it was of the
remarkably beautiful Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house. We only realised this when we
attempted to reconcile the images we’d seen of this fantastically opulent masterpiece of
French Second Empire excess with the anonymous concrete block we found ourselves standing
outside. The hotel was situated in what I came to term ‘the African hairdressing quarter of
Paris’ with numerous establishments on both sides of the main thoroughfare leading into the
city centre dedicated to this art. In the evenings, when the hairdressers had shut up shop for
the night, and put out their refuse for collection, offcuts of human hair would blow along the
street, propelled by the light breeze. These would coalesce into sizeable balls, gathering up
leaves and assorted street debris, to form impressive ‘tumbleweaves’, often travelling at some
velocity and making noise as they went. I took quite a fright the first time one shot past me,
thinking it was a giant rat. Shock quickly turned to disgust on the realisation that this was a

4. vast collection of human hair from multiple sources, apparently moving of its own volition –
such are the things that nightmares are made of! Of the hotel itself, the rooms were tiny,
Spartan, and the main door couldn’t fully open because the bed was in the way. On the positive
side, the staff were lovely and the breakfasts were excellent … and all within walking distance
of the centre of the city. We did quite a few of the touristy things you’d expect … or at least
those that you’d expect an obsessive archaeologist to be attracted to. We hit Père Lachaise
Cemetery, the Paris catacombs; the Roman ruins under Notre Dame; the tapestry
masterpieces at the Musée de Cluny; the house of Nicolas Flamel (who was a real person & not
just a character in the Harry Potter novels); and the Eiffel Tower. Admittedly, in the case of
the latter, I had forgotten the vast scale of the construction and insisted that ‘there’s no need
to go by Metro … it’s just over there!’ Several hours later, back at the hotel (via a stop at a
chemist to purchase ibuprofen cream to soothe tired, flayed feet) a quick perusal of the map
I’d left behind indicated that I’d taken us on a forced march of approximately 7.5km (c.4.6
miles) through the highways and backstreets of the city. We used the city’s Metro with much
more frequency after that.
The Paris Catacombs
Somewhere in amongst these cultural meanderings, punctuated by frequent stops for lunches,
dinners, beer, numerous bowls of French Onion Soup, and strong, sweet Parisian coffee, we
found ourselves outside the doors of the church of Saint-Sulpice. What with all the other
archaeological and historical delights to sample around the city, it wasn’t even on my cultural
horizon as a place to visit. But … now that we’re here … I suggested to my wife that I’d like to
go in for a look about. She eyed both me and the building with something approaching
suspicion and asked ‘what’s so special about this one? Paris is filled with churches like this!’
Time to come clean! “Well … it’s a scene of some action in The Da Vinci Code, but it’s also
really important in the whole Rennes-le-Château affair, because this is where the
priest Bérenger Saunière came to celebrate mass when he visited Paris …”. I don’t think I really
got much further than that. By this stage, my wife had taken on a look of ‘not this madness
again?’ She sighed and indicated that I was welcome to the dull and dusty church, but she was
staying outside to enjoy the sunshine and the festival of poetry books on sale in the adjacent
Place Saint-Sulpice.

5. Bone art at The Paris Catacombs
Today, the church of Saint-Sulpice is the second-largest in Paris (after Notre Dame). The
original edifice was constructed during the 13th century in the Romanesque style. The current
building was begun in the mid-17th century, under the direction of Jean-Jacques Olier, the
founder of the Society of Saint-Sulpice. The west façade was redesigned in the 1730s
by Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, inspired by Christopher Wren's Saint Paul's Cathedral in
London. There have been additions and subtractions along the way, but what remains today
is an imposing, but (to me at least) uninspiringly bland mock Classical affair.

