The Da Vinci Code's secret society was invented in the 1950s
Dan Brown's 2003 thriller opens with a page declaring the Priory of Sion a real society founded in 1099. It sold 80 million copies and convinced many readers. Yet the son of one of the men behind the Priory legend later said flatly that his father and Pierre Plantard had made it up.
The novel follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, first seen in Angels & Demons, and police cryptographer Sophie Neveu after a Louvre curator is murdered and found posed like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. His cryptic final message sends them through Leonardo's paintings, a Zurich bank vault and a cryptex, a lettered cylinder that destroys its papyrus message if forced, before the trail runs through Westminster Abbey to Rosslyn Chapel. The central twist holds that the Holy Grail is not a cup but the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, carried on through the Merovingian kings of France.
Those ideas drew on earlier speculative books, including The Templar Revelation and works by Margaret Starbird; Brown said he did not use Holy Blood, Holy Grail as research, though the novel mentions it. A version of the Magdalene story is old: a 13th-century Cistercian chronicler, Peter of Vaux de Cernay, reported that Cathars believed an 'earthly' Jesus had her as a concubine.
The book became a phenomenon, outsold in 2003 only by a Harry Potter novel, translated into 44 languages and filmed by Columbia Pictures in 2006. It also drew fierce criticism. Many churches denounced it as an attack on Catholicism, and historians objected to its presentation. The New York Times writer Laura Miller called it rank nonsense built on a notorious hoax, the fabrications of Pierre Plantard, said to have created the Priory in 1956. Brown fuelled the row by telling CNN in 2003 that 99 per cent of the background was true.
In 2005 Tony Robinson presented a Channel 4 rebuttal, The Real Da Vinci Code, in which Arnaud de Sède said his father Gérard and Plantard had concocted the Priory, dismissing it as piffle. The programme also questioned Rosslyn Chapel's Grail links and the legend of Mary Magdalene landing in France. Brown maintained that his fact page covered only documents, art and rituals, leaving characters' theories to readers.
Source: The Da Vinci Code
