The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

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Book cover of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 2005 illustrated hardcover edition.
Book cover of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 2005 illustrated hardcover edition.

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, which was based in large part on Pierre Plantard’s Priory of Sion.

The book was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London, as a follow-up to a BBC TV documentary on the series Chronicle. A sequel to the book, called The Messianic Legacy, was published in 1987. 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.

In summary, the authors argue that there is evidence 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, which 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 nearly 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 then be fictionalised by Dan Brown in 2003 in his runaway best-seller novel The Da Vinci Code, even using Richard Leigh’s last name for the character Leigh Teabing’s first name, and Michael Baigent’s last name, scrambled, for Leigh Teabing’s last name.

Contents

[edit] Content

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail details the authors’ investigation (starting in the 1960s) of the alleged mysteries of the village of Rennes-le-Château in southern France. In the late 1800s, a pastor of the village, Bérenger Saunière, had became mysteriously wealthy, and the authors sought to determine why.

After over a decade of research and speculation, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln came to the following conclusions:

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

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

It is generally presumed the authors knew these claims to be, at best, unprovable. In fact, Richard Leigh has stated on television that they only set out to offer a plausible hypothesis, but “never believed it to be true.” However, the wording in HBHG, though it acknowledged some elements were only a hypothesis, clearly presented the existence of the Priory of Sion was a “proven fact.”

[edit] Influence and similarities

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.

[edit] 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, Time Magazine, and the BBC claiming that many of the book’s claims are not credible or verifiable.

The “Priory of Sion”, which was listed as “fact” in Holy Blood Holy Grail, never actually existed. Far from having a “history (that) spanned more than a millennium,” the Priory was a hoax created by an anti-Semitic French pretender to France’s throne, Pierre Plantard, a convicted con-man, in 1956. As part of his hoax, Plantard had planted two sets of forged medieval documents: one in the French National Library, and another in the 1967 book Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Chateau. (For more details, see The Priory of Sion, Rennes-le-Chateau, and Pierre Plantard). The documents were taken as factual by the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which led to many of the false claims in the book.

Other critics have argued that one of the book's claims— that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married— was not original to Holy Blood, but had in fact been proposed previously many times. For example, in a 1971 article in The Observer, it was proposed by theologian Charles Davis, who also pointed to the implications in the Gospel of Philip, the Gnostic Gospel written over a thousand years ago. [1][2]

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 Prieuré de Sion, and described the story as “piffle.” 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. The authors of the book itself have also backpedaled in recent interviews, claiming that they were only presenting a “hypothesis.”

The reaction of the various churches to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was a combination of outrage and exasperation, for whilst parts of the book could not be considered entirely factual, professional historians rejected its theory overall.

[edit] Quotations

  • 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.” [3]
  • 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)

[edit] References

  • Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982). The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. (ISBN 0-385-33859-7)
  • Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. The Messianic Legacy, 1987 (1989 reissue: ISBN 0-440-20319-8)
  • Smith, Paul. Priory-of-Sion

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Notable reviews

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