Da Vinci Code, The

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code had an enormous worldwide success following its publication in 2003, implanting many misconceptions in the public consciousness. Brown and his publishers announced that the book is a work of fiction, yet they immediately went on to claim that it is based on fact. The first page of the book declares as fact (written in bold capitals) that something called the Priory of Sion is a real, secret organization founded by the European Crusaders in 1099. It goes on to state that in 1975, parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets (Secret Files) were discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale (the French national library). These “parchments” identified numerous famous figures of history as members of the Priory of Sion. These “facts” are an almost total falsehood.

In reality, the Priory of Sion is the name of a tiny extremist group founded in the 1950s. It had no existence whatsoever before then. The Dossiers Secrets were not “discovered” in the Bibliothèque Nationale at all. Instead, they were deposited there in 1967 by a 20th-century French fantasist and fanatic named Pierre Plantard, who claimed to be the rightful king of France, a descendant of the Merovingian kings and ultimately of Jesus Christ. These Dossiers include newspaper clippings, imaginary genealogies, and “parchments” forged in the 20th century. None of the documents is ancient or medieval. Plantard himself quit the organization in 1984. Nothing that Brown alleges of the Priory is true, and all the elements deriving from it are false. Brown's Sion myth is only the first falsehood on which the novel's pretensions to fact rest.

Brown's plot is ingenious, and there are some real facts (as there are in most novels). But fantasies dominate, linking Freemasonry, witchcraft, the Gnostic Nag Hammadi scrolls, Mithraism, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Newton, Tarot cards, the Opus Dei, the Crusades, the Merovingian kings, the Templars, the Louvre, the Grail, Victor Hugo, Rosslyn Chapel, Jean Cocteau, and other unrelated subjects. Historical evidence contradicts, among other things, the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children, that Leonardo had painted Mary (instead of the apostle John) in his “Last Supper,” that the Grail is the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, that the Merovingian kings of the Franks were descendants of Jesus, that Godfrey of Bouillon was a French king descended from the Merovingians, and so on. Fantasy has a legitimate place in civilization, but when presented as fact, it corrodes truth and understanding.

The social importance of Brown's novel lies in its astounding popularity. Plantard's documents are among a long list of forgeries and fantasies about ancient secrets from the 17th-century Rosicrucians, through the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, through Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today, to the present. Many scholars attribute the success of the novel to the tendency of society to cynicism, lack of trust in the use of reason and evidence (whether political, scholarly, or religious), belief in cover-ups and vast conspiracies, relativism, eagerness to believe that “secret [Page 278]truths” are more likely to be true than overt truths, faith in tabloids and uncritical Internet entries, and reliance on intuition and feelings instead of facts.

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