'Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges: when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite history.' (Umberto Eco, "Foucault’s Pendulum")

It's just a fantasy-novel, but Dan Brown’s bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" made half of the world-population believe in the good old myth about the order of the Templars and the holy grail as the bloodline of Jesus Christ, who did not die on the cross as described in the bible. Even good friends of mine believe in this fairy tale. The book "Holy Blood and Holy Grail" by Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent came up with this idea first. A whole lot of people, including certain satanists trying to start their own order in Berlin-Charlottenburg, fall for this. Lots of them are right-wing revisionists trying to rewrite history from the very beginning. Lincoln and his friends claim that Jesus died in France and was buried in Rennes-le-Château in France. They found all these "clues" that were scattered throughout history by "initiates" of "the secret order of extraordinary gentlemen", people like Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Massimo Polidoro asked the right question: "Who invented such an incredible story?" He travelled to Rennes-le-Château to have a look at these "clues" himself. The story is a complete lie of course, but is has been around for a long time and Polidor finally found the guy who came up with it: Pierre Plantard.

"Plantard was an anti-Semite and the leader of a minor occult, right-wing organization known as Alpha Galates. His scheme was quite ingenious and complex. He had the parchments made by an artist friend, Philippe de Cherisey; then, he passed them on as real to Gérard de Sède, to whom he also told the invented story of Saunière’s findings.

Plantard also invented the Priory of Sion in 1956 and created fake manuscripts and documents that linked the Priory to RLC and deposited them at the National Library in Paris, where he suggested Lincoln and friends go to look for important discoveries.

But why go to all this trouble? All this and more was necessary in order to demonstrate not only that Plantard was the current Grand Master of the elusive Priory but also that he was the last descendant of the Merovingians. This meant that he was the current vessel of Christ’s holy blood and, above all, the heir to the throne of France as its legitimate king.

The scheme did not work out, however; there were no descendants after Dagobert II, and there were no living Merovingians pretenders to the throne that fell with Louis XVI. Plantard’s fake geneology quickly dissolved under close scrutiny. "

Full story: "The Secrets of Rennes-le-Château": Massimo Polidoro reports for the Skeptical Inquirer