Hello everyone!
So every once in a while I'll pick up a book which has somehow or other been deemed inappropriate, scandalous, or, you know, it may even have been forbidden at some point or other.
I mean, The Da Vinci Code is certainly on that list!
But then again, other times I'm going to go back to re-read some things and remember there are other books connected to whatever it is I'm reading, which means that I'll be on the hunt to track down these other sources.
This was what happened to me with tonight's book of choice.
I was never one of those people who would fall so completely into a legend or story that I'd be doing my own research, but just before my parents took a short trip I asked my dad to dig up a book I'd remembered seeing lying about at some point, but books in our house tend to grow legs and clatter everywhere you can imagine.
My father being the amazing man that he is went and actually unearthed this book from under a couple of tires and out of a box. I'm talking about Holy Blood, Holy Grail, of course.
Now, as this is a sort of individual research type of book, I won't be linking anything else down below which may connect to it. Because, and this is the honest truth, Dan Brown isn't the first one to have written about what ifs and a history connected to the Church which may or may not have gotten into some sort of problem along the way with said Church.
This will just be a brief recap and my own two cents on what the authors, Michael Baignet, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln came up with.
Onward!
Ahem.
As you may have picked up from the title of the blog post and the book, this particular printed work deals with that thing which the Church really, really doesn't like: namely that the Holy Grail wasn't exactly the cup which Jesus used during the Last Supper and which was later re-used to catch his blood after he was stabbed in the side while on the cross, but that it's a metaphor.
See, I'm going to start this blog post with how the title came about: if you look at how you'd historically spell the Holy Grail, it would be 'san greal', which is basically one and the same thing.
Now, some historians argue that this word comes from an even older one, 'sangreal', and that it was split in the wrong place.
If you split it just one letter later, getting 'sang real', the translation becomes - dun dun dun - holy blood.
How did the authors actually discuss this, you ask? Let's dish.
The book is divided into three separate sections, which is actually really neat because, for a slightly OCD freak like myself, it's nice to be able to have all your ducks in a row and not to mix everything up into a slushee of some sort.
Part One basically concerns 'The Mystery', which I honestly thought would be a heck of a lot of mumbo jumbo and confused writings all over the place. And it kind of still is that, but it's also organised if you get what I mean.
See the actual search for any answers or clues begins in a small French village where a poor-as-churchmice priest, Bérenger Sauniere, allegedly found some sort of treasure, because he kind of went all-out on a digging expedition, paving the village road, remodelling the church, and building himself a grand ass villa (where he never actually lived, but, you know).
The question for this was: how? How on Earth did someone who was supposedly just a curator and shepherd of a pretty poor flock get his hands on so much money?
The theory was that he discovered parts of the Templar treasure, or, if that didn't work out, then something the Templars might have BROUGHT over to this spot, connected to their treasure (or maybe the actual source of it), and hid there until further notice. But then, the more you dig into this particular piece of information, the more you realize that there never would have BEEN any Knights Templar if not for some convenient timing and pretty easy acceptancy by some historical figures down in Jerusalem.
Which niftily brings us to Part Two: The Secret Society.
This was the part which I was - and still am - most skeptical about. Because for the most part, the authors spend much of their time convincing the reader that what they write here could be the absolute truth, but you'd have to believe that these secret documents which were unearthed in the National Library of Paris all belong and were written by the Priory of Sion. If you believe THAT you can believe everything else in this part, because for about three quarters of the statements in there you don't get much historical cross-referencing, only that 'we found it in these dossiers and couldn't cross-check anywhere else but these documents are authentic so'.
Eh.
But alright, if we "believe" for two seconds, this explains how the Priory was actually the instrument behind the Knights Templar and that, allegedly, their history goes even farther back than you'd think.
Conveniently, however, they also sort of drop off the face of the planet, without any kind of hint or trace, for quite the span of time before supposedly popping back up in the fifties and sixties of the previous century (hint: that fifties-sixties thing? Elaborate hoax; the stuff before that time, however, could potentially be real).
There's a whole lot to sift through in part two, but the main gist of it is this: whatever you think was unresolved or has gone unanswered in history, what may or may not have happened, well, if you attribute it to the Priory of Sion, you'd probably be right if you believe the theory. This is supposedly an organisation guarding a secret for "when the time is right" but also putting themselves in places of power and subtly governing everything and anything under the Sun they deem could help them.
So, you know, the usual secret society on the move stuff.
However, by Part Three: The Bloodline, we actually move even further back in history (you know, part one we went to the Templars and their treasure, part two we figured out who founded said Templars and that they went way back as well). And this is the bit I'm actually pretty interested in, merely from a historical point of view.
Because, see, this is where the authors explain that the Priory of Sion was concocted to protect the "holy grail" - just not the actual chalice you're thinking of.
It's also the place where a bold theory is explained, saying that early Christianity divided into two branches: followers of the Blood, and followers of the Teachings. The winners were the second ones.
But what Blood? I can almost hear you ask.
Well, when I said the Priory was tasked with protecting the "blood" (in this case the "grail"), I mean the bloodline of Jesus.
Oh yeah, this book goes there.
The authors theorise that Jesus was a ) married and b ) had children, but also c ) that he was from the royal house of David and married Mary Magdalene, herself from the royal house of Benjamin which almost went extinct during some tribal wars or something.
This would give any children they may have had a very, very powerful claim to the throne, and made Jesus pretty unpopular with the Romans at the time.
And you have to remember, until Emperor Constantine, Jesus wasn't actually declared a god - just a very exceptional mortal man. But in a council, he was then VOTED to become a deity, at which point (prety logically actually) any and all signs of his mortality and his "human" life had to be erased from history.
There's also a theory that he didn't die on the cross but that doesn't really signify that much since the point is this:
when Jesus was crucified and the witchhunt for his family began (purely for political reasons if you follow the authors), Mary Magdalene fled to France with whatever family she had left, and from there on, the bloodline has, supposedly, continued uninterrupted to this day. How? Well, regardless of their refugee status, they'd still be a family of royal blood, so they intermingled with the leading tribes of the area, from which then sprung the Merovingian dynasty. After their deposition, the Carolingians intermarried with them to strengthen their claim. And of course from there that family sort of spread out pretty much everywhere across Europe, to Austria, England, Germany ...
So basically, it COULDN'T be completely eradicated at any point in time. Because they were too smart and married well.
At which point we as readers are left to figure out whether or not this is all a fable or the truth, and to do a little of our own digging. But it all comes back to this: that the priest in France uncovered documents about the bloodline of Jesus, that the Templars brought them there, an order founded by another order, the Priory of Sion, which came about specifically to protect the family and bloodline of Jesus. And who would potentially have the power, if actually existing, to unite peoples under one banner precisely because of their deep roots in history.
But that's for everyone to decide individually.
Me, I just like the idea of Jesus as a man. It doesn't take anything away from christianity in my eyes.
Actually, his humanity is what makes everything that more compelling.
xx
*image not mine
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