A few years ago I was asked to write a review of the book and film, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. As usual, I got rather carried away and the final version was far too long for the slot available. I filed it away and forgot all about it. Now, after a rummage through old drawers and files, it’s popped up again. And here is part of it:

Now we have the movie of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Professor of Symbology at Harvard University. Has anyone ever met a Professor of Symbology? No, neither have I. But it is fiction … isn’t it?

It depends what you mean by fiction. Fiction often contains more essential truth than factual accounts of the same sequence of events. In Da Vinci, the chances are we’re looking at a mosaic of ideas, some nearer the truth than others.

Here’s my attempt at an answer to the Da Vinci puzzle, based on many years of research in this fascinating field. It may not be conclusive, but I believe it to be closer to the truth than either Henry Lincoln’s inferences in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, or the Church’s desperate attempts to defend its patrimony.

I’m going to break it down into two strands: the bloodline question, and the Holy Grail. That’s to say, the physical aspects, and then the spiritual.

Preamble
Human history comes down to us like a dream. Events get out of synch. Facts mingle with fantasy to produce myths with great psychological force. Jung called them Archetypes. History is full of them.

However, many of the myths of humanity have been proved to be true by archeology and science. Agamemnon’s Mycenae (Minoan civilization) was unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans on Crete. Homer’s Troy was discovered in Turkey by Heinrich Schliemann. Many Old Testament sites have been found in modern Israel. Myths can’t just be tidied away as foolish wish-fulfilment fantasies.

The Bloodline
I believe the question of the bloodline of Jesus is true but garbled by time. It’s a long story, so I’ll cut it back to the essentials.

“Christianity” began a long time before the historical Jesus was born. It began in Egypt as a mystery religion which spread across the Near East and into Europe, especially Greece. It was based on a virgin birth and a later resurrection. The mother was Isis and the son was Horus, often portrayed as a hawk, no doubt because of something in his character.

Her husband, Osiris was murdered and sliced up by the mysterious Seth. Isis tracked down his remains and put them together again in a miraculous resurrection. This is a classic Mystery Rite aimed at proving the existence of consciousness after death. People of the time understood the ritual nature of resurrection and didn’t take it to mean a physical “rising again”. To this day, the Freemasons have a similar ceremony, but it tends to be empty of real substance and is just a distant echo of long-forgotten events.

The mystery sect established itself in Alexandria, with a contemplative outpost in Palestine at Qumran. This was the base of the famous Essenes, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls, many dated hundreds of years before Jesus, describe a “Teacher of Righteousness”, causing many to believe this was Jesus himself. It was a title only, taken by many over the years, including probably James, the brother of Jesus.

Jesus then was a travelling holy man, with strong links to the Essenes and therefore to Egyptian spirituality. The basic story of his birth is a folk echo of real events at the time.

Priests at the Temple in Jerusalem were of a brahminic bloodline (the House of David). They all had the name (or title) of Cohen. To preserve the bloodline they would take young girls of suitable birth into the Temple and impregnate them at the age of twelve or so. They would then return them to their families, who would bring up the children as their own, counting it a great honour.

The Jesus story is a garbled version of that. Joseph and Mary had a son fathered by a Cohen, an almost godlike figure in their culture. Jesus therefore was special, and was treated as such all his life.

When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD70, the priests dispersed to many points, no doubt with impressive retinues. Many ended up in Europe, where one married into an aristocratic family and founded the Merovingian dynasty of France. Others came to Britain and did likewise.

These became the secretive Rex Deus, the Divine Kings, the ancestors of all the Royal lines in Europe, including the British Monarchy. The Knights Templar (or Knights of the Temple) were an essential part of this whole movement from the 12th to the 14th centuries, when they were all but destroyed. They subsequently reinvented themselves in Scotland as the Freemasons.

The thread of history is becoming clear now. Everything traces back to the Temple, burned by Rome, and the mysterious priesthood, the Cohens, heirs to the spirituality of ancient Egypt.

So, the bloodline in question was not Jesus’s specifically, but that of the Cohens of whom Jesus was but one. The secret, kept for centuries, was that the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem had spread their seed across Europe into the ruling families, who became titular Cohens. It may have been just a bit of spin that Jesus was said to be the founder of the bloodline rather than the Jewish priests. It’s only half a lie because Jesus was actually one of them.

