Belief.net on the Priory of Sion

"The historic Priory of Sion, properly called the Prieure du Notre Dame de Sion, was a religious community founded in Jerusalem in 1099, immediately after the First Crusade. (It had no special relationship with the Knights Templar.) After their church was destroyed during a Muslim attack in 1219, the priests of the Priory withdrew to Sicily. In 1617 they joined the Jesuits and disappeared.

Nevertheless, the Priory still flourishes in fantasy. According to theories popularized in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" by Michael Biagent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982), a book heavily mined by Dan Brown for "The Da Vinci Code," the Priory had a hidden mission--guarding the secret bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. According to this legend, Jesus' lineage, passed through the Merovingian dynasty of France and the crusader Geoffrey of Bouillon, still exists.

The idea of a still-existing Priory with a shocking secret was, in fact, invented by a convicted French conman named Pierre Plantard on the model of a 19th-century esoteric society, the Order of the Rose-Croix of the Temple of the Grail. The only modern Priory of Sion was a short-lived club registered by Plantard in 1956.

But Plantard and his accomplices later fabricated false documentation for the Priory, which claimed to have enrolled thousands of important people throughout the world under Grand Master Plantard, heir to the holy blood and the throne of France. These claims wilted under investigation, including a debunking by BBC in 1992. A French court forced Plantard to admit his hoax under oath in 1993."

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