The Real Story Behind The Da Vinci Code | The Da Vinci Code Decoded (2006) | Full Film

[Music] what Leonardo devinci wanted to tell us was something very basic about the Roman Catholic church and he has coded that in his paintings is it more likely that a man should be born of a virgin and walk on water and rise from the dead or is it more likely that he should have been born as other men are born married and raised a family on a balance of probabilities which is more likely it was almost obnoxious to think that that Jesus might have been married coming from my background and my my um Orthodox Catholic position Mary Magdalene is most important woman in the world history not for what she said or did particularly but because of the reason that the church fathers were so afraid of her image when Dan Brown makes his suggestion that this great coverup has gone on a lot of people get nervous and become in distinctively critical of The Da Vinci Code but I think Dan Brown's actually on a pretty good historical footing with some of these uh suggestions and his detail may be wrong or maybe designed to serve um his fast-paced plot but the big picture question of how Constantine and subsequent Roman emperors reshaped Christianity to serve their own purpose of political theory for the empire is a powerful and I think largely valid argument devil day published the DiVinci Cod 6 months ago and since that moment I have been asked one question over and over and over and that is why does everyone want to talk about this book and I'd love to say it's about the storytelling and it's about the writing in all fairness and in all honesty it probably has a lot more to do with the subject matter [Music] so 35 years ago in 1969 heading off a holiday in the s in France I picked up this paperback to read as a little bit of holiday relaxation and it was the story quite entertaining of a priest of a little French Mountain Village who had apparently found a treasure in 1891 certainly he was peniles when he made his Discovery and by the time he died in 1917 he had spent enormous sums of money The Da Vinci Code opens with the murder of a fictional character Jacques sonier who is said to be in the D Vinci Code the curator of the louv museum and presumed to be as you read the novel The Uh current Grandmaster of the prior of Canan whose job it apparently has been in addition to being very much a Leonardo da Vinci type character left-handed as Leonardo was left-handed interested in all sorts of Science and machines as Leonardo was um Jacques zier's mission in life seems to have been according to the novel to protect his granddaughter uh Sophie no uh from uh those associated with the church or otherwise who wish to wipe out the uh family who are presumably the modern descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene um so Jacques sonier raises Sophie NOA the female protagonist of the D Vinci Code what Dan Brown doesn't tell us is that the name son is actually the name of a French priest who had a significant history in the area in which he lived he was the parish priest of renle chatau in the area of ladok in southern France a very outof thee way area and in particular in 19th century France he was sent there as a relatively young man with ambition and one of the first things he did when he arrived at Ren chatau was to renovate the church when he was renovating the church he removed the altar Stone from the church and found that there were there was a pillar that was Hollow it was a visigoth pillar so it dated back to the 6 century and in this hollowed out pillar there were some parchments he took them out and what the what was written on them was what appeared to be um parts of the New Testament written in Latin and some letters were raised slightly above the others and it's these raised letters which cause the most interest so the general assumption was what treasure could he have found the clues essentially were preserved in some parchments these had passages from the gospels in in Latin but they concealed secret messages the author of the paperback told us that there were secret messages he didn't tell us what they were and it was while I was staring at one of these parchments reproduced in the book that I found myself reading off the secret message it was terribly easy to find and it didn't give away any important information it just said this treasure belongs to dagar II King and to Zion and he is there dead what a good and exciting message I wondered why the author hadn't given us the message and as a writer of a television it intrigued me King dager was the last of the acknowledged maravian Kings he was the son of Clovis I first Clovis the first had made a pact with the Catholic church that if Clovis increased his Empire let's call it of of his area of France and dedicated that to Christianity then uh the Catholic Church would acknowledge the marians as being the uh inheritors of the throne the maravian line is we believe a line of direct descendants from Jesus Christ Baron son didn't understand what the significance of these parchments was at all and we still don't to some extent so the first thing he did was go straight to the bishop of carcasson the bishop had a long hard look at these parchments and sent him straight up to the ecclesiastical authorities in Paris he returned from Paris a wealthy man he had a tower built on the edge of