In The Da Vinci Code, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and other books of this genre , the dominant forces of Western history, represent the powers of ideological normativity as they engage in a conspiracy to obliterate heretical (i.e., progressive) practices; meanwhile subdominant forces, represented by the subtle influence of secret societies, heretics, are engaged in a conspiracy to preserve knowledge not only of Christ's bloodline, but of , an enlightened form of spiritual knowledge. This story of a sub-dominant conspiracy struggling against, and always in danger of being over-mastered by, the ideological array of the dominant culture is a major feature of such  book's narrative.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail dramatizes its acts of reconstruction as a heroic struggle against the odds, a mission to reveal what's been erased in the historical record. Medieval silences often signal conspiracy for the authors, but the period's lack of documentation is as fertile for them as it is disabling, and medieval texts operate as a motivating resistance to the work of narrative in this alternative history, opening up spaces for speculation and reconstruction in the very gaps where the historical record proves most resistant to interpretation. Texts operate as agencies in this alternative history; they signal a crucial,
diffuse intentionality focused on shaping the historical record. And even where such texts fail in their immediate aims, they also succeed to the extent that they have left behind some trace of this intentionality in their wake.

Case Study P.1:

Like academic interpreters, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh understand that the rare survival of medieval materials represents a problem for reading. This is where the status of the corpus begins to matter most for these authors. “The Dark Ages, we discovered, had not been truly dark,” they remark. “On the contrary, it quickly became apparent to us that somebody had deliberately obscured them” (Baigent et al. 234).

While the watchword of the modern text is ubiquity, making it difficult to erase evidence once it has been publicized, the chance survivals of medieval materials allow room for deliberate plotting and sinister machinations. As a result, the authors claim that Dagobert II, a Merovingian king assassinated in 679, was the victim of historiographical foul play as well as murder. They argue that “At some point during the Middle Ages, a systematic attempt was apparently made to erase Dagobert from history, to deny that he ever existed” (Baigent et al. 258). What is more, “not until 1655 was Dagobert II reinstated in accepted lists of French kings” (Baigent et al. 258). Clearly, such an erasure could only be explained by “vested interests [who] had something of import to lose” if the full story of Dagobert’s assassination and the survival of his bloodline became public knowledge (Baigent et al. 258). In similar fashion, the authors are convinced that the accepted accounts of the Templars, the accounts offered by respected and responsible historians … not only collapsed under scrutiny, but suggested some sort of “cover-up.” We could not escape the suspicion that something had been deliberately concealed and a “cover story” manufactured, which later historians had merely repeated (Baigent et al. 65).

These references work to suggest the diffuse agency of conspiracy in motion: somebody obscures something because somebody has something to lose. We might be inclined to see this erasure as a metaphor for ideology in action, a figure for the effects of medieval realpolitik or the mundane valuations that tend to render certain historical subjects invisible while insuring the hypervisibility of others.

For Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh there is in fact little to choose between conspiracy theory as a metaphor for ideology and conspiracy as a historical fact. From their point of view, ideology often is conspiracy. "Something" and "someone" point to moments of textual resistance, in which the ideological conspiracy of early medieval historians, seconded by their modern heirs, works to frustrate the decoding methods of the authors.

But this resistance proves to be enabling rather than crippling, it allows the work of historiographical narrative to move forward by opening a space for imagination, in which someone and something are suggestive rather than definitive. Of course, critics of alternative history argue that the authors preserve such spaces of undecidability in bad faith, as a cover for the advancement of spurious historical claims.

But someone and something, if we pay attention to them, also have something to tell us about the work of historical reconstruction, about the narrative tropes that structure it, and about the uncertainties that drive history's narratives forward at least as often as they hold them back. The space of historiographical resistance, in other words, can be an enabling space almost as easily as it can frustrate reconstruction altogether.