When Henry Lincoln hit upon the story of the priest, Berenger Sauniere, at Rennes-Le-Chateau, he made certain inferences from the data that were remarkably close to the truth. Sauniere’s discoveries made him rich. He undoubtedly discovered some secret, rather than a treasure hoard, and was richly rewarded to keep it to himself. That secret was the fact that the Royal bloodline in France and many ruling families, especially in the Languedoc region in the south, were descended from a Jewish priesthood. The Catholic Church wouldn’t have wanted that information made public. Given the anti-semitism in Europe then, it was explosive information.

The Spiritual
The spiritual strand of Christianity is by far the more interesting one, and the one the Church finds hardest to refute. Again it’s a long story, so I’ll be brief.

Jesus was a wandering holy man, born of the Cohens, with links to the spiritual Essenes — his brother James may well have been the Teacher of Righteousness.

The original themes of Christianity were those of Jesus himself, and were expressed in the “Gnostic” scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. These were Gospels not included in the New Testament by Bishop Irenaeus, acting for Rome in the 4th century.

We know that some interpreters of Cathar ideas believed the Holy Grail to be a book: The Gospel of Thomas, perhaps. I believe it to be “Nirvanic experience”, a mystic state that proves the continuation of consciousness after death. All the mystery religions have this at their heart, even today’s Freemasonry, now just a shell of distant memories.

So-called “primitive” Christianity was reinterpreted and translated into Greek so that Paul could take it to the gentiles (Westerners). This version was a very different one to the first Christian books and was expressed in the three synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Rome took the whole thing over and Christianity became part of the glue of the Roman empire. A version of the old Osiris story, depicted in a materialist way, was bolted on to make it miraculous, and Christ put on an immense pedestal. The Cohen connection was lost.

Some other sects which descended from the original Christianity, as described by the Gnostics and by the Gospel of John, developed an alternative form of the religion. The Cathars, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Coptic Christians all derived from this strand. They were ruthlessly annihilated by Rome wherever it could find them.

So, where does that leave The Da Vinci Code? Such was the secrecy of these original Christian groups — mainly to protect themselves against the power of Rome — that they almost certainly used codes and ciphers to convey essential meanings. Codes then are not out of the question.

We’ve also seen that a bloodline was preserved in Europe, linked to the Merovingian Kings. But it was not directly Jesus’s or Mary Magdalene’s, which may have been used to cover up the Jewish connection.

Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene (Mary of Bethany)? Was the Wedding at Caana, where Jesus supplied the wine, an account of his own marriage to Mary? We may never know, but the chances that he was married are strong. We’ve seen how the Cohens were keen to preserve their bloodline in other respects.

Is Da Vinci right or wrong? Mostly right, I’d say, but with a lot of false trails followed.

Is the Catholic Church culpable of cover-up? Partly, but much of it is probably down to ignorance. There was no CNN, Internet or daily newspapers in those days.

Constantine and Irenaeus seem to have started a movement that was forced in the opposite direction of its founder’s teachings by the very logic of its connection with the source of temporal power: Rome. Dostoievsky got it right in the Grand Inquisitor chapter of his great novel The Brothers Karamazov.

Finally, I believe a document may exist in the Vatican Library dated AD37 which shows that Joseph of Arimathea really did come to Britain to buy tin. In the process he set up the first national church of Christ in the world. Mary (which one?) was said to have travelled with him.

Then there’s the ancient legend of England, echoed by William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, of the young Jesus coming to Glastonbury with Joseph on one of his many trips as a trader. As we’ve seen, legends are often a garbled form of the truth.

John Evans

who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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Watching PMQs an hour ago, I was struck, as I often am, by how many politicians are stuck in grooves carved in stone decades ago.

Dinosaurs — a word used by the Prime Minister in another context — are alive and well and thriving in all parties, but especially Labour, and particularly in education seen as a class issue, not a learning opportunity.

Yesterday, I read an article on education by Bel Mooney of such poignancy and sense of loss, that I believe it should be read by all politicians across the House and beyond:

The gamekeeper’s girl aged nine, her magic century-old exercise book and humbling lesson for today’s schools

If that isn’t a game-changer I don’t know what is. Backed up by hard evidence, its message is unanswerable, even perhaps by the bigots in the educational establishment.

So let’s all get behind Michael Gove’s Free Schools and Academies initiative, while simultaneously urging him to go even farther and faster.

For education is one area the Coalition must get right.

John Evans

I have a theory about the BBC’s madcap Sherlock Holmes redo: Sherlock. But more of that later.

The new Holmes is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor who dispenses the role with a single facial expression — a blank stare — and a wild impression of St Vitus’s Dance (an illness, by the way).

