Published in L'Express on June 18, 2006 —
Interview by Claire Chartier —
The Priory of Sion is at the heart of the Da Vinci enigma. You embarked on the trail of this secret society, whose existence no one before you had thought to verify. What did you discover?
At the risk of disappointing some readers, there is no priory founded by Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099. The only Priory of Sion recorded in history is the one created by a man named Pierre Plantard, a draftsman in a stove factory in Annemasse, on June 25, 1956! It is a non-profit association (governed by the 1901 law), whose statutes were filed with the sub-prefecture of Haute-Savoie. The Mount Sion to which the society's name refers does not refer to the mountain in Jerusalem, but to the mountain in Haute-Savoie. This Pierre Plantard—like Sophie Plantard de Saint Clair, the heroine of The Da Vinci Code—claimed to be descended from the Merovingian kings—again, like the Sophie in the novel. The son of a valet, a Pétainist and a pathological liar, Pierre Plantard initially wanted to be a priest, then turned to esotericism. At the end of the 1950s, when he founded his famous Priory, he discovered the Rennes-le-Château affair, which would allow him to enrich his personal legend.
A truly incredible story…
Absolutely! It features Father Béranger Saunière, who—another nod from Dan Brown—inspired the surname of Jacques Saunière, the Louvre curator murdered at the beginning of the novel. In 1885, this priest arrives in the small parish of Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude region, whose church, dedicated to Mary Magdalene, is in ruins. He restores it and, for reasons unknown, begins to excavate the cemetery. Then he has a tower and a retirement home built for elderly priests. "Where did the money come from?" the locals wonder. Rumors spread: the priest supposedly discovered parchments hidden in a pillar of his church, which led him to take an interest in the cemetery. Why not? What is certain is that Abbé Saunière engaged in the trafficking of Masses: he wrote to hundreds of Catholic organizations across Europe requesting money to say Masses for the deceased. But, while he was supposed to say only one Mass a day, he received sums that could have funded more than 30 Masses daily! He was condemned by his bishop for this fraudulent activity.
Despite this, the legend of Abbé Saunière's treasure has endured!
Yes, because his housekeeper took over. Some thirty years after the priest's disappearance, she sold the estate to a businessman, Noël Corbu, who decided to open a restaurant there, while also undertaking a thorough search of the property himself. After fifteen years, penniless and without a single treasure to his name, the restaurateur figured he could at least use the story to attract customers. A journalist from La Dépêche du Midi came to visit and wrote an article, "Abbé Saunière, the priest with billions." The legend was born.
How did Pierre Plantard find out about it?
Plantard read the article. So did Gérard de Sède, a sort of Trotskyist poet and writer, and the Marquis de Cherisey, a whimsical aristocrat with a passion for royalist genealogy. Our three characters met and then decided to forge the myth of Rennes-le-Château in the mid-1960s. To lend historical legitimacy to their story, they themselves deposited documents at the National Library, supposedly proving the existence of the Priory of Sion and the fact that Pierre Plantard was the last descendant of the Merovingian dynasty. In the early 1980s, three Anglo-Saxon authors, Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh, added to the mystery by claiming in *The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail* that the Priory held a secret: Jesus and Mary Magdalene had descendants… from whom the Merovingian kings descended. Abbé Saunière supposedly discovered Templar documents in his church that would prove it! We found these famous "secret files" at the National Library, which Dan Brown mentions in his preface, describing them as "parchments": they are nothing more than ordinary typewritten pages! In 1979, the Marquis de Cherisey even admitted that he had fabricated them himself, drawing inspiration from other works
But why invent this whole story?
Pierre Plantard really thought he was the last descendant of the Merovingian kings, the lost King, whom the Marquis de Cherisey had been dreaming of for years! As for Gérard de Sède, he wanted to play a hoax.
The list of famous Priory leaders that Dan Brown cites in his preface – Victor Hugo, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci – is therefore totally ludicrous.
