Just re-published in
the USA 2004, ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' is climbing the bestseller charts.
Dan Brown's thriller, in turn, inspired a crop of new books coming out, from
''Breaking the Da Vinci Code'' to ''Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide
to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code.''
The truth about all
the usual suspects will be revealed, the Cathar heretics, the Knights Templar,
the Rosicrucians, the Vatican, the Freemasons, Nazis,
the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Order of the
Golden Dawn plus many more..
First of all the
Holy, Blood and the Holy Grail, and their follow-ups are a classic example of
the conspiracy theory of history. When doubts surround even such recent events
as the assassination of President Kennedy, it is easy to see why the
certainties offered by an alternative version of history are so attractive. It
would take a book as long as the original to refute and dissect The Holy Blood
and the Holy Grail point by point: it is essentially a text which proceeds by
innuendo, not by refutable scholarly debate. Like many similar books and
title’s until recently like "The Book of Hiram, Unlocking the secrets of
the Hiram Key" by C. Knight and Robert Lomas, where the authors’ promise
to "unlock" their first book (title), the whole argument is an
ingeniously constructed series of suppositions combined with forced readings of
such tangible facts as are offered.
H. Blood H. Grail’s
reference to documents in the Bibliotheque Nationale are harmless fantasies which surface from time to
time, all too familiar to any publisher remotely connected with historical
publishing - from imaginative amateurs who believe that they suddenly hold the
key to "life, the universe and everything."
It is a genre, which,
if it were not usually so tedious, would repay study as a manifestation of
twentieth-century popular culture: a folklorist would classify it in the
way that "urban myths" have been studied.
Especially here, the
documents were not discovered by the Library staff, as The Da Vinci Code seems
to imply, but by confederates of Plantard, i.e. by
the same people who had planted them in the Library in the first place. No
serious scholar has ever regarded the documents as anything else than a 20th
century fabrication.
Dozens of credible
details are heaped up in order to provide a legitimizing cushion for rank
nonsense. Unremarkable legends (that Merovingian kings were thought to have a
healing touch, for example) are characterized as suggestive clues or puzzles
demanding solution. Highly contested interpretations (that, say, an early Grail
romance depicts the sacred object as being guarded by Templars) are presented
as established truth. Sources, such as the New Testament, are qualified as
''questionable'' and derivative when they contradict the conspiracy theory,
then microscopically scrutinized for inconsistencies that might support it.
Continuity in books
like Holy Blood Holy Grail is provided by a series of statements based on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventions about the Grail: in three
sentences we have the Cathars as owners of the Grail, the Templars as its
custodians, and the Templar heads as parallels for the Grail. On the way, they
manage to read the symbolic scenes in romances such as Perlesvaus
as obscure allusions to crimes of which the Templars are said to have been
accused.
This is the excuse
for a rapid survey of the Grail stories, and we are told that "modern
scholars concur that the Grail romances ... refer to the Merovingian
period" which may surprise readers of the present book somewhat. At this
point, there is an excursus on the "need to synthesise,"
a thinly veiled attack on "experts" and on the specialist nature of
modern university research:
What is necessary is
an interdisciplinary approach to one's chosen material - a mobile and flexible
approach that permits one to move freely between disparate disciplines, across
space and time. One must be able to link data and make connections between
people, events and phenomena widely divorced from each other.
And "it is not
sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts," This is carte blanche
to create an imaginary network of previously invisible links, which is
precisely what the authors proceed to do, in what they call our hypothesis'.
The mistaken fifteenth-century etymology of the Grail as "Sang real,"
John Hardyng's secularization of the Grail, is quoted
as definitive: a misreading or whim of an English writer perhaps not entirely
at ease with French becomes the key to the whole mystery. If the Holy Grail is
not the "sang real" or "blood royal," the whole argument
(such as it is) falls to the ground, and the splendidly imaginative construction
of a "bloodline"' of Merovingian kings descended from a Jesus who was
never crucified can have no connection with the Grail, or indeed anything else
in the real world. Once again, the (Grail's true function seems to be as a
lodestar for imaginative creation, in this case disguised as history but in
truth imaginative indeed.
Recently two books by
astrologer Ovason one about the seal on the dollar
bill, and the more bestselling book about a presumed use of
astrology by the builders of Washington DC. stands or falls on the
assumptions that L'Enfant and Ellicott were freemasons, that freemasons held
similar views about astrology that he does, and that Freemasonry places any
significance in Virgo. All his assumptions are unproven and his theory as with
the other books in this genre fails to pass any reasonable examination.
The methodology of
books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail has become widely popular freely
applied now by most paranoid style of conspiracy theorists like Graham Hancock
and Robert Bauval.
Two other authors
re-examined the supposed evidence of H. Blood H. Grail, and concocted an
equally wild theory, that the "core of the treasure is a strange artifact,
an inexplicable power source created by some ancient, long forgotten
technology, or brought to Earth in a starship ... whose qualities enabled its
owners to accumulate a huge treasure." At least they have the grace to
admit that "there is, of course, no proof for this theory;" we are in
effect dealing with a new genre, fictional history.
