The Magical Enigma
of Sir Henry Lincoln

I can’t bring myself to call Henry Lincoln anything other than “Sir” Henry. As a rebellious American, I take liberty and choose to recognize the Knights Templar as a legitimate authority for granting knighthood, though as a proper Englishman Sir Henry always chuckled when I introduced him that way. It somehow seems wrong to call such a venerable figure simply Henry … especially when he’s charging you with the solemn task of guarding an ancient secret hidden for centuries.

The first time I met Sir Henry, he revealed a treasure buried in code and whispered through time. I wasn’t anyone special—he spent the last fifty years of his life telling anybody who would listen. Yet every time, he told the story with the same glimmer in his eye, the same mysterious enthusiasm. It’s not every day you encounter a real-life mystery—one that’s thousands of years old … one that’s set down in complex ciphers … and one that people went to their graves protecting.

By the time I arrived on the scene as a Sally-come-lately-to-the-party, over a thousand books had been written on the mystery of Rennes-le-Château—all disagreeing about the true treasure hidden in this cosy corner of Southwest France. Some claim that Jesus was buried on the local mountain of Cardou … Others insist that Mary Magdalene lived and taught in the region … There’s reason to believe that a Visigothic treasure may be lurking beneath any hillside … But in my humble opinion, the most spectacular theory of all is the ancient secret of which Sir Henry Lincoln claimed knowledge and proof.

The mystery of Rennes-le-Château is a tantalizing tale of treasure and intrigue. A 19th-century priest, Bérenger Saunière, was renovating his parish church when he supposedly discovered a great treasure. Though nothing could be proven, rumors flew across the countryside, and the priest picked up some of the idiosyncratic habits of the rich—peacocks in the yard and Parisian starlets over for parties. As he continued renovations of the church, subtle depictions of ancient heresies began to appear in his designs. Were they secret codes hiding midst the artwork?

Sir Henry Lincoln’s flair for the dramatic and propensity for storytelling were at home in this fabled region among tales of treasure and heresy. He soon found himself immersed in the story, thrust back through time exploring codes and motives, histories and curiosities. The actor-turned-writer had finally found a story that allowed him to use his many talents. His skill as a presenter and the knack for research that carried him through many an assignment with the BBC were imperative. But his greatest gift—the litmus test which so many seekers fail—was that he didn’t believe what he found.

Like imperceptible quicksand, belief is the pitfall of seekers in this region. It’s simply too tempting. Easier to believe that one has solved a cipher, cracked a code, or demystified a mystery of history than to live with the questions

He never believed—he set out to prove … but those who know this mystery well, know that he fell short. It took half a lifetime for Sir Henry to embrace the truth he intuitively sensed from the beginning. At the end of his life, he finally understood why so many people come to Rennes-le-Château searching for treasure. Yet by then, it was too late. He couldn’t risk people believing him again. So he charged me with the task he couldn’t do.

Now I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand what he couldn’t do, you must first understand what he did … and why he swore he’d never do it again.

The year was 1969, and Henry Lincoln was on an innocent holiday in France with his family. He was guarding the children one languid summer afternoon when he cracked open a little French paperback about the tiny hilltop village of Rennes-le-Château and a priest who found a great treasure. The book, Le trésor maudit de Rennes-le-Château, contained a photograph of (what was said to be) an ancient parchment. Ever an eye for mystery, Sir Henry suddenly found himself decoding a secret message buried in the text.

“It was so simple any schoolboy could have found it,” he often said, “so I wondered why the author hadn’t mentioned it. He might have sold more books.” 

Sir Henry carried the paperback around for months, always looking for hidden messages or other clues. He reveled in trying to solve the mystery. This wasn’t some adventure in a faraway universe like those he had written for the original Dr. Who; it was a real-life puzzle.

Using his credentials as a BBC writer, he arranged a meeting with Gérard de Sède, the author of the Le trésor maudit de Rennes-le-Château. From across a Parisian bistro table, Sir Henry asked the man, “Why didn’t you print the message?”

“What message?” came De Sède’s cryptic response. 

The two writers must have been delighted with the clever bout of verbal sparring that ensued as they established that they both knew of the secret message hidden in the parchment (and they were speaking of the same secret message). At last, De Sède looked at him and said, “We thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself.”

We … 

With that one little word, Sir Henry knew he was onto something—De Sède wasn’t working alone. Curiosity piqued, he returned to London where he pitched the idea of a short documentary to BBC’s Chronicle. Sir Henry’s contribution to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château wasn’t just cracking codes or solving ciphers … it was introducing the story to the English-speaking world.

When he began his first film on Rennes-le-Château, he could never have imagined how all-consuming the subject would be. The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem turned into a three-part series about Bérenger Saunière, the treasure of Rennes-le-Château, the Knights Templar, and the strange histories of the Languedoc of Southwest France. During the Chronicle films, he teamed up with writer/researcher Richard Leigh and photographer Michael Baigent, who both had a passion for the mysteries of history. By the time they published The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail together, the mystery had become a phenomenon.

Yet there was a problem right at the heart of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The authors not only followed clues and hunted down long-buried research, they also introduced an idea so alluring that people around the world immediately began to believe it. The evidence was inextricably woven around the complex mystery of Rennes-le-Château so that the average person couldn’t tell where scholarly research left off and conspiratorial conjecture began. Sir Henry the fiction writer had concocted a dazzling hypothesis, and while scholars screamed that it couldn’t be proven, readers latched on to it.

The crux of the book was the hypothesis that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child and their lineage became the Merovingian line of French kings. The proposal of a holy royal marriage wasn’t new—only a few years before, Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield had put forward a similar theory. What made Sir Henry’s work different from others was that he sensationalized it. Above all else, Sir Henry Lincoln—thespian and screenwriter—had a penchant for drama.

