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HOLY GRAIL

Are the claims in The Da Vinci Code about the Holy Grail, the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar historically accurate?

According to The Da Vinci Code, the legendary Holy Grail is not the chalice used at the Last Supper of Christ. Instead, Brown uses his fictional "experts" to suggest that the real Holy Grail is a person, Mary Magdalene, who carried the bloodline of Jesus Christ by having His child.

The book also treats as fact the existence of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, which for centuries has kept the secret of Jesus' relationship to Mary. Mary Magdalene, according to this bestselling novel, represents the feminine aspect of God (the "divine feminine")—loved by Jesus but denied by the church for hundreds of years. The Knights Templar are also included as protectors of the secret but were all but wiped out by the church.

The Holy Grail and the Priory of Sion are only two of the many "facts" that need to be subjected to a historical reality check.

The Holy Grail is a medieval legend about the cup of the Last Supper. The first appearance of the term Holy Grail was in 1170 in Perceval, a romantic writing about the legend of King Arthur and his kingdom of Camelot. When Brown suggests that the Holy Grail is not a cup but actually Mary Magdalene who carried on Jesus' bloodline, he alters an existing legend about the historical "cup of Christ" and uses it to advance fictional claims about Jesus and Mary.

The Priory of Sion also has a basis in fact, but not in the sense that Brown portrays it. The title has been used three different times. It was first a monastic order founded in Jerusalem in 1100 that was absorbed into the Jesuits in 1617.

The second and third versions of the Priory of Sion were each under the leadership of Pierre Plantard (1920-2000), an anti-Semitic Frenchman who went to jail in 1953 for fraud. In 1954, Plantard formed a group called the Priory of Sion to help those in need of low-cost housing. The group dissolved in 1957. Then in the 1960s and 70s, he created a series of forged documents to "prove" the existence of a bloodline descending from Jesus and Mary through the kings of France to himself (claiming to be the rightful heir to the throne). He and his associates called themselves the Priory of Sion and deposited these documents in libraries all over France, including the National Library.

In 1993, however, Plantard admitted under oath to a French judge that he had fabricated all the documents relating to the Priory of Sion. The judge issued him a severe warning and dismissed him as a harmless crank (www.priory-of-sion.com).

The Knights Templar are based in history but, once again, not as portrayed in The Da Vinci Code. They were founded in 1118 as a military religious order, but they did not become wealthy, as alleged in the novel, by discovering the secret of the Holy Grail. And there is no evidence that they were annihilated for having knowledge of it.

The significance of the Priory of Sion is bolstered in the plotline of The Da Vinci Code by claiming a little-known connection with such geniuses as Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton. Once again, however, Brown bases these assertions on one of Plantard's forged documents called Les Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau ("The Secret Records Of Henri Lobineau"). Even though a French judge got Plantard to admit his hoax, Dan Brown uses these "secret records" as if they were legitimate.

These facts are important to readers of The Da Vinci Code. If there is no credible evidence that Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton were secretly involved in the Priory of Sion, and if there is only fraudulent evidence that the Priory of Sion was formed to keep "the secret of Mary Magdalene," other factual claims of The Da Vinci Code also need to be questioned.