Review: The DaVinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail

I have said — in person, and apparently not yet on this blog — that professional philosophers are always either undercriticized mathematicians, undercriticized sociologists, and/or undercriticized psychologists. The entire world of academic philosophy is basically a self-propogating collection of high-school style cliques who pass notes to eachother by way of publishing houses. The only good philosophers I have read are the ones that are already well-defined and proven in one of the beforementioned fields.

I hold the same sentiment for The DaVinci Code. The author (Dan Brown), who warmed up with the weighted bat addressing the Catholic church and the Illuminiati, sets a slightly more limited tone of Jesus Christ and all of French history. Like some punk adolescent trying to prove how smart they are, he proceeds to make a whole series of unsubstantiated assertions and conclusions. Despite the non-fiction tone adopted in various points of the book, the author flees from the spotlight back behind the Fiction shelf whenever a real challenge is made. So the discerning reader is left trying to figure out what is fictional and what is nonficitional, and an unsuspecting or undiscerning reader might be bamboozled into believing things that have no real basis in reality.

And aside from the nonfictional assertions, the book reads like a Tom Clancy novel with less intelligence. It’s your standard contemporary hackery with a bad Indiana Jones knock-off playing the lead, and a sharp-tongued-and-strong-yet-vulnerable-and-accessible damsel who comes along for the proverbial ride (and, of course, a slightly more literal ride at the end). In short, it’s crap.

If you want to actually deal with the interesting parts, without having to wade through the crap, you read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which The DaVinci Code lifted its only potentially good or powerful ideas. So, having been informed of this too late to save my time, I turned from The DaVinci Code to Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

If you read the book carefully, they supply three kinds of evidence to make up their entire case:

1. Conjecture (“Could it be that…?”)
2. Unverifiable Information (“We managed to get this, but only because we really shook our tail feathers hard, and nobody else can shake them like we do!”)
3. Overreaching Validation (“This document says A and B. We can prove B. Therefore A! HOW DID THEY KNOW?!?!”)

.

Most of the book draws its knowledge from the unenumerated “Priory Documents”, which are made up of a bunch of disperate books, pamplets, etc., etc., that the authors managed to pull together and connect together, despite coming from a variety of sources. I’m not kidding — they literally admit in the book that the “Priory Documents” are basically random things they’re drawing connections between. If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s how the schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind worked, too. The saddest part about that last statement is that the authors deliver this assertion with all seriousness — here’s the quote.

In 1956 a series of books, articles, pamphlets, and other documents relating to Berenger Sauniere and the enigma of Rennes-le-Chateau began to appear in France. This material had steadily proliferated and is now voluminous. Indeed, it has come to constitute the basis for a veritable “industry”. And its sheer quantity, as well as the effort and resources in producing and disseminating it, implicitly attest to something of immense but as yet unexplained importance.
[...]
Since 1956 a quantity of relevant material has been deliberately and systematically “leaked” in a piecemeal fashion, fragment by fragment. Most of these fragments purport, implicitly or explicitly, to issue from some “privileged” or “inside” source. Most contain additional information, which supplements what is known before and thus contributes to the overall jigsaw. Neither the import nor the meaning of the overall jigsaw has yet been made clear, however. Instead, every new snippet of information has done more to intensify than to dispel the mystery. [...] And underlying it all is the constant, pervasive intimation of a secret — a secret of monumental and explosive proportions.
The material disseminated since 1956 has taken a number of forms. Some of it has appeared in popular, even best-selling books, more or less sensational, more or less cryptically teasing. Thus, for example, Gerard de Sede has produced a sequence of works [...]
[...]
The information disseminated since 1956 has not always been contained in as popular and accessible a form as M. de Sede’s. Some of it has appeared in weighty tomes diametircally opposed to M. de Sede’s journalistic approach. [...]
[...]>
In additional to published books, including some that have been published privately, there have been a number of articles in newspapers and magazines. There have been interviews with various individuals claiming to be conversant with one or another facet of the mystery.
[Chapter 4: Secret Documents]

The author then proceeds to use all these disparate sources — without sense or justification — and refer to them as some kind of amalgamated entity under the single title “the Priory Documents”, as though they were always intended to be put together in the first place! And, remember from the first paragraph: they are all being released and leaked intentionally, at great cost and difficulty. After all, it would take a whole industry. Where would one find such an industry? Who could conceive that there would be a media industry, or an entire economy constituting an information economy?!? HOW COULD IT BE?!?! IT’S ALL UNDER CONTROL!!! THE PRIORY OF SION! THE PRIORY! JESUS DIDN’T DIE ON THE CROSS!! ARGH!