6. Art Deco Masonic columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Dull, dusty … and definitely dark! Stepping in from the bright sunshine, I expected that my
eyes should take a few moments to adjust. In that brief time of partial blindness I had
anticipated a change from the hustle and bustle of the city streets to something quieter and
altogether more reverend. If anything, the sound levels appeared to increase – it was louder
inside the church than outside on the street. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I could see that
the church was packed with people. My first reaction was to back out and leave these
worshipers to their service … but they weren’t worshipers and there was no cleric in evidence
to conduct them in prayer. These were tourists who had either – like me – wandered in here
or had deliberately sought this place out. A brief scan around the nave indicated that there
were quite a few holding copies of Dan Brown’s book – in multiple translations – and there
were even a few to be seen sporting thumbed paperback editions of HBHG. I was clearly among
the hard-core!
One of the chief items of interest within the church is the large obelisk-like gnomon and its
brass strip inserted into the floor. Although it looks out of place within a church, it is there to
serve a largely christian function. The monument was completed in 1743, on the request of the
parish priest of the church, Jean-Baptiste Languet de Gergy, as a means of better identifying
the occurrence of the equinoxes and, thus, determining the exact date of easter, though it has
been used for a number of other, purely scientific, purposes. It is often stated – without any
verification that I have ever seen – that the church was saved from the wreckers and
iconoclasts of the French Revolution precisely because of this connection to scientific
endeavour. Certainly, the church was used during this period as a place to worship
the Supreme Being. The Wikipedia article asserts (but I’ve never noticed it) that there is “a
printed sign over the center door of the main entrance. One can still barely make out the
printed words "Le Peuple Francais Reconnoit L’Etre Suprême Et L’Immortalité de L’Âme"
("The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul")”. The
church also appears in the so-called Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau, widely considered a
forgery concocted by Pierre Plantard (a French pretender to the French throne) and Philippe

7. de Chérisey (a disgraced, alcoholic, minor noble). These documents purport to be an account
of the Priory of Sion, an organisation founded by Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099. Without
providing the whole background to, and contents of, the documents it may be safely stated
that all reputable researchers who have investigated the issue conclude that they are forgeries,
concocted as part of a surrealist hoax, or ludibrium.
Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Between these various sources, the church of Saint-Sulpice had achieved a degree of mythic
aggregation in the realms of pseudo history that near rivalled Rennes-le-Château itself, even
before the publication of The Da Vinci Code. The novel gets many things wrong, including the
fact that the metal strip in the floor is in some way related to the Paris Meridian (which actually
passes c.100m to the east and was established nearly 80 years earlier, in 1666). In the
novel, Silas, the albino monk, enters the church in search of a ‘keystone’ that will give him the
location of the Holy Grail. Following the available clues, he discovers it (actually a decoy
created by the Priory of Sion) in a cavity under a floor tile at the foot of the obelisk. The Wiki
article on the church notes that “In the years following the publication of the novel, tourists
would sometimes be seen knocking on the floor near the obelisk, searching for hollow spaces.”
Had I read that line without having been to the church and seen it with my own eyes, I would
not have believed it. Actually, I disagree with one word in the sentence: ‘sometimes’. The scene
that lay before me was that of a cacophonous throng, attempting to soak up and appreciate
every bit of esoteric, occult, and conspiracy-laden mysticism that had been encoded into the
architecture and decoration by those likely lads from the Priory of Sion, the Illuminati, the
Knights Templar … and probably helped out by the Freemasons too! It seemed that
everywhere I looked there were people tapping for hollows in the floor, or making deep,
meaningful sighs as they beheld the significance of the brass strip in the floor. That poor line
of metal had already been polished to a high shine by two and a half centuries of pedestrian
traffic by worshipers, tourists, and sundry French Revolutionaries. Now it looked like it was
about to either expire or combust under the accumulated weight of gentle stroking and esoteric
significance that was being placed upon it. Individuals were photographing it or sighting along
it. The hand gestures used by occasional small groups – pointing or swinging a limb parallel –
Indicated that a number of animated conversations were being had about it. Other people were
photographing the alleged references to the Priory of Sion encoded in the stained glass, or
looking at the large and ornate candlesticks on the high altar. In the latter case, one of these
candlesticks is mentioned in Brown’s book as having been used by Silas to smash his way
through the floor of the church. I would be wrong to paint a picture that suggested I was a lone
sceptic among this throng of historical conspiracy theorists, though it did certainly feel that

8. way at first. No more than my eyes taking some time to adapt to the lower light levels within
the building, I slowly began to discern that it was not a uniform host before me. First in
scattered overheard wisps of conversations, and later in a couple of chats with other visitors, I
came to realise that a significant number of those there had, like me, wandered in to see ‘what
all the fuss was about’. For all that, we were definitely in the minority. In making my way
around the church, I noticed that there were concerted hums of activity around the gnomon
and the high altar etc., all within the general background throng of floor-knockers and brass-
polishers. There was, however, one distinct group – a loose knot of people, standing together
in relative silence looking at something of interest that I couldn’t quite see. I made my way
through the crowd, careful not to trip over any bent-kneed strip-strokers, bump into anyone
‘having a significant moment’, or the one guy who loudly proclaimed that he was there ‘To
Worship Isis’. Once I got closer, I could see that there was not one object of fascination, but
several. A series of small, rectangular cards were mounted on stands. Each card had a short
text in one of several languages. Despite my enviable fluency in both ‘War Movie German’ and
‘Outrageously French’, I shuffled along until I got to the English version. Try as I might, I
couldn’t recall any more than the general gist of it and a couple of generalised phrases.
Thankfully, someone out there had the foresight to record it for posterity and include it near
the end of the Wikipedia article on the church:
“(...) Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-selling novel, this is not a vestige of a
pagan temple. No such temple ever existed in this place. It [the line in the floor] was never
called a «Rose-Line». It does not coincide with the meridian traced through the middle of the
Paris Observatory which serves as a reference for maps where longitudes are measured in
degrees East or West of Paris. (...) Please also note that the letters «P» and «S» in the small
round windows at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the
church, and not an imaginary «Priory of Sion».”

