Quest For The Grail In Top Gear

The latest entry in the DVC-inspired grail-quest documentary genre, BBC’s Richard Hammond And The Holy Grail, initially sounded rather slight and even silly. For a start, it was a BBC1 rather than BBC2 production – on the BBC’s mass-entertainment channel rather than its more highbrow 2nd channel which normally hosts historical-inquiry documentaries. Secondly, it was hosted by the young ‘housewives favourite’ co-host of BBC’s car-test driving show Top Gear, Richard Hammond. Thirdly, Hammond’s advance-promo feature in the Daily Mirror (15-5-06) didn’t inspire confidence as he managed to refer to Da Vinci as ‘Da Vici’ and ‘Ad Vinci,’ adding the BBC gave him only two weeks to find the Grail. Fourthly, it was announced and publicised in January, scheduled again for showing the weekend of TDVC’s cinema release, and postponed again before being shown Whitsun Monday. (British TV networks run ‘specials’ for the millions forced to stay indoors by the traditionally rainy holiday-weekend weather.)
However in the event, it was not much different from other entries with a ‘lay person’ as the seeker of truth being guided along by unseen programme researchers. (For instance, ITV’s recently-rerun 2005 one-hour documentary The Grail Trail: In Pursuit of the Da Vinci Code, in which three young people travel by train to Rome and Paris to interview experts, including an Opus Dei rep). Hammond makes little attempt to be cute, and the initial snatch of the Indiana Jones march we hear is not repeated.
He starts in Istanbul, as the old capital of Christendom, Constantinople, for a visit to the St Sofia church and an enquiry about holy relics there. Then he tosses a coin to decide whether to follow the crusader route (unexplained) through Europe, or north to Britain. There, he visits London’s Temple Church for an interview with its now-famous Rector, who shows us the Templar effigies. Then it’s up (in his slinky vintage tourer) to Rosslyn Chapel, for a debunking of its Templar origin. So, inspired by the Arthurian Romances, it’s back on the road down to Glastonbury. There he visits the ruined Abbey, stumbles into a crop-circle symposium, and climbs Wearyall Hill, to no purpose. At the British Library he has a talk with Arthurian scholar Richard Barber (who is actually the programme’s historical consultant), who says the Grail came from the old French Romances. So we’re off to France, first to Paris (where TDVC is finally mentioned as the rationale for coming here) for a look at The Louvre’s glass pyramids and an interview with Simon Cox, author of Cracking TDVC. Then it’s south by TGV train to the Cathar-Templar-Grail-HBHG Country of SE France, where he drives a 4x4, rides a 'Cathar' horse, visits Carcassonne, Rennes-le-Chateau church, climbs up to Montsegur with a Cathar historian, and goes down a grotto for a reference to the Nazis’ supposed grail quest. Finally we visit The Vatican’s ‘secret archives’ (a concrete bunker with 30 miles of metal shelving) for no perceptible purpose, and he gets a final dismissal from a Vatican scholar. Just as Tony Robinson did in his Channel 4 docu, Hammond concludes Chrétien de Troyes just made the Grail up. Cue the author of The Discovery of King Arthur, Geoffrey Ashe: "In the stories it is magnificent, it is jewelled, it shines, it hovers in the air, it is a supernatural object altogether. It's quite mistaken to equate it with a thing you could actually find and put in a museum or anything like that." He adds the connection between the Grail and Glastonbury is derived from the 19th-century poetry of Tennyson. This being a BBC production, it is unlikely to appear on DVD, but will no doubt circulate around the world’s premium channels. For a more critical reaction (hostile to the lay-person-as-host idea), see The Times review here.

Was What Sauniere Found A ‘Codex’?

Was what began the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery really Abbe Sauniere’s finding a ‘codex’ scrapbook? And did discovering this three years later inspire the 'Father of the Ghost Story'?

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Pictured: M.R. James, 'Father Of The Ghost Story', whose interest in exploring relics in historic French churches seems to have led him to a disturbing conclusion about the nature of their secrets ...

