The story goes that Paul Le Cour accidentally lost his treasured Signet Ring while waiting for a bus, that he inherited from Jeanne Lépine; that ultimately belonged to the co-founder of the Hiéron du Val d’Or, the half-Basque, half-Russian Baron Alexis de Sarachaga (1840-1918). The 73 year-old Jeanne Lépine died alongside Marthe de Noaillat from asphyxiation caused by a faulty stove on 5 February 1926.

Here are three accounts of the loss of the Signet Ring:

Jacques d'Arès, in Atlantis, (Number 252, page 307, May-June, 1969).

“In any case, another detail must be mentioned to be objective. Paul LeCour, having considered publishing his entire correspondence with Mademoiselle Lépine, ended the postscript to his manuscript in January 1931 with this sentence: ‘May I, in turn, pass on to another, when the time comes to leave this earthly life, the Signet Ring that was briefly entrusted to me.’ However, this ring was accidentally lost, and Paul LeCour added at the bottom of his manuscript: ‘Note: this Signet Ring was lost in 1948; it therefore cannot be passed on, and this would seem to imply that the work will no longer have a successor...’”.

Jacques d'Arès, “Mémoires d'un Trouble Fête – La Vie Ésotérique en France à Travers la Revue Atlantis 1926-2010” (Éditions Dervy, Page 36, 2018). E-Book version, page 221:

“In one of them, she [Jeanne Lépine] tells Paul, ‘You will be one of us in three years’. However, Jeanne Lépine died accidentally on February 4, 1926, that is, before the initiation. Paul therefore never knew the full story, especially since, in her will, Jeanne Lépine had bequeathed to Paul the Signet Ring of the Baron of Sarachaga. Now, this Ring, which I knew well, he lost while trying to catch a bus...”

Christian Doumergue, “Le Fil d’or, Paul Le Cour et le Hiéron du Val d’Or” (Equinoxis, 2025)

“Paul Le Cour likely lost the signet ring as he was getting off an omnibus. The ring slipped off his finger without him noticing. He only discovered it once he got home. As he was a mystic, he undoubtedly saw much more than a simple loss in it. A sign. The note he added to the postscript of the edition of his correspondence with Jeanne Lépine supports this interpretation: ‘...this signet ring was lost in 1948; it therefore cannot be passed on, and this would seem to imply that the work will have no successor...’ The work of the Hieron was thus finished. Something else had taken its place, in another form: Atlantis. Perhaps it was no longer necessary, then, to make this correspondence public. Why hadn't Paul Le Cour done so before? To this day, there is nothing that can explain it with certainty”.

It was later claimed that one of the unofficial later quirky beliefs of the Hiéron by Paul Le Cour, that the origins of Christianity lay in the mystical Atlantis (one of his favourite hobby-horses); that the group also worked to prepare the way for the social political reign of Christ the King in the year 2000 (millennialism) and devoted themselves to the name Aor-Agni (“Light-Fire”).

Paul Le Cour recounted receiving direct communications and metapsychical revelations from Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (known as “the Unknown Philosopher”) at his home in Paris between 1908 and 1918 (and particularly in 1918). He described these apparitions not as physical events, but as spiritualist contacts or “metapsychical explorations” with invisible entities. He recorded these experiences in a specific work entitled “Manifestations Posthumes: Mes Rapports avec les Invisibles” (Éditions Dervy, 1950; also published in the same year by Omnium Littéraire).

The predominantly right-wing esoteric society of Martinism was founded by Martinez de Pasqually (died 1774), Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730-1824) and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803).

There is absolutely no connection between either the Hiéron du Val d’Or and Paul Le Cour with the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château – other than the speculations of pseudo-historians and fringe mystics.

There are also no photographs of Paul Le Cour’s ex-Signet Ring in existence – and the whole episode seems to be a symbolic account of the final liquidation and the end of the Hiéron du Val d’Or.