Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln:
The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail
445pp. Cape. £8.95.
0 224 01735 7

This rather silly book would not be worth noticing were it not for two factors which have nothing to do with its merits. One is that Henry Lincoln, the third-named author, has already embodied some of its ideas in three documentaries broadcast by the BBC. The other is that the public's consuming interest in secret societies and esoterica will ensure that it is widely read, however worthless.

The authors set out to explain the mysterious wealth of Bérenger Saunière, parish priest of Rennes-le-Château, a small village in the French foothills of the Pyrenees. Saunière, who lived in Rennes from 1885 until his death in 1917, is said to have discovered some coded documents in his church during a restoration in the 1890s and shortly afterwards to have acquired a great fortune from some mysterious source which he always refused to divulge. In France the mystery of Bérenger Saunière has produced a spate of books, half fact, half fiction. This one, however, purports to be wholly fact, the authors allowing only that a few “details here and there” may be “subject to modification” in the light of further research.

The assertion is that Jesus Christ was the bridegroom at the marriage feast of Cana, and that Mary Magdalen was his bride. Between them they had a number of children, including Barabbas. Jesus was not really crucified. His family bribed Pilate to stage a phoney crucifixion, thereby enabling him to fulfil the Old Testament prophecies before quietly stopping off to the east, or perhaps going to ground in Palestine. Meanwhile, Mary Magdalen and Barabbas (or perhaps it was another son) took ship to Provence.

The authors thus adopt as fact the legend forged by the monks of Vézélay in the eleventh century to justify their claim to possess her relics. But there are interesting variants. In the authors' version the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalen became kings of an autonomous Jewish principality in southern France. In the fifth century, the authors suggest, the Jesus dynasty intermarried with the rulers of the Franks, with the result that the Merovingian dynasty had the blood of Jesus in their veins until Dagobert II, who was murdered with the connivance of the Church in 679. Dagobert's son, believed at the time to be dead, in fact survived to continue the line, and to this day his descendants are living comfortably in France in the knowledge that they are its rightful kings and successors of the Messiah.

The secret of Christ's descendants in France constituted the treasure of the Holy Grail. The authors “can only speculate” on the physical form of the Grail, but perhaps it consisted of “the equivalent, so to speak, of Jesus's marriage license and/or the birth certificates of his children” or else “something else of comparably explosive import”. Whatever it was, the treasure was preserved in Jerusalem until the First Crusade, when Godfrey of Bouillon (himself a descendant of Jesus) went out to Jerusalem as its leader. There he founded the Order of Sion, a precursor, the authors say, of the Templars. The Order of Sion, and after them the Templars, were in charge of the preservation of the Grail, and with this object in view Bertrand de Blanchefort, Grand Master of the Temple, caused the Grail to be taken to France and buried in a specially excavated hillside near Rennes-le-Château.

In some obscure fashion the Albigensian heresy comes into all of this. Perhaps the Albigensians had the Grail with them in the castle of Montségur where they made their last stand in 1244. If so, they got it back to its hillside before the castle finally fell. Thereafter it was guarded by the Templars and, when that order was dissolved, by the Order of Sion, which continued to exist in secret under a succession of distinguished Grand Masters including Réné of Anjou, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, Jean Cocteau, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

All this is perfectly straightforward, and the question why it has not come out until now is easily answered. The authorities will stop at nothing to cover up the secret, especially the discreditable role of the Church in the murder of Dagobert II. The Order of Sion itself is anxious to keep the secret until its time is come. For centuries one or other of them has censored the sources used by historians. They have bumped off the cognoscenti by throwing them from high-speed trains, and obstructed the researches of Messrs Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln by ensuring that when they want to read a book in the Bibliothèque Nationale their application form is mislaid or the book is on loan to another reader.

We have come some way from Bérenger Saunière. Indeed the authors are in some difficulty in bringing him back into the picture at the end of the book and must rest content with the dark suggestion that he got his money by blackmailing the Vatican with the threat to reveal the secret of the Grail. And why not?

The authors' researches have been guided by three principal canons of enquiry. The first of them is that there is more to everything than meets the eye. If somebody is somebody else's nephew or comes from the same part of Italy, or met him somewhere or other, here is a remarkable coincidence which cries out for an explanation. Somewhere there must be the seeds of a conspiracy. Secondly, if a hypothesis is possible (or, to use the authors' words “cannot be dismissed out of hand”), and if another hypothesis can be devised which is consistent with it, then both hypotheses must be true. So, if there was a secret about Jesus's descendants in France, Bérenger Saunière might have discovered it, and if he had discovered it he might have used it to blackmail the Vatican. Therefore there was such a secret and he did discover it and did blackmail the Vatican. Thirdly, if there is no evidence for something, then it must be true, the evidence having evidently been suppressed. We are told, for example, that the Vatican was always afraid of Saunière, a circumstance clearly pointing to blackmail. The authority for the proposition is to be found in a note at the end of the book which explains that two searches of the Vatican archives have failed to reveal any mention of him whatever, which “suggests that all information regarding this priest has been extracted deliberately”.

This being the basic approach it was perhaps unnecessary for the authors to cite (or indeed to have) any sources for their thesis. In fact, however, some thirty pages of references appear ex abundantia cautelae. We have, in the first place, references to reputable sources which, on inspection, are found not to support the text. There is about one instance per page of this technique, so I shall content myself with a single example. The existence of the Order of Sion in the twelfth century is said to be proved by original charters. But they refer to a community of Benedictine monks established on Mount Sion shortly after the First Crusade.

Other references are to genuine but disreputable sources, such as the epic poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in particular the Grail legends of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The refusal of other historians to treat these legends as sources for historical events several centuries earlier is inferentially dismissed as professional pedantry on the basis that a literary myth can carry the reflection of real events through a millenium. It is rather like reconstructing the history of sixteenth-century England with the aid of Donizetti's operas.

These sources, however ingeniously used, would not lead the authors to their conclusions unless supported by copious references to the works of other nutters who themselves supply no references at all: privately printed esoterica published by obscure Masonic lodges, bogus genealogies prepared by pseudonymous researchers for armigerous chumps, compilations of arcane material with titles such as Les Dossiers Secrets which so far from being secret are deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It reminds one of nothing so much as Stephen Leacock's spy, with half a dozen secret badges pinned on the outside of his lapel.

Ultimately one falls back on the refrain which is heard throughout this work and others of its ilk: it cannot be proved to be wrong. This is true, but then as Bertrand Russell once observed in another context, we cannot prove that there is not between the earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit. The probabilities are not high enough for us to assume it, and perhaps it does not matter anyway.