Mary Magdalen and the Kings of France
Susan Haskins suggests that the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and Dan Brown, who famously faced each in court earlier this year, are guilty of the same thing – writing bad fiction.
The Da Vinci Code, millions of people who have read Dan Brown’s novel or seen the film know – or at least think they do – who this ‘Dark-Age’ dynasty was. And they ‘know’ that Mary Magdalen apparently married Jesus, and bore his child, their descendants marrying into the French royal line and, after several generations, engendering the Merovingian dynasty. (In the seventh century, according to Brown’s book, the Vatican attempted to eradicate the dynasty by murdering Dagobert II, but his son Sigisbert II survived, as did his bloodline down through history, ending up with Sophie [Sophia, Greek for wisdom, and Mary Magdalen’s alter ego in the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text], heroine of the novel.) The ‘historical’ aspects of this tale were first told in The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail (1982), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln).
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