Mystical systems
Priory of Sion
Direct answer
Priory of Sion: The Priory of Sion was a small French association registered in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, later given a false medieval history through forged documents.
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At a glance
- Also called
- prieure de sion, pierre plantard
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Knights Templar, Conspiracy Theory, Freemasonry, Bavarian Illuminati
The Priory of Sion was a small French association registered in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, later given a false medieval history through forged documents.
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Is the Priory of Sion real?
The legend says that a secret order founded in Jerusalem in 1099 has guarded the bloodline of the Merovingian kings ever since, under grand masters who included Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. The record says otherwise. The Priory was registered as a local association at Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, near the Swiss border, in 1956, and concerned itself at first with low-cost housing.
During the 1960s Plantard, with Philippe de Chérisey, produced parchments and typed genealogies that were placed in the French national library under the title Dossiers Secrets. They made Plantard the heir of the Merovingians. The story reached a wide public through The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982, whose authors added the idea of a line descended from Jesus, and through the novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003. French researchers and journalists traced the forgeries to their makers, and Plantard himself admitted the invention.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Orders and mystery schools.
What sets Priory of Sion apart
The hoax worked by reversing the usual direction of proof. Its makers did not announce their claims; they deposited papers in the Bibliothèque nationale and let authors discover them, so that the library's catalogue seemed to vouch for the contents. Each later book then cited the files or one another. What undid it was ordinary checking: the files were typescripts of the 1960s, the maker of the parchments said so in writing, and the prefecture's register gave the true founding date.
- Registered: 1956, at Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, Haute-Savoie, France
- Founder: Pierre Plantard (1920 to 2000)
- Forged files: Dossiers Secrets, placed in the Bibliothèque nationale in the 1960s
- Claimed founding: 1099, in Jerusalem, a date without any evidence
- Admission: Plantard under oath before a French judge, 1993
- Made famous by: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982); The Da Vinci Code (2003)
Often mistaken for something else: The Knights Templar were a real medieval order with thousands of surviving records; the Priory of Sion has none before 1956 and was attached to the Templars by its inventors.
The story behind Priory of Sion
The statutes were filed in 1956. The planted documents date from the 1960s, and Gérard de Sède's book of 1967 on Rennes-le-Château first drew on them. De Chérisey acknowledged in writing that he had made the parchments. In 1993 Plantard was questioned by a French judge in the course of a financial inquiry and stated under oath that he had fabricated the Priory's history; he died in 2000. A medieval abbey of Mount Sion did exist in Jerusalem, but nothing connects it with the association of 1956.
Why Priory of Sion matters
Priory of Sion is among the best documented modern hoaxes about secret orders, and it shows how planted papers in a great library can pass for history.
How to read Priory of Sion
The name covers the 1956 association, the fictional order of novels and films, and a textbook example in studies of pseudohistory.
Priory of Sion in practice: an example
A reader who finishes a thriller about the Priory of Sion and looks for its medieval charters finds only papers typed in the 1960s.
Where readings of Priory of Sion go wrong
Books that treat the Priory as ancient rest on the forged files; no independent document supports a history before 1956.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- priory of sion meaning, prieure de sion, is the priory of sion real, priory of sion hoax, pierre plantard
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Is the Priory of Sion real?
An association of that name was really registered in France in 1956. The ancient secret society described in books and films is an invention, built on documents forged in the 1960s by its founder and his associates.
Who created the Priory of Sion?
Pierre Plantard, a French draughtsman, with a few friends, in 1956. The false pedigree was written in the following decade with the help of Philippe de Chérisey, who drew up the supposed medieval parchments.
Was Leonardo da Vinci a grand master of the Priory of Sion?
No. His name stands on a list of grand masters in the forged Dossiers Secrets, alongside Newton, Victor Hugo and others. The list has no source earlier than the 1960s and no historian accepts it.