Ahem.

I’m better now. For a second there, I was almost infected by the book. Sanity has returned.

The scholarly quality of the book does not get better. For instance, there’s this minor problem. In the “most important piece of evidence”, a portfolio of various snippets and clippings that the authors stumbled across in the French National Library in Paris, there is this (now popularized) jewel.

In the Dossiers secrets the following individuals are listed as successive grand masters of the Prieure de Sion — or, to use the official term, Nautonnier, an old French word that means “navigator” or “helmsman”:

Jean de Gisors	1188-1220
Marie de Saint-Clair	1220-1226
Guillaume de Gisors	1266-1307
Edouard de Bar	1307-1336
Jeanne de Bar	1336-1351
Jean de Saint-Clair	1351-1336
Blanche d’Evreux	1336-1398
Nicolas Flamel	1398-1418
Rene d’Anjou	1418-1480
Iolande de Bar	1480-1483
Sandro Filipepi	1483-1510
Leonardo da Vinci	1510-1519
Connetable de Bourbon	1519-1527
Ferdinand de Gonzague	1527-1575
Louis de Nevers	1575-1595
Robert Fludd	1595-1637
J. Valentin Andrea	1637-1654
Robert Boyle	1654-1691
Isaac Newton	1691-1727
Charles Radclyffe	1727-1746
Charles de Lorraine	1746-1780
Maximilian de Lorraine	1780-1801
Charles Nodier	1801-1844
Victor Hugo	1844-1885
Claude Debussy	1885-1918
Jean Cocteau	1918-

Pretty dreary, right? Here’s the fun part. That means that the people became grand masters at the following ages:

So, in short, the power of this grand and glorious organization usually falls to a 20-something, and far be it to hold the reign of control from so influential a person as the 2 year old Charles de Lorraine or 10 year old Rene d’Anjou.

The authors, having noticed this little faux pas, address it. In a document they claim to have received from a previously unmentioned “Philippe de Cherisey, with whom we had already established contact and whose name figured as frequently as Pierre Plantard’s as a spokesman for the Prieure de Sion” (with a signature on it by the last mentioned Grand Master, whose signature is authentic — trust them!), they have this statue laid out as one of the key governances of the Prieure de Sion:

Article Sixteen — By virtue of hereditary right confirmed by the preceding articles, the duties and titles of Grand Master of the Prieure de Sion shall be transmitted to his successor according to the same prerogatives. In the case of a vacancy in the office of Grand Master, and the absence of a direct successor, the Convent must proceed to an election within eighty-one days.

They draw this conclusion immediately afterwards:

It is now comprehensible why there should have been grand masters aged five or eight. [...] In principle the title would seem to be hereditary, transmitted downt he centuries through an intertiwned cluster of families all claiming Merovingian descent. When there was no eligible claimant, however, or when the designated claimant declined the status offered him, the grand mastership, presumably in accordance with the procedures outlined in the statues, was conferred on a chosen outsider.

This would make sense, if the most egregious derivations were in any kind of reasonable hereditary manner. However, they aren’t — the familial relationships are the ones that make much more sense, and the places where it jumps to a child or young adult tend to also be fmaily jumps. Worse, the only connection many of these “Grand Masters” have had with the previous grand masters are not until well after they assumed the authority, and the Grand Mastership seems to jump through a variety nationalities and spanning throughout the geography of Europe — which is odd for a decidedly French nationalistic agency.

Thinking that someone had to have put more work into debunking it than I cared to, I wandered off to the great nexus of rumor and I-think-this-is-right-but-if-it’s-not-can-you-please-check-out-my-work-and-fix-it-thanks reporting that is Wikipedia. The links there were good, if only for their entertainment value. I particularly like this article, which takes a while to warm up but really gets going impressively by the end.

Related posts:

1. Parts 1 and 2 of My Series on “The Holy Saint John”