Holy Blood, Holy Grail (46 page)

- 318 -

If the Grail could be, identified with the Merovingian bloodline, what was its connection with Jesus? Why should something so intimately associated with Jesus also be associated with the Merovingian epoch?”

How were we to reconcile the chronological discrepancy the relation between something so pertinent to Jesus and events that occurred at least four centuries later? How could the Grail refer, on the one hand, to the Merovingian age and, on the other, to something brought by Joseph of

Arimathea to England or the Magdalene to France?

Even on a symbolic level such questions asserted themselves. The Grail, for example, pertained in some way to blood. Even without the breaking of

“Sangraal’ into “Sang raal’, the Grail was said to have been a receptacle for Jesus’s blood. How could this be related to the Merovingians? And why should it be related to them at precisely the time it was during the

Crusades, when Merovingian heads wore the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem, protected by the Order of the Temple and the Prieure de Sion?

The Grail romances stress the importance of Jesus’s blood. They also stress a lineage of some kind. And, given such factors as the Grail family’s culmination in Godfroi de Bouillon, they would seem to pertain to

Merovingian blood.

Could there possibly be some connection between these two apparently discordant elements? Could the blood of Jesus in some way be related to the blood royal of the Merovingians? Could the lineage connected with the

Grail, brought into Western Europe shortly after the Crucifixion, be intertwined with the lineage of the Merovingians?

The Need to Synthesise

At this point we paused to review the evidence at our disposal. It was leading us in a startling yet unmistakable direction. But why, we wondered, had this evidence never been subpoenaed by scholars before?

It had certainly been readily available, and for centuries. Why had no one, to our knowledge, ever synthesised it and drawn what would seem to be fairly obvious, if only speculative, conclusions? Granted, such conclusions a few centuries ago would have been rigorously taboo and,

- 319 -

if published, severely punished. But there had been no such danger for at least the last two hundred years. Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole?

The answers to these questions, we realised, lay in our own age and the modes or habits of thought which characterise it. Since the so-called

“Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness had been towards analysis, rather than synthesis.

As a result, our age is one of ever increasing specialisation. In accordance with this tendency, modern scholarship lays inordinate emphasis on specialisation which, as the modern university attests, implies and entails the segregation of knowledge into distinct

“disciplines’. In consequence, the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments. In each compartment the relevant material has been duly explored and evaluated by specialists, or “experts’ in the field. But few, if any, of these “experts’ have endeavoured to establish a connection between their particular field and others that may overlap it. Indeed such “experts’ tend generally to regard fields other than their own with considerable suspicion spurious at worst, at best irrelevant. And eclectic or “interdisciplinary’ research is often actively discouraged as being, among other things, too speculative.

There have been numerous treatises on the Grail romances, their origins and development, their cultural impact, their literary quality. And there have been numerous studies, valid and otherwise, of the Templars and the

Crusades. But few experts on the Grail romances have been historians, while fewer still have displayed much interest in the complex, often sordid and not very romantic history behind the Templars and the Crusades. Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to “factual’ records and documents. The Grail romances have been dismissed as mere fiction, as nothing more than a “cultural phenomenon’, a species of “by-product’

generated by the “imagination of the age’. To suggest to such an historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical

- 320 -

truth would be tantamount to heresy even though Schliemann, more than True, various occult writers, proceeding primarily on the basis of wishful thinking, have given literal credence to the legends, claiming that, in some mystical way, the Templars were custodians of the Grail whatever the

Grail might be. But there has been no serious historical study that endeavours to establish any real connection. The Templars are regarded as fact, the Grail as fiction, and no association between the two is acknowledged possible. And if the Grail romances have thus been neglected by scholars and historians of the period in which they were written, it is hardly surprising that they have been neglected by experts on earlier epochs. Quite simply, it would not occur to a specialist in the Merovingian age to suspect that the Grail romances might, in any way, shed light on the subject of his study, if, indeed, he has any knowledge whatever of the

Grail romances. But is it not a serious omission that no Merovingian scholar we have encountered even makes mention of the Arthurian legends which, chronologically speaking, refer to the very epoch in which he claims expertise?

If historians are unprepared to make such connections, Biblical scholars are even less prepared to do so. During the last few decades a welter of books has appeared -

according to which Jesus was a pacifist, an Essene, a mystic, a Buddhist, a sorcerer, a revolutionary, a homosexual, even a mushroom. But despite this plethora of material on Jesus and the historical context of the New Testament, not one author, to our knowledge, has touched on the question of the Grail.

Why should he? Why should an expert on

Biblical history have any interest in, or knowledge of, a spate of fantastic romantic poems composed in Western Europe more than a thousand years later? It would seem inconceivable that the Grail romances could in any way elucidate the mysteries surrounding the New Testament.

But reality, history and knowledge cannot be segmented and compartmentalised according to the arbitrary filing system of the human intellect. And while documentary evidence may be hard to come by, it is self-evident that traditions may survive for a thousand years, then surface in a written form that does illuminate previous events.

- 321 -

Certain Irish sagas, for instance, can reveal a great deal about the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society in Ancient Ireland. Without Homer’s work, composed long after the fact, no one would even have heard of the siege of Troy. And War and Peace although written more than half a century later can tell us more than most history books, more even than most official documents, about Russia during the Napoleonic era.

