The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

**

Gripping, but unfortunately complete rubbish 20 Aug 2007

Having read this book three times, I feel it might be interesting to offer three short reviews of it, charting my changing opinions as my acquaintance with it grew better.

Reading 1: Truly a thrilling read; inspirational, even. In the single sitting it took to complete the book, I found almost every received idea which I had hitherto accepted as single fact overturned and revealed either as entirely false, or as having a meaning far beyond anything I had ever imagined. History was laid bare, opened up to reveal a great network not only of people but of ideas that had shaped and guided European history for one-and-a-half millennia. The authors had uncovered a remarkable society which had survived in secret since the Dark Ages, and which sought to restore the blood line of Christ to the throne of Europe. My life would never be the same again.

Reading 2: I was baffled. This was no longer the same book which I had devoured so eagerly two years before. Those passages which had so dazzled me were flat, or I could no longer identify them, and the pace had gone. It took me a period of reflection to work out why, but I realised that the book relies on its breakneck pace to keep its narrative going, and that a reader who already knows what is coming around the corner is at a major disadvantage. The nature of this disadvantage is serious: at a second reading one is automatically more critical and scrutinises the evidence more closely, and it was in doing this that, on the one hand the narrative fell apart, but on the other, the glaring flaws in logic, scholarship and writing became apparent. Ideas which were presented as hypotheses in one chapter suddenly became fact in the next, and became the basis for yet more hypotheses which in turn were morphed into incontrovertible truths. The sheer sloppiness of the historical approach shocked me: lack of evidence was taken to be evidence in itself, and absence of proof served to prove anything which lacked evidence. The approach of the book revealed itself to be nothing more than that of a spy novel: a series of clues lead to the revelation of a great global conspiracy. Sadly, that is not the way that good scholarship works. While the effect may be thrilling, what is all too easy to see is that not one of the pieces of evidence which was used to present the case stands up to even the slightest scrutiny, and it is at that point that the book ceases to be worthwhile.

Reading 3: perhaps more motivated by nostalgia than anything else, I returned again to the book to see if I had judged it unduly harshly on my previous reading. If anything, I realised that I had been too lenient. The whole premise of this book (that Christ's bloodline survived in a dynasty of early medieval French kings, later to be taken up by the Cathars, the Knights Templar and a quasi-Masonic organisation) defies rational inquiry, and ignores not only any sane assessment of how history operates, but also the significance of the claim were it to have any merit whatsoever. On the one hand it is nonsensical to believe that there is a shadowy organisation which has lurked in the background of history for one-and-a-half thousand years, and, especially when its leading lights were as disparate as Isaac Newton and Claude Debussy (of course Newton is famous for his interest in masonic matters, but Debussy was hardly in a position to usher in revolution on a political scale, regardless of his brilliance as a composer.) Moreover, it matters not one jot whether Christ's bloodline survived through Mary Madgalene - his children would simply belong to the House of David just as he had done. They would not be Gods, or even able to do especially clever card tricks: the point, if one subscribes to Christian theology, of Christ, is that he was uniquely human and divine. His significance as a human on earth came to an end when he ascended into heaven.

This is one of those galling books which captures the popular imagination and spreads its memes around in the most insidious way, although it would be deeply unfair to accuse the authors of anything so sinister. What they are guilty of is a credulously sloppy approach to writing history, in which unproven and insubstantial evidence is adduced and shoehorned into an absurd thesis which, as they themselves admit, can never itself be proved. Don't waste your time here.