Load of mumbo-jumbo
Simon Hoggart
‘t’s neat, it’s authentic, it makes sense. IThe trouble is, it’s rubbish,’ said Tony Robinson, speaking about the research behind The Da Vinci Code, the book which has, judging by the numbers of people I see clutching it on the Tube, more or less killed off newspaper reading in this country.
Mr Robinson, better known to viewers as Baldrick from Blackadder, was presenting a two-hour special documentary on Channel 4 called The Real Da Vinci Code (Thursday). Finding the limitless errors in this novel, which claims to be based on factual research, has become a cottage industry in itself, rather like those Chinese people who make a living sorting the plastic bags we throw away. There are now several books about the DVC, pointing out among other things that the author, Dan Brown, has a sense of geography that would be disgraced by a drunken pigeon. Or, as Tony Robinson discovered, he describes the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King’s College London as having ‘one of the best and most sophisticated research databases in the world’ when in fact it has a few shelves of books and a reading list. A small point, but one of many.
But Mr Brown has bigger fish to fry. His theme is that the Holy Grail was not a cup used at the Last Supper but the ultimate secret of Christianity — that Christ married Mary Magdalene, they had a daughter, and his descendants walk among us. ‘San Greal’ — holy grail — actually meant ‘sang real’, royal blood. Geddit? The knowledge was suppressed by the Church, since it threatened the whole Christian myth, but was handed down through a secret organisation called the Priory of Sion. This was founded in 1099, and included among its members Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Nicholas Poussin, whose paintings are, like Leonardo’s, full of coded revelations of this mighty secret.
Except that the Priory of Sion was actually founded in the middle of the 20th century by a French fascist and a pair of surrealist hoaxers, so Leonardo and Newton could no more have belonged to it than to the Ovalteenies. It was, Tony Robinson said, ‘a con that has fooled a whole generation of grail hunters’ — whoever they might be. As in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, it turns out that the object of the quest can never be found, and is a boojum anyway.
One of the points made in Michael Wood’s In Search of Myths & Heroes (BBC2, Fridays) is that myths actually accrete layers as they move around the world and through time, with different societies and cultures making the changes and adding the elements which appeal to them, or to their rulers. So we have the Christian myth, based on gospels written decades after Christ; now on top of that we have imposed a story that the myth is mistaken — using mythological evidence to support the case against the myth. Which is true? Does it matter? A few centuries ago, pilgrims went from site to site, following relics of the true cross, drops of Christ’s blood, fragments of the Virgin, all to deepen and sustain their faith. Now tourists go on guided tours round Paris finding the sites which imply the whole thing was one gigantic, 2,000-year-old hoax. It’s a load of mumbo-jumbo purporting to deny an earlier load of mumbo-jumbo.
It also made a beguiling television show. Tony Robinson only occasionally allowed himself to scoff out loud, though he used his skills as an actor to as much effect as the script. The look on his face as he presented us with one purported grail, a sort of green stone eggcup that you might buy at a gift shop in Siena, told us all we needed to know about that.
Michael Wood has the same eager but sometimes disappointed air, like a puppy who’s just learnt that the walk is off. He was chasing after the Queen of Sheba, another myth that has been adapted for just about everyone in the Middle East. Even what we know about her — that she visited Solomon in Jerusalem and had his child — is supported by only one Biblical text written centuries later. Hebrew myth has her hoisting her skirts and revealing that she had goats’ legs, a real problem in those days before plastic surgery and depilatory creams. Luckily, the condition was cured when she acknowledged the one true God. But then the Koran has Solomon flying through the air on a green silk carpet, chatting to the birds.
Michael Wood chased various versions of the myth around Palestine, Israel, Egypt and the Horn of Africa. This was like hunting a glow-worm; it shines briefly, and always in a different place. But it did make for a most agreeable travelogue, enlightening in many ways, even if we still have no idea whether the Queen of Sheba existed or what her legs were like.
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