Because of the blog’s title, I thought it might be worth looking into a recent theory regarding the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau as a lost codex. The theory concerns how M.R. James, ‘the Father of the Modern Ghost Story', launched his writing career after a visit to a village in the Rennes-le-Chateau area. James was a scholar, a Cambridge academic, whose field was paleography: the study of old documents such as mediaeval manuscripts, which were often collected and bound as codices – sewn together in the manner of a scrapbook. He wrote nonfiction books on church art and architecture, and apocryphal Biblical lore. He also specialised in the ‘antiquarian ghost story.’ Old manuscripts, codexes, and other documents are often a plot springboard of MRJ’s ghost stories, used to create verisimilitude – via what The Wordsworth Companion To Literature refers to as ‘scholarly details.’ His first-ever story, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book,’ was written just after he visited a church not far from R-L-C in 1892. This spring, in Fortean Times, Nick Warren argued that the story was based on rumours then in circulation about what Abbe Sauniere had found at nearby Rennes-le-Chateau that made him rich. If this is so, the story is of interest due to its early date, contemporary with the life and times of Abbe Sauniere, and long before the now-so-familiar modern R-L-C theories appeared. Did he by chance hear the original, contemporary version regarding what Sauniere had found?
The story’s setting is an ex-cathedral church in the same region of France as Rennes-le-Chateau, St Bertrand de Comminges. The church was built by the local Bishop who became the Pope who had helped destroy the Templars, and one of whose descendants lived in R-L-C Castle. Her sepulchre, says Warren, gave Sauniere clues to the hidden treasure - whatever that was.
Could this treasure have had any link with the HBHG mystery? Was there any connection between this part of France and the Holy Lands in the post-Crucifixion period, when apostles were said to have fled to Europe, bringing holy relics? The Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote two historical accounts after he was captured during the Jewish revolt in Galilee and became a Roman citizen, said that when the pro-Roman Herod Agrippa was made king of the Jews, Rome exiled one of Herod the Great's surviving sons there in AD 39. (Herod Agrippa was Josephus’s source for much of his historical writings.) This unwanted heir was retired to the family estate in a remote part of the Roman province of Spain. The Rennes locality of course is not in modern Spain but is nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees forming the present Spanish-French border. He was exiled to the Roman colony-town of Vienne, near Lyon north of Massilia (Marseilles). Massilia was the landfall port for Palestian and other traders following the overland tin-trade route across Gaul to southwest Britain, and so is on our ‘grail trail’ in relation to Joseph of Arimatheia et al. Laurence Gardner’s 2005 book The Magdalene Legacy cites Stewart Perowne’s 1958 book The Later Herods [Ch 10, p69] as the authority on this, which itself cites Josephus’ Wars Of The Jews that both sons of Herod the Great were exiled to this area. (Josephus was the earliest writer to mention Jesus and his brother and successor James, though later manuscript alterations by church fathers are suspected. For the page references in Josephus, see the Wikipedia entry for Herod Antipas, which also explains the manuscript copyist’s France-Spain geographical confusion.) The other surviving son, Herod Antipas, who ruled Galilee at the time of the Crucifixion, was also exiled in AD 39, ending up in … St Bertrand de Comminges - the same village MRJ wrote of. This corner of France was what other writers have characterised as a ‘Jewish Princedom’, the colony building up after the massive Jewish revolt Josephus wrote of as the Jewish Wars, which ended with the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Whether any relevant relics like Galilean Biblical manuscripts came with these exiles however remains an unanswered question.
The MRJ story has a frightened local sacristan or verger gladly selling the narrator a rare scrapbook-codex of centuries-old pages, together with a plan of the cathedral encoded with magic symbols, which the now-dead Canon Alberic tried to interpret to search for lost treasure. It also has a drawing of Solomon facing down the demon or dragon who guards the Temple gold. This ‘appalling effigy’, an Old Testament demon, then materialises to the new owner of the manuscript when he takes off his crucifix. In another story, ‘The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas,’ the antiquarian storyteller deciphers a biblical code sequence hidden in the artwork of an old chapel, leading to a treasure behind a keystone, again guarded by a ghoul. In fact, most of MRJ’s subsequent stories had a similar setup. Told in the first person as if the events had actually happened to the author or to a friend of his, a travelling scholar or antiquary happens on some papers or treasure, possessing which unleashes some occult force. Usually, a shadowy figure begins to stalk him, leading to death, madness, or flight. The plot setup obviously had a great impact not only for James but for others, for his stories have never been out of print since 1904.
Nick Warren implies Sauniere had a vision of such a ghoul, commemorated in the vivid full-colour sculpture of the swarthy, red-eyed horned-demon painted wooden sculpture seen in the R-L-C church, and now on various websites [pictured], where the Latin inscription over the door says 'Terrible Is This Place.’ He speculates what Sauniere may have found was such a scrapbook-codex containing old pages with heretical (Templar?) content that would have embarrassed the Vatican, allowing him to overcome his demons, accumulate vast wealth, rebuild the church and, supposedly, leave architectural clues dotted around the landscape. While demonic hauntings do not figure much in the modern round of R-L-C books I have seen, the Templars were certainly accused of consorting with a demon whose head they worshipped. This may be why the label le tresor maudit or ‘the accursed treasure’ was used by Gerard de Sede as the title for the first of these modern books. Of course, if it was a codex-scrapbook of pages culled from old manuscripts, the question remains, what could have been there that was so frightening? Whatever the Sauniere secret was, it certainly seems to have upset the church - there's a story Sauniere was even refused absolution on his death-bed when he confessed his secrets. The Church tended to denounce heretical works as creations of the Devil, which could explain how the idea of a demon came to be associated with such a mystery.
Clive Prince & Lynn Picknett's recent The Sion Revelation [p251] notes other published authors seem to have heard rumours about the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery around this time: e.g. the Arsene Lupin novels [1907-] of Maurice Leblanc, where Lupin is in plots 'that can appear unsettling when we know the story'; and Jules Verne's 1896 adventure Clovis Dardentor, where the hero has the first name of a Merovingian king and a surname said to mean "of the descendants' gold" (using the same root as Plant-Ard). And in Huysmans’s notorious 1891 novel of Satanism in 19th-C Paris, La-Bas, the setting includes the strange Church of St Sulpice which features in The Da Vinci Code.
The controversial Dossiers Secrets, which HBHG was largely based on, refer to a curse - hence the title of de Sede's book, Le Tresor Maudit - The Accursed Treasure. (The "worst" swear-words a Catholic can utter are maudit tabernacle.) The message Henry Lincoln decoded (this is how the whole HBHG enterprise began) from the parchments reproduced in de Sede's book, A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LA MORT could be translated similarly to mean ‘At [Mt] Sion is this treasure and it is Death.’ As Prince & Picknett put it, "the treasure in some way brings death", the parchment ‘cursing the miscreant who dares steal a fragment of this treasure'. The solution to the now-famous parchment's riddle mentions both Poussin, the painter of the Arcadian scene, and a demon guardian. Les Dossiers Secrets say that the 7th-C Merovingian dynasty, on losing power to the Carolingians, hid their treasure in this area. A curse was put on it to protect it, which was what supposedly caused Sauniere to fall from grace, be put out of a job in 1910 by his Bishop, and be ordered to Rome to face charges. He had introduced 'satanic' elements into the church which his mysterious wealth had rebuilt, such as having the stations of the Cross run counter-clockwise, and the demon pictured holding up the water stoup. He also had a dog he named Faust, after the character who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mortal advantage.
Of course the motto made famous by Poussin, Et Ego In Arcadia, said to be on a tombstone Sauniere covered up, can refer to Death or any other figure one whould not expect in Arcadia. The motto appeared in an 1832 travel book on the area by a friend of Victor Hugo's, which also referred to the "Devil's treasure" being there. Another aspect suggested by Sauniere’s odd behaviour is that if the documents he found referred to some terrible secret about Christianity such as that Jesus had survived, been married, perhaps had children, then this discovery in itself would be akin to a curse, for how could a man of the church carry on with his duties while keeping such a terrible secret?
Further Reading & Viewing: If you want to explore this approach further, Nick Warren’s article ‘An Accursed Treasure’ is in Fortean Times #206 [Feb 2006 – article not archived online yet]. The magazine also carried a feature by Picknett & Prince in their July issue, #212. For a commentary on the "demonology" of "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book", see the online essay The Nature of the Beast by Helen Grant. Even if you’ve never even heard of Montague Rhodes James, you may still have come across his work via a film or TV adaptation. (On the other hand you may just think you’ve seen adaptations because his work has been so widely imitated.) The most famous film version is the 1958 classic Night Of The Demon directed by Jacques Tourner, based on MRJ’s story ‘Casting The Runes.’ (In it, an Aleister Crowley type of figure discovers the terrible price that must be paid after he conjures up a demon using an old book of spells he stole from the British Museum.) A 1989 Italian horror film scripted by Dario Argento, La Chiesa (English title The Church), was inspired by ‘The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas.’ On TV, the first seems to have been a 2-part dramatisation of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book’ directed by Tony Richardson in 1954. BBC did a famous b&w adaptation of MRJ’s tale of a dangerous Templar relic, “Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad” directed by Jonathan Miller, available on DVD from the BFI, with excerpts viewable online). From 1971-8, BBC-TV produced 5 MRJ ghost stories as part of its annual “A Ghost Story For Christmas” series, including ‘The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas’ and ‘A Warning To The Curious’. The latter is the most famous of the 5, and is available on DVD from the BFI. The stories were meant to be read aloud at social gatherings, and make natural source material for radio and talking-book adaptations, of which there are many. For links to etexts, click here [scroll down] or here. ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book’ is here, and there is a study-guide PDF to it here [right-click to download]. MRJ’s story and own visit to St Bertrand de Comminges is discussed in ‘The Jamesian Traveller’ series on the MRJ fansite, here. Fortean Times March 2007 issue says MRJ’s work came out of copyright at the end of 2006, and a ‘flurry’ of new adaptations is expected.