9. Chapple on top of the Arc de Triomphe
... with fashionable Eiffel Tower decoration sprouting from top of head
This was where I took my deep meaningful breath and sighed! It was a beautiful feeling! In
among all this crazy, here were a series of small signs acting as beacons for rationality and
doing your research! I was about to head back out of the church, happy in the knowledge that
there still existed a stout bulwark of sense and sanity to counter the massed ranks of Lincolns,
Schellenbergers, Browns, and their adherents. Just as I was about to turn and go, I overheard
two middle-aged ladies discussing what they had just read. Their accents indicated that they
were of North American origin and they were dressed in what amounts to traditional tourist
garb that included large floppy canvas hats and ‘bum bags’ (or ‘fanny packs’ in North American
parlance). One held a copy of The Da Vinci Code under her arm while the other had the same
squeezed awkwardly into her ‘bum bag’. Both copies of the novel were heavily dog-eared and
thumbed. One volume in particular sprouted a profusion of coloured ‘post-it’ notes and
sundry ad-hoc markers, many of which appeared to bear scribbled notes and jottings.
Listening to them attempt to process the information from the sign was quite extraordinary.
Confronted with these facts, so plainly stated, and in contradiction with the novel they clearly
loved they didn’t seem to know how to react. There was quite a bit of halting, confused half
sentences left trailing off into the void: ‘But … Dan Brown … just …’ or ‘I thought … that …’. I
had quite a bit of sympathy for them – I had once been in a similar situation. I have tried to
rationalise the difference in terms of my infatuation with The Holy Blood and the Holy
Grail was based around a book that purported to be genuine history, while Dan Brown’s work
was very clearly a novel – a work of fiction. But that won’t wash. Both HBHG and The Da Vinci
Code claim the same base set of pseudo-historical ‘facts’, assumptions, and downright lies to
weave their stories of conspiracy laden alternative history. The only difference is that the novel
adds a cast of fictional characters, including Prof. Robert Langdon, Sophie Neveu Saint-Clair,
and the totally not based on two of the authors of HBHG, Sir Leigh Teabing. It had taken quite
a portion of my childhood and teenage years, but I had read, reasoned, and researched my way
out of this intellectual abyss – and now it was their turn. For anyone not already aware, the
suppressed historical narrative here is that Jesus escaped the crucifixion and made it to the

10. south of France with his wife, Mary Magdalene, where their children went on to found
the Merovingian dynasty of French kings. The Merovingians survived their deposition in the
mid-8th century and survive to this day as near mystical ‘once and future’ kings. The whole
story has been covered up by the Catholic Church in order to preserve their business interests
and maintain their orthodoxy. Simples.
A much thinner (& less grey) Chapple under the Eiffel Tower
I stood there and listened as these two tourists fumbled their way toward some uncomfortable
conclusions. If there’s no Priory of Sion dedicated to protecting this secret bloodline … maybe
there’s no bloodline … maybe it’s all made up! Could it really just be a hoax? In retrospect, I’m
sure I could have provided some genuine assistance and support. I could have offered a
metaphorical hand of reason and helped lift them from their ignorance. Turns out, I’m not
that guy! Some days I’m a total asshat … this, gentle reader, was one of those days. I leaned
forward, conjured up my best impression of a Clint Eastwood gravelly voice, and said: “Maybe
that’s just what they want you to believe!” This had the desired effect of creating a sudden wall
of sound from the two ladies … sharp intakes of breath, followed by stereo ‘Oooh!’s and then
‘Of course!’ and ‘I knew it!’ By that point I was already on my way out of the church, into the
sunshine, and their voices were a receding sonic spike amongst the general cacophony behind
me.
I'm a bad person - I know this! But I'm comfortable with being that guy!