FOURTEEN
Mediterranean sunshine
One of the more eccentric claims of recent hagiography is that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, is descended from the great-great-grandfather of the Prophet Mohammed. This startling claim stems from the marriage in 1372 of her ancestor Edmund of Langley, fifth son of Edward III of England, to Isabella, daughter of Pedro the Cruel, who was descended from the Caliphs of Cordoba, and therefore from the senior branch of the Qoreish ruling dynasty of Mecca through the Prophet’s great-granduncle, Abd Shams, the banker.1 Edmund of Langley’s great-grandson became Edward IV. His great-granddaughter was Mary, Queen of Scots, with whom Her Majesty is connected through cousin marriages over twenty-two times.
An equally intriguing, and entirely sacrilegious, claim is made that, in a similar way, the bloodline of Jesus, his having fathered children by Mary Magdalene, has passed into the Merovingian–Frankish dynasties of France and also into Scotland’s Royal House of Stewart. None of this sounds so entirely daft in the light of the regular assertion of that eminent Scottish genealogist, the late Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, who maintained that literally everyone in Europe, be they lord or peasant, was descended from the eighth-century emperor, Charlemagne.2 It was Sir Iain’s conviction that all ancestors are interesting, for they are all necessary in handing down life to us even if they lived long, long ago. Had Charlemagne not come of such vigorous stock, and had his third queen, Hildegard, never been born, there would have been no George Washington or George III, no Herman Goering or Winston Churchill, no President Chirac, no Tony Blair or George W Bush.
Depending upon your faith, there is something deeply shocking, and, at the same time, compellingly grotesque, about rewriting received history, especially when it is arguably the greatest story ever told. It may be salutary to recall that it was on a considerably lesser charge that Thomas Aikenhead, a young divinity student in Edinburgh, was found guilty of blasphemy and hanged on the gallows of Leith Walk. And that was only just over three hundred years ago.3
Conceivably Jesus of Nazareth did marry Mary Magdalene, as both The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code assert. In his position as a rabbi there would have been nothing untoward about this. Under the terms of Jewish Mishnaic Law it would have been expected. However, such a union has to be totally unacceptable for Orthodox Christians, for whom the words of the Bible are inalienable. Attention is directed in both books towards a gospel of Mary Magdalene, a Gnostic manuscript excised from the Holy Bible during the fourth century.4 Why did this occur? The explanation given for this action is that in this Gnostic text Mary is seen to have been granted precedence over the other disciples. From there, it is easy to imagine how steps might have been taken by certain misogynist members of the Holy Roman Church to suppress the contents and blacken her name, casting her instead as a prostitute. Such speculation becomes truth in the fanciful claims inherent in both The Holy Blood and The Holy Grailand The Da Vinci Code.
The storyline then progresses to Marseilles, where Mary, the wife of Jesus of Nazareth, and their family, under the protection of Jesus’s disciple, or possibly uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, whom mediaeval tradition portrays as the custodian of the Holy Grail, are said to have fled following the Crucifixion. Tradition has it that they arrived in a boat with no oars after narrowly escaping death during a storm at sea. With them on the boat was a young girl known as ‘Sarah the Egyptian’, who is commemorated by a statue in the town of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. There are caves in which it is claimed the fugitives took refuge, and a celebration and gypsy festival is held here each year on 24 May, Sarah’s feast day. Could there be a possible connection between this Sarah and the gypsies of Roslin Glen? I would not want to dismiss the idea out of hand.
A further elaboration on the Magdalene story is pursued in various writings, which reveal that there is a strong possibility that this Sarah, and indeed Mary herself, was a black African, which is not at all improbable, given the geographical location of the Holy Land, and would explain the widespread cult of the Black Madonna which emerged throughout southern France in the first millennium.
Tradition indicates that Mary died around AD 42 in either Aixen-Provence or Saint-Baume. The latter is today revered as a holy mountain situated between the towns of Var and Bouches-du-Rhône, and has become the centre of Provençal Christian mythology. The high walls around the villages were constructed in the fifteenth century to protect them by King René, prince of the House of Anjou, and Mary’s remains are said to be conserved in the crypt of St Maximin.
