Brown's Conspiracy Theory: Wild or just Whacked?

So, The Da Vinci Code hit the screen this past Friday. At first I was hard up to see it as soon as possible, but then a couple of people I know saw it and told me it was really boring, and for the very reason I feared it might be: long, intricate bits of exposition can make for a real page-turner of a book (which TDVC most certainly was), but it rarely translates well onto the screen. Nothing slows down a film's pace like having all the characters sit down and talk.

Still, I'll have to see it at some point, even if only after it hits HBO, because the book was fantastic and it deals (eloquently) with one of my personal favorite topics: Wild Conspiracy Theories!

But as Wild Conspiracy Theories go, how does Dan Brown's Code really stack up?

Hopefully without ruining it for the three people left in America who haven't read the book yet, here it is in a nutshell:

TDVC alleges that Jesus Christ was merely a mortal man, and that He and Mary Magdelene were in fact married. This union produced on offspring, a daughter, still in utero at the time of Christ's crucifixion. The other disciples were all insanely jealous of Magdalene, because Jesus loved her more than he loved them (?) and she feared they would kill her and her daughter. So, she fled by boat across the Mediteranean, and landed on the south shore of France, where she bore her daughter, who later married into the Merovingian dynasty of French roalty.

Fast forward about 300 years, and we see the founding of the Holy Catholic Church via Emporer Constantine and the Council of Nicea. From the get-go, the church somehow manages to erase almost all public knowledge or memory of this divine bloodline (which had a 300 year headstart on them), and forever seeks to destroy the San Greal (Holy Grail) documents which prove the descendent lineage of Christ. These documents, as well as the identities of those descendents themselves, are guarded by the Priory of Sion, a shadowy, secret society whose list of Grand Masters just happens to read like a who's who of the most famous (and attention loving) people of all time. The list includes the likes of Sir Issac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and of course, a flaming homosexual painter named Leonardo Da Vinci, who riddled his works with vague and abstract "clues" as to the true identity of the Holy Grail (Magdalene). The church continues to this day to try to stamp out this all powerful secret via a sub-sect called Opus Dei (Work of God), which employs intimidation, bribery, and murderous albino monks to keep the world from finding out the truth.

Believe it or not, if you haven't read the book yet, you can have all the info I just laid out and still find it to be an intriguing read. Even so, most of it is easily debunked, which of course resulted in an almost immediate cottage industry of "debunking The Da Vinci Code" books. Author Dan Brown readily admits his book is a work of fiction, except when he can generate controversy and book sales by going on TV and claiming it's all fact. Even the authors of 1982's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which Brown blatantly plagiarised, won't go that far.

Brown liberally mixes fact and fiction, and has never claimed otherwise to my knowledge. Still, many of his assertions are at best demonstrably flawed, and at worst intellectually dishonest. For instance, there is an author's note at the beginning of the book which claims the Priory of Sion is a real organization, founded in 1099. More accurately, the Priory was a real organization, founded in 1954 by a convicted con artist named Pierre Plantard, who produced several elaborate forgeries of documents related to the Merovingian dynasty, in which he added himself as the last living member of their family tree, and thus rightful heir to the throne of France. The Priory is named therein as the group who protects and records said bloodline. Plantard claimed to be its then current Grand Master (conveniently putting himself in league with Da Vinci and alike). He arranged for those documents to be "found" by a reporter of his acquaintence at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and made public. Plantard then did a much publicized television interview (member of secret societies protecting great secrets generally don't do that). I've heard it reported that the reporter, whose name escapes me at the moment (Blassard, I think, or alike) later admitted his role in the hoax. He has also since died. Plantard, likewise, passed on in 2000.

I should note that Plantard claimed only to be descended from the Merovingians, not from Christ Jesus. In fact, on a French radio interview he very specifically denied the latter. There is no evidence of any kind that the two bloodlines were ever intertwined, or indeed that Christ ever fathered a bloodline.

So as conspiracy theories go, Brown's, while certainly entertaining and thought provoking, rates fairly low, since so much of it has been thoroughly debunked, and what remains is flimsy at best. There are some great ones out there though, which I will delve into in my next entertaining and Illuminating (readers of Brown's Angels and Demons will note the oh-so-eeeeeeerie invocation of another secret society) column.