The DaVinci Trail, Armchair-Travel Style

Another way to visit relevant locales is vicariously, by means of armchair travel. It's a form of travel that appeals to may as it avoids the cost, delays and physical inconveniences often associated with actual travel. Despite Tom Hanks's enthusiasm about making the film being like a holiday trip, I'm reminded of his earlier holiday trip on the Flying Scotsman, where he wound up throwing up out the train window after eating Scots 'Mexican' food. Other 'set-jetting' would-be location visitors have been disappointed to discover on arrival that Rosslyn Chapel is covered in scaffolding, or that Temple Church was closed for repairs (as film critic Roger Ebert complained), or that the real St Sulpice Church is lit by modern fluorescent lighting rather than candles.
As armchair-travel vehicles, there are already a score of related documentaries, some being TV programmes and others non-broadcast DVD releases, some of which are companions to a nonfiction guidebook. A list of DVDs currently available is on the Channel 4 site (where they both sell and rent them): Da Vinci Code Decoded, The Da Vinci Code Tour, Da Vinci - Tracking The Code, Beyond The Da Vinci Code, Breaking The Da Vinci Code, Exposing The Da Vinci Code, and so on. Not all of them make satisfactory armchair-travel vehicles, being more talking heads (BBC4's recent The Da Vinci Code - The Greatest Story Ever Sold for example) than questing travelogue, but one that is suitable, and which was both televised and issued on DVD, is Channel 4's feature-length The Real Da Vinci Code. For anyone interested in this approach, I've done a programme-tour synopsis. [more]

Caveat ‘Set Jetters’ –Onscreen, Things May Not Be What They Seem...

As to the actual locations on the itineraries on these tours, any would-be ‘set-jetters’ should be aware that, often in films, what you see onscreen is not what you get in terms of story settings, even when film-makers claim to have shot on the “actual locations.” Here, the novel’s French and Italian settings are as often as not portrayed by English stately homes or by English studio mockups. (And, in the Biblical flashbacks, Palestine is Malta.) It may have been nervousness of the film’s perceived anti-Catholic theme that prompted the filmmakers to choose locations in Protestant Britain over those in Catholic Europe. And French President Chirac’s attempting to negotiate production co-operation in exchange for the filmmakers hiring his actress niece instead of Audrey Tautou, and for paying French actor Jean Reno a bigger salary, may have decided the director to film only the minimum coverage in France since he had no intention of adopting Chirac's 'suggestions.' In Britain, the crew actually ran into a problem with the Church Of England when Westminster Abbey changed its position about letting film cameras inside, for reasons either theological or financial. (The Abbey claims the former and co-star Sir Ian McKellen claims the latter.)
For anyone interested, I’ve put various images I have of the film’s locations (some from the film and some my own) onsite, together with an explanatory outline of what’s what: Da Vinci Code Locations Photos Guide.