Far more critical to the agenda of the current promulgators of discord, however, is the meaning of the word sangraal, which was employed by early chroniclers to describe the entity of the Holy Grail which tradition maintains Mary had in her possession. Everything boils down to inventive modern interpretation. When the word is broken after the ‘n’ to form ‘san graal’ it means ‘holy grail’ or ‘holy cup’, but when broken after the ‘g’ it becomes ‘sang raal’, which in Old French can only be interpreted as meaning‘blood royal’. Attention is then drawn to the Bible, and Revelation 12: 1–17 where St John the Divine refers to a woman ‘clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’, and the persecution of her seed. ‘And the dragon (that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan which deceiveth the whole world) was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.’
Two strands of opinion have thus evolved. The first interprets the grail as a physical object, ie: a drinking vessel or cup. The second asserts that it takes the form of a woman, the view taken in The Da Vinci Code. A millennium after the crucifixion of Jesus, knightly Europe became obsessed with the former, which was embedded in the grail legends of Celtic invention: Chrétien de Troyes’ Story of the Holy Grail written in the twelfth century; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem Parzival dating from the thirteenth century; the Arthurian sagas of the fifteenth century, culminating towards the end of the nineteenth century with Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Richard Wagner’s epic opera Parsifal.
To create a plausible historical perspective, however abortive, others have doggedly set out to establish that the ‘sang raal’, otherwise the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, has passed through progressive royal marriages within the Merovingian–Frankish and Carolingian dynasties of Europe to the present day. On that basis, by subscribing to Sir Iain Moncreiffe’s received wisdom, it could be said that we are all of us descendants of the Son of God, which is what the Church has been telling us all along.
Laurence Gardner, in his books Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark and The Magdalene Legacy, takes it a step further towards mediaeval Scotland, or rather backwards by a thousand years, by connecting the bloodline of Jeremiah to the first-millennium Celtic kings of Ireland and Scotland, which explains how, in the sixth century, Scotland became home to the Old Testament Stone of Destiny. For serious academics, this is all complete and utter hokum, but has certainly not deterred many from pursuing this line of enquiry.
In The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland, the self-styled Prince Michael of Albany, claimant to the Scottish throne, and a most engaging character as I have discovered, asserts that from the union of Tamar Tephi, daughter of King Zedekiah of Judah, and Eochaid, High King of Ireland, in around 586 BC, were descended most of the royal lines of Ireland, not least the Dal Riata – the Royal House of Dalriada, through which all kings of Scots were able to trace their ancestry from the biblical kings of Judah, from the princes of Greater Scythia, and from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Writing a review of The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland at the time of its publication in 1998, I felt compelled to ask why it was that Michael sought only after the throne of Scotland when there was so obviously a far larger one on offer?
The key to the puzzle of Mary Magdalene’s status and that of her descendants, however, as outlined in The Da Vinci Code, is that great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper created for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. This extraordinarily powerful image was completed in 1498, around the time that the building of Rosslyn Chapel was discontinued, but its fascination for the conspiracy theorists lies with the figure seated at the right hand of Jesus, and reclining away from him – an unbearded and distinctly feminine face hitherto assigned to St Peter, but which, in the light of contemporary revelation, must surely be that of Mary Magdalene. I find this conclusion perfectly plausible, but it is strange that it has never been considered before.
No doubt Dan Brown would be astonished to find a Victorian tapestry featuring this very image hanging in the dining room at Rosslyn Castle. Why had this particular artwork been chosen to hang in the castle, and by which member of the St Clair family and when? No one can be sure, but there it is for all to see. Pure coincidence? The believers shake their heads knowingly.
In a monumental parody of all of this, The Da Vinci Code tracks down the living survivors of the ‘sang raal’ to a cottage beside Rosslyn Chapel, hotly pursued by sinister factions within the Church of Rome and protected by a bewildering web of arcane intrigue ranging from the Cathars and Knights Templar to the Rosicrucians, an esoteric grouping which claims a provenance in the glory days of Ancient Egypt. At all times lurking in the background is the shadowy Prieuré de Sion. Is it any wonder that the tour operators have been beating a path to the chapel gates?