The Da Vinci Hoax (7)

The Errors - Secular History

Priory of Sion

In the opening "Facts" section of his book, Brown claims a secret society called the Priory of Sion was founded in 1099, and that parchments discovered in Paris' Bibliothèque Nationale in 1975 identified numerous members including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli and Victor Hugo. This is incorrect.

1. Brown appears to be confusing two different organizations here. The first, a community of canons, attached to a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary at Sion, was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 and called the Prieure du Notre Dame de Sion (Priory of Our Lady of Sion). After their church was destroyed during a Muslim attack in 1219 the priests of the Priory withdrew to Sicily. In 1617 they joined the Jesuits, and were no more.

2. The other Prieure de Sion (Priory of Sion), the one with the documents in the Paris' Bibliothèque Nationale, was founded a tad later - after World War II. This is known because all clubs had to register with the French government, and the Priory of Sion registered in 1956. It had four members including Pierre Plantard (who had previously served six months in jail for fraud and embezzlement) and André Bonhomme (the original president).

3. The organization broke up after a short time, but in 1962 Pierre Plantard revived it, claiming he was the "Grand Master" of the organization, and began making outrageous claims regarding its antiquity, prior membership, and true purposes. It was he who claimed that the organization stemmed from the Crusades and was guarding a secret royal bloodline that could one-day return to political power. (Guess who was the legitimate King of France?).

4. In a 1996 statement made to the BBC, the Priory of Sion's original president, André Bonhomme stated: "The Priory of Sion doesn't exist anymore. We were never involved in any activities of a political nature. It was four friends who came together to have fun. We called ourselves the Priory of Sion because there was a mountain by the same name close-by."

5. Dan Brown asserts that "in 1975 Paris' Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments, known as Les Dossiers Secrets, which revealed the story of the Priory of Sion." He goes even further and says, "the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists" (p. 206). Really! The documents referred to were not "discovered" in 1975 but rather deposited there in 1967. They are not parchments either but texts which speak about the way to interpret certain parchments - which were neither then nor now at the National Library of Paris but in the possession of Pierre Plantard.

6. There is no doubt that both Les Dossiers Secrets and the parchments are forgeries compiled in the year 1967. Why? All three of the culprits involved in the falsification have subsequently admitted it. The publisher of the Dossier, Gérard de Sède, wrote twenty years later that it was an "apocryphal" work inspired by "market sensationalism" (G. de Sède, Rennes-le-Château. Le dossier, les impostures, les phantasmes, les hypothèses, 1988, p. 107). He named the fabricator of the parchments as Philippe de Chérisey, an impoverished French marquis. De Chérisey has repeatedly admitted, as far back as 1967 (as confirmed by a letter from his lawyer), to having forged them. He claims to have never been paid by those who commissioned him: Plantard and de Sède.

7. Pierre Plantard eventually admitted it was all a hoax. It came about this way. Plantard "officially retired" from Priory of Sion activities during the mid-1980s following a conflict with the French author Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who had discovered details about Plantard's past. In 1989 a certain Roger-Patrice Pelat died. At the time Pelat was under investigation for his part in a financial corruption scandal involving a Prime Minister of France in the 1980s. Plantard voluntarily came forward in September 1993 offering evidence to the enquiry that Pelat had been a "Grand Master of the Priory of Sion" during the interim period of 1984-1992. The Judge in charge of the investigation ordered a search of Plantard's house that uncovered a hoard of Priory of Sion documents, claiming Plantard to be the "true King of France." The Judge subsequently detained Plantard for a 48-hour interview and, under oath, Plantard admitted that he made everything up. Whereupon Plantard was given a serious warning and advised not to "play games" with the French Judicial System. This was all reported in the French press at the time. The Priory of Sion was terminated that year and Plantard disappeared into self-imposed obscurity. He died in Paris in February 2000.

The Holy Grail

Dan Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the bloodline of Jesus Christ in her womb. Moreover it was also the symbol of the sacred feminine. "The Grail is literally the ancient symbol for womanhood, and the Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, eliminated by the Church" (p. 238). "The quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine" (p. 257).

Brown makes great claims for the Grail story, calling it "the most enduring legend of all time" (249). Never mind that is was unknown until the late twelfth century. Brown says that the Grail has been the object of wars and quests-as if these were real and not literary creations! It seems Brown has the same problem as many of his readers: a difficulty separating fact from fiction, reality from fantasy.



1. The development of the Grail legend has been traced in detail by reputable historians. Mary Magdalene factors in none of them.

2. As the most cursory investigation would tell it is not that ancient of a legend, being of late medieval origins. It first came together in the form French romances written in the later 12th and early 13th centuries.

3. The Grail first features in Perceval, le Conte du Graal (Percival, The Story of the Grail) by Chrétien de Troyes. In this incomplete poem, dated sometime between 1180 and 1191, the Graal is described as an elaborately decorated, wide, somewhat deep dish containing a single Mass host.