Incidentally, can you imagine any parents naming their new-born, Benedict Cumberbatch? How did he survive school?

Steven Moffat, a writer/producer with the Beeb, is up to his Dr Who tricks again with the nation’s best-loved detective. Set in 21st-century Britain, Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) is a tweeter and blogger, and Holmes, sorry, Sherlock (such familiarity!), is a gangly semi-magician, probably a spin-off from Jonathan Creek. I won’t even get started on Moriarty.

Sherlock looks like a robot, speaks like a computer and knows the contents of any box (“cufflinks, tiepin”), and the life history of any person he sees for more than a second or two (“married with two children, works in a jewellers”). This becomes really tiresome after a while.

Meanwhile, Dr Watson is not the good and faithful servant of Conan Doyle’s stories but an exasperated flatmate, constantly fed up with his companion’s lunacy.

And here I come to my theory, which will probably be revealed in the final episode. They need more to make up a box set, since you asked.

It is my belief that Martin Freeman is the real Holmes, while the pixilated Cumberbatch is Watson after a spell in a mental institution, now out on Care in the Community.

After all those years in the shade, good egg Watson is under the delusion that he is the master detective, while Holmes (Martin Freeman) plays along with it on doctors’ orders. Mark my words, I can spot a plot twist a mile off.

A final riposte to Comrade Moffat. Do stop repeating that balefully stupid bon mot, written on one of Conan Doyle’s off-days: “When the impossible has been eliminated, whatever is left must be the truth.”

It is not impossible for me to change my name by deed poll to Benedict Cumberbatch, but I can assure you it will never be the truth.

Wee Eck, or Alex Salmond as he’s known down south, believes his rank of First Minister of Scotland is demeaning to his position in life. Only the top job will do.

He would like a complete break with the United Kingdom, taking all the oil fields, picking up none of the National Debt, and using Sterling for as long as he wants while having a say in monetary policy.

He also expects the rest of the UK to take on the vast liabilities of the zombie Scottish banks: RBS and HBoS, which were brought to their current pass by Scottish politicians in London. As bids go, it falls just short of Adolf Hitler’s sense of entitlement.

Scotland brought nothing but its own bankruptcy to the Union and was rescued by the English Exchequer. Why would they expect anything back after deserting their fellow countrymen?

The Scottish people, who enjoy having their own parliament, but are very wary of the wider ambitions of their cocksure leader, are not being told the full implications of separation.

Their Triple-A credit rating, consequent upon the Union with England, will almost certainly be downgraded to something like Triple B, virtually junk status. They will not get all the oil fields, nor will they be allowed to be like Greece is to Germany by retaining the pound.

As for joining the European Union, Germany and its allies are in no mood to take on another small, bankrupt basket case. They have too many of those on their books already.

If any Scottish voters are reading this, beware of that slippery fish Salmond. Remember that salmon always swim up river against the tide.

Poppycock Watch
Michael Gove has apparently been slapped down by the Prime Minister for suggesting the nation fork out £60m for a new Royal Yacht Britannia as a gift to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. The republican Lib Dems are probably behind the veto.

But has the Education Secretary any idea how long it takes to commission, design, build, equip and launch a ship that size? I believe the anniversary is on February 6th, 21 days from now.

Back to school, Michael.

Poor Ed Miliband did his best on Marr yesterday but was rendered unwatchable by his rubbery face and adenoidal diction. It’s hard to get round those attributes and listen intently to his ideas — I’m assuming there were any.

Conservatives must pray for his continuance in the role of Leader of the Opposition. However, if he is to avoid total humiliation in forthcoming polls and a General Election, he would do himself a favour by graciously standing down.

Fratricides are rarely rewarded with public office, especially when they prove not up to the job.

I was delighted to see that Dr Rupert Sheldrake has a new book out, serialised last week by the Daily Mail. The Science Delusion continues the theme started in his eye-opener, The Sense of Being Stared At. Here’s my own contribution to the subject:

Anyone who travels to work on the London tube will be aware of how uncomfortable it is. I don’t mean the overcrowding and standing room only.

On tube trains most people bury themselves in books, Kindles or newspapers, rarely looking up except to see if they have arrived at their destination. Even the most gregarious of folk will avoid any contact with their fellow passengers.

This syndrome, as it might be called, is thought to be something of a neurosis. In other words, human behaviour deriving from an inappropriate response to one’s environment. It’s so widespread, though, that it has crossed over into the normal.