Read The Book, See The Movie … Now Visit The Locations

Regarding TDVC, what may be of interest for our purposes here is the glimpse afforded in the film of the ‘sacred’ sites used in the novel and the film. Hanks called making the film "one fabulous vacation adventure moment after the next" – which perhaps give some insight in his decision to star in a story he has called a lot of “hooey”. However for those who want to follow in the characters’ footsteps to pursue the film’s “Seek the Truth” motto, there are various resources. For those who want to see the story’s various settings but don’t want to have to plan their own itinerary, a number of tour packages have been created, now that “set-jetting” is a recognized form of tourism. There is a representative itinerary, from DaVinciCodeJourneys.com. The Scottish and French tourist boards have joined forces to offer a “Codebreaker” prize (the adjacent photo is from a London travel-agency window), VisitBritain offers a destinations list, VisitScotland are promoting a 3-night DVC-themed short break, and LastMinute.com are offering a June charter trip from London to Paris for £169, are offering a package in conjunction with EuroStar, who seem to be the most involved with this idea. The cross-channel train company put on a special-livery train to take 300 of the film’s cast and crew and studio reps to Cannes for the premiere, and now offer their own travel package ‘The Da Vinci Code Eurostar Quest’ with $200,000 in prizes and gifts. (One press report implies EuroStar were inspired by the fact Dan Brown’s novel was the most-left behind item on train seats – though of course this fact is capable of an alternative and more negative explanation.) The Channel 4 ‘microsite’ (done in lurid comic-book style as part of their ‘Weird Worlds’ section) from Feb 2005, lists itself as produced “in association with EuroStar”. For the independent traveller, there’s information from the VisitBritain site. Fodor's, the travel-guide publishers, also have an online 'Da Vinci Code Tour' guide detailing the various locations covered in the novel, such as London. In print, some of the discover-the-real-Da-Vinci-Code guidebooks have site info. There’s now also The Da Vinci Code Travel Journal book (“Retrace Robert Langdon’s footsteps”), issued in the US in March. I haven’t seen it yet, but the Random House blurb says it uses descriptive text from the novel, plus “plenty of lined pages for jotting down observations as you experience these phenomena firsthand.” (Although somehow I don’t think Robert Langdon ever actually needed lined paper to write on.)

The Real Da Vinci Conspiracy?

A number of church organisations have been saying they welcome the opportunity to clarify any public confusion about their actual role, to counter the idea they are involved in cover-ups. See for example, this brand new post-premiere church-run site. There has been some suspicion by press commentators the studio was cultivating this kind of controversy in order to get free media coverage in the form of church protests in the press. Now, an in-depth feature in The New Yorker confirms that a writer in this field was approached by the studio to help promote such controversy. The studio, mindful of the PR ‘nightmare’ of Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ, was reportedly involved in setting up a website in February 2006 with essays by church representatives, The Da Vinci Dialogue, in order to co-opt protests, and get Christians to “engage” with the film (which would mean seeing it rather than boycotting it). In the event, even Opus Dei adopted the idea of engagement, seeing the DVC publicity as a marketing opportunity for themselves, and abandoning plans to sue Dan Brown and Sony Pictures. (They have since almost been overwhelmed by enquiries about joining the order, which does practice some "corporal mortification" but has no monks.)

TDVC Film v Book – A Case Of TMI?

In the past few days I've waded through dozens of reviews, nearly all negative, of the film of The DaVinci Code, but none of the comments I’ve read offer much insight into what went wrong with the adaptation of such a sensationalist pot-boiler. I’ve written at length elsewhere (for a UK writers’ magazine) about the related book-film adaptation issues, and about how the book came from a background of development of the ‘film-friendly novel’. Anyone interested in this can read my feature here: The Da Vinci Formula.
My own guess, before having seen the film, is this. The novel was too long (at 593 pages) and wordy to work within the feature-film screen-time limitations (here stretched to its limit at 150 minutes), and within the Hollywood mainstream film’s conservative conventions – and the usual studio requirements of broad demographic appeal. (Sony actually toned down the music score on the British film censor's advice it was too scary, in order to get it a more general ‘12A’ release certificate in the UK). The church-led campaigns that began attacking the project pre-release may well have stifled creativity and sensible decision-making. The industry trade paper Variety classed it as ''oppressively talky.''
For some of the audience who hadn’t read the book, it may have been a a case of 'TMI' - too much information both as to quantity and to its ‘revelatory’ nature, which can create a certain culture shock and incredulity among many raised as traditional churchgoers.However this would not necessarily harm ticket sales due to the film being an “event” and a conservation piece, and any inability to follow the film’s dense yet obscure plot might only encourage viewers to read, or re-read, the book for clarification.
One could also argue the book actually used the sleight-of-hand technique of overloading readers with so much 'revelatory' information they lose their critical focus, and don't notice the plot clues don't really add up. In the film however, the necessary pruning away of background historical explanation leaves the plot leaps more exposed, with the explanations having to be squeezed into and around the obligatory Hollywood-thriller chase and 'suspense' scenes.

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DaVinci Code Film Adaptation Released To Critical Reactions

