Dan Brown and the Templars and the Grail

For at least a few years now, due to Dan Brown, very many people have been thinking about the Templars in association with the Holy Grail. Whether Brown alone is responsible for the dimensions of this current fascination, or whether he has just been riding a wave of great popular interest before him, I don't know.

I do know that at least partly due to Brown, and to people like those at the History Channel riding Brown's wave, many people have gotten the idea that the Grail, or at least the idea of the Grail, goes way back in time into the early Dark Ages, if not actually into antiquity, if not actually all the way back to Jeebus Himself, when in fact the Grail originated in 12th-century fiction. Dingbats like Brown and the folks working for and consulted by and associated with the History Channel are spreading the notion that the Grail is nonfictional, whether it's a jeweled chalice as in the popular Arthurian stories, or some sort of magic stone, or Jesus' great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. There's all this awful bullshit about the Mysteries of the Grail, when there's no mystery, and therefore also no need for any self-described genius to come along and solve the mystery. Any decent introductory course in Medieval French literature solves the mystery by informing the student that Chrétien de Troyes invented the Grail in his epic poem Perceval. There ya go, folks, Grail mystery solved, yr welcome.

Lately it occurred to me to wonder how many people may have been mislead in the opposite direction: they already knew that the Grail was fictional, either because they had attended a competent class in Medieval literature or because they generally pay attention, and now, having never heard of the Templars before this aside from their mention in fiction, the widespread hoopla about the Grail and the Templars has led them to assume that the Templars are fictional, that they also never existed.

I get the impression that a large portion of the public, and of the reporters of the mainstream public, have first heard of mythicists via Bart Ehrman's recent book-length attempt to discredit them. If this is correct then it may mean that Ehrman's attempt has in fact been quite successful.

But it's so hard to really know what the general public thinks. Public-opinion polls, even when they're done well, and Lord knows they aren't always, have serious shortcomings. Presidential elections less so -- but wait, how do I know that? Well, of course, I don't. I'm just guessing and speculating and poking around in the dark all over the place here, as is anyone who tries to gauge public perceptions. At least some of us know we're just guessing. Above I assumed that mainstream-media reporters had been pretty ignorant of the historicist-mythicist debate until Bart Ehrman recently succeeded in leading them astray -- but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the publishers and editors of mainstream media deliberately keep the sharper reporters far away from any stories about religion. That would be both bad and good news: bad, of course, because it would mean that media bosses are deliberately misleading us more than we might imagine, and good because it could mean that their nefarious attempts to keep us in the dark are not as successful as they or anyone else thinks.

Sometimes public opinion is suddenly and surprisingly revealed, in a good and reassuring way. When I was in the 8th grade it was assumed that either a certain rich girl, daughter of a physician, my primary-care physician as it happened, although the term "primary-care physician," to my knowledge, was not yet in use, would be elected homecoming queen, or one of two other members of her clique. Because they were the popular girls. Or so everyone assumed. But no, the other girl surprisingly on the dais with them as a finalist, not a rich girl, dressed much more like the rest of us because she couldn't afford to dress like the rich cliques, none of us could, was announced the winner and the place went nuts. Conventional wisdom was proved wrong.

Don't accept conventional wisdom just because it's conventional. And don't assume that the assholes and idiots have quite as tight a hold on public perceptions as Time magazine and The New York Times may have you believe. I'm not denying that things are often awful, just suggesting that maybe, maybe, good sense is more widespread than it may appear. bubbling under the surface. For goodness' sake, vote to re-elect President Obama.

Corrections

I was talking with some people about Dan Brownlately, and it occurred to me that I might want to correct a few misconceptions he's spread.

*sigh* I know: around 600,000,000 people eagerly read everything Brown publishes, and as little as 5 or 10 may read this blog post, and as many as 4 to 8 or so of them may already be way ahead of me. Still. It ain't right, what he's doin'!

The Priory of Sion

In The Da Vinci Code,which, as Brown strenuously asserts whenever it suits him, is after all only a work of fiction, after the Acknowledgments and before the Prologue, on a page carrying the bold capitalized headline FACT: Brown states that the Priory of Sion was founded in 1099 and that its member included da Vinci, Newton and Victor Hugo.

In fact, the Priory was established in 1956, established and then described as being centuries old, by a man named Pierre Plantard, as part of his attempt to pass himself off as a descendent of the Merovingians, and therefore, he alleged, a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

The Merovingians

Okay, this one is not so much a matter of fact as a matter of WTF. Why would someone choose precisely that dynasty, as their ancestors and as the descendants of Jesus? Why, that is, unless they had not heard the prevailing description of the Merovingians, taught in countless Intro to Western Civ classes, namely that they were horrible, disgusting, shockingly evil people, personally responsible for much of the Darkness in the Dark Ages?

However...

...the prevailing, horrifying picture of the Merovingians comes mostly from one contemporary author, Gregory of Tours. And while I know of no particular reason to assail Gregory's reliability as an historian, historical spin was by no means unknown to ages before our own, and it is possible that our main historical source for the Dark Ages had some personal or professional feud with the Merovingians.

Now, regarding the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a couple and had a child...

...I couldn't care less if this is true or not. Nor do I have any particular reason either to support this theory nor to throw doubt upon it. I got nothin'. Sorry, you'll have to look elsewhere for help on this one.

Concerning the Grail, however, which according to Brown and to Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh,who gave Brown the idea, was the bloodline of Christ:

The Grail was first mentioned in the late 12th century in the epic poem on Percival by Chrétien de Troyes. If you attempt to establish the existence of the very notion of something called the Holy Grail earlier than Chrétien, then, I am sorry, my fellow scholar, but you must do so without my support. It's fictional, and it's mostly likely either a fictional chalice or a fictional stone, sought by the fictional knights of the fictionalized King Arthur's fictional Round Table.

But, but, the History Channel...

I know. I may write posts in the future similar to this one, dealing with stuff put out there by the History Channel.

So why d'ya watch the History Channel if you think it stinks so bad?

Because I'm weak. Often the subjects they cover are interesting to me, even if the treatment of these subjects tends to be excruciating, and they show lots of pictures of pretty paintings and medieval illuminations.