Part V
In this part . . .
This part of the book is a little different from the other four. Literally millions of people first heard of the Knights Templar in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, where the order was fictionally wrapped up with lots of, well, fiction. Unfortunately, it was presented as factual information, and lots of Brown’s readers have been left confused over what’s true and what isn’t.
This part takes a careful, nonfiction look at the historical claims put forth in The Da Vinci Code’s take on the superstructure of the Christian faith that didn’t exactly thrill the Catholic Church.
Chapter 12 explores the tale of the Templars and other “secret societies” in The Da Vinci Code universe. Chapter 13 explores Brown’s many assertions about the “sacred feminine,” and it delivers up some surprising facts about women in the history of the Church, as well as in Celtic and other pre-Christian cultures. Chapter 14 presents the amazing behind-the-scenes politics in the creation of the Bible as we know it today. We fearlessly tread on the thin ice of the topic of celibacy, and its improbable survival into the age of pole-dancing and pay-per-view porn. We cut through the PhD-speak and look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocryphal books that didn’t make it into the Bible, and the rediscovered Gnostic Gospels that have caused many to reexamine the foundations of their faith. This part closes with the place of the Knights Templar in the postmodern world, and the latest theories of Templar influence on the survival of these alternative gospels and the secrets they contain.
Chapter 12
In This Chapter
● Discovering Dan Brown’s society secrets
● Telling Teabing’s tall tales
● Looking again at Leonardo’s The Last Supper
As a result of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a large chunk of society will go through life believing that Jesus was married, that women were officially despised by the Church throughout Western history, and that the entire foundation of Christianity is built on a series of poorly crafted lies thrust upon them by pointy-hatted fascists at the Council of Nicaea. Unfortunately, using Brown as your source is like getting your history from watching an Oliver Stone movie — entertaining, but deranged.
Because of Brown’s book, the next generation may believe that the Templars were not devout, independent warrior monks, but were controlled by a dark and formidable inner secret society called the Priory of Sion, a society for which there is not one, single, solitary shred of historical evidence, not even a phone number scribbled on a matchbook. The Templars really are shrouded in mysteries that are never even mentioned in the novel, fascinating enigmas and shocking possibilities that never play a part in the secret-society-drenched plotline of The Da Vinci Code.
Dan Brown’s own Web site proudly touted a New York Daily News review that proclaimed, “His research is impeccable.” Actually, it’s as peccable as a duck’s backside. (There’s a reason the newspapers in New York are dying.)
In this chapter, we examine some of that “impeccable” research, dig up his sources and see whether the “facts” he presents about the Templars have any facts in them at all.
The Secret Societies of Dan Brown
So why all the hubbub over a piece of fictional beach-reading material? As writers, we two have agreed to disagree on the subject of The Da Vinci Code-as-novel. One thinks it’s a smooth and clever thriller, with a wonderful sense of playfulness about cryptography; the other thinks it’s a purloined piece from beginning to end. Yet, we both agree on one thing: Dan Brown’s irresponsible misuse of history is downright criminal. When it suits Mr. Brown, The Da Vinci Code is merely a novel, not to be examined as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls. And when it suits Mr. Brown, The Da Vinci Code is the real scoop on history and the powerful secret societies that control it, and he merely chose to deliver it up as fiction in order to make it more exciting, and less threatening to the sinister powers that be.
But any book that opens with the provocative and now notorious statement that “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” is really just asking for it, in terms of the dreck it dishes up as history. Brown is particularly asking for it in terms of the many and various secret societies he tosses around with paranoid regularity, for both good guys and bad guys. In Dan Brown’s universe, you come into this world with a birth certificate, a Social Security number, and a dues card.
Not a single theory, no matter how wide-eyed, that gets trotted out in The Da Vinci Code, didn’t originate somewhere else first. What made the novel so successful was something else entirely: a human hunger for mystery, conspiracy, and hidden truths beneath the surface of obvious ones. It’s been rearing its head in the literary world for some time now.