The long-awaited film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks as Brown’s cryptologist-hero Robert Langdon, opened on May 19 with a massive almost world-wide simultaneous release (nearly 16,000 cinemas). The film had been kept under wraps until its premiere to 1,000 critics and industry reps at the Cannes Film Festival the week before. The usual advance press screenings were not offered, the only glimpse of the film available pre-Cannes being the trailer (now online), and one of those half-hour the-making-of TV promo specials which are really the TV equivalent of the newspaper ‘advertorial’ - i.e. an extended advert disguised as editorial content. (These TV 'specials' have been popular with Hollywood since Disney pioneered the genre in 1954 with one for their upcoming 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.)
This secrecy is a practice that always makes reviewers suspect a film is likely to get bad reviews, and these were not long in appearing (with the most snide comments reserved for Tom Hanks and his “ageing-academic” 1970s-style mullet hairdo). Apparently the secrecy was so great the usual studio precaution was not taken of public sneak previews (when last-minute tweaking is done, such as dubbing the unclear or risible lines of dialogue some critics complained of). The director is now suggesting people who are not getting much out of the film should go see the film again. That the studio had themselves suggested the film should be shown to open the Film Festival to an audience of critics who are notoriously hostile to Hollywood “blockbusters” suggests the makers were suffering from an uncritical overconfidence. (There were some pre-release predictions it would be the greatest film blockbuster of all time, just as the novel is the most successful ever.)
Overnight, the reviews, nearly all uncomplimentary, went online, with the trade paper Variety calling it a grim, stodgy affair, and only the NY Post giving it unqualified approval. (See also the Rotten Tomatoes site.) Bad reviews would not affect initial box office any more than poor reviews of the novel affected book sales, especially as so much is down to its curiosity value. (Opening-weekend ticket sales were estimated at $77 million in the US alone, and if it reaches its expected worldwide opening box office of $175m, it will certainly be “the biggest non-sequel opening of all time.")
But the studio may fear the film may not prove so popular in the long run if the word-of-mouth, which made the novel such a hit, is not so much “See the film even if you’ve read the book,” but “Stick to the book, it’s better.” As part of the studio strategy, the film was released right afterwards, but the first batch of ‘User Comments’ on the Internet Movie Database showed a similar lack of enthusiasm from first-nighters.

