From the Skeptical Enquirer, an intelligent rebuttal to the Dale Brown phenomenon.
Massimo Polidoro,
an investigator of the paranormal, author, lecturer, and co-founder and head of CICAP, the Italian skeptics group, decided to find out.
"What if the Holy Grail, the San Greal, was not the legendary and elusive cup that held the blood of Christ dying on the cross but was itself a blood, or a bloodline, a “
sang real,” a “royal blood?” The idea, suggested for the first time in
Holy Blood and Holy Grail, a 1982 book by British journalists Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent, is at the core of Dan Brown’s bestseller
The Da Vinci Code.
Lincoln and his colleagues suggested that the “royal blood” is that of Jesus Christ, who did not die on the cross but survived the ordeal, married Mary Magdalene, had a child, Sarah, and the bloodline secretly survived and continued for 400 years, up to the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks of dark-age Europe. Jesus died an old man in France, where he fled with his family to escape prosecution from Peter and the Apostoles, and was buried near a little town on the Pyrenees, Rennes-le-Château.
This amazing story was supposedly kept secret for two millennia by the Priory of Sion, a mysterious sect that is said to have also founded the Order of the Templars. Notwithstanding the secrecy, clues to this concealed story were scattered throughout the centuries by some initiates belonging to the Priory, such as Leonardo da Vinci, [
1] Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. This is how Lincoln and friends have been able to reassemble the story, uncoding hidden names, enigmas, wordplays, and hints hidden in various paintings.
But is this all true?
In order to better understand the story, I visited the remote town of Rennes-le-Château (RLC) on the Pyrenees last July."
The write-up continues here.