Every generation has its Da Vinci Code. Chariots of the Gods put forward evidence of alien visitation in the ancient world, and it spawned a film and two sequels, becoming a full-fledged phenomenon. Before that, The Passover Plot was in every dorm room, which purported to prove that a cabal of radical, anti-Roman Jews had faked the crucifixion so that a living Jesus could reappear, just like the magician David Copperfield, for his jaw-dropping “resurrection.” The Late Great Planet Earth, in print since 1970, spun a web of biblical prophesy from Isaiah to Jesus to hint that the end of the world and the rapture was just around the corner, in 1988. (Witness the success of the Left Behind series of novels inspired by it.) All these books were like The Da Vinci Code, the topic de jour of radio talk shows, classrooms, and parties.
The difference is that each of these books had the courage to present themselves openly as history — speculative history, of course, but still history. Each of these authors was willing to stand up like a man and take the critical brickbats that were thrown at them from both the academic and the clerical community. Dan Brown, on the other hand, cowers behind the skirts of the novel form, as the world’s biblical and secular historians take apart his research.
However, there is one place where Dan Brown deserves sympathy (or brownie points, if you will) — and maybe a fruitcake for Christmas with a nice card. He certainly didn’t deserve the continuing harassment of lawsuits from the two authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. (Henry Lincoln, the third author, refused to have any part of it.) Why sympathy? Because, with a great deal of courtesy and generosity, he lays out the names of the books from which these theories were drawn — they’re mentioned prominently within the dialog. This kind of a mention is free advertising that an author can only dream about. It’s not unheard of, but it’s certainly unusual in a novel, and Dan Brown deserves to be praised for setting a terrific precedent. It was the gentlemanly thing to do.
The Da Vinci Code's “facts" of the Priory of Sion
In The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon explains to Sophie Neuvu the meaning of a key with a PS symbol on it that has been given to her by her grandfather. Langdon recognizes it as the logo of the Priory of Sion, as if it were as common a bit of currency as a Star of David or a stop sign. He describes a brief outline of this “oldest surviving secret society on earth,” with the facts pulled directly from the Holy Blood playbook listed in the preceding section.
We discuss the Priory of Sion and the origin of the hoax that perpetrated it at length in Chapter 11, but here, we need to spell out some of the claims made about it as they relate specifically to the Dan Brown universe, because it is on this foundation that The Da Vinci Code is partially built.
The tale goes that, in A.D. 1090, Frankish knights of the Merovingian bloodline founded an organization called the Prieure de Sion, igniting the Crusades to take their rightful place on the throne of Jerusalem. After this was accomplished, the order was restructured in 1099, establishing a military arm called the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, and the same officer served as Grand Master for both brotherhoods — until 1188, that is, when the Grand Master of the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion broke up, a divorce that was precipitated by some sort of spat over the fact that the Templars had bungled the Battle of Hattin and lost the city of Jerusalem. The Priory, the parent organization, went its own way, to cause more mischief all over Europe in its attempts to restore the Merovingian dynasty of French kings (a.d. 476-A.d. 750) to their rightful place on the throne of France. The arrogance of the Merovingians is perfectly understandable in light of the fact that they’re the direct descendants of Jesus Christ.
These are the “authoritative facts,” right from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail upon which Dan Brown built The Da Vinci Code. Mr. Brown apparently did (and does) accept these as indisputable facts. But in truth, they’re pretty disputable.
The “sacred" bloodline
The Merovingians were the first of what could be called a dynasty of French kings, though they were more properly called “Franks” or “Gauls,” and not “the kings of France.” The Dagobert II discussed so often in Holy Blood, Holy Grail was the king of a nation called Austrasia, divided from its Merovingian-ruled neighbor, Neustria, because of a war between two of King Clovis’s sons. Neustria ran roughly to the north and west, Austrasia to the south and east. Dagobert II was the rightful king of Austrasia, but as a young man, he was dethroned, shoved into an Irish monastery and usurped by an adopted son of his father’s, the son of the evil mayor (a high palace official) of the Austrasian palace, Grimoald. It caused a war and, eventually, Dagobert was called out of the monastery in Ireland to take back the half a throne of Austrasia.
Many of these events are subject to historical debate, particularly the ones we were merciful enough to leave out. Myth records at least one marriage for Dagobert, which produced only daughters, but history has its doubts even about that. However, it’s true that Dagobert II was assassinated while out hunting, on December 23, A.D. 679. Once more, according to myth and not history, he did indeed fall asleep under a tree and was speared through the eye by an unknown assassin. According to the Holy Blood playbook, he was done in by operatives of the pope, who were frightened by his “sacred” lineage and its potential threat to the papal throne.