Any responsible researcher must, like a detective, pursue whatever clues come to hand, however seemingly improbable. One should not dismiss material a priori, out of hand, because it threatens to lead into unlikely or unfamiliar territory. The events of the Watergate scandal, for instance, were reconstructed initially from a multitude of ostensibly disparate fragments, each meaningless in itself, and with no apparent connection between them. Indeed, some of the often childish “dirty tricks’ must have seemed, to investigators at the time, as divorced from the broader issues as the Grail romances might seem from the New Testament. And the Watergate scandal was confined to a single country and a time-span of a few short years. The subject of our investigation encompasses the whole of Western culture, and a time-span of two millennia.

What is necessary is an interdisciplinary approach to one’s chosen material - a mobile and flexible approach that permits one to move freely between disparate disciplines, across space and time. One must be able to link data and make connections between people, events and phenomena widely divorced from each other. One must be able to move, as necessity dictates, from the third to the twelfth to the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, drawing on a varied spectrum of sources early ecclesiastical texts, the Grail romances, Merovingian records and chronicles, the writings of Freemasonry.

In short, one must synthesise for only by such synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem.

Such an approach is neither particularly revolutionary, in principle, nor particularly controversial.

It is rather like taking a tenet of contemporary Church dogma the Immaculate Conception, for instance, or the obligatory celibacy of priests and using it to illumine early Christianity. In much the same way the

- 322 -

Grail romances may be used to shed some significant light on the New Testament on the career and identity of Jesus.

Finally it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts. One must also discern the repercussions and ramifications of facts, as those repercussions and ramifications radiate through the centuries often in the form of myth and legend. True, the facts themselves may be distorted in the process, like an echo reverberating among cliffs. But if the voice itself cannot be located, the echo, however distorted, may yet point the way to it. Facts, in short, are like pebbles dropped into the pool of history. They disappear quickly, often without a trace. But they generate ripples which, if one’s perspective is broad enough, enable one to pinpoint where the pebble originally fell. Guided by the ripples, one may then dive or dredge or adopt whatever approach one wishes. The point is that the ripples permit one to locate what might otherwise be irrecoverable.

It was now becoming apparent to us that everything we had studied during our investigation was but a ripple -which, monitored correctly, might direct us to a single stone cast into the pool of history two thousand years ago.

Our Hypothesis

The Magdalene had figured prominently throughout our inquiry.

According to certain medieval legends, the Magdalene brought the Holy Grail or “Blood

Royal’ into France. The Grail is closely associated with Jesus. And the

Grail, on one level at least, relates in some way to blood -or, more specifically, to a bloodline and lineage. The Grail romances are for the most part, however, set in Merovingian times. But they were not composed until after Godfroi de Bouillon fictional scion of the Grail family and actual scion of the Merovingians was installed, in everything but name, as king of Jerusalem.

If we had been dealing with anyone other than Jesus if we had been dealing with a personage such as Alexander, for example, or Julius Caesar these fragmentary shreds of evidence alone would have led, almost ineluctably, to one glaring self-evident conclusion. We drew

- 323 -

that conclusion, however controversial and explosive it might be. We began to test it at least as a tentative hypothesis. Perhaps the Magdalene that elusive woman in the Gospels was in fact Jesus’s wife.

Perhaps their union produced offspring. After the Crucifixion, perhaps the

Magdalene, with at least one child, was smuggled to Gaul where established

Jewish communities already existed and where, in consequence, she might have found a refuge. Perhaps there was, in short, an hereditary bloodline descended directly from Jesus. Perhaps this bloodline, this supreme sang real; then perpetuated itself, intact and incognito, for some four hundred years which is not, after all, a very long time for an important lineage.

Perhaps there were dynastic intermarriages not only with other Jewish families, but with Romans and Visigoths as well. And perhaps in the fifth century Jesus’s lineage became allied with the royal line of the Franks, thereby engendering the Merovingian dynasty.

If this sketchy hypothesis was in any sense true, it would serve to explain a great many elements in our investigation. It would’ explain the extraordinary status accorded the Magdalene, and the cult significance she attained during the Crusades. It would explain the sacred status accorded the Merovingians. It would explain the legendary birth of Merovee child of two fathers, one of them a symbolic marine creature from beyond the sea, a marine creature which, like Jesus, might be equated with the mystical fish. It would explain the pact between the Roman Church and Clovis’s bloodline for would not a pact with Jesus’s lineal descendants be the obvious pact for a church founded in his name? It would explain the apparently incommensurate stress laid on the assassination of Dagobert II for the Church, by being party to that murder, would have been guilty not only of regicide, but, according to its own tenets, of a form of deicide as well. It would explain the attempt to eradicate Dagobert from history.

It would explain the Carolingians’ obsession to legitimi se themselves, as Holy

Roman Emperors, by claiming a Merovingian pedigree.

A bloodline descended from Jesus through Dagobert would also explain the

Grail family in the romances the secrecy which surrounds it, its exalted status, the impotent Fisher King unable to rule, the process whereby

Parzival or Perceval became heir to the Grail castle.

- 324 -

Finally, it would explain the mystical pedigree of Godfroi de Bouillon son or grandson of Lohengrin, grandson or great-grandson of Parzival, scion of the Grail family. And if Godfroi were descended from Jesus, his triumphant capture of Jerusalem in 1099 would have entailed far more than simply rescuing the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel. Godfroi would have been reclaiming his own rightful heritage.

We had already guessed that the references to viticulture throughout our investigation symbolised dynastic alliances. On the basis of our hypothesis, viticulture now seemed to symbolise the process whereby Jesus who identifies himself repeatedly with the vine perpetuated his lineage. As if in confirmation, we discovered a carved door depicting Jesus as a cluster of grapes. This door was in Sion, Switzerland.