An innocent sentence uttered over a cup of coffee sparked the idea. “There’s something fishy about the Merovingians …” Sir Henry would say afterwards that you could hear the penny drop in the room with a thunderous clang. I imagine you might also have heard the wheels turning in his mind. Fishy … Icthus … The Merovingians are descendants of the royal bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene! 

That hypothesis became The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Sir Henry often said, “If not for that cup of coffee, no one would be talking about Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene.”

Of course, the premise of the book would be impossible to ever prove, but it was a thrilling story. Overnight, he became the Mystery Man and by 2004, he was the real-life story behind the Da Vinci Code. The actor in him reveled in the drama. He was bombarded by fans who came forward to claim they were of the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, clamoring to be recognized as an important piece of the puzzle.

Still, he never really understood why his work was so important to people. “It was a hypothesis,” he used to say, mystified. It was years after Holy Blood before Sir Henry came to See the true Mystery he had uncovered … and that, he would spend the rest of his life puzzling over.

That's where I came in.

At 83 years old, Sir Henry had been living in the South of France for nearly a decade, giving unofficial tours to folks visiting the hilltop hamlet of Rennes-le-Château. Sitting beside him in the garden of a charming restaurant, I listened raptly as he gave the presentation that would change my life. I stared wide-eyed as he walked us through the parchment cipher, the codes in the church, leading dramatically to his ultimate finding—the geometry on the landscape.

To tell you about this discovery in a short article is akin to describing an opera in a text message. It’s possible that by telling you so plainly, you’ll never comprehend the significance of his discovery. But the story has been shrouded in secrecy too long. I have to try.

This real-life mystery is so complex that even a writer of magnificent imagination could never have invented it. Spanning centuries and continents, it takes us from a small parish church in the foothills of the Pyrenees to the Knights Templar and beyond. Yet the Light at the end of the tunnel is so simple that most who learn of it fail to see its significance.

All the clues, codes, and ciphers finally led Sir Henry to one of the greatest discoveries of all time—a complex, intentional, geometrical pattern on the landscape. In this area of Southwest France, the churches, springs, Templar Commanderies, standing stones, and other sites form a spectacular grid of sorts.

Sir Henry was amazed to have found something so utterly provable! There was no need to believe—one could easily measure the distance and angles between landmarks.

From his first discovery of this phenomenon, he embarked on a long and winding journey, spending decades researching and plotting the geometry. He used to say he’d get a whiff of something that “just didn’t smell right,” and he couldn’t let go until he’d followed the trail. His findings evolved from their first appearance in the Chronicle films to become the book The Holy Place—Sir Henry’s full account of the codes at Rennes-le-Château and how they led him to the discovery of geometry on the landscape. He also penned Key to the Sacred Pattern, an entertaining autobiographical account of his adventures following the mysteries (and his favorite of the books he wrote).

Yet to simply state that there is remarkable geometry on the landscape is like saying that the TARDIS is just a spaceship. The natural geometry of the Languedoc is a phenomenon that defies description; it is a reality that must be experienced.

It wasn’t until the last years of his life that Sir Henry began to admit to himself the true significance of what he had found … the implications … the meaning … the power. By then, he had lived too long under the shadow of the hypothesis of Holy Blood to even consider publishing another unprovable idea. He had long-since grown weary of the drama his brilliant storytelling had created. He longed simply to share the beauty of what he had discovered.

When I came to work with Sir Henry, the first question he asked me was, “How are we going to tell them out there?” We sat in his garden looking out over the landscape of the Languedoc, smoke from his ever-present cigarette curling about his face, wispy white hair twirling in the breeze. He took a long drag, staring toward the ruins of the Templar Commandery at Bézu barely visible on the skyline, as if looking back through time. With him, it was as if every moment contained a question to be solved, a new piece of information to be integrated. I knew he could see the geometry on the landscape as clearly as if his brown pen had drawn great lines across the garden. I had yet to learn what it all meant.

We spent months tracing the landscape together, the old man beside me clinging to the passenger’s handle as we bumped and whizzed round the curving highways of Southwest France. Sir Henry never told me what we would find, only offered mysterious names—we’re going to Les Capitelles … Nébias … Campagne-sur-Aude … When we arrived, he didn’t say a word. Instead, he watched as I explored, leaving me to my silent questions.

Am I missing something? What am I supposed to see? Why is the geometry so important? Why was it hidden in code through the centuries?

The mystery of Rennes-le-Château has flummoxed many a seeker and stolen the sanity and salary of treasure hunters worldwide. It wasn’t until long after I grew familiar with Sir Henry’s enigmatic style and came to know the tiny details of the mystery that I began to See what he couldn’t say. There are no words for the experience of these geometry sites. There’s no simple explanation for why so many people feel called to explore these mysteries. Yet those who dare enter the Unknown with curiosity and humility may be blessed and forever changed by these discoveries.

Sir Henry charged me with telling the story of Rennes-le-Château as he could not—with all the subjective magic and unprovable mystery still intact. After years of writing some of the most original fiction this world will ever know, he hung up his hat and passed on the torch.

My novel The Heretic is the fictionalized account of my own adventures with Sir Henry, dedicated to the man who invited me into worlds beyond this one. It offers the “true” story of the magic of the geometry as he presented it to me—with all the wonder and intrigue he shared as a master storyteller. As Sir Henry Lincoln moves beyond our reach into worlds we can only imagine, I like to think that a part of him lives on in Sir Anthony Leclair—everyone’s favorite character—the mysterious old man who will ever be guiding people through the mystery of Rennes-le-Château and the magic of the Mystery.