The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

I read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" to get better acquainted with the argumentation behind some of the theories in "The Da Vinci Code".

I wasn't disappointed: this 1982 book, followed on from a BBC TV documentary, is a true delight for any conspiracy theory buff. It defends a conspiratorial view of western history: Jesus may have survived the crucifixion and traveled with his wife Mary Magdalene (of royal blood) and their offspring to what is now southern France. There they established what became the Merovingian dynasty, which is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.

Endless conspiracies throughout the times (all of them deriving from the need to hide the true identity of Jesus and Mary Magdalene) are tacked by the authors.

Personally, I found the theory behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion scam (that triggered such brutal anti-semitism in Czarist Russia and in Hitler) to be one of the hight points of his fascinating book.

Synopsis

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees, which enables him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The author's conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material riches but a secret - a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than...the Holy Grail.