The Books Behind The Da Vinci Code-cont'd

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... As far as finding inspiration in earlier fictional works goes, Brown’s own defense statement says he had ‘read almost no commercial fiction at all since The Hardy Boys as a child.’ And though the author is only 41, the family had no TV. Then in 1993 while holidaying in Tahiti he read a Sidney Sheldon thriller, The Doomsday Conspiracy. (Though now out of print, it was apparently about a missing ‘spy’ balloon being tracked by the CIA.) “The Sheldon book was unlike anything I'd read as an adult. It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read. The simplicity of the prose and efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my schooldays, and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a "thriller" of this type one day.” A Daily Telegraph article even claimed “he gave up his job to write full-time after he read a Sydney Sheldon novel, The Doomsday Conspiracy, on holiday and imagined he could do better.” In terms of similar fiction, we should mention that American thriller writer Lewis Purdue has been claiming Brown plagiarised chunks of his novels The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter of God (2000). He hasn’t been successful in this but has now sold film rights to his work. (More on his legal saga here. )
The other sources given are all nonfiction, or rather that mix of history and speculation classed as ‘historical conjecture.’ One exception was a result of Brown’s youthful art studies, which led him early on to Joseph Campbell, author of a book on eternal myths which has been influential among Hollywood scriptwriters, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, who became a ‘partial inspiration’ for Robert Langdon. For The Da Vinci Code, he says he and his wife Blythe got the idea initially from the books ‘we were buying at around this time’, namely: The History of the Knights Templars by Charles G. Addison, The Templar Revelation by Picknett & Prince; The Goddess In The Gospels and The Woman With The Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starbird, and The Tomb of God by Andrews & Schellenberger. Later in his statement, he names the 7 books he cited as factual background in the proposal he originally sent to the publishers. As well as those mentioned above, there were The Hiram Key by Knight & Lomas, The Knights Templar by Partner, and Born in Blood [-The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry] by Robinson. He notes: “In this bibliography, Holy Blood, Holy Grail does not appear. That is because when I wrote the Synopsis I did not own a copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail nor had I, or Blythe, read it.” He says the bloodline theory is in most of these books - Addison’s History of the Knights Templars, Templar Revelation, Starbird’s Goddess In the Gospels and Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and Tomb of God.
Several of these belong to the favourite genre he calls the “… ‘secret history’ - those parts of mankind's past that allegedly have been lost or have become muddied by time, historical revision, or subversion.” Picknett & Prince’s 1997 The Templar Revelation seems to have been the first major book in this field that he encountered – and he claimed that was as late as spring 2000. The judge said “It is plain that the title The Da Vinci Code is taken from TR. The cover of the book describes it as being "The Secret Code Of Leonardo Da Vinci Revealed". Chapter 1 is headed "The Secret Code of Leonardo Da Vinci". Mr Brown's original copy as provided in this action has significant notes and markings on them.”
From Andrews & Schellenberger’s The Tomb of God he got ‘information on coded paintings’. From Knight & Lomas’s The Hiram Key he got “secret Templar history and the possible involvement of Leonardo da Vinci ... the role of the Masons and The Knights Templar in excavating and then hiding a cache of early Christian writings ... the nature of what the Templars found and the subsequent impact on Christianity ... the family of Jesus (siblings as opposed to children), the origins of Christianity, the Gnostic Gospels, and Rosslyn Chapel," this being the ‘the predominant source for my Rosslyn information.’
From Margaret Starbird’s Goddess In The Gospels and Woman With The Alabaster Jar, he got the idea of the Hieros Gamos (the sacred-marriage rite, a version of which young Sophie sees, causing her to run away and never speak to her grandfather Sauniere again). Though he adds, ‘The description of the ritual itself was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film 'Eyes Wide Shut'.’ (The film was adapted by Frederic Raphael [Darling etc] from a 1925 Arthur Schnitzler novella called Traumnovelle or ‘Dream Story,’ the famous ‘orgy’ scene being based on rumours of depraved versions of the then-fashionable high-society masquerade party.) Brown also got from Starbird “the bloodline theory from a Lost Sacred Feminine perspective … the story of the misrepresented Mary Magdalene … the image she created of Mary Magdalene being the bride, the lost sacred feminine, was very elegant - it seemed like the "big idea" -- like the core of a classic fairy tale or enduring legend. This concept of the lost sacred feminine became the backbone of The Da Vinci Code.’ Starbird in turn said in her WAJ preface that she wrote the book after she read HBHG and, being a Catholic, was appalled at what she thought was not only wrong but bordered on blasphemy, but then found "there was real substance in their theories". (Brown says he wanted to use the name Starbird for a character but thought it sounded too much like an American Indian name.)
His novels being "location driven", he drew on standard guide books like Fodor's Guide to Paris 2001, and the internet. Here, he had web searches done for him. “I was helped in my research ... by ... a librarian based at the University of Ohio, via his access to Lexis-Nexis [subscription database used by academics and journalists] who did keyword searches on "Merovingian", "Magdalene", "Priory of Sion", "Templar", "Grail", "Opus Dei", "bloodline of Christ." However his main internet researcher was his wife, who he insisted had no need to appear in court. She printed pages out for him, often unattributed. This seems to have been where he ran into difficulty. The judge was quite scathing about this, for in court he plainly had no idea where some of his facts came from, and obviously, the judge said, just uncritically utilised material of value to his story that she emailed him.
Significantly not on the disclosure list was Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s 1982 The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which Brown claimed he had never even heard of till the novel was half-finished, saying he used it later on, mainly as a crib during book tours, to rebut attacks by Christian fundamentalists. In Chapter 60 of TDVC, Sir Leigh Teabing shows Sophie his library, identifying several books. (Brown has said he lists real nonfiction books in his novels to encourage people to go to these sources, saying it’s the teacher in him.) Listed on the page, in block capitals, together with subtitles are what he obviously felt were the top three sources in the field: The Templar Revelation, Woman With The Alabaster Jar, and The Goddess In The Gospels. Then he pulls ‘a tattered hardback’ of HBHG off the shelf as "perhaps the best known tome". Teabing says: "This caused quite a stir back in the nineteen eighties. To my taste, the authors made some dubious leaps of faith in their analysis, but their fundamental premise is sound, and to their credit, they finally brought the idea of Christ's bloodline into the mainstream." Brown says he has Sophie astonished that it says ‘The Acclaimed International Bestseller’ on the cover because he himself was astonished, having never heard of it. (The other books on his reading list are much later than HBHG 1982. In fact they are near-contemporary with his own thriller-writing career, some of the DVC research being admitted left-overs from his earlier ‘Vatican conspiracy’ Robert Langdon novel Angels & Demons.)
At the trial he did admit he obtained information from HBHG for what the judge called ‘the Teabing lectures.’ "A lot of this information (including some of the text), I believe, had come from The Hiram Key, as did some of my research on the Templars.... [Re] the Priory of Sion, San Graal, and marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene… I understand that this information (and some text) appears to have come from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.” (There is also his use of the name Sauniere, after the controversial priest at the heart of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery first publicised by HBHG.)
But he said for this part he also ‘looked at' The Hiram Key, Templar Revelation, Elaine Pagels’s Gnostic Gospels, and Starbird’s Woman with the Alabaster Jar. ‘I was uncomfortable including specific information in the novel unless I could corroborate it in at least a couple of sources.’ He pointed out HBHG “does not mention Atbash and Sophia” - referring to The Atbash Cypher, which Brown used as the code which in his plot opens the Cryptex cylinder, since “application of the Atbash Cypher to the word 'Baphomet' [the name of the Templars’ controversial idol] yields ‘Sophia,’ the Greek for wisdom, which he used as a character name. However he doesn’t mention Hugh Schonfield, who first published (in mass-market paperback terms) about the Atbash Cypher in his Secrets Of The Dead Sea Scrolls. Evidently Brown got this via a secondary source, Picknett & Prince’s Templar Revelation.
Brown tried to distance himself from HBHG for another reason – that it implies the Crucifixion was a staged event. (This would be what Teabing’s critical remark re the HBHG authors’ ‘dubious leaps of faith’ refers to.) "This is not an idea that I would have ever found appealing. Being raised a Christian and having sung in my church choir for 15 years, I am well aware of Christ's crucifixion and ultimate resurrection as the very core of the Christian faith. The resurrection is perhaps the sole controversial Christian topic about which I would not desire to write. Suggesting that they marry Jesus is one thing but questioning the resurrection undermines the very heart of Christian belief." He says he invented the Teabing character as a mouthpiece for anti-Church views as he did not want his hero to support such theories or appear to be too anti Catholic.
The judge said he thought HBHG was in fact the main source for ‘the Teabing lectures.’ (The fact the character name Leigh Teabing is an anagram of HBHG co-authors Leigh and Baigent was a bit of a clue here.) The copy of HBHG submitted in evidence was heavily annotated by Blythe Brown, and the judge said he didn’t believe their claim they had mostly done this post-publication, since Brown had claimed he did thorough research beforehand. The judge pointed out that ‘on the cover of TR is this statement. "One of the most fascinating books I have read since the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" – Colin Wilson. HBHG is extensively cited in the text. After the first annotations at the front of the book in Mr Brown's copy of TR the next significant annotation is at page 39 where HBHG is referred to for the first time. The title of the book is actually underlined and along side it Blythe Brown has written "get this book".'
A lot of TDVC readers have since decided to ‘get this book’ with sales of a new ediiton of HBHG increasing a hundred-fold to around 3,000 a week during the trial, and other books on the list have been similarly reissued. Brown says Margaret Starbird has thanked him, and Picknett & Prince evidently have no issues either. (They and other authors now appear in DVC-tiein documentaries.) There is now a thriving genre of nonfiction works, which will no doubt continue long after TDVC has wound up in the bookshop remainder bins. A regularly- updated chronological book list of fiction and non-fiction on Rennes-le-Chateau and related mysteries since HBHG in 1982 can be found on a ‘debunking’ website the judge cited in his verdict, here.
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C4's "The Real Da Vinci Code"

