Since the few readers of this column have given strong praise to Saat Samundar and stronger brickbats to Small World, Saat Samundar is back. This time connecting Sion to Priory of Sion.

Saat Samundar

The Dadar-Matunga-Wadala-Sion scheme of 1899-1900 was the first planned suburban scheme in Bombay. The City Improvement Trust formulated this plan in order to relieve congestion in the centre of the town, following the plague epidemics of the 1890’s. According to the survey plan, 60,000 people were to be housed at Dadar-Matunga and an equal number in Sion-Matunga.

During the epidemic of 1896, Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine was called from Calcutta to Bombay. He was a star having produced a successful cholera vaccine. He improvised a laboratory in the Grant Medical College and set to work.  A form of preventive vaccine using dead bacteria, useful enough for human trials was ready by January 1897, and tested on volunteers at the Byculla jail the next month. Use of the vaccine in the field started immediately. Recognition followed soon.

While Haffkine got recognition in India, in his past he was no stranger to notoriety. The son of a Jewish schoolmaster, W. M. Haffkine was born in the prosperous Black Sea port of Odessa. After completing his education, he became the curator of the Zoological Museum in Odessa, and would have remained there comfortably. However, for a short time, young Haffkine was a member of Narodnaya Volya, the group which assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Although he had broken up with the group when they turned to terrorism, during the pogroms in Odessa of 1880s, he participated in Jewish self-defense and was arrested and tried by the administration of Tsar Alexander III, the Tsar who brought back ‘anti-reforms’.

Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar, succeeded Tsar Alexander III. When his father died at the age of 49, Nicholas was so unprepared for his role that in tears he asked of his cousin “What is going to happen to me and all of Russia?”

Tsar Nicholas was persuaded by his advisors to reject a Japanese offer of compromise, which lead to the Russo-Japanese war and a heavy defeat. This defeat undermined the prestige of the monarchy, at a time when workers and peasants were already discontented. To protest against various ills, a demonstration that marched to the Winter Palace, on the 22 of January 1905. Nicholas himself, thinking that there was nothing serious about to occur, had already left for the weekend to stay in his country palace. Convinced that the Tsar would not permit the soldiers to shoot at his own people, the marchers ignored government orders to call off the demonstration. However the troops opened fire killing large numbers. That Bloody Sunday pushed Russia into revolution.

That revolution came to head in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when Lenin led his followers to defeat the Tsarist forces. Incidentally, Narodnaya Volya had also planned the murder of Tsar Alexander III. Among the conspirators captured was one Aleksandr Ulyanov, who was the brother of Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov or Lenin.

Amongst the unintended effects of the Bolshevik Revolution was the increased popularity of The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion, a tract purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by Jews. While the work is a complete hoax, it was popularized by those opposed to the revolutionary movement. The idea that the Bolshevik movement was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination, plus the fact that some top Bolsheviks, particularly Leon Trotsky, were indeed Jews, sparked worldwide interest in the Protocols. However Nazi Propaganda using them to justify their excesses finally diminished their credibility.

However, this didn’t prevent Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln to incorporate the tract into their book, “Holy Blood and Holy Grail”. They claimed that the original Protocol had emanated from an irregular Masonic organization that used the name "Sion" but had nothing to do with an international Jewish conspiracy. The original version was not intended to be inflammatory or released publicly, but was a program for gaining control of Freemasonry. The person responsible for changing the text in about 1903 was Sergei Nilus in the course of his attempt to gain influence in the Court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

Holy Blood and Holy Grail was based on the pseudo-historical Secret Dossiers of Henri Lobineau found at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The authors were unaware that the Dossiers were a forgery and actually written by Pierre Plantard and his friend Philippe de Cherisey in 1960s. Also in the 1960s, Plantard began writing a manuscript and had a series of "medieval parchments" forged by de Cherisey which contained encrypted messages to a secret society. The story that they concocted claimed that a certain Father Bérenger Saunière (Now that surname should ring a bell!) had supposedly discovered these seemingly ancient parchments inside of a pillar while renovating his church in Rennes-le-Château in the 19th Century. The story and existence of these parchments were intended to prove Plantard’s claims that the secret society, the Priory of Sion, was a medieval one.

The journey from Sion to the Priory of Sion runs through revolutionary doctors, Jews and Tsarist Russia. Isn’t this the stuff of another book? Is Dan Brown listening?

(Dhoomketu has stopped reading newspapers to make time for his blogging, because of his hectic day job. Besides watching movies, reading science fiction and trying to find himself, he is furiously reading up on professional wrestling. His passions are quizzing, eating and travelling, all of which get occasional mention on his blog 22nd floor.)

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