4. It was in the work of Robert de Boron that the Grail became the legendary "Holy Grail" and assumed the form most familiar to modern readers. In his verse romance Joseph d'Arimathie, composed between 1191 and 1202, Robert tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea acquiring the chalice of the Last Supper to collect Christ's blood upon His removal from the cross.

5. Brown's grail scholar Teabing informs the reader that "the word Sangreal derives from San Greal - or Holy Grail. But in its most ancient form, the word Sangreal was divided in a different spot…Sang Real literally meant Royal Blood" (p. 250). "Grail" has many variant spellings. In Sir Thomas Malory's famous Le Morte D'Arthur it is "Sankgreall" and "Holy Grayle." Old French renderings include graal, greal, greel and greil. Carl Olson says its usage as a common noun predates all reference to the Holy Grail. "Therefore, Brown's division of sangeal as 'sang real', supposedly French for 'royal blood' is wrong, since 'royal blood' in French would be le sang royal" (The Da Vinci Hoax, p. 183).

The Knights Templar

Brown claims the Knights Templar, which he identifies as the military wing of the Priory of Sion, were founded by Godefroi de Bouillon in 1099 (p. 157) and eventually suppressed in a "Machiavellian" scheme devised by Pope Clement V in concert with King Philippe IV (pp. 159-160). In an "ingeniously planned sting operation" the Pope issued secret orders for "his soldiers all across Europe" to arrest all the Templars on the same day. He then had them tortured into confessions and burnt as heretics. Finally their ashes were "tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber" (p. 338).

1. The Knights Templar were not founded by Godefroi (Godfrey) de Bouillon in 1099. The order was founded around 1119 (nearly twenty years after Godefroi's death) by the French nobleman Hughes de Payens, a veteran of the First Crusade. As Grand Master he led the Order for almost twenty years until his death.

2. Brown further claims that the Templars' initial headquarters was "a stable under the ruins" of the Temple in Jerusalem. This is inaccurate. King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them quarters in a wing of the royal palace on the southeastern portion of the Temple Mount platform.

3. Brown writes that the Templars were "master stonemasons" (p. 434) who created the Gothic style of architecture, encoding secret messages of the sacred feminine in its very structures. The cathedral layout representing the body of the Goddess. In reality the Knights Templar had no reputation for learning, building or architectural skills. They were a military order of monks founded at the time of the Crusades. They were known as monk-soldiers, landowners and bankers. The Knights were not involved in the building of medieval cathedrals. A cathedral is the principle church of a diocese, the seat of the bishop, and was generally commissioned by the local bishop and his canons. The first rib vault which made the Gothic style possible was used at Durham Cathedral in England in 1091 - a generation before the founding of the Templars. As to the symbolism of the structure we learn something from the man who is commonly accredited with having built the first major Gothic church. The Abbot Suger, a Benedictine monk, helped design the famous Basilica Abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris, where the French kings are buried. It was begun in 1136. We are told the abbot wanted to create a building with a high degree of linearity, suffused with light and color, as a physical representation of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

4. Brown suggests that all churches used by the Templars were built round and that roundness was considered an insult by the Church. But historian Peter Partner tells us the Templars had no standard style (The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth, 1981, pp. 12-13). There are also quite a number of round Catholic churches. In Rome, for example, there is San Stefano Rotundo, San Costanza, and Bramante's Tempietto of San Pietro (built for Pope Julius II on the site of St. Peter's crucifixion). Moreover in Christian art the circle is used as a symbol of eternity, since without beginning or end. Three intertwined circles or a circle inside a triangle symbolized the eternal nature of the Blessed Trinity. The suggestion that circles were considered an insult to the Church is inane.



Pope Clement V

5. As any serious history of the Templars, even a standard encyclopedia, would have told Brown the initiative to crush the Templars was actually the work of King Philip IV ("the Fair") of France. He was probably motivated by rumours of misconduct and a financial desire to seize their assets. It was his royal officials, not the pope's, who did the arresting in 1307. Using evidence obtained by state torturers (It is said that 36 Knights died from the horrific maltreatment and more than 20 committed suicide), Philip then pressured the weak Pope Clement V - then resident in France - to condemn the Order based on confessions of blasphemy, sodomy, and idolatry. About 54 were burned at Paris in 1310, nine at Senlis, and an unknown number in Cyprus. Few Templars suffered arrest or death elsewhere in Europe. By papal decree the Knights Templar were abolished everywhere in 1312.

6. The Pope could not have tossed anyone's ashes into the Tiber if for no other reason than physical impossibility. Clement V was the first pope to live and reign from Avignon, in southern France. The ashes of Geoffrey de Charney and the last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, were ground up and thrown into the Seine, so as to leave no relics.

7. Brown alleges that the belief that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day stemmed from the mass arrest of Templars on October 13, 1307. It is true that the mass arrests occurred on that date. However there is no evidence that Friday the 13th was considered especially unlucky until the 19th century. The belief in the number 13 as unlucky is ancient, going back at least as far as the ancient Babylonians.

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