The authors apply a similar method to their reading of grail legends (they refer to them as legends rather than "romances"), searching out and exposing moments of deliberate historical erasure. They argue that stories about the grail were coded carriers of a message more profound than Christian doctrine, preserving heretical and dangerous knowledge under cover of fantasy into the modern period. Here, as elsewhere, things are not what they appear to be. Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln imply that Chrétien de Troyes may have said too much in his last romance, "The Story of the Grail, or Perceval":

Chrétien himself died around 1188, quite possibly before he could complete his work; and even if he did complete it no copy has survived. If such a copy ever existed, it may well have been destroyed in a fire at Troyes in 1188. The point need not be labored, but certain scholars have found this fire, coinciding as it did with the poet’s death, vaguely suspicious (Baigent et al. 288).

These “certain scholars” are never named, but the claim that the romancer's death “around” 1188 coincides with a mysterious fire of that date is hedged about with conditional phrases, Chrétien’s work was "quite possibly" interrupted; if a manuscript were produced," “it may well have been destroyed." Alternative historians frequently leave open such conditional constructions, reminding us that they view their work as a hypothesis, a theory, rather than an established fact. What is most important about this passage, however, is its preoccupation with a vanished text, the final lines of a manuscript that may or may not have existed, and may or may not have held a crucial clue to the substance of Chrétien's work. The authors are preoccupied with written evidence of all kinds, but inaccessible texts, coded messages, and lost documents are especially critical for them. These absent documents testify to history’s mutilation; they are witnesses to the unspoken crime that drives the investigation. Embedded in this discussion of medieval texts is the theme of conspiracy as an act of deliberate erasure, implied by the “vaguely suspicious” circumstances of Chrétien’s death and the unknown fate of his text. Medieval romances are alleged to carry coded messages that testify to the existence of the double conspiracy, both the conspiracy to preserve "heretical" knowledge, and the conspiracy to eradicate it.

Secret or hypothetical texts further testify to the critical importance of the legend that dominant powers attempted to erase, according to Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. After Chrétien’s romances were written, the grail legend spread through western Europe like a brush fire. At the same time, however, modern experts on the subject agree that the later Grail romances do not seem to have derived wholly from Chrétien, but seem to have drawn on at least one other source as well, a source that in all probability predated Chrétien. And during its proliferation the Grail story became much more closely linked with King Arthur … And it also became linked with Jesus (Baigent et al. 288).

Case Study P.2:

Another hidden text is at work behind the partial, perhaps amputated, text of Chrétien’s grail romance. The unnamed “modern experts” are possibly careworn linguists of another generation, speculating about the descent and relations among manuscripts. The authors may also be referring indirectly to the work of R.S. Loomis, a prolific writer working in the first half of the twentieth century whose work they cite elsewhere, a scholar who made large claims for the Celtic origins of Arthurian stories. Whatever the case, those moth-eaten scholarly hypotheses have been concentrated and distilled into the tantalizing possibility of a secret mother-text laden with portentous inside knowledge.

In Richard Barber’s study The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (Harvard University Press, 2004), the work of  Loomis is briefly summarized as: “The archetypal Celtic enthusiast among the twentieth-century scholars was R.S. Loomis, hugely diligent and learned, who elaborated the parallels already established by earlier writers. But in the end, his zeal for Celtic origins outran the material on which he was working, and his arguments rely on a series of assumptions and analogues which scarcely hang together” (245). Barber places him in the tradition of the Cambridge school of myth criticism pioneered by Alfred Nutt, and reminds his readers that the Cambridge scholars tended to emphasize in their readings that "normality is the pagan past, Christianity the aberration" (244). This emphasis on the pagan past is the major source of their interest for alternative historians.