But boring old history books actually say Dagobert II was probably ordered to be killed by his mortal enemy at the Neustrian court, a man named Ebroin, the ambitious mayor of the palace. (These “mayor” guys were nothing but trouble — for heaven’s sake, hire a butler!) These books say that Dagobert II had no son, hardly a serious dynastic threat to anyone, and that he spent the greater part of his time on the throne founding monasteries and churches. He was soon afterward made a saint by the Church that supposedly assassinated him. His childless state led to the end of the dynasty. Of course, for the Dan Brown/Holy Blood team, the boring history books are all lying anyway.
At the end of Part One of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, in Chapter 4, the following statements are presented not as speculations, or even likelihoods, but as facts:
● There was a secret order behind the Knights Templar founded in 1099, which created the Templars as its military and administrative arm. This order, which has functioned under a variety of names, is most frequently known as the Prieure de Sion (Priory of Sion).
● The Priory of Sion has been directed by a sequence of Grand Masters whose names are among the most illustrious in Western history and culture.
● Although the Knights Templar were destroyed and dissolved between 1307 and 1314, the Priory of Sion remained unscathed. Although itself periodically torn by internecine and fratricidal strife (in other words, civil wars) it has continued to function throughout the centuries. Acting in the shadows, behind the scenes, it has orchestrated certain of the critical events in Western history.
● The Priory of Sion exists today and is still operative. It is influential and plays a role in high-level international affairs as well as in the domestic affairs of certain European countries. To some significant extent, it is responsible for information leaked to the public about itself since 1956. What they mean is that’s when the Priory apparently came out of the closet.
● The avowed and declared objective of the Priory of Sion is the restoration of the Merovingian dynasty and bloodline — not only to the throne of France, but to the thrones of other European nations. We think someone needs to tell these guys that there hasn’t been a throne of France since 1876. Not to pick nits, but the Merovingians were kings in France, not kings of France. And while we’re at it, there aren’t many thrones left in Europe, apart from countries small enough to be fully carpeted, like Monaco or Luxembourg. It doesn’t seem likely that any of them would step down in favor of the son of Pierre Plantard.
● The restoration of the Merovingian dynasty is sanctioned and justifiable, both legally and morally. Although it was deposed in the eighth century, the Merovingian bloodline is not extinct. On the contrary, it perpetuated itself in a direct line from Dagobert II and his son, Sigisbert IV.
The weakest link in the bloodline
And just who is Sigisbert IV? Why, he’s the infant son of Dagobert II, born in the authors’ favorite hallowed ground, Rennes-le-Chateau, whose very name is never mentioned in any other historical reference books. When the confused reader peers at the footnote for this information, he finds that — surprise! — the existence of Sigisbert IV is taken from the Priory of Sion’s own documents! ’Round and ’round we go. And where does this direct line eventually lead? Why, it leads right to the doorstep of the man who fed these three authors this information to begin with — Gerard de Sede, the pet author of one Pierre Plantard (a.k.a. Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair), a French huckster and compulsive founder of secret societies who had a really interesting record with the French police. They used to lock guys up in a padded room for claiming to be Napoleon. Now those guys get a book deal.
The "Da Vinci" Templars
The Knights Templar are almost as fictional in The Da Vinci Code as the Priory of Sion. Although hero Robert Langdon at first hesitates to bring up the Templars in his lectures because very mention of them brings out the conspiracy lovers, Brown has no problem making them part of his own conspiracy theory. Here are some of the Templar references in The Da Vinci Code, along with our comments:
● The true goal of the Templars in the Holy Land was to retrieve the secret documents of the Priory of Sion from beneath the ruins of the temple. The documents prove the sacred bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene. The true goal of the Templars was to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. Although fanciful claims have been made that the Templars were digging for treasure, there has never been any record or proof of it.
● The Templars did not grow beyond nine men until Hughes de Payens returned from a trip to France (where he went to secure funds and papal support). His trip was to deliver up the damning documents that the nine knights had unearthed in nine years of digging. Actually, there is ample documentary evidence of the job the Templar knights (who were growing in number from the first year) were doing patrolling the roads of Jerusalem.