This genre is perhaps
best described as "selective history;" historical facts which favour the argument are adduced as proof that the whole is
true, ignoring their context and any contrary evidence. Sometimes the result
is, on the surface, well-documented and referenced, and involves genuine
historical research. A good example is Noel Currer-Briggs'
attempt to link the Holy Shroud of Turin, the Holy Grail and the Templars in
The Shroud and the Grail. Here the Grail becomes the casket in which the Shroud
of Turin, imprinted with Christ's image and soaked in his blood and sweat, is
housed. The tradition which connects the Grail to the concept of
Christ's blood is dismissed however here.
Henry Lincoln next
inspired by Genisis (a wild fantasy) by David Wood
introduced another, seemingly unlikely addition to the geometry of
Rennes-le-Chateau, the Paris Meridian.
However a
meridian is simply the line showing the direction of the sun at midday; every
place on the earth (except the two poles) has its local meridian, and every
person who has accurately set up a sundial, has, without necessarily being
aware of it, established their own meridian. This is fine for measuring the
local time, but in order to know one's place on the Earth's surface relative to
somewhere else, the latitude and longitude must be measured. The latitude
presents little difficulty, since the elevation of the sun at midday gives it
directly, but how to measure the longitude was a serious problem from the
sixteenth century onwards when the great sea voyages were being undertaken.
Basically, one had to measure the difference between the local time and the
time at some place of origin, and astronomical methods were the only ones
available for doing this. In order to measure longitude, in 1666 Louis XIV authorized
the building of an observatory in Paris. The centre
line of the building was established as the line of zero longitude - the Paris
Meridian - and it has been in exactly the same place ever since. In 1884 at the
International Meridian Conference in Washington DC, the Greenwich Meridian was
set as the prime meridian of the world. The French Government was not happy
with this decision, and French cartographers continue to the present day to
indicate the Paris Meridian on maps of the IGN, including the one of the area
around Rennes-le-Chateau. The Meridian passes about 350 m west of the Poussin'
tomb.
There is a very
famous local meridian in Paris in the church of Saint-Sulpice.
It was .et up in 1727 at the request of the cure,
Languet de Gercy, who wished to determine precisely
the date of the March equinox, and hence the date of Easter Sunday. The
meridian of Saint-Sulpice, which is about 100 m west
of the Paris Meridian, is marked in the floor of the church with a brass line.
The proximity of the Paris Meridian to Rennes-le-Chateau and the occurrence of
the church of Saint-Sulpice in the affair have caused
some confusion. In Le Serpent Rouge, under "Gemini," "the reader
is told to look for the line of the meridian," and "place yourself in
front of the fourteen stones marked with a cross," clearly referring to
the interior of the church, but interpreted by David Wood as referring to the
Paris Meridian on the ground near Rennes-le Chateau.
So Henry Lincoln
started his own, and soon asserted that `the Paris Meridian, which the Cassinis measured and which is still used by the French
Geographical lnstitute, runs exactly along the line
of intersections formed by an alignments of structures.
Lincoln's alignments
however include churches dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at
least 500 years before the Meridian was established. Lincoln says, "It is
difficult not to be drawn to the obvious conclusion that the Cassini Meridian
line was based upon the "cromlech intersect division line."
The essence of his
case is illustrated in two diagrams which appear in chapter 16 of The Holy
Place. The first shows five alignments all intersecting at a point on the
Meridian. We give a diagram of these alignments in Fig. 13.8 and the data in
tabular corm beneath it. Four of the five lines cut the Meridian within a
distance of 220 m, which is hardly an accurate intersection. The third (through
Castel Negre and the centre
of the circle of churches) is another 240 m away, but it is only fair to state
that the location which we found to be the best fit for the centre
of the circle is not necessarily where Lincoln would have placed it.
The above
intersections define Point A on the Paris Meridian. Lincoln finds that the line
from Antugnac church to Point A is just one of a fan
of 10 lines radiating out from the church towards the Meridian. He says that
these lines cut the Meridian into equal segments, and that this confirms that
the Meridian was sited in relation to Misting structures.
But most if not all
of the so-called "Knights Templar" organizations in existence (as far
they are not purely Masonic) derive from a forger by the name of Fabre-Palaprat, Michael
Baigent is a member of this.
It was the
occultist Josephin Peladan who
renewed this order after it practically disappeared. A poor writer, the latter
loved big titles, called himself a Czar, and created the
Ordre de la Rose + Croix, du Temple et du Grail.
The new order was to
the Catholic, and, more important, aesthetic; and it became very much part of
the artistic scene in Paris. Someone who picked up many of Peladan’s ideas of combining the occult with expressions in
the arts was Rudolf Steiner founder of the Waldorf schools, who also
incorporated all of the Grail and Rosicrucian stories in his work.
The chief outward
manifestation of Peladan's order was an annual art
exhibition called "Salon de la Rose + Croix," the first of which
caused a considerable stir in the Parisian artistic world in 1892.. Visitors to
the opening of the first salon were greeted by the sound of a brass band
playing the prelude to Parsifal, and paintings on themes from the opera
appeared in several of the exhibitions. Rogelio de Egusquiza's
etching of the Grail may have been the result of a meeting with Peladan on a visit to Bayreuth. The Belgian artist Jean Delville was also a regular exhibitor, and his
"Parsifal" stems from the same Wagnerian enthusiasm.
Peladan himself was dedicatee of a strange reverie about
Narcissus and the Grail in Saint-Graal. His most
important contribution was a pamphlet with the suggestion that the Grail was
associated with the Cathars, it was to have surprising and remarkable
consequences.
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