The story that “spread through western Europe like a brush fire,” the story that may or may not have gotten poor old Chrétien killed, takes on an amorphous new life, floating behind the scenes and holding out the promise of answers only hinted at in Chrétien's other texts. These romances are integrally linked to "progressive" aspects of high culture in the period. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the elegant world of the troubadours represents all that is fine and good about the society of southern France, but in larger terms the courtly world of medieval aristocratic readerships across Europe represents the only hope for rescuing this warlike, patriarchal society from its own darkest self. In this view, the softening influence of coded literary representations eventually forces a shift in the culture's conception of itself. This is powerful literature indeed. The source text has been successfully erased from the historical record, according to the authors, yet the popularity of Chrétien's stories suggests that the agencies of the subdominant conspiracy have managed to keep their message alive. The survival of the coded text operates as proof of the conspiratorial agency in action. These legends allegedly offer a secret relationship to the past for modern interpreters and once offered the rebellious few of the Middle Ages a special relationship to one another. Nonconformists, heretics, and those who carry the secret knowledge of Christ's bloodline allegedly share in a secret line of communication.

Baigent and Leigh often return to the theme that legends contain some kernel of historical truth, the residue of some lost (or obliterated) folk knowledge. Alongside the censorship of the Middle Ages, then, there are also the “shadowy vestiges” of another truth that has "slipped through the curtain drawn across the past” (Baigent et al. 234).

From such legendary “vestiges,” the coded folk wisdom of ancient informants, “a reality could be reconstructed, a reality of a most interesting kind and one very discordant with the tenets of orthodoxy” (Baigent et al. 234). When confronted with the myth of origins attached to the Merovingian line, in which the first king was supposed to have been born of a sea creature, the authors remark that such “fantastic legends,” while common, “are not entirely imaginary, but symbolic or allegorical, masking some concrete historical fact behind their fabulous façade” (Baigent et al. 235).

Thus the sea beast becomes a man from beyond the sea, and a reference to the Merovingian descent from Christ. This hermeneutic method manages to be literal and fantastic at the same time, as the fantastic stories prove to be in some sense literally true, and are therefore doubly provocative. This reading also implies an intriguing anthropology of the past, one that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the history of academic analysis of these early romances. The history of scholarly debate over the concept of courtly love, a concept first proposed in relation to Chrétien's work, in fact, is a story of colorful speculations rivaling (and in some cases inspiring) the work of alternative historians.

Roger Boase summarized these theories of origins in 1977 with labels quite as turgid as the theories themselves: Hispano-Arabic, Chivalric-Matriarchal, Crypto-Cathar, Neoplatonic, Bernardine-Marianist, Spring Folk Ritual, and Feudal-Sociological. (See also Sarah Kay, "Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love," in Roberta Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 81-96).

Yet the major questions driving older interpretive schemes are much the same questions that drive both academic and popular speculation now, whether romances describe spiritual themes that are compatible with Christian doctrinal understanding, and what sort of relationship (or not) may have existed between "real" life and the practices described in such stories, particularly where sexual relations are concerned. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail the medieval world becomes capable of accounting for itself, of remembering its own history, only through the vehicle of “historical reality eclipsed by legend” (Baigent et al. 235). In fact  this characterization is not so far removed from academic models for dealing with similar evidence. Underwriting these specific issues of interpretation is a more far-reaching disciplinary problem. How do medieval texts (especially literary ones, but not only these) reflect the world around them? How can we trace the largely anonymous agencies that produced such texts, and how can we go about isolating or understanding the voices of those who might have rebelled against the dominant ideology of their moment?

While idea of radical agency advanced in Holy Blood, Holy Grail flies in the face of historicist practice in Medieval Studies, the idea of a diffuse corporate agency driven forward by the work of subjects who are both self-conscious and unconstrained speaks to the repressed desires of anecdotalism.

Anecdotalism offers a form of argument in which anomalies, strange exempla, and cryptic gestures from the historical record are strung together to form the "nodes" of a narrative that is paradoxically singular and representative at the same time. In light of the various critiques advanced against new historicism in recent years, it is also worth reemphasizing its traditional commitment to the contextualization of specifically literary practice, and its resulting uncomfortable position somewhere between the disciplines of literary analysis and history. Critics of such historicist methods have tended to suggest that this approach is both insufficiently explanatory (in other words, too idiosyncratic, too local, disrupting history's work rather than enriching it) and too "literary" in its commitments, emphasizing virtuoso acts of interpretation over the development of a thorough-going analytical framework.