● The secret documents were used to blackmail the pope into issuing the papal bull that gave them the various rights they enjoyed as the holy monks and warriors of God. De Payens supposedly returned with bullion stuffed everywhere but his BVDs. Overnight, they were wealthy beyond the mere dreams of mortal men. The boring truth is that, even though the central records hall of the Templars was destroyed on Cyprus after the fall of Acre, records exist all over Europe of the gifts of money, and principally of lands and manors, that were given over to the Templars by the faithful. The King of Aragon in Spain was so grateful for the work the Templars had done in helping to hold off the Moors from his kingdom that, when he died childless in 1131, he willed one third of his entire kingdom to the Knights Templar. The idea that they blackmailed the pope to gain their wealth is just plain stupid.
● The Templars invented modern banking; traveling crusaders deposited gold and silver into their local Temple Church, and could then withdraw it from any other Temple Church along the way to the Holy land. Sort of true, but not really accurate. Yes, the Templars did indeed invent international banking. But deposits were not made or withdrawn from Templar churches. The Templars were among the most devout Christians who ever lived, and they did not turn God’s temple into a bank. They knew the story of Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple. Templar commanderies and preceptories across Europe and the East, as has been explained in other chapters, ran the gamut in size and wealth, but they were in effect small villages or small, fortified cities. The bank was usually a centrally located donjon or keep, because the chapel or church was also centrally located, for the same reason (safety from attack). But the bank was the bank, the vaults were the vaults, and the church was the church. The vaults below the Templar churches were for burying the dead knights and others of the faithful, as were the church graveyards.
● The Templar Grand Master was more powerful than kings. The Grand Master was frequently an advisor to kings, not their overlord. On paper, the Templars were exempt from the laws and edicts of kings, and could only be tried or disciplined by the pope. But remember that it was a king, Phillip IV of France, and not even a pope, who brought down the Templars.
● The Knights Templar were killed by the pope, “unceremoniously burned at the stake and tossed into the Tiber.” The Tiber River flows through Rome. But all the Templar knights who were burned at the stake were torched in France by King Phillip IV, not Pope Clement V. The pope wasn’t even in Rome during the suppression of the Templars; he was in Avignon. Rome never had anything to do with it.
● Rosslyn Chapel south of Edinburgh was built by the Knights Templar in 1446. The Templars were arrested and disbanded in 1314. The chapel was built by William Sinclair, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he was a Templar, even a 132-year-old Templar. The book further describes an enormous five-pointed star engraved by centuries of footsteps into the floor. There is nothing of the kind there, despite the hands-and-knees efforts of hordes of tourists to find it.
● There are two direct bloodlines from Jesus, and that these two families, Plantard and Saint-Clair, are in hiding, protected by the Priory of Sion. They weren’t in hiding then, and they aren’t now. But oh, how we wish they were.
Brown’s misunderstanding of who and what the Templars were comes shining through near the very end of the book. Robert Langdon states that he has explained to Sophie the fact that the Knights Templar were the principal influence on modern Freemasonry, “whose primary degrees — Apprentice Freemason, Fellowcraft Freemason, and Master Mason — harked back to early Templar days.” The Templars did not wear aprons and use the three degrees; this aspect of Freemasonry is drawn from the medieval guilds of the stonemasons. There are some tenuous and unproved ties between the Templars and the Freemasons, all of them strictly theoretical (see Chapter 8) Unfortunately, the Templars of The Da Vinci Code have little to do with their historical counterparts.
Opus Dei
The controversial Catholic sect called Opus Dei is the only secret society mentioned in The Da Vinci Code that may well have some of the smear coming. This is not to say that Silas, the mad and murderous Albino monk, is even remotely a fair depiction of the organization. It does seem fair to say that part of the philosophy behind the organization could easily become twisted, delivered up in just the right way to just the right suspicious mind.
Not everyone in Opus Dei is expected to remain celibate. In fact, home and family are both emphasized deeply, as you may expect of a Catholic organization. Yet, parallels with the Knights Templars exist, in that both are organizations “attached” to the Church, quasi-independent, in the case of Opus Dei with something called a “personal prelature,” a status that has only existed since Vatican II. And both require a far higher degree of sacrifice from their members than attending Mass on Sunday.
