It is a curious thing, the vehemence with which some people insist that Circuit is “rubbish.” They speak with the conviction of witnesses who were never in the room. What fascinates me is not their certainty about what the book is, but their certainty that it is not worth reading.
To me, Circuit has always been a small act of genius disguised as nonsense. It plays the fool, but only so that it might slip past the guards of rationalism and plant a seed in the reader’s imagination. Its ciphers, its biblical echoes, its absurd parables — all of these form a theatre of misdirection in which humour performs the oldest function of art: to reveal what cannot be said outright.
Philippe de Chérisey understood the double nature of irony better than most. He knew that a joke can protect a truth the way myth protects a mystery. When he writes of tombs, angels, and Magdalene, he is not simply weaving another strand into the Rennes-le-Château legend; he is playing a far older game — the one where language becomes a labyrinth, and the reader, if they are patient, finds themselves in conversation with their own search.
So yes, I take his joke seriously.
Some observers have told me, with admirable firmness, that Circuit is nothing more than a prank: a “Priory of Sion trick,” a literary parasite feeding on the credulity of others. Perhaps. But I can’t help noticing that those who speak most loudly about its supposed emptiness are often those who have never opened its pages.
There is a particular kind of comfort in dismissal.
It allows one to feel clever without ever being touched by ambiguity. It replaces the difficulty of interpretation with the safety of ridicule. But ridicule is not analysis, and contempt is not criticism. The refusal to read is not an act of discernment — it is an act of fear. I do not mean fear of Chérisey’s ideas, which are mischievous rather than dangerous. I mean the fear of the possibility that Chérisey might have meant something. Because if he did — if the riddles and parables are not mere smoke, but signs pointing toward a genuine vision — then we, the modern inheritors of cynicism, might be obliged to admit that imagination still has authority.
It is easier to call a mystery “garbage” than to confront the unease it stirs. Easier to call believers “gullible” than to acknowledge that belief, in any form, requires courage. If we only repeat the dismissals of others without reading the primary work, we miss its texture and tone — the very qualities that reveal the kind of mind behind it. Harsh and revealing responses are usually of three distinct layers:
The contempt is a defensive mechanism. They need “gullible believers” as foils to validate themselves. Debunkers often define their identity by opposition. To assert control, they use labels like “stupid.” It’s a form of intellectual bullying, not argument. None of those are actually arguments about the text itself.
French researchers such as Jean-Luc Chaumeil and Henry Lincoln (in his later reflections) all recognised Chérisey as a literary figure — not a theologian, but a surrealist who injected mythic artifice into history. Modern mythography and media studies increasingly study this kind of “performative forgery” as cultural production. Taking Philippe de Chérisey and Circuit seriously as a literary and cultural agent is not credulity but analysis. The boundary between hoax, art, and belief is a recognised topic in the study of modern myth. To study it is to understand how cultural meaning is made. Henry Lincoln’s reaction mirrors what many people who actually knew Philippe de Chérisey discovered once they met him: behind the parody and the deliberate misdirection was a highly literate, witty, and complex mind.
Lincoln gradually came to see that Chérisey wasn’t simply a trickster. He understood language, symbolism, and the architecture of myth in a way that could easily outfox literal-minded “debunkers.”
Calling a work “garbage” is like calling Finnegans Wake garbage because it’s difficult. Circuit is not a treatise; it’s a literary artefact. It belongs to a tradition of esoteric satire that includes Rabelais, Swift, and Borges — texts that build a maze to make the reader confront their own hunger for meaning. If the only criterion is factual verifiability, then yes, it fails. But as literature — as a work that dramatises the dance between belief and disbelief — it succeeds profoundly.
When someone labels interest in these questions an “addiction,” they’re revealing more about their discomfort with uncertainty than about others. Their tone often gives the message away: it’s built on received opinion, not firsthand reading. You can always tell when someone hasn’t actually encountered the text itself — they repeat the vocabulary of dismissal (“rubbish,” “hoax,” “gullible”) without referring to a single passage, image, or rhythm from Circuit. Anyone who’s really read Circuit — even skeptically — can’t help but notice that it’s far too idiosyncratic, literary, and layered to be written off as propaganda. The metaphors are too strange, the humour too delicate, the voice too consistent. There’s artistry there, whether or not one agrees with the message.
So the common smear techniques are often utilised to delegitimise. This is a lazy appeal to authority, with no evidence. They are trying to define the field so that they alone get to decide who is “reputable.” That’s not reasoned critique — it’s gatekeeping. When someone becomes a “professional debunker”, they start to need the myths as much as the believers do — otherwise, they have no purpose. They thrive on opposition. They will be forgotten as a polemicist, aggressively attacking on or refuting the opinions or principles of another. They dont want a piece of writing to be explored or understood — they want to attack, denounce, or win an argument. They take a strong, combative stance, often using ridicule or moral superiority.
For me, engaging with Circuit directly has been an intellectual and creative journey worth taking, regardless of where one stands on the surrounding mythology.