The  discomfort with such historicism arises from the ways in which its commitment to the anecdote not only raises the specter of historiography's narrativity, but also points to the self-generating, even deterministic overtones of the work of interpretation itself, which reads every textual fragment as saturated with the potential for deeper meaning. Part of what is precisely "literary" about the work of new historicism, in other words, is its commitment to this supersaturation, the multiplicity and dense overdetermination, of history's narrative work. Alternative history showcases whit a similar "conspiracist" capacity of narrative, but more importantly acts out new historicism's frustrated desire to access "the real" of historical experience outside the constraints of historical contingencies. In other words, alternative history's radically free subject is new historicism's object of desire. (See Sonja Laden, Recuperating the Archive: Anecdotal Evidence and Questions of 'Historical Realism,'" Poetics Today 25:1, 2004: 1-28).

The strategic use of the anecdote is a crucial tool of argument in new historicist writing, and is closely associated with its more "literary" maneuvers of interpretation.The anecdote in fact appears to be  intended, to disrupt smooth explanatory narratives and rob them of their illusions of sufficiency, while it stages a confrontation with the "radical strangeness" of the past meant to provoke an understanding of past reality as contingency. Thus the link between the strange and the real is not accidental, it is a link that drives such historicism to excavate anecdotal anomalies, and is implicated in complex ways in an interest in literary forms and symbolic gestures.

Sonja Laden argues that anecdotes create a necessarily false sense of authenticity by hiding their role in the work of reconstruction behind the screen of direct testimony or access (8-16). By encouraging an illusion of direct access to the "real" unfolding of historical events, anecdotes also effectively secure for the historian a status approaching that of an eyewitness. In fact  ‚anecdote’produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, and  uniquely“ lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological. „

Books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail use anecdotal evidence in ways that are precisely similar to those of new historicism, to point to anomalies, produce a reality effect, and quietly hint at all that "might have been." Such a perspective instantiates an ethics of obligation to the dead, which encourages us to engage in the ritual of searching for their messages to us across time. Most importantly, the reality effect thus generated evokes rather than decides the issues for us, alternative history insists on its status as hypothesis, as theory, and confirms its own undecidability in the very midst of its grandest interpretive gestures. Alternative history also does what new history writers cannot do, but can only wish for or dream about: it recuperates radically free subjects who resist the oppressions and depredations of power and yet get away with it, subjects who nudge and wink from the margins of history without, however, paying the price of containment. If we gave ourselves free rein to collude with the dead, would we not wish to generate just such a conspiracy?

In fact  also Lynn Picknett and Clive Price believe that tracing the descent of these continuities should have been a paradigm for the writing of history itself in the face of the terrifying meaninglessness of a disordered past. For example their The Templar Revelation begins with a series of investigative vignettes, opening with a discussion of the alleged hidden symbolism behind some of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous works. From there, the authors move on to a tour of the twentieth-century church just off Leicester Square in London, Notre-Dame de France. The building was designed and partly decorated by Jean Cocteau, and Picknett and Prince claim it is linked to Leonardo’s paintings via a common symbolism drawn from an “underground tradition” (Picknett and Prince 48) of secret knowledge and spirituality. From London, the narrative travels to southern France, where the authors discuss the medieval legends and sites associated with Mary Magdalene in the region, once again arguing for a link between these sites, Leonardo, and Cocteau’s church, citing references to the same set of complex symbols. Soon the authors introduce us to the Cathars, the thirteenth-century heretics of southern France who were obliterated by the methods of inquisition and crusade. This leads to the hermeticists of the Renaissance, and finally the early history of Freemasonry in Europe. Along the way, we learn about a secret organization, the Priory of Sion, which has allegedly kept the confidences of all these loose cadres of freethinkers, and has possibly even directed their actions. But once we have followed this chronology up to the present, perhaps thinking we are back in the grip of linear time once more, we take a sharp right into the Biblical period for the remainder of the book, where the roots of this secret knowledge, and an alternative religion based on the teachings of John the Baptist, first became known.