Channel 4's 2005 two-hour documentary The Real Da Vinci Code was repeated on the eve of the release of TDVC feature, coinciding with its own release on DVD. For those who have not seen it and are interested in obtaining the DVD (Amazon UK), below is a run-down of its content. (I don't know if a documentary synopsis requires a warning that programme "spoilers" follow, but the description does include the programme's own theories.) It is presented by Tony 'Baldrick' Robinson, but here instead of racing against time to dig up a threatened site as he does in his Channel 4 Time Team, Robinson here drives around Europe to find the truth of the grail-as-bloodline thesis, interviewing various authors and experts as he travels.
After a red-herring false-start visit to the specialist 'Institute' Brown claimed exists at King's College library near Westminster Abbey, Robinson heads for Hawkstone Park in Shropshire, where the 18C landowner, the antiquarian Thomas Wright, created an extravagant estate-wide “folly” – what we would now call a heritage theme park, which is what it has now become. There, Graham Philips (author of a series of books and a pioneer investigator in this field, but identified here only as author of The Search For The Grail) tells him the story how the grail was found from clues in the back of a painting found in the grotto. He shows him the tiny (eggcup-sized) 'Hawkstone Grail', a 1stC AD Roman scent jar collected by the antiquarian landowner Wright. Philips, who discovered it while researching his The Search For King Arthur, argues this is not the Last Supper goblet but the vessel in which Mary Magdalene collected drops of the blood of Christ.
Next, Arthurian historian Richard Barber is interviewed, to debunk this, saying Wright made no such claims in his lifetime. Then we’re off to Valencia Cathedral, where a 3rd C. stone goblet the Santa Caliz, claimed by the Church as the Grail, is quickly dismissed. Robinson then says (on the authority of Barber) the Grail in fact never existed, being a medieval invention - by Chretien deTroyes in the first-ever Grail tale, Le Conte de Graal. Cue clip from Monty Python & The Holy Grail, which Robinson tries to claim is relevant here. Suddenly we’re at the Forest Of Broceliande in Brittany, which Robinson doesn’t adequately explain was the ‘magical’ setting of scenes in the early Old French Arthurian Romances. (These were set ‘en Bretagne’ – meaning either in Britain or in Brittany, the ambiguous name deriving from the fact the French peninsula had been renamed as a British expatriate colony around 500 AD). Back to Richard Barber telling us Chretien promoted the idea the grail was the dish or cup of The Last Supper, but when he died in mid-story other continuers confused the issue with their descriptions - but, adds Robinson, it's all fiction anyway. Next we’re off to the Languedoc and HBHG country, to Montsegur castle on the French side of the Pyrenees, where there are some cave paintings (the significance of these is never explained). A Cathar historian (and QC) debunks the idea the sect held any secrets or venerated Mary Magdalene.The region was also a Knight Templar centre, and next the Templars rather than Cathars are suggested as guardians of the grail secret (as per HBHG).
From SE France the scene switches to Jerusalem, to hear a local archaeologist deny the Templars could have dug down so far into the Temple rock on the First Crusade (to recover bloodline-related documents). "A Templar Historian" says they were fighting men who got rich by sponsorship and then by establishing a banking system (not by finding treasures in the Temple Mount). She says the Templars were not heretics, only admitted this where tortured, and the Pope later dismissed his inquisitors. Rosslyn Chapel is next, where he thinks the Grail might be held. Andrew Sinclair, author of various books in the field, is interviewed regarding his recent work The Secret Scroll. The Chapel caretaker refuses to let Robinson dig up the floor with a mechanical digger, Time Team style. (Sinclair had in fact already tried to excavate the crypt, using an endoscopy-style probe.)
Then it’s back to SE France, to the town of Rennes-le-Chateau, where we see the church where the local priest allegedly discovered the parchments holding the bloodline secret. We head up to Paris to examine photocopies of the typewritten ‘Dossiers Secrets’ that HBHG made (in)famous, and see clips of Henry Lincoln’s filmed 1970s interview with Pierre Plantard claiming the Priory of Sion is real and guards a secret, not a treasure. His debunker Jean-Luc Chaumeil appears next to show a signed confession the parchments were forgeries, and were in fact an exercise in authority-mocking surrealism. Finally, we go to Milan, to see Leonardo’s painting The Last Supper to argue whether that really is meant to be a woman on Jesus’s right hand. In conclusion, Robinson summarises what he concludes is the 'true’ secret of TDVC, which I won't spoil here....

About This Blog Site

This blog explores issues relating to the authentic old legends that Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code either ignored or missed. As many Americans first encountered this subject area via TDVC, I should explain these are mainly legends associated with the early Celtic or Apostolic Church Of Britain which became the Church Of England … hence its title, Codex Celtica. The perspective is British, rather than the fundamentally American one of vast international conspiracies as the novel and others of its genre are. If you are looking for all-out conspiracy theory, rehashes of the 'HBHG' * or ‘holy blood, holy grail’ theory, as dramatised in Dan Brown’s TDVC, then you will easily find these - elsewhere, by using Google. Similarly, if you want to find sites debunking TDVC and telling it’s all nonsense and you can safely forget all about it, the same Google search should also turn up a range of church-sponsored websites, press campaigns, and books by Christian clerics.

* HBHG: Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baignent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln (1981). For neophytes, this was the bestseller that established the idea that the Grail, the “san greal” or “sainted grail” of Old French Arthurian Romance, should be interpreted as sang-real, or royal blood, referring to a French dynasty which carried a sacred bloodline deriving from Mary Magdalene. It also postulated that there were clues to this in paintings (in this case not by DaVinci, but by Poussin), part of an esoteric tradition maintained by the Knights Templar and then a secret order called the “Priory of Sion.” (Sound familiar?)