Opus Dei was founded in 1927 by St. Josemaria Escriva, a parish priest in rural Spain. In later years, in Rome, he became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Theology and a prelate of honor to the pope. At his death in 1975, thousands of lay Catholics and a third of the world’s bishops asked the Holy See to open a case for canonization. Pope John Paul II beatified Escriva in 1992 (which is a sort of pre-saint status) and then canonized him ten years later on October 6, 2002.
The organization is in 61 countries worldwide, with around 87,000 members, and it’s involved with education and relief work. At its spiritual core, Opus Dei is founded on the belief that God should be a part of daily life. The phrase Opus Dei means “Work of God” in Latin, and the group is sometimes referred to by its members as “the Work.” The overwhelming majority, 98 percent, are lay Catholics (not priests or nuns), governed by an apostolic convention headed by a bishop.
There are four types of membership:
Supernumeraries: Supernumeraries make up over 70 percent of members. They lead traditional lives, work, raise families, and so on, and they rarely practice such rigorous habits as celibacy or “corporal mortification.”
● Numeraries: Numeraries, about 20 percent of the membership, are men and women who live in the Opus Dei centers, celibately, in segregated quarters. They are encouraged to be college graduates, and to work outside of the center, donating most of their money back to it, a very cultish practice.
● Numerary Assistants: Numerary Assistants are celibate women who live in the Opus Dei houses. They do not have outside jobs, and they take care of the cooking, cleaning, and other domestic matters of the center. The accusation of gross discrimination against women is generally aimed at the treatment of the members of this rank.
● Associates: The last small category of membership, Associates, have a high level of devotion but have obligations that require them to live outside the homes.
Numeraries, Numerary Assistants, and Associates live in celibate group homes, and so are far more likely to be considered by outsiders as members of a religious cult. Of course, to others, they might look more like monks in a monastery.
Despite this section’s heading, Opus Dei is not a secret society. If it’s anything negative at all, it may be a religious cult. Whether it’s a harmless one is a matter of debate. They do incorporate a lot of medieval belief into their Catholicism, and that can make modern people nervous.
Part of their tradition is a monastic practice called corporal mortification, the idea that inflicting pain on yourself (or deprivation, as in a fast) is a way to “scourge yourself,” to help achieve a state of grace. This practice was common in medieval Catholicism, though extremely rare today. It has also been practiced by other faiths besides Christianity. Members believe that this self-punishment, which is supposed to be inflicted in various mild forms, is their way of “taking up the cross,” or in other words, sharing in Christ’s pain in order to reach oneness with him.
Corporal mortification is only recommended in its mildest forms by the powers that be, who sometimes can’t be held responsible when some nutcase decides to carry it over the edge. Members are encouraged to make small sacrifices here and there of the creature comforts we’ve become so used to; take a cold shower, sleep without a pillow, fast, or remain silent for a certain number of hours each day.
But some in the group houses let it get out of hand. Sometimes members flail themselves regularly with a small rope whip they call a discipline, while others go even farther, using a device called a celise mentioned in The Da Vinci Code that would make any sane man’s flesh crawl — it looks like a cross between a Slinky and a piece of barbed wire, and it is to be worn beneath the clothing for a specified time, usually two hours, wrapped around the upper thigh, spikes pointing inward. According to Opus Dei, members are told not to draw blood with it. Terrific.
To be fair, corporal mortification isn’t quite as loony as it sounds. In fact, aspects of it survive in our own culture in some very unlikely places. Its fans in Opus Dei describe it as a way of tuning in to a deeper level of awareness, a philosophy seen in many guises. Have you ever been driving home in the pouring rain, and you glance off to the side and notice a runner on the sidewalk, going for all he’s worth, his face wearing a really unsettling grimace, but with sort of glassy eyes? Runners sometimes call this “being in the zone,” a place where the pain is no longer felt, and the mind is at peace. As the body toils, even painfully, the mind clears, and a zone of inner serenity is reached that allows them to face their problems later with clarity and calm.
