Holy Blood, with Fries

Poor Mary Magdalene, turned into a prostitute by Pope Gregory, blamed for the excesses of French aristocrats by Nazi henchmen, and dragged into the plot of a popular thriller.

The Da Vinci Code has kindled an interest in the Magdalene’s contribution to spiritual history, but in our enthusiasm to solve riddles, we may be missing the jewel among the mysteries.

The hoax about a bloodline began in 1953, when Frenchman Noel Corbu, inherited an estate from priest Bérenger Saunière. He opened a restaurant in Villa Béthanie, the Hotel de La Tour, and concocted a rumor that Saunière had discovered parchments containing a Castilian Seal, in a hollow pillar of his Church. The story was a promotional gimmick, so Corbu didn’t bother to check facts. The renovation began five years earlier than he claimed, there was no hollow pillar, and no evidence linked the well-known priest to any parchments.

In 1955, Corbu met Nazi sympathizer Pierre Plantard. During World War II, at the age of 17, Plantard had founded “Alpha Galates,” to promote anti-Semitic ideas for “purifying France.” He published Vaincre ("Conquer"), filled with right-wing platitudes and superficial esoteria lifted from Celtic mythology. Plantard spent time in prison during the 1950s for fraud and embezzlement, but later promoted himself as a descendent of Merovingian kings, thus a pretender to the French throne.

Plantard borrowed the restaurateur’s story about the parchments, embellished it, created a “Priory of Sion” group, and published a new magazine, Circuit, featuring spurious history about royal bloodlines, linking himself, through the Merovingians, to Jesus. With the help of academic Philippe de Chérisey, Plantard added his name to an authentic genealogy from a 1960 historical journal Les cahiers de l’histoire. He forged parchments detailing this “history” and slipped them into the Bibliothèque Nationale. The bogus documents repeated the Saunière story and linked Plantard to royal blood and the phony “Priory of Sion” gang that allegedly included Leonardo.

In 1967, Plantard, Chérisey, and ghostwriter Gérard de Sède published the hoax as L’Or de Rennes, and a 1970 BBC documentary treated the story as authentic. Plantard and his co-authors bickered over royalties and launched a court case, during which both Chérisey and Plantard admitted they forged the parchments. Plantard repeated the confession in Circuit and other publications.

American astrologer Liz Greene (Leigh) read Sède’s story and wove the royal bloodline into a novel about French psychic Nostradamus. Her brother Richard Leigh and boyfriend Michael Baigent then teamed up with Henry Soskin (“Henry Lincoln”) to write Holy Blood, Holy Grail. French scholars, who knew the story, claim they warned Baigent, but the Holy Blood authors insisted on depicting the hoax as real.

As Plantard gained publicity from the Holy Blood book, he revised his story again, recanted his confession, and claimed that Chérisey had copied the fake parchments from “originals.”

Dan Brown read Lincoln’s book and used the premise for his now famous novel. It’s a stirring book, and at least he sold it as fiction, except for the opening “Fact” claiming that the Priory of Sion was a real “secret society founded in 1099.” He based this claim on the forged parchments in the Bibliotheque Nationale, naming Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci as members.

Brown’s novel is entertaining and interesting, but it is not history. An actual Priory of Sion – a Catholic monastic order founded in ancient Jerusalem, Zion (Sion) – existed until 1617, when Jesuits in Sicily absorbed it. The priory was never a secret and had no association with the Templars. Plantard simply resurrected the obsolete name for his bogus 1956 group.

The problem with all this is that these myths are passed off as a revival of the feminine in religion, but may actually confuse an authentic revival of women’s rightful place in history and religion. A patriarchal church indeed suppressed goddess worship and Mary Magdalene’s role among the apostles, but fabricating history is not the way to restore these traditions. For authentic feminine spiritual history, see Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Goddesses and the Divine Feminine.

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory accused Mary Magdalene of being a reformed prostitute. The Roman church adopted certain gospels and outlawed others, specifically the Gospel of Mary and other Gnostic texts. There is no need to change Mary from a prostitute into Jesus’ girlfriend. Whether or not there were sexual relations among any of these early Jewish followers remains undocumented in the record. It is entirely possible that Mary Magdalene had an intimate relationship with Jesus – or Yeshua, the teacher from Galilee – but we’ll never know, and we don’t need to know..

Mary is portrayed in several accounts, including the Gospel of Philip, as a devoted disciple and teacher in her own right. For those who want to investigate the personage of Mary, a good place to start is Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels. Better yet, read the actual Gospels of Mary.

The Gospel of Mary was discovered at a burial site at Akhmim, Egypt, about 60 km north of the Valley of the Kings, at the end of the 19th century. Mary offers vivid insights into the teachings of their leader from Nazareth, that the Kingdom of God “is within you,” that the body is divine, not wicked; and that “where the mind is, there is the treasure.”

A cult of Mary likely existed and she may have traveled to both Ethiopia and to France. It is entirely possible that the person sitting next to Jesus in Leonardo’s Last Supper painting is intended to be Mary Magdalene. Nevertheless, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Da Vinci Code, entertaining as they are, do not represent history. Their premise is a 1950s restaurant promotion gone terribly wrong.

Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, deserves to be taken seriously.

This was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Spiritualism . Feel free to respond, or trackback.