Like many other alternative histories, the Revelation tackles an enormous span of Western history, but to say that this sweep extends “from” the Biblical period “to”the present is obviously misleading. Instead, like many books in the genre, this textmoves by fits and starts, ranging backward and forward over the formidable  territory of the past according to a logic of space rather than linearity. Reading the Revelation, one might be forgiven for thinking that history exists on a flat plane or in a very large room, where it is possible to browse among its contents as one would the products in a Salvation Army shop. The “underground stream” of hidden knowledge sounds a lot like old-fashioned triumphalism dressed up in new clothes, where the progress of European culture and even world hegemony are made more enticing by virtue of being viewed through the eyes of freethinkers and outsiders.

Given the genre's penchant for questioning or undermining academic history's narrative methods, it is perhaps not surprising to find the assumptions of linearity itself called into question. But more importantly the Revelation asks us to imagine history as a meaningful whole, and this narrative technique is a way of theorizing about patterns in our culture, rather than viewing history as a set of disparate, discrete narratives about the past. (See also Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, 2001).

Because of its historical influence, Picknett and Prince understand Christianity as the tradition responsible for founding a Western order of civilization that generates both global capital and global injustice. However, because the “underground tradition” is also supposed to have included some of the West’s iconic thinkers, men like Leonardo, Isaac Newton, and Victor Hugo, it is also paradoxically a motive force behind the development of Western culture, making positive contributions to it, as if from behind a veil.

They describe the Cathar heretics of the thirteenth century as one group whose influence and insights long outlasted their existence as an identifiable religious culture, and they do this, in part, by reviewing the history of the heresy itself. The picture they present of the Languedoc-Rousillon region of France is by now a traditional one among alternative historians: In the eleventh and twelfth centuries this area was the envy of Europe for its civilization and culture. Its art, literature and science were by far the most advanced of the day—but in the thirteenth century this brilliant and glittering culture was ripped apart by an invasion from the barbaric north, causing a simmering resentment that persists to this day. Many of the inhabitants still prefer to regard the land as Occitania, its former name. It is, as we were to find, a region with a particularly long memory (Picknett and Prince 85).

This “barbaric” invasion, destroying what it would not understand, remains the “single fact of history that has been responsible for the systematic impoverishment of the area” (Picknett and Prince 84), while the region’s long memory is matched by an equallydistinct cultural identity. The “old Languedoc,” we are told, “has always been a heartland for heretical and unorthodox ideas, probably because a culture that encourages the pursuit of knowledge tends to tolerate radical new thought” (Picknett and Prince 85). The links between the modern world and the bloody history of Cathar persecution are cemented by references that no contemporary reader would overlook: “The Languedoc saw the first act of European genocide,” a series of horrific acts which pre-figured “more modern holocausts” (Picknett and Prince 85). The intent here seems to be prefiguration rather than comparison, and the text already gestures toward its own prescriptive function: if history had developed as it should have done, and if we had understood its lessons as we should have, then the Holocaust would never have happened.

After painting the contemporary countryside of southern France as a landscape of devastation, Picknett and Prince go on to describe the horrors of the Cathar persecution itself. Here we encounter the townspeople of Béziers, who in 1209 refused the crusaders’ demands to turn over the Cathar residents of the town, despite the certain knowledge they would be killed for their efforts (Picknett and Prince 87). These heretics and sympathizers were duly put to death on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, the 22 of July, their fates allegedly sealed with the infamous dictum, “Kill them all. God will know his own” (Picknett and Prince 88).

