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Now, farfetched isn’t necessarily a problem to somebody who reads Lord of the Rings at least once a year. Fetch it as far as you like when you’re writing fiction. Hamlet couldn’t have gone to the University of Wittenberg, there were no chiming clocks in Timon’s Athens and Bohemia has no seacoast. Shakespeare made all these “goofs”, but he could still write some of the best fiction this island has ever produced, and he always knew that even his “history” plays were fiction. The DaVinci Code is, essentially, a novel that acts as marketing for bad history. I noticed instantly, even with the margaritas, that I’d read the stuff before, but under a different title. In 1985 I’d read the “secrets” that underlay the plot of DaVinci Code in a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that called itself fact. It’s difficult to summarise Holy Blood/Holy Grail. It’s a testament to Dan Brown, the author of Da Vinci Code, that he was able to do so in a scene involving a British guy called “Leigh Teabing”, a play on the names Leigh and Baigent two of the three British television producers who wrote the Holy Grail book. The best-known part of the concept, and the part that the Roman Catholic church (and other Christian denominations with less-noticeable costumes) appears to find so very irksome, is the idea that Jesus had children by Mary Magdalene. The Magdalene, whose womb either is the Holy Grail or contains the embryo which is the Holy Grail, in turn emigrated to Europe and raised the Jesus Family in southern France. This fact is supposed to be so potentially damaging to the Christian religion, and the Roman Catholic church in particular, that it has been kept secret for centuries by a secret organisation called the Priory of Sion. Now, as a woman of a certain age, I remember the Billy Joel song from 1977: “Only The Good Die Young.” When I was a pre-teen, “everyone knew” that the Catholic church had tried to ban the song. We were unclear as to how they would go about this sort of banning, and we were unclear, I must confess, why they would. Perhaps, we thought, the Church objected to the chorus “Only the good die young” on theological grounds, insisting that people who aren’t good can also die young. Perhaps they objected to the line that “Catholic girls start much too late” on the grounds that the song was impugning punctuality in Catholic schools. In the event it wasn’t the full might and majesty of the Universal, Catholic and Apostolic Church which objected to the Piano Man’s song. At the time Pope Paul VI was busy negotiating with the Israelis for the release of Archbishop Hilarion Capucci who’d been caught running guns and explosives to the PLO. He was probably hanging around the Vatican Secretariat of State rather than the Vatican’s pop music division. Yet, Joel credited conservative Catholic objection to the song’s lyrics (notably from Seton Hall University, a Roman Catholic institution in New Jersey) with helping sell the album it was on. The lyrics, in which the song’s narrator sings about trying and failing to seduce a Catholic school girl, really seemed to push somebody’s buttons. How, I have to wonder, do you push the right buttons to get the Roman Catholic Church to complain loudly and profitably about your book? The DaVinci Code isn’t about birth control or abortion or Liberation Theology or the sorts of things that usually seem to rile up the lads in the pointy hats. It can’t be about the shadowy conspiracy theories that surround the “secret” of the Jesus Family: they could easily be dismissed as fantasy even if they were true. The Church’s objection has to be to the theological points themselves: that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were lovers, that they had a child together, and that the family has survived. The Catholic Church seems to be just as bothered in real life about this “secret” as it is in Brown’s fiction. I suppose that’s just the nature of Christian theology: when a religion bases its message on the idea of God-made-flesh, it’s hard to laugh off the idea of something as fleshly as god-sex, god-sperm and god-babies as obviously unrealistic. I’m not fussed about the theology, though. I’m not going to notice one more thing I don’t have in common with the Church of Rome. What I’m fussed about is the “history” presented in the Holy Grail book and that Dan Brown’s wife Blythe Brown wrote into “his” research for DaVinci Code. What’s wrong is that the Holy Grail book is just as fictitious as the DaVinci Code book, and the reason is bad history. The Holy Grail book suggests that Godfrey de Boullion, duke of Lorraine, was descended from Jesus and, when he was King of Jerusalem, established a shadowy order to keep the secret of the Jesus Family. The order was called the Priory of Sion, and it’s public face for many years was the Poor Knights of the Temple, the Knights Templar. The reality, supported by evidence, was that Godfrey de Boullion was duke of Lower Lorraine (which isn’t the same thing), didn’t call himself King of Jerusalem (he called himself the Defender of the Holy Sepulchre), established the Templars to give himself his own army and police force in the chaotic and cut-throat environment of First Crusade Jerusalem. The Templars became a very popular charity over the ensuing years, and became wealthy as a corporation and good at handling money for European kings. As a later King of France consolidated power over his kingdom, the Templars had to go. After taking control of the pope, the King of France persecuted the Templars, took their money, and when the puppet pope dissolved the order the King of France passed him their cash after taking a hefty service charge. As mediaeval history goes, this stuff is supported by a great deal of evidence: financial records, court records and formal correspondence. If you want to claim that everything we know about these well-documented phenomena is wrong, then you need to produce some evidence. Why suppose the Templars knew some deep, dark secret? Because when the Inquisition came after them with hot irons they babbled extensively about all sorts of secrets (some of which, Third Rock from the Sun fans will be delighted to know, involved a Big Giant Head). They talked about secrets including bizarre religious practices, lots of gay sex and other things that inquisitors liked to hear. Not one mention about the Jesus family. Why
suppose that there was a secret order called the Priory of Sion in Crusader
Jerusalem? Because there was a mediaeval monastery on Mount Sion or Zion
(not the same as the one there now), and some order of monks must have
