Essays & Stories
Holy Blood, with Fries
by Rex Weyler
Poor Mary Magdalene, turned into a prostitute by Pope Gregory, blamed for the excesses of French aristocrats by Nazi henchmen, and now 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 real story is far more interesting.
Dan Brown opens his now famous book with this “Fact:” The Priory of Sion is a “secret society founded in 1099.” He bases this claim on parchments allegedly found in the French Bibliotheque Nationale, naming Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci as members. His narrative should not be mistaken for history. The entire legend started as a French restaurant promotion.
In 1953, 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.
However, Henry Lincoln heard the story and wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. 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.”
The Holy Blood authors willfully or ignorantly accepted the hoax as real. French scholars, who knew the story, claim they warned Lincoln. Dan Brown read Lincoln’s book and turned the story into “fact,” fame, and fortune. Brown borrows other myths – the planet Venus tracing a pentagram, the Olympic rings as a secret tribute to the goddess, and Gothic architecture as coded female anatomy – but no credible evidence exists for any of this. Reworking myths may serve titillating storytelling, but it is not history. The notion that Jesus of Nazareth was a wealthy teacher defies the historical record. Mary Magdalene as a Benjamin, remains completely speculative and irrelevant. It is simply not a big deal and has no connection to royal bloodlines.
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 bit about “Sangraal,” the Holy Grail, being turned into “sang raal” or royal blood, linking this to Mary Magdalene and Jesus, the Merovingians, a Priory of Sion, and Mr. Plantard, remains unsupported by any evidence. Brown presents these myths as a revival of the feminine in religion, and he serves his audience with an engaging tale. Nevertheless, his mock history may represent a disservice to the task of reviving woman’s rightful place in history and religion. A patriarchal church has indeed suppressed goddess worship and Mary Magdalene’s role among the apostles, but fabricating history is not the way to restore these traditions. For an authentic history of 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 mystic Jewish seekers is undocumented in the existing record. It is entirely possible that Mary Magdalene had an intimate relationship with Yeshua, the teacher from Galilee, perhaps involving common fertility rites and the sacred marriage of the people’s queen. Margaret Starbird makes a good case for Mary as the ritual sacred bride of Jesus in Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile.
In any case, Mary remained 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, Thomas, Philip and others in the Nag Hammadi Library. Recent archeological discoveries of parchments and scholarship of texts have made these early ideas available. Go to the original source. 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 so forth.
Mary’s testimony recounts a contentious discussion with disciples Peter, Matthew (Levi), and Andrew. In the beginning of the discussion, Peter asks Mary to explain certain teachings of Jesus, such as the nature of sin. Later, Peter and Andrew doubt that Jesus would reveal teachings to Mary that he had not told them. Levi, however, leaps to Mary’s defense, accuses Peter of being hot-tempered, and reminds the disciples that Jesus “made her worthy” and “loved her.”
Roman patriarchs and emperors outlawed this material from the orthodox gospels in the fourth century, burned the library of Alexandria, and drove these Gnostic stories underground. Our culture is enriched by the fact that a few courageous scribes or ascetic devotees risked execution to bury copies of the outlaw gospels in the deserts of Egypt.
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. It could also be an effeminate St. John, similar to the artist’s portrayal of John the Baptist. In any case, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Da Vinci Code, entertaining as they are, do not represent credible sources of alternative history. Their premise is a 1950s restaurant promotion gone terribly wrong.
Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, deserves to be taken seriously.