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. He was murdered, sliced up, then put together again by his mother 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 (minus the later “virgin” additions) 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 12 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 conceived 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. 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. I write about this state in my new book, The Nirvaneans, soon to be published by Humdrumming.

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. The old Horus 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.

Now there’s a real story for Brown. So, come on Dan, get to work. The world of publishing needs the revenues.