lived there. What has Leonardo daVinci got to do with this? The book in the Bibliotheque nationale says he used to run the Priory, which is odd because Leonardo daVinci was great at all sorts of things except for organising. He lost track of commissions, missed deadlines and barely remembered where to find his hat. Sitting at the centre of a Europe-wide web of intrigue and deceit is the last thing anyone would expect from Leonardo. (Oho! The last thing anyone would expect … how very clever this shadowy order is – and clever enough to get their secret records into the Bibliotheque nationale!) How do you deposit a book in the Bibliotheque nationale? Very simple: you send it to them. It’s a depository library: if you send them a book they assign it a file number and stick it in storage. Who wrote this book in the Bibliotheque nationale? A man called Pierre Plantard, who spent the Nazi occupation of Paris trying to get the Gestapo to let him start an extreme-right-wing anti-Semitic organisation. The Gestapo dismissed him as a nutter. What was Plantard’s connection to the whole Holy Grail thing? Well, if you follow the twists and turns of the book you find that if you follow the genealogy of the late, lamented Jesus Christ through the Merovingian kings and through various dukes of Lorraine you find that God Almighty’s great-great-great etc. grandson is one Pierre Plantard. The secret of Plantard’s divine and royal lineage conspired to keep him living in a small Paris flat with his mother well into adulthood, rejected even by the Nazis he admired. The complex fantasy he creates to account for this embarrassing state of affairs involves taking jewels of perfectly straightforward history and stringing them together on a flimsy thread of his own fabrication. We know a great deal about many of the groups and individuals whom the “history” makers of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail write about: the Templars, the Cathars, the dukes of Lower Lorraine. We are meant to be shocked and engaged by the exciting connections that the authors draw between these pillars of conventional history. When presented as history thousands bought the book. When presented by Dan Brown as fiction millions more did. This has a good deal in common with the sort of extraordinary claim the sceptical community is used to seeing from the hucksters of miracle cures or the Cold Fusion school of scientific revelation. Do you remember Cold Fusion? In 1989 two physicists at the University of Utah announced to the press that they could run a fusion reactor at roughly room temperature and at roughly sea-level atmospheric pressure. They announced their findings in the popular press immediately before submitting their papers to journals, and attracted a great deal of attention before it was discovered that there weren’t a lot of results to back up the claims. This is what Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln did when they “discovered” the great secret: that Pierre Plantard, the fantasist who lived with his dear old mum until the day she died, was descended in direct male line not only from the crusader chief Godfrey de Boullion, not only from the Frankish King Dagobert, but from Jesus Christ himself. Rather than publish their discovery in some peer-reviewed journal or with an academic press, they made a television show and launched a book from a popular press without academic review. There
was a bit of an uproar when first they published. Not from historians:
historians don’t do uproar well – not without a few drinks
on board, anyway. The uproar was from religious authorities who were disturbed
by the book’s religious ideas. The judge in the case of Baigent and Leigh v Random House, who decided that the Browns didn’t plagiarise, was very clear, in an excitingly snotty way, that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was bad history, and that the big ideas that they claimed were stolen by Dan Brown were, in fact, little ideas which the authors had portrayed as fact. But so what? Who does it hurt when bad history hits the shelves? The cardinals and bishops may howl, but when all’s said and done they’re using the bad history for publicity same as the Browns. Bad science can kill. Quack cures can drive people away from the therapies they need. If the worst side effect of bad history is angry bishops and dull movies, then it seems to be a pretty minor issue for the sceptical community. If critical thinking skills aren’t applied to history, and if we don’t demand at least ordinary evidence from historical claims, then we lose our ability to distinguish the reality of our history from the claims of fantasists. Fantastic history exposed to a mass audience becomes dangerous. The theosophists of the 19th Century suggested that certain European nations were descended from a primeval, pure “Aryan race”. This, among other theories, formed the basis for Nazi “race science” generations later. It has been suggested that the Western Allies killed a quarter of a million Germans by bombing of a civilian target in the destruction of Dresden. This has supported arguments of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and the Nazis and has supported the contention that had the Western Allies not intervened in 1939-45 the Holocaust would never have happened. This bad history was spread in print and by word of mouth amongst the elites of Europe. How easily, one wonders, would false history spread over television? Entire channels are already given over to the paranormal, and they sit beside channels given over to a constant flow of serious talking heads telling us about history. In the US, the same company, Arts & Entertainment, owns the History Channel and the Biography Channel. The other company with mainstream history programming is Discovery. Both companies source their history material from the same group of production houses. If the same standards cable networks use for ghost-hunting shows were applied to history, misinformation could instantly become received wisdom. The judge in Baigent and Leigh v Random House took a knowingly bitchy attitude towards the rotten history underlying The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, popularised in The DaVinci Code. He pointed out that even when the author of a work of fiction writes “this is the factual bit” he has no responsibility to tell the truth. He even included a secret code in the published version of his decision. Set down the decision in the Holy Grail case, and pick up the judge’s decision in Irving v Lipstadt and Penguin Books, which exposes in grim detail David Irving’s years of published bad history aimed at denying the Holocaust and minimising German responsibility for genocide. Read Section XI on Irving’s mendacious treatment of the evidence surrounding the bombing of Dresden. Read the whole decision, and see how dangerous bad history can be. The Baigent & Leigh v Random House judgement is available online here. The Irving v Lipstadt judgement is available here. Dr Lynette Davidson lectures and writes on history. She lives in a charming market town in the south of England with her partner and two daughters. She will be speaking on “Bad History” at Skeptics in the Pub on 22 June. |
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