A related condition is when people feel uneasy entering a communal room, or speaking in front of an audience. This can be so painful that a few seek the help of the NHS’s Cognitive Behavioural Unit at their local hospital.

The notion is that there’s a flaw in the wiring of their brain which must be rewired appropriately. Neurosis, so called, is the most prevalent “psychological illness” in our times.

But is the cause of it really inappropriate behaviour at all? Is it the sufferers fault? In a lot of cases, I don’t think so.

Consider, in large cities, where these symptoms largely develop, we are walking around in a psychic soup of other people’s thoughts and emotions: Sheldrake’s “extended mind”. Some of us are more susceptible to psychic influences than others, but everyone will have some inkling of them.

Tube phobia may not be a phobia at all, but a natural susceptibility to other people’s mental states, plus an intense dislike of finding ourselves locked into a disconcerting psychic soup. For many it must be like descending into the Underworld rather than the Underground.

Before rushing off to see a shrink, consider that the “fault” may not lie with you, but indicates a strong psychic sensibility — a talent not a disease.

John Evans

who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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CERN* is alive with the sound of Quantum physicists.

While it doesn’t quite have the ring of the opening line of The Sound of Music, the place really is abuzz these days with pinging particles singing from the same hymn sheet.

The reason for it all is a minor “breakthrough” in the seemingly age-old quest for that most elusive of objects: the Higgs Boson, also called the God Particle.

“The Higgs,” as it is universally known — after British scientist, Peter Higgs — is thought to be a kind of field which matter, in its disassembled quantum state, passes through. The drag on particles by the field gives mass — or the appearance of mass — to the bits that are said to constitute matter.

You may think the above paragraph is filled with enough caveats to drag any particle down, but that is how the experts themselves tell it. Though even they can’t really believe they will achieve this crucial step towards verifying the Standard Model of the Universe as imagined (theoretically) during the age of Albert Einstein.

The Higgs is now thought to occupy a narrow segment of the giga-electron volt spectrum defined as 125 GeV. All else has been more or less checked and eliminated. It’s a bit like a gambler with one throw of the dice left to secure his winnings — all or nothing.

Psychologically, some of the players are preparing to be disappointed, saying: “If the Higgs is not found, it will be even more exciting!” Yeah, right.

But you’ve got to hand it to them for their energy and enthusiasm, not to mention their zeal for spending copious quantities of our money. Quantum expenditure is something they have yet to master. Let us hope it is less elusive than the Higgs.

In his Royal Institution lecture on Quantum Mechanics over the Christmas holidays, Prof Brian Cox claimed that Pauli’s Exclusion Principle demonstrates that “everything in the universe is connected to everything else” — the mystics’ Unity of Being, perhaps?

He then rubbed a very large uncut diamond, thus “increasing the energy level of all the electrons within it”. At that moment every other electron in the universe apparently adjusted its energy level because it can’t occupy the same level as any other, according to Pauli.

Think about it: all movements on Earth, or anywhere else, “cause” a maelstrom of frantic activity around the universe. Could the universe actually be alive, as genuine mystics have always asserted? It sounds very much like Indra’s Net to me — a very ancient idea that everything in the universe reflects everything else.

Did those early physicists get their ideas from ancient mysticism (“hippy stuff,” according to Brian Cox)? Discuss.

Similarly, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, much used by Cox in his lecture, has the unmistakable whiff of free will in action. Again though, it’s spoken of as a driver of events, not the result of intelligent action.

With the Higgs all the rage right now, it’s not easy to squeeze in an alternative view of the universe. But as this column is Midweek Mysticism, an attempt must be made to inject some sanity into the “will we, won’t we” debate that’s boiling over in Geneva.

Last week I chanced upon hints of a fascinating book published in 1901 by Dr Richard Maurice Bucke, a 19th-century psychologist and medical doctor: Cosmic Consciousness — A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind.

Twenty-nine years earlier, Bucke had experienced a shattering and life-changing expansion of consciousness in which he “saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter, but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is also built and ordered. That without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of everyone is in the long run absolutely certain.”

The content and breathless nature of that statement bears all the hallmarks of countless mystical experiences down the ages.

Dr Bucke believed there are three stages in the psycho-spiritual development of man: Simple Consciousness, which is shared with animals; Self Consciousness, which is the normal state of human beings; and Cosmic Consciousness, which only the illumined attain.

He cites nine examples of such beings: the Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Dante, the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and, interestingly, the American poet Walt Whitman, whom he knew personally. There would also be many unknown people with such insights not made public.

