The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States) is a controversial book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.

The book was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London, as an unofficial follow-up to three BBC TV documentaries being part of the Chronicle series. A sequel to the book, called The Messianic Legacy, was published in 1986. The original work was reissued in an illustrated hardcover version in 2005. One of the books, according to the authors, which influenced the project was L’Or de Rennes (later re-published as Le Trésor Maudit), a 1967 book by Gérard de Sède, with the collaboration of Pierre Plantard.^[1][2]

In this book, the authors put forward a hypothesis that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had one or more children, and that those children or their descendants emigrated to what is now southern France. Once there, they intermarried with the noble families that would eventually become the Merovingian dynasty, whose special claim to the throne of France is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.

An international bestseller upon its release, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail spurred interest in a number of ideas related to its central thesis. Response from mainstream historians and academics, however, was almost universally negative. Professional historians argued that the bulk of the claims, ancient mysteries and conspiracy theories presented as fact, are pseudohistorical. Nevertheless, these ideas would be very successfully fictionalised by Dan Brown in 2003 in his runaway best-seller novel The Da Vinci Code, even using Richard Leigh’s and Michael Baigent’s last names (Baigent's scrambled) for the character Leigh Teabing.

Content

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail details the authors’ investigation, starting in the 1960s, of the supposed mysteries of the village of Rennes-le-Château in southern France. Gérard de Sède argued that, in the late 19th century, a pastor of the village, Bérenger Saunière, decorated his church with heterodox images, became mysteriously wealthy, and was refused absolution by the priest who came to his death bed. Accepting these allegations as factual, the authors sought to determine why.

After over a decade of research and speculation, Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh presented the following factoids:

Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego features prominently in the authors’ quest

• there is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that has a long history starting in 1099, and had illustrious Grand Masters including Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci;
• it created the Knights Templar as its military and financial front;
• it is devoted to returning the Merovingian dynasty, that ruled the Franks from 457 to 751, to the thrones of Europe and Jerusalem;
• it protects these royal claimants because they may be the literal descendants of Jesus and his alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, or, at the very least, of King David; and
• the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter, instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene.

These authors further asserted that the modern goals of the Priory of Sion are:

• the restoration of Merovingian hereditary monarchies across the European Union;
• its control of, or transformation into, a dominant political party in the European Parliament;
• the European Union declaring federal status as the final step of European integration;
• the promotion of esoteric Christianity as the civil religion of Federal Europe after revealing each state's Merovingian monarch to be "Children of the Grail";
• the accession of Israel to the "United States of Europe";
• the grooming and installing of a messianic Merovingian pretender on the throne of Israel,
• the election of the King of Israel to the Presidency of the European Parliament; and
• the reconstitution of Federal Europe into a "Holy European Empire", which could become the next hyperpower and usher in a new world order.

Influence and similarities

• The Jesus Scroll, written by Australian Donovan Joyce and first published in 1972, was an early attempt by an author to claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been married and had a son together.
• Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) mentions the Jesus–Mary Magdalene idea in passing (a quote from the book is in fact one of the chapter headings). However, Eco the rational humanist takes a negative stance on such conspiracy theories. The resurgence of interest in the topic has recently sparked the colourful description “a thinking man’s Da Vinci Code” for Eco’s book. Foucault's Pendulum was a strong debunking of themes found in 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' through the medium of satire.
• The novel The Children of the Grail (1996) by Peter Berling incorporates the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a central part of the plot.
• The third installment of the Gabriel Knight series Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (1999) used the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children as one of the basic structures of the storyline, however tying it together with a number of other myths in an original story. “Et in Arcadia ego” is also an important object, with the characters finding important clues in the picture.
• Elements from the book are used as background in the time-travel novels Arthur War Lord and Far Beyond the Wave, by Dafydd ab Hugh.
• Most recently, author Dan Brown in his bestseller The Da Vinci Code (2003), makes reference to this book, also liberally using most of the above claims as key plot elements; indeed, in 2005 Baigent and Leigh unsuccessfully sued Brown’s publisher, Random House, for plagiarism, on the grounds that Brown's book makes extensive use of their research and that one of the characters is named Leigh, has a surname (Teabing) which is an anagram of Baigent, and has a physical description strongly resembling Henry Lincoln. In his novel, Brown also mentions Holy Blood, Holy Grail as an acclaimed international bestseller (chapter 60) and claims it as the major contributor to his hypothesis. Perhaps as a result of this mention, the authors (minus Henry Lincoln) of Holy Blood sued Dan Brown for copyright infringement. They claimed that the central framework of their plot had been stolen for the writing of The Da Vinci Code. The claim was overturned by High Court Judge Peter Smith on 6 April 2006, who ruled that “their argument was vague and shifted course during the trial and was always based on a weak foundation.” In fact, it was found that the publicity of the trial had significantly boosted sales of Holy Blood. The court ruled that, in effect, because it was published as a work of (alleged) history, its premises legally could be freely interpreted in any subsequent fictional work without any copyright infringement.
• The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception.
• The video game Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars references this book as well, in the form of dialogue when the player asks what a character knows of the Templars.