Now, do we recommend corporal mortification? No. In fact, we think it’s a little nuts. On the other hand, we think the guy jogging 5 miles in the freezing rain is nuts, too.
A nonprofit organization called Opus Dei Awareness Network exists to reach out to people who have experienced a “negative impact on their lives” at the hands of the organization. According to the network, although Opus Dei isn’t exactly a cult, they certainly do use many cult practices and, in general, exercise a high degree of control over their members — particularly, of course, the ones who live in Opus Dei houses.
Leonardo da Vinci and His Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci was a unique artist, engineer, mathematician, inventor, musician, and writer. He was the embodiment of the true Renaissance Man, and every bit the eccentric genius he was reputed to have been. The question that undoubtedly comes up in any discussion about the Knights Templar and The Da Vinci Code is obvious: What does a Florentine artist from the 15th century have to do with a defunct order of medieval knights?
Da Vinci was definitely an esoteric character and a man of contrasts; a bastard son who rose to prominence; an early Deist who worshipped the perfect machine of nature to such a degree that he wouldn’t eat meat, but who made his first big splash designing weapons of war; a renowned painter who didn’t much like painting, and often didn’t finish them, infuriating his clients; and a born engineer who loved nothing more than hours spent imagining new contraptions of every variety.
Da Vinci is listed in the Priory of Sion documents as a past Grand Master, a logical choice. Because he was an enigmatic man of eccentric genius, but little is known of his private side, people can impress on him any ideology they like.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail is not the only book that The Da Vinci Code's hero, Robert Langdon, mentions. Another is The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (1997), by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. And it is here that the da Vinci connection to this whole story really begins, in their chapter “The Secret Code of Leonardo da Vinci.” They specifically examine the two paintings that become central to The Da Vinci Code: Madonna of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
Da Vinci’s famous Last Supper is actually an enormous painting that covers an entire wall of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. Although it was painted on a plaster wall, it is not, as it is sometimes described, a fresco. A fresco, for those of us who really care about such trivia, is painted on a wet plaster wall, so the paint actually is embedded into the plaster when it dries. Frescos last a long time. The Last Supper, alas, was simply painted on the dried surface of a plaster wall that constantly crumbles and is susceptible to temperature and humidity damage. Originally painted between 1493 and 1498, over the last five centuries it has been painted over, altered, and “restored” several times, with startlingly different results. The most recent, a process that took almost 20 years, painstakingly re-created what da Vinci painted, filling in with light watercolors where the original work was irreparable.
John or Mary?
One of the central themes of both the Templar Revelation and The Da Vinci Code is that the figure seated at Jesus’s right hand is not a young St. John, but Mary Magdalene. “She” is alleged to be wearing feminine clothes, showing a hint of bosom, with a feminine face, and sitting in the place where a wife of Christ would normally be sitting, if he had one.
But if you actually look at the painting, none of it is true. “Her” clothes match the other apostles at the table — same look, same colors, even the same metal pin holding the neckline together. Anybody looking for a bosom here is hallucinating. And there is nothing else to indicate that the figure is anything other than the image of the very young male disciple that “Jesus loved,”
John. If he looks effeminate and needs a haircut, so does James, the second figure on the left, the one with the sort of Bette Midler look about him. And if we play along with this fantasy and say, okay, it is Mary Magdalene, then we have a math problem, because we’d be short one apostle in the room.
Another claim is that the cluster of apostles around Jesus’s figure, along with the angles of Christ’s shoulders and robe, form an M, and therefore create what amounts to a Renaissance billboard for Mary Magdalene. But again, if you actually look at the painting instead of taking Brown’s — or our — opinion as fact, it could also be argued that da Vinci composed the space around Jesus as a V, as though you could expect rays of holy light to emanate from him at any second. Or a V for Vinci. Or maybe it was an M after all, and it stood for Milan. Or the Virgin Mary, which would mean it was both a V and an M. Or maybe it isn’t there at all.
Writing about art is like knitting about music.
Sometimes a painting is just a painting, and sometimes what’s in the painting is just what the painter put there. How do we really know that it’s John sitting next to Jesus — or, for that matter, just exactly who each figure in the painting is supposed to be? After all, they aren’t wearing name badges. Because da Vinci made preliminary sketches of the painting before he started, called cartoons, and in them, he wrote the name of every apostle next to everyone in the painting. The cartoons were for his own use as he worked out the design of the massive work. And da Vinci clearly identified the apostle next to Jesus. It wasn’t Mary Magdalene. It was John.