After this, the campaign “proceeded with the utmost brutality, as city after city fell to the soldiers” and the length of the conflict offered “a not inconsiderable period for the crusaders to do their very worst” (Picknett and Prince 90). Finally the doomed heretics were left with one last major refuge, the imposing fortress of Montségur, built on the “dizzying heights of a craggy mountain” (Picknett and Prince 91). Once again, the authors employ some familiar tropes of the legendary history of the Cathars: we learn that some of the crusading soldiers so admired the heretics they defected to the besieged fortress, and that those inside the walls requested a mysterious fifteen-day reprieve before surrendering to crusading forces, during which time they were supposed to have smuggled out a socalled “Cathar treasure” in the dead of night (Picknett and Prince 91-92).

Picknett and Prince also suggest that the Cathars knew some “trance technique” that allowed them to transcend physical pain, since they allegedly “approached their certain death by torture not only with stoicism, but with total calm, even, it is said, when the flames actually began to lap around them” (Picknett and Prince 92). In this context, they recall the “haunting image,” remembered from the 1970’s, of a Buddhist monk immolating himself to protest the conflict in Vietnam (Picknett and Prince 92).

In the Revelation, these medieval episodes of inhumanity together act as a crucial link in the transmission of enlightened, heretical knowledge between ancient and modern worlds. Here the Middle Ages appear in a classic role, as the great “middle” of Western civilization. But for alternative historians, the medieval is more than just a way station, a dark and barbaric stop on the way to the modern. Instead the medieval prefigures the modern, and acts as the glue that holds Western history together. Thus it is always a quick two-step back to the medieval in alternative historical accounts, whether we are approaching from the ancient world, linking antique traditions to medieval Christianity, or moving backward from the present, suggesting that medieval organizations, beliefs, and events continue to have a profound influence on the contemporary world. For Picknett and Prince, the Cathars occupy this middle comfortably. The authors assert that the Cathars were the descendents of the Bogomil heretics of the tenth century, and that the Bogomils were the heirs of a variety of dualism borrowed from the ancient world. This comes only a few pages after their suggestion that, “No-one can, with any accuracy, pinpoint the genesis of the Cathar faith” (Picknett and Prince 93 and 89, respectively). The so-called “Cathar faith” was “a local tradition [with] almost unique power over the hearts and minds of the people,” and its suppression, in turn, “caus[ed] scars so deep in the collective psyche of the people [of southern France] that it is by no means whimsical to detect them still” (Picknett and Prince 88-89).

Ancient dualists, Bogomils, and Cathars, descend finally to the modern people of southern France, and the proof of continuity between them is visible in the landscape itself: what was “once the richest area of France, [is still] among its poorest” (Picknett and Prince 84).

Although some parts of this history of the Cathars is true, alternative historians ad their speculations about a “Cathar treasure,” and with a heightened sense of drama, they are invoking a legendary history that has become the short-hand of late-night speculations.

Case Study P.3:

When Picknett and Prince add their conjectures about the Cathars’ ability to transcend pain and their intimations of the long life of a certain heretical “orientation” in the region, they are speaking to a stifled impulse to martyrology, one that is not as fully expressed here as in some other alternative historical texts. And yet in its depiction of the Cathars, The Templar Revelation still suggests that this episode contains more than the usual ethical import. In this history, it is unethical not to take sides just because the events are removed from us in time. And the side we choose is understood to imply something about our ethical status in the present, not least because this is about more than a persecution; it is a “European genocide,” a “holocaust” (Picknett and Prince 85).

And when Picknett and Prince claim that Cathar beliefs were inherited from or somehow transmitted by the earlier Bogomil heretics who dwelt in the Balkans, and that this group, in turn, were the recipients of Manichaean religious ideas of late antiquity they are repeating a general claim stemming from medieval intellectuals.

Worse, like  we detailed in Part three of our case study above, the very word ‘Cathar’ is itself an illusion produced by a desire to discover an organized heretical ‘church,’ complete with an ecclesiastical hierarchy including bishops.