Criticism

The claims made in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail have been the source of much investigation and criticism over the years, with many independent investigators such as 60 Minutes, Channel 4, Discovery Channel, Time Magazine, and the BBC claiming that many of the book’s claims are not credible or verifiable.

Historian Marina Warner commented on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when it was first published: "Of course there's not much harm in thinking that Jesus was married (nor are these authors the first to suggest it), or that his descendants were King Pippin and Charles Martel. But there is harm in strings of lurid falsehoods and distorted reasoning. The method bends the mind the wrong way, an insidious and real corruption".^[3]

In 2005, Tony Robinson narrated a critical evaluation of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, The Real Da Vinci Code, shown on Channel 4. The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of the Priory of Sion, and described the story as “piffle.”^[4] The programme concluded that, in the opinion of the presenter and researchers, the claims of Holy Blood were based on little more than a series of guesses.

Despite the exhaustive debunking of the Priory of Sion myth, some secular humanist skeptics are concerned that the promotion and popularity of books and films inspired by this myth have contributed to the insidious mainstreaming of conspiracism, pseudoscience, superstition and other confusions but, more troublingly, of the fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-modern, and anti-liberal mentality of romantic reactionaries, like Plantard, and their unwitting apologists. ^{[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]}

Quotations

• I admit that 'The Sacred Enigma' (French title for 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail') is a good book, but one must say that there is a part that owes more to fiction than to fact, especially in the part that deals with the lineage of Jesus. How can you prove a lineage of four centuries from Jesus to the Merovingians? I have never put myself forward as a descendant of Jesus Christ - Pierre Plantard, on the Jacques Pradel radio interview on 'France-Inter', 18 February 1982; also cited by Philippe de Cherisey in his article "Jesus Christ, his wife and the Merovingians", published in Nostra - Bizarre News N° 584, 1983.
• It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel.—Anthony Burgess, writing about The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in The Observer.
• It would be quite wrong if fictional writers were to have their writings pored over in the way DVC has been pored over in this case by authors of pretend historical books to make an allegation of infringement of copyright.—Judge Peter Smith, in his ruling that the Da Vinci Code lawsuit was “based on a contrived and selective number of facts and ideas.” [1]
• The Templar-Grail myth... is at the heart of the most notorious of all the Grail pseudo-histories, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, which is a classic example of the conspiracy theory of history... It is essentially a text which proceeds by innuendo, not by refutable scholarly debate... Essentially, the whole argument is an ingeniously constructed series of suppositions combined with forced readings of such tangible facts as are offered.” Richard Barber (2004). The Holy Grail, The History of a Legend. (ISBN 0-14026-765-4)

See also

• Rex Deus
• Smithy Code
• The Da Vinci Code

Footnotes

References

• Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982). The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. London: Cape. ISBN 0-385-33859-7
• Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1987). The Messianic Legacy. London: Cape. 1987 ISBN 0224021850

External links

Notable reviews

• O'Neill, Tim. (2006) 'The Priory of Sion' Myth and Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
• Burns, Alex. (2000) Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Disinfo
• Mondschein, Ken. (2004) Holy Blood, Holy Grail. New York Press
• Mader, Eric. (2005) “At First We Were Skeptical”: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
• Miller, Laura. (2004) The Da Vinci crock. salon.com
• Telegraph editors. (2004) Da Vinci Code bestseller is plagiarism, authors claim. The Daily Telegraph
• Simon Raikes. (2005) The Real Da Vinci Code. Channel 4da:Helligt blod, hellig gral

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