Priory of Sion was founded by Godefroi de Bouillon

The Priory of Sion was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by the French king Godefroi de Bouillon, immediately after his conquest of the city. The brotherhood was created to protect a powerful secret that had been in Godefroi's family since the time of Christ, a secret whose protection became the very reason for the Priory's existence. The Priory's mission was to guard this secret and pass it on from generation to generation, forming an unbroken chain of knowledge that would survive through the centuries.

Founding and Purpose

Godefroi de Bouillon, a French king who conquered Jerusalem in 1099, founded the Priory of Sion as a secret brotherhood. He was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret that had been in his family since the time of Christ, and he feared this secret might be lost when he died. The Priory was charged with protecting this secret by quietly passing it on from generation to generation. During their years in Jerusalem, the Priory learned of a stash of hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod's temple, which had been built atop the earlier ruins of Solomon's Temple. These documents, they believed, corroborated Godefroi's powerful secret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing to get them. The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered from the rubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die.

Creation of the Knights Templar

In order to retrieve the documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm—a group of nine knights called the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, more commonly known as the Knights Templar. The Knights Templar were founded by the Priory of Sion to retrieve a collection of secret documents from beneath the ruins of the temple. The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which the Templars ran their mission; their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents from beneath the ruins of the temple. The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins that made them wealthy and powerful beyond anyone's wildest imagination. The documents that made the Knights so powerful were the same documents that have been the object of countless Grail quests throughout history.

The Secret and Its Guardians

The Priory of Sion guards the Sangreal documents, which contain the proof of the true nature of the Holy Grail. The brotherhood's threefold charge is to protect the Sangreal documents, protect the tomb of Mary Magdalene, and nurture and protect the bloodline of Christ—those few members of the royal Merovingian bloodline who have survived into modern times. The Priory's membership has included some of history's most cultured individuals: men like Botticelli, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci, who presided over the Priory between 1510 and 1519 as the brotherhood's Grand Master. The identities of living Priory members are kept extremely secret, and only four members at any given time know where the Holy Grail is hidden—the Grand Master and his three sénéchaux.

The Keystone and the Grail

The Priory created a keystone—an encoded stone that reveals the hiding place of the Holy Grail. The keystone is believed to have been created by the Priory sometime in the past couple of decades. The keystone is a preuve de mérite, a test through which a rising Priory sénéchal can prove himself worthy of the information it holds. The Priory's tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church 'conned' the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine. The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.