The "missing” Grail found
Sophie paused, realizing it was the trick question. And after dinner, Jesus took the cup of wine, sharing it with His disciples. “One cup,” she said. “The chalice.” The Cup of Christ. The Holy Grail. “Jesus passed a single chalice of wine, just as modern Christians do at communion.”
Teabing sighed. “Open your eyes.”
She did. Teabing was grinning smugly. Sophie looked down at the painting, seeing to her astonishment that everyone at the table had a glass of wine, including Christ. Thirteen cups. Moreover, the cups were tiny, stemless, and made of glass. There was no chalice in the painting. No Holy Grail.
—Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Oh, but there is, just not where it is supposed to be. Look at the painting. In reality, da Vinci’s Last Supper (see Figure 12-1) is huge. If you stand up close, you’d never see it, because the Grail is not on the table in front of Christ, just as Teabing says. But as in all da Vinci paintings, it pays to look around, and then look again. It’s part of his charm. Look at the last apostle on the left.
Over his head is a window or doorframe. Up close, the lines just look like details of the alcove, even though such details don’t appear in the other two similar ones behind it, or on the other side of the painting. But step back and look again, and the image of a chalice does indeed appear, floating right over the head of St. Bartholomew. When you see it, you’ll look at it every time. (We’re not the only ones to spot this in the painting. After we did, we went digging for allies. Have a look at code-breaker Gary Phillips’s Web site at http://realmoftwelve.fateback.com/about/grail.html.)
Figure 12-1: In spite of what Dan Brown claims, the Holy Grail is indeed in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, over the head of the last apostle on the left, St. Bartholomew.
But why him? Bartholomew barely appears in the New Testament accounts of the apostles — only as part of the lists of the followers of Christ that appear in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts — and most biblical scholars believe he is also referred to as Nathanael in the Gospel of John. Curiously, according to Syrian tradition, his original name was Jesus. So there’s lots of confusion among theologians about Bartholomew.
There is no Gospel of Bartholomew in the Bible. But there is an apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew. It’s a fascinating document that describes Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection and, among other things, showing them the pit of hell, with a long interview between Bartholomew and Satan. But what may very well connect St. Bartholomew, the Grail, da Vinci’s painting, and The Da Vinci Code is an episode in the gospel in which Jesus’s mother, Mary, reluctantly tells the apostles about the circumstances surrounding her virgin conception of Christ. Here’s a passage from the Gospel (Questions) of Bartholomew (4:5-6):
Mary saith: Thou art the image of Adam: was not he first formed and then Eve? Look upon the sun, that according to the likeness of Adam it is bright.
And upon the moon, that because of the transgression of Eve it is full of clay. For God did place Adam in the east and Eve in the west, and appointed the lights that the sun should shine on the earth unto Adam in the east in his fiery chariots, and the moon in the west should give light unto Eve with a countenance like milk. And she defiled the commandment of the Lord. Therefore was the moon stained with clay and her light is not bright. Thou therefore, since thou art the likeness of Adam, oughtest to ask him: but in me was he contained that I might recover the strength of the female.
Now when they came up to the top of the mount, and the Master was withdrawn from them a little space, Peter saith unto Mary: Thou art she that hast brought to nought the transgression of Eve, changing it from shame into joy; it is lawful, therefore, for thee to ask.
In this little-known gospel, Mary says that by giving birth to Jesus, she has wiped away the original sin of Eve. If ever there were a clear conflict with Church doctrine, it would have been this very contention! So, did da Vinci paint the Grail over Bartholomew because he wanted us to look at the gospel of this saint again for what was kept out of the Bible? Did he do it as an inside joke because Bartholomew’s name was also Jesus? Or is there no significance to it being over Bartholomew at all, and the ghostly presence of the Grail in the background where we’d least expect it is just a visual prank? One thing is certain: The Last Supper took four years for da Vinci to complete. There is nothing there by accident. Teabing is right. There’s no Grail in front of Jesus. But it is in the painting, and it’s over Bartholomew.