However if you are interested (as I have been for some years) in the authentic historical background and cultural traditions of largely Celtic provenance which predate the various modern hoaxes, forgeries, and conspiracy theories, then you may find this site of interest. The first items in the blog concern The Da Vinci Code itself, as this is the starting point for many who have just become aware of this subject area, especially with the just-released film being seen by those who didn't get around to reading the book. So we're starting with 'TDVC' as a familiar point of reference, but we will soon be expanding subject coverage farther afield. (If you want to send anything in for review, email me and I'll send you the postal address.)
This blog is independent and has no connection with any interests other than my own.

I hope to update the site every week. I’ve been giving talks in this general subject area for some years, and have a number of resources I plan to use on the site.

Why "Codex Celtica"?
"Celtica" is a term that traditionally refers to the domain of the Celtic people, and their culture. The Celts of early Europe were not not so much a race as a society and a culture, and the name should be pronounced with a hard "C" (rather than an 's' sound). The early Greek writers who were the first to mention them never gave the name as 'Seltoi' (with an initial letter sigma) but as 'Keltoi' (initial letter kappa).
"Codex" is the Latin original of our word “code”, though the original meaning was different. The term was originally used to mean an early form of folded and sewn book, and later was used to refer to a volume containing a legal 'code', but I have used the term here to refer to ancient manuscript compilations, regardless of their actual physical binding. Scholars apply ‘Codex’ as a prefix name to a collection of ancient documents hand-stitched together in the pre-printed-books era (as with the Nag Hammadi Codex or various collections of writings by Leonardo da Vinci) whose text they are studying in order to decipher it, and to determine its sources, its authority etc. My premise is that you need to look at TDVC and its progenitor HBHG, and now the various follow-on books and documentaries, in a similar way to avoid confusion. That is, if you have just become interested in this subject area after seeing the film TDVC, you have come to it via several layers of source works, which themselves may not be what they seem.
First, it is a dramatisation of a novel which claims its background is all factual (it isn’t) and which is largely inspired by a 1981 book (HBHG) which claimed to be original nonfiction. This 'inspiration' was the basis of a recent London court case brought by two of HBHG’s co-authors against the publishers of TDVC for copyright infringement, claiming that "the whole architecture" of their 1981 book had been reused in TDVC. In one of the more important copyright decisions of recent times, the judge ruled there was no infringement, as the similarities were not specific enough to be covered by copyright, though he reduced the damages as he said he believed Dan Brown had lied saying he hadn’t read HBHG before he wrote TDVC - Brown's personal copy of HBGH, when produced in court, was covered in annotation marks. On the other hand, he ruled that HBHG was itself not entirely original and exclusive in its 'nonfiction' aspect. Complicating the issue was the argument HBHG’s own narrative construction itself was historical fact. This impinges also on the idea that the Bible, which many Christians believe completely factual, had been subject to historical revisionism (the basis of the novel and film's own conspiracy-theory plot premise). HBHG’s own cited main evidence was a set of documents which proved forged, planted in national archives for dubious political ends post-WWII. Nevertheless, since HBHG became an international bestseller in 1982, other writers have adopted its 'sang real' holy bloodline thesis, and elaborated on it. (It was one of these other works, rather than HBHG, that Dan Brown had said in court inspired his plot.) Here, we’ll try to avoid simply rehashing the sort of confused retelling that is already proliferating.
Unlike other writers on both sides, I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers, but if you want to explore ideas and sources along with me, you are very welcome. Some early manuscript sources survive, and we can use these as our "codex."

The Origins Of ‘Pridian'
To avoid unnecessary puzzles: my blog username “Pridian” is taken from a word, itself obsolete, that derives from the Latin pre dies meaning “relating to yesterday”. I used it not only for its apt meaning and its own antiquarian status as a word, but partly because coincidentally it matches the Celtic root of early words referring to Britain - Celtic Prydain, Roman-Latin Britannia -- here implying someone who is a Briton - which is what I am. (In Celtic languages, incidentally, the emphasis is put on the penultimate syllable: pri-DE-an.) The authentic legends I refer to above have - as you will see - a largely British background, rather then the French one HBHG and TDVC focus on. (This was the result of the fact the forged documents they drew on as evidence or inspiration were created by a group of French surrealist pranksters backed by a French monarchist clique.)
My own interest in British and Celtic history, including the ‘holy grail’ and related mysteries, was initially perked by reading a 1959 book, Guardian Of The Grail: A New Light On The Arthurian Legend, by John Whitehead. (If you’never heard of him, he seems to have been a former Civil Servant who apparently wrote just this one book. The aristocratic writer on occult mysteries The Right Honourable Brinsley le Poeur Trench spoke highly of it in his 1963 Men Among Mankind as one of the great forgotten pioneering works in the field.) It was an early attempt at a revisionist history of post-Roman, an engaging (if not entirely convincing) attempt to rationalise the Grail legends in terms of real political events and Dark Ages catastrophe affecting the south of England, where I was born and currently live. And long before HBHG made startling revelations about conspiracy and coverup regarding the Crucifixion and Resurrection, I read (in 1965) about this in another largely now forgotten predecessor work, The Passover Plot by a British Bible historian, the Jewish scholar Dr Hugh S Schoenfield.
(When Jesus Christ Superstar came out, I wondered if it, with its "conflicted" Judas, was inspired by his book.) You can read about his work here [Wikipedia] and obtain the book’s details here [Amazon] .
If you want to 'google' this site, to find other 'Codex Celtica' posts and feature pages, you can do so by clicking here.