Yes, but they weren't chosen at random. They all dabbled in esotericism: Victor Hugo held séances, Isaac Newton practiced alchemy, Leonardo da Vinci was interested in secret societies. But none of them ever belonged to the famous Priory… and for good reason! In my eyes, Rennes-le-Château represents the greatest esoteric myth of our time.
The novelist has added a spicy ingredient: Opus Dei. Murderous monks wearing hair shirts, scheming prelates, scandals… The author doesn't hold back!
There is obviously a good deal of fiction involved: the work of God has never been condemned for a criminal act. But it is true that this ultra-traditionalist Catholic group, founded by José Maria Escriva de Balaguer in 1928 and boasting 80,000 lay members, cultivates secrecy, that it is very well established in the Vatican, whose coffers it has likely helped to replenish, that it is quite macho – only men govern – and that some of its members practice bodily mortification.
Was Leonardo da Vinci the heretical painter and genius of esotericism described in the book?
Leonardo da Vinci took many liberties with the Church and slipped numerous pagan symbols into his paintings. But most Renaissance painters, steeped in Antiquity, used these symbols, which were familiar to the public. Scholars and artists of the time were fascinated by Hermeticism, Neoplatonic texts, and Christian Kabbalah. The whole question is whether Leonardo actually painted Mary Magdalene instead of Saint John in his painting of the Last Supper. The apostle depicted in the painting does indeed look effeminate, although he has no breasts, contrary to what Dan Brown claims. But there's nothing strange about that either: the vast majority of Renaissance paintings depict Saint John with almost adolescent features, long hair, and beardless—tradition holds that he was 17 when he met Jesus. Moreover, since Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual, he likely chose his boyfriend at the time as his model. To say that the apostle John in the Last Supper is none other than Mary Magdalene seems to me absolutely fanciful.
Let's turn to Mary Magdalene: what do we know about the character?
The Gospels tell us about several distinct figures: Mary Magdalene, the first disciple to whom Jesus appeared on the day of the Resurrection; Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha; and finally, an unnamed repentant sinner who anointed the feet of the prophet from Galilee with perfume. Gradually, the repentant sinner became a prostitute in the Christian imagination, and then the three figures merged into one.
Could one of these three Marys have been a companion of Christ?
Dan Brown draws on the apocryphal Gospel of Philip, written in the mid-2nd century. This Gospel does indeed exist, but it belongs to a particular school of thought, Gnosticism, which spread at the time throughout the Mediterranean basin, especially in Alexandria. The Gnostics believed that salvation came from knowledge, not faith, which led the Church Fathers to consider them heretics. These "iconoclastic" believers, for whom the soul is good and the body fundamentally evil, revalued the feminine. In their view, the complementarity between woman and man was of the same nature as that which unites humankind with God. What does the Gospel of Philip say? Mary Magdalene was Jesus's favorite disciple, whom he "kissed on the mouth." If one reads this passage at face value, one might conclude that they were lovers. But if we read it from a Gnostic perspective, we know that the kiss symbolizes the breath of the spirit, knowledge. The master kisses his disciple to transmit the breath, the spiritual soul.
The idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children – the secret of the Holy Grail – would therefore be completely extravagant?
I'm simply saying that Dan Brown's argument in favor of this thesis doesn't hold water. However, there is no historical evidence to prove this idea false.
The novelist also refers to the precious Qumran manuscripts, which, according to him, contain part of this secret. Why were they only translated half a century after their discovery?
The 850 scrolls—including 200 biblical texts—unearthed from 1946 onward near the Dead Sea were simply in very poor condition, and the École Biblique in Jerusalem, which had been tasked with the translation, took a long time to begin the work. Today, all the documents have been deciphered, published by Oxford University Press, and the controversy has died down. But Dan Brown misrepresents history when he presents these Qumran manuscripts as the “first Christian texts”: in reality, these texts are Jewish, and none of them mentions Jesus. Even less so Mary Magdalene.
Can we say, as Dan Brown does, that the Catholic Church deliberately erased the role of women in the early days of Christianity?
