THEORIES

There is a temptation, when Charles Perrault is mentioned in relation to Le Serpent Rouge, to treat the fairy-tale clue as decorative: a charming literary allusion, a wink towards childhood, a piece of poetic ornament placed among the more obviously esoteric references to Saint-Sulpice, Poussin, Teniers, the zodiac, the meridian, and the “shepherdess”. But that may be the wrong way to approach it. Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty in the Wood may not have been used because Plantard and Chérisey wanted us to think of a fairy tale. It may have been used because the fairy tale itself is a doorway — a literary thicket and ticket — through which the reader is meant to pass backwards into older and darker material. 

The Priory of Sion affair should not be understood simply as a hoax invented from nothing, nor as a reliable historical revelation. A more precise model is this: Plantard and his associates appear to have constructed a false documentary apparatus from real fragments, borrowed names, occult-Masonic residues, genealogical debris, local traditions, and older Rennes material. The result was a “rigged deck” — a prepared set of documents arranged to force a particular interpretive effect.