Like  Mark Pegg pointed out earlier,the word was never used by these heretics themselves, who referred to one another in the surviving records as “good men” and “good women,” terms also used (rather inconveniently) as simple polite forms of address in these rural communities. In the surviving records from one particularly large inquisition, involving the examination of almost 6,000 men and women in 1245,not only was ‘Cathar’ never uttered or an elaborate dualist theology ever expounded, but no international heretical organization, no ‘Cathar Church,’ was discovered … Nor will such an entity be unearthed by modern scholars—unless, of course, hundreds of references to heretici and boni homines are persistently, and rather unashamedly, translated as referring to ‘Cathars’.(Pegg, “On Cathars, Albigenses, and good men of Languedoc,” Journal of Medieval History 27.2/2001).

But this among other examples, points to the effects produced when scholarship is influenced by powerful unconscious desires and assumptions. In this case, the desire for a narrative of continuity is obvious, as is the need for easily identifiable forces at work—heresy versus church, stubborn resistance of the countryside versus the intrusive knowledge structures of the elite.

But just because people in other times and places thought concepts which appear to be similar to concepts we know and understand, we cannot be sure they thought those thoughts in the same way we think them, according to the same logic, within the same contexts, or for the same reasons.

Thus we cannot say for sure why René d’Anjou went hunting for the Magdalene’s bones, or to what extent piety or selfinterest were at work when Philip the Fair arrested the Templars in France (Picknett and Prince 74-75 and 99, respectively). But Picknett and Prince, like many other alternative historians, figure this strangeness, this difference or indecipherability, as the proof of a secret, the evidence that “something was going on” (Picknett and Prince 105), including not only a conspiracy to suppress the truth, but also a conspiracy on the part of the secret tradition to preserve its independence and carefully amassed insights.

But where current academic history  observes the boundaries of this opaque sphere, alternative history reads a purpose in the silence, The Templar Revelation and and books following in its wake,ask us to engage in a practice of ethical identification with the lost heretics of southern France, and they suggest in their different ways that this identification will serve as a method for overcoming the gap between past and present. Thus for Picknett and Prince, and most of the other alternative writers today, the medieval world is continuous with the modern one in spite of its moments of illegibility.

Case Study P.4:

If, like Picknett and Prince, we see history as a realm of continuous returns, in which the usual evils emerge in every generation to menace us, we may give up on political action. If in the extreme opposite, we see each historical period as incommensurate with any other, we may cease to believe we can learn anything from the past.

Picknett and Prince register their awareness of these critiques indirectly in their concerns about mainstream history’s biases and the conspiracies the past keeps from the present.

The "real" source of the modern celebration in St. Maximin may have been forgotten, but for Picknett and Prince the gestures and signs of the contemporary ritual encode crucial clues about Europe's origins in the ideological violence of early medieval Christian history.

Beginning with this local relic, the authors of The Templar Revelation proceed to examine the historical basis of legendary stories about the Magdalene, and their narrative in this section of the book is a crucial index of the philosophy of history operative throughout their work that acts like a  wish fulfillment structure.

The Revelation's impolitic argument for a universal "pagan" religious drive suggests that we ought to ask what interpretive principle underwrites our sympathetic identification with historical figures. At the same time, this alternative history’s recourse to a grand oppositional narrative of Western culture exceeds easy comparison with academic practice, and asks impertinent questions about the commitments of scholarly methodology. In the pages of The Templar Revelation, academic historiography's suspicion of too-easy representations of the European past explodes into a full-blown oppositional ethnography which deploys a skeptical reading of Christian legends and rituals in order to suggest that Europe has never been what it thinks it is.

This “something more” is the residue of pagan practice which will be uncovered as The Templar Revelation progresses, living on in disguise as devotion to the orthodox female saint, Mary Magdalene. Picknett and Prince  adopted the familiar “two worlds” philosophy of history popularized in neopagan and occult works, in which an ancient tradition of European goddess worship was crippled by the rise of Christianity and its totalitarian vision of Western culture. In additionn like many other alternative historians today, they reveal a disposition toward Jungianism, with its emphasis on archetypes and instinctual desires.
 

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