It is on this point that the author of The Da Vinci Code is correct. The role of women in the Gospels is far more significant than the one the early Church was willing to grant them after the death of Jesus. The Gospels describe Christ surrounded by female disciples. And it is to Mary Magdalene that Jesus first appears, near the empty tomb. The young woman throws herself at his feet, saying, "Rabboni!"—a Hebrew word meaning "Beloved Master." This affectionate diminutive reveals the very close relationship that existed between them. From the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Saint Paul onward, women are no longer included. In my opinion, this is a purely sociological mechanism, a Mediterranean macho reflex, which the Jews experienced, and later the Muslims. In patriarchal societies, where women led neither churches nor synagogues, it was logical that they would not be given prominence in religious texts either. Later, sensing that popular piety demanded female figures, the Church authorized the veneration of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. But the mother of Jesus became a desexualized figure, a symbol of absolute purity, while Mary Magdalene was assimilated to the sacred prostitute. Two dehumanized archetypes.
Far removed from the sacred feminine that Dan Brown is bringing back into the spotlight…
Absolutely! Let's not forget that, for a long period before civilizations, deities were female. Then humankind settled down and became aware of its crucial role in procreation. As patriarchy took hold, the divine became masculinized in Greece, the Roman Empire, among the Jews, and among Christians. Dan Brown is being dishonest when he places the entire responsibility for this repression of the sacred feminine on Christianity.
The novelist goes further, claiming that this religion owes its historical success to a vulgar political maneuver orchestrated by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD.
Constantine did indeed convert to Christianity on his deathbed, and he had already made it the principal religion of the Roman Empire. But it was Theodosius, in 380, who established it as the official religion. Crucially, the Council of Nicaea, in 325, was not convened by Constantine at all to sift through the Scriptures and burn the apocrypha, but to address the crisis of Arianism. A major theological debate was then dividing the Church: Was Jesus a man, was he divine, or was he God-man? In the Gospels, the Nazarene prophet defines himself alternately as the Son of God and the Son of Man. Arius, a priest of Alexandria, asserted that the Son, the second person of the Trinity, was not equal to God the Father. A number of bishops opposed him, and the dispute escalated. Constantine, concerned with avoiding divisions in order to unify his empire on the basis of Christianity, convened the Council of Nicaea to force all the prelates to reach an agreement. Therefore, there was no political conspiracy, but rather lively theological debates.
Therefore, Dan Brown is not wrong to say that the dogma of the Trinity did indeed result from a vote.
It is true that it took four centuries to establish the dogma of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ, since it was the Council of Nicaea that decreed Christ to be consubstantial with the Father and condemned Arianism as heresy. But Dan Brown is mistaken when he claims that Constantine sought to favor the anti-Arius camp by ordering the destruction of apocryphal Gospels that corroborated the priest's thesis. It was only at the Council of Carthage in 397 that the Church rejected—not burned—these apocryphal texts and retained the four Gospels we know, which, along with the letters of Paul, are among the oldest Christian texts.
How do you explain the global triumph of The Da Vinci Code?
Dan Brown and his wife had a brilliant business idea: adding a conspiracy theory—the Church's lies—to the theme of secrecy, and intertwining it with the sacred feminine, with Leonardo da Vinci thrown in for good measure. But The Da Vinci Code is also, in my opinion, a genuine social phenomenon. It highlights powerful contemporary trends: the public's fascination with Jesus, the crisis of institutions—including academic institutions, since, for Dan Brown's fans, official history is also suspect—and the increasingly evident need to reconnect with the feminine. It was, in fact, American feminist circles that initially made the book a success. If The Da Vinci Code resonated so strongly, especially with de-Christianized Christians, it's because it attempts to rehabilitate women and sex within Christianity. Why did the Church so thoroughly neglect the feminine? Why did it become so fixated on sexuality? Clearly, Dan Brown uses flawed arguments, but he asks good questions.
Published in L'Express, June 18, 2006