The Priory, in turn, was said to have formed the real-life Knights Templar, the order of warrior-monks who served as the Crusader armies’ shock troops and went on to establish the first international banking system before being accused of heresy and suppressed by the greedy King Philippe IV of France in 1307. In response, a secret society known as the Priory of Sion was formed during the First Crusade in 1099 to protect the putative royal bloodline. (Much of Brown’s speculative information came from a 1982 British book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, about which more below.) Ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been obsessed with extirpating this sacred lineage to prevent the explosive secret from getting out, beginning with the supposed assassination of Dagobert II in 679. After hundreds of years their descendants, carrying the royal blood of the house of the biblical King David, eventually got around to intermarrying with the Merovingians, the myth-shrouded first line of French kings who lived in the fifth through eighth centuries.

For those of you who may have been hiding in a tomb the last few years, here’s the gist:īoth the novel and movie posit that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who was not a prostitute (a folk tradition added later by Rome) but a lady of high standing who fled Palestine after the crucifixion with the couple’s child-a girl, Sarah-and settled among the Jewish community in southern France. So let the deconstruction begin…ĭespite being roundly panned by most critics, the movie is, unsurprisingly, making tons of money-nearly $150 million in its first two weeks-attracting both the book’s legions of fans along with many others curious what all the fuss is about. The perfect media-publicity storm and religio-cultural zeitgeist-tickler that is The Da Vinci Code, the second coming of Dan Brown’s controversial super-blockbuster 2003 novel, has at last arrived in theaters. The Paradoxes of Mainstreaming Esotericismĭizzy from all the Decoding? Tired of endless yammering about Tom Hank’s hair? Ready to move on from the “Greatest Coverup in Human History”? Well, welcome to the cult, er, club.

The da vinci code movie wiki