The 'Why the Hell Not?' Approach to History

I just finished Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln's seminal work in the history of fringe conspiratorial pseudo-history, 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail,' which I had received ironically enough as a Christmas present. First let me say that I was really eager to get into this. I reread Foucault's Pendulum right before Christmas and really enjoyed it all over again, and again had my interest piqued by historical conspiracies, the Templars, the Cathars, Jaques de Molay, Rene D'Anjou, the Comte de Saint-Germaine, etc etc. And though I haven't read The Da Vinci Code [a)it's way too popular now for me to deign to pick it up and b)I can wait for the summer movie, anyway] like many Americans these days I too have been swept up in the swirling rip-tide of secret societies and ancient conspiracies.

In some ways, HBHG doesn't disappoint. It doesn't lack in ambition, and it certainly is grand enough to be interesting. I think that if the authors had constrained themselves a bit, or if they had had someone playing devil's advocate, they might have come up with something a bit more reasonable and concrete albeit a bit less grandiose. But like Belbo in Foucault's Pendulum, one gets the impression that the authors here started off as skeptics who wanted to believe but couldn't, and ended as believers-at-all-costs who ignored evidence to the contrary and who stopped asking the hard questions. Of course they were at a deficit from the beginning because they weren't historians, they were trained as writers and/or journalists, and HBHG never really feels like a serious work because of it. Certainly the authors explored a lot of primary sources and had a good understanding of their topic, but it feels like they were more interested in their story than in the truth.

But what a story. Honestly, I'm pretty forgiving because 1)the authors seem to have looked at a lot of sources and 2)regardless of whether it's true or not, it sure is fun. Here's the best summary I can give:

-~100 or so years ago a poor unspectacular priest in southern France named Sauniere, in a very small town called Rennes-le-Chateau, seems to have uncovered something underneath/inside of his church which gave him a lot of power.

-In the course of his life he spent more money than could have been possible for a small town priest, and he was also visited by a number of very powerful people (including the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty). Why?

-Well, maybe because what he discovered there was evidence that:

a)Jesus was not celibate, but in fact was a father (via Mary Magdalen)
b)The Holy Grail, which is often viewed as a receptacle for Jesus' blood and thus often is depicted as a chalice or cup of some kind, was actually his bloodline, or his heirs, who were secreted away to southern France soon after the Crucifixion was staged.
b1)That's right, with the complicity possibly of Pilate and others, the Crucifixion was staged and Jesus did not die, but rather someone died in his place, possibly Simon.
b2)This explains how the Resurrection was later staged.
c)Jesus and his heirs went on to spread the 'family' cause, which was basically the argument that the 'Second Coming' of Christ would be the return of his heir to the crown of Jerusalem. They weren't popular with the proponents of the 'message,' those who believed Jesus literally died and was reborn, was truly holy and not symbolically so, and who would definitely return some day from Heaven to reclaim his throne in Jerusalem.
d)Because the 'family' was threatened they had to go into hiding, which they did under the protection of a bewildering sequence of royal families in France in the early Middle Ages...what's important is that they eventually were united with the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled France for a few hundred years around 1000 AD.
e)The Merovingians seem to have been connected to a group of warrior monks called the Knights Templar who led a series of Crusades to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels, presumably so that when they did so they could put Jesus' heir back on the throne.
f)Eventually the Templars fell out of favor with both the Roman Catholic Church (those old proponents of the message and adversaries to the family) and with the clandestine group that had been functioning behind the scenes and secretly controlling them all along - the Priory of Sion. When they lost the protection of the Priory of Sion they were vulnerable to the Church and its pretender to the French throne, Phillipe IV, who had Jaques de Molay (23rd and final Grandmaster of the Knights Templar) and his cohorts brought up on charges and executed in 1314.
g)What then had seemed to be the end of the family cause was just a diversion, the Knights Templar had been a red herring of sorts meant to distract the family's enemies from the true conspirators, who continued to operate in secrecy for the next 700 years through a series of sometimes obscure but sometimes ridiculously famous Grandmasters (among them da Vinci, Victor Hugo, Newton) and whose aim was to restore the Jesus/Merovingian line to the French throne and to reconquer Jerusalem. Along the way the Priory of Sion was in some ways connected to practically every well-known conspiracy theorist group/secret knowledge advocates, among them the Freemasons, their counterparts in France whose name I can't recall, the Rosicrucians, the publishers of the Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc etc. But these were probably all still more distractions meant to conceal the real truth.

-Sauniere died still claiming he had a secret, and his companion made the same claim after his death, even though she died in poverty. No one really knows what he knew.

Which is a big part of the problem with HBHG. The authors never really provide an answer to the mystery that began their entire investigation! Sauniere is the starting point, but then he's discarded and forgotten while they traipse around European history in search of clues for the secret society they believe he uncovered. I would be a lot more satisfied now if they could have simply answered where Sauniere got his money, what he uncovered in Rennes-le-Chateau, and why he was so popular with so many powerful people. Of course they imply it was because he knew the truth about the conspiracy theory I've laid out above, but they can never demonstrate that connection existed; they have no proof, only conjecture.

And as for their conjecture, well, there are a lot of holes in the theory. For starters, the list of the supposed Grandmasters of the Priory is obviously a ridiculous farce. Don't you think that in the volumes of research done about great men like da Vinci and Hugo and Newton, in the countless hours spent researching their lives, that legitimate scholars would have found some connection among these men and a secret cult? And yet the authors of HBHG offer no such reference, the best they can muster is the association these men had with well known occult figures and imply that they probably had deeper ties. And I don't even want to get started on their Biblical theories. Of course the Gospels have holes in them, contradict one another, seem to imply things that aren't explicitly said, were arbitrarily chosen by members of the early Church at the exclusion of others, yadda yadda. But asserting that the Gospels are unreliable evidence doesn't then give you the power to cherry pick stuff from other, equally unreliable Gospels (like the Gospel of Thomas and of Mary) and from the four canonical Gospels to buttress your own theory. And the connections are strained, at best, for example there is apparently a scene in I believe Matthew in which Jesus attends a wedding, and the authors suggest that because his mother just happened to be there and because Jesus seems to be in command that it must have been his own wedding, not one of a stranger. Even if you agree that the incident is a curious one, that doesn't mean that your own theory about what happened is true. Just because Magdalen was associated with Southern France, with carrying a child, and with a sort of intimacy with Jesus does not mean that she bore him a family that gave rise to the greatest conspiracy the world has ever known.

But with all that said...I enjoyed it. Conspiracy theories are the new religion, I think, they give the faithless something to cling to, some sense of design and order that is just beyond our ken but which isn't necessarily divine, it's just mysterious enough to seem that way.