Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch

Author:David Aaronovitch
Language: ru
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-05T06:24:08+00:00

Henry Lincoln and the TV Quest for the Holy Grail

At around the same time as the trial in London was closing, the movie of The Da Vinci Code was opening in cinemas across the world. Its thunderous trailer, shown a million times already, claimed that the film would tell the story of “the greatest cover-up in human history,” which readers of the book knew to be that supposedly perpetrated by the Catholic Church, which for two millennia had deceived its adherents into believing that Jesus was a bachelor and Mary Magdalene a whore. So intense had the controversy over Dan Brown’s theology become that bishops denounced the film, and the very day I tried to see it in the Indian city of Hyderabad, it was banned by the state government of Andhra Pradesh because it might lead to demonstrations and civil disorder. “The minority organizations,” said a state spokesman, “have pointed out that the film’s storyline attacks the very heart of the Holy Gospel, destroying the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

This may have been India, which is very careful about its minorities for good historical reasons, but even so, it seemed surprising that such an extreme stance should have been taken. Surely everybody knew how to distinguish a farrago of exciting nonsense involving psychotic albino monks and centuries-old secret societies from a genuine claim about historical truth? But perhaps the Andhra Pradeshis were right, after all, because, as we’ve seen, at least two groups central to the creation of The Da Vinci Code weren’t making the crucial fact-fiction distinction. Indeed, Dan Brown included this categorial foreword at the beginning of all editions of The Da Vinci Code: “FACT: The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975, Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered its parchments known as the Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.” Brown elaborated later in a television interview that while the murderous albino and the angry French police officer named Fache might have been made up, “all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact.”

Meanwhile, Baigent and Leigh were adamant that there was also a historical basis to their work: in the publicity for their 1986 follow-up, The Messianic Legacy, they argued that “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—the book in which the Priory of Sion was unveiled—rocked the very foundations of Christianity.” With pilgrimages being organized to the historical sites where this alternative history had supposedly been played out, and with Church employees being harassed by eager neo-heretics, it was perhaps little wonder that the popular triumph of The Da Vinci Code so irked the Catholic Church. But where had it all started?

Strangely, given the prominence in the court action of Baigent and Leigh, the story of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail didn’t begin with them at all, but rather with their absent coauthor, Henry Lincoln. In his

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