THE DA VINCI CON

The Code War or Jiggery-Pokery in Rennes Le Château

Since the birth of speculative freemasonry in the early 17th century, large numbers of intelligent and otherwise well-informed, sane and sensible people have believed that much of what was happening around them only occurred because it was set in motion by secret societies, the motors of history. Many still believe that virtually everything unpleasant that happens can be attributed to them and that there is an occult force operating behind the seemingly real façade of public and political life. What has been written about the Priory of Sion is a monumental example of a view of the world shaped by nonsense and irrationality, and even though it is sometimes amusing, it is always disturbing when intelligent people seriously talk nonsense, taking fiction for reality. As many of these authors have found out to their advantage, it never pays to underestimate people’s credulity. The Da Vinci Code alone has sold counterss millions of copies worldwide since its publication in 2003.

CHRIST DID NOT DIE on the cross. He was taken down alive and then quietly shipped out with his wife or partner, Mary Magdalene, to begin a new life in the south of France, hence the empty tomb. It was their children’s bloodline that four centuries later launched the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled in early Medieval France from 476 to 750 AD. This is the central hypothesis of the authors of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. According to their account, itself repeated from embellished secondary sources, the ‘secret’ of this ‘bloodline of Christ’ and the House of David — the ‘Holy Grail’ — lay hidden for centuries, until one day in 1891 four ‘ancient’ parchments referring to an 800-year old secret association, the Prieuré de Sion, were allegedly ‘discovered’ by a village priest inside a hollowed-out Visigothic pillar. The priest subsequently became inexplicably wealthy, spending money extravagantly and conspicuously. In 2003 this story was presented as fact by novelist Dan Brown and provided the basic storyline in his novel The Da Vinci Code.