He suggests that they are the beginnings of a new race of man increasingly inhabiting the Earth. The marks of this race are: “moral and intellectual elevation”, a clear conception of the meaning of the universe, a good character, and having passed the “age of illumination”.

In time, all humans will possess this faculty, he writes. “The same race and not the same; for a Cosmic Conscious race will not be the race that exists today … The simple truth is, that there has lived on [Earth] appearing at intervals for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another [superior] race … breathing the same air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing. … This new race is in the act of of being born from us …”

As an antidote to the Higgs/CERN excitement, I recommend this book to you. I spent a while last week trying to lay my hands on a copy. Amazon didn’t have any, although they acknowledged its existence. Library stacks have long ago pulped it to make room for rows of computers and shelves of DVDs.

As is often the case, though, serendipity, in the form of the “Library Angel” came to the rescue. It’s obtainable from the Kindle system.

What would we researchers of arcana do without Amazon’s Kindle? Downloaded in seconds for a pittance, there it is, fully formed like Hydra, a voice of sanity from the past.

It’s just a pity that the file is not editable. It would be great if out-of-copyright books at least, had a cut and paste facility from Kindle to Word. It would be easy enough on Kindle for PC, a free online app.

Never mind, many thanks for not so small mercies.

* CERN in Geneva, home of the Large Hadron Collider and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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Put aside the razmataz of the Olympic Games and other showbiz festivities this year, they are part of the problem, not the solution as many commentators are peddling.

This Christmas our television screens were dominated, as usual, by two distinctive strands in the British psyche.

On the one hand, there were a number of adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novels and other examples of Victoriana, while in an alternative universe, the now familiar “reality” formats based around Strictly Come Dancing and offshoots of The X-Factor franchise.

In the first camp, as well as the Dickens, we were given a new, edgy, postmodern Sherlock Holmes, full of jump-cutting and almost incomprehensible dialogue. Since the human mind seeks order and sequence in the world around it, this offering mimicked the effects of serious brain damage and was probably bad for the health. Holmes would not have been pleased.

As for the Strictly/X-factor efforts, what can I say? General mayhem with questionable celebrities and young kids in floods of tears at the slightest setback. It’s so extreme, it’s not even funny.

Narrowing it down, we had a choice between Victorian values and the modern world; ultimately between character and personality.

Dickens was above all a psychological novelist writing about human character. His people were given names to match their characters: Uriah Heep, Wilkins Micawber, David Copperfield, and Harold Skimpole, not forgetting Sweedlepipe, Honeythunder, Bumble, Pumblechook, and M’Choakumchild. Ebeneezer Scrooge could only be a miser, Samuel Pickwick an agreeable pillar of the community.

Character was, after all, the basis of Victorian society. It explains the unprecedented commercial, technological and artistic successes that the people of these small islands took around the world at a time when, in the words of the American author, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Everyone wanted to be an Englishman.”

At the beginning of the 21st century, it is clear that the rest of the world learnt our lessons well. Even formerly backward wildernesses and deserts are now overtaking us economically, teaching us a thing or two about character and hard work.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has sunk into a cult of personality that is destroying its very existence as a coherent country. While character is “inner substance”, personality is “outer show”, flimsy, transient, lightweight, good for little except trash TV. The tragedy is, it’s the younger generation that is absorbing these tendencies, egged on by a derelict education system.

Television reflects the times we live in and magnifies trends out of all proportion. In 2012 most people are informed by entertainment media rather than structured education or serious writing. Personality trumps character, artificial excitement drowns out considered inspection.

Therein lies great danger for us today. An undoubted majority would think it regressive to go back to the “Victorian” values of thrift, hard work, honesty and personal decency, which are widely regarded as outdated Christian left-overs. In fact, they derive from a much deeper spirituality that underpins any successful culture.

Major religions are composed of two parts, the outer show: the liturgy, services, meetings of the faithful, churches, temples and the clergy, usually in colourful dress; and an inner core of mystical knowledge, largely ignored now. Character and personality.

The Diamond Jubilee this spring and summer, only the second in our history, is a celebration of real character. Queen Elizabeth II has maintained her popularity for 60 years through good times and bad.

While her Jubilee will be a starburst of outer show and pageantry, none will forget that it is her character and dedication to duty that carried her through all the trials of that period.

If we are to recover our former peaks of achievement as a nation, we should look to our inner substance and downgrade the tinsel and the spangles of mere personality.

Olympics? Bah, humbug!

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mysticism in the Modern World is coming soon.

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