the mountain which is the mountain where Rena chatau was situated he had a large house built for him and his housekeeper had five or six bedrooms and he called it lailla Bethany with the obvious Biblical reference and and furthermore he had the whole Road from the base of the mountain on which Ren the shatow was situated right up to the top of the village paved he was um you know an ordinary humble country priest and yet at some point he discovered something that made him an extremely wealthy man and he spent um a lot of money um refurbishing the church the church of Mary Magdalene which is the village Village Church very old church was practically falling apart when he came he bought up a lot of land in the village lived an excessively lavish lifestyle entertaining visitors from toou from Paris uh in very high style he during the course of his life all all that last 20 years of his life he something in the the of about2 million that's the mystery and there have been many solutions put forward it started with the most obvious one that he found a treasure or a treasure Trove but it's developed over over the years to theories that he discovered a secret a secret that he was either paid to reveal or paid to keep quiet about there are theories that he was actually blackmailing the Vatican because he discovered something of great uh importance that would undermine the uh the church and the church were paying him to keep quiet about it the bishop at this point was getting a little bit jumpy about this huge expenditure of money in addition to this he was throwing wild vast parties for the whole village at a time and spending a great deal of money and of course the bishop was getting jumpy because this was a simple country priest and he he had no conception of where he was getting his money from the only conclusion he could reach was that he was guilty of simony that is the selling of masses in order to uh make up for sins that are committed so he accused him of that and suspended him after this Baron son appealed directly to the Vatican and was reinstated but shortly afterwards he died very Suddenly at the beginning of 1917 uh and he died of a stroke but what is perhaps significant and we don't quite know why is that 10 days before his death his housekeeper had already ordered his coffin nobody's ever come up with a conclusive answer um as much as can be said today after Decades of research the least likely explanation is that he discovered a treasure our own research and um you looking into the mystery and particularly looking into his cash flow um and the way his fortunes changed because there were times when he was you know pretty broke and then suddenly another load of money would come along Lyn I believe that the source of his money was that he was being paid money by people who lived outside the Village um and there's quite some good evidence for that including as the fact that when he had to account for his money to the local Bishop that's actually what he said um many researchers just actually ignore his own words and think he was hiding a treasure but is actually what he said that he was given donations large donations by people who lived outside the Village um but he was given those donations under conditions of strict secrecy that he couldn't break he couldn't reveal who those donors were and when you look at his cash flow that is the most plausible explanation it's half an answer because the other part of the answer we want to know is why these people gave him huge sums of money what was it about him or the place he lived or whatever he knew that Led Led to people wanting to give him you know hundreds of thousands of pounds and that's that's now the bit that needs to be answered it's more information he had or something that he was doing after Baron his death uh his housekeeper continued to live in the house until her own death when the French changed currencies from the old frank to the new Frank she was found in the garden or she was seen in the garden burning large amounts of paper money presumably because she didn't want to claim where the money had come from she did actually tell the person who moved into the house that she would tell him the secret of their wealth before she died but unfortunately she also suffered a stroke which rendered her speechless and she was never actually able to say where the money had come from so the mystery died with her so as a writer for television I decided it would make an interesting subject for a documentary program and I went to the BBC and suggested it and they seemed to think it was a good idea so this was in 1970 and I went to meet the author in Paris and discussed the subject with him and I asked him why he hadn't published the hidden messages and he said because we thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself and that I found a very very intriguing response the link between the renat mystery and the prior of Zion is that um the prior of Zion claimed to to be they claimed to have been the people behind Sonia and who were giving him money they they paid for him to build his buildings and to have his lifestyle and uh their claim is that the reason is that the um Sonia discovered documents that revealed the truth about the survival of the maravan dynasty the research had got vast it was far too much for one man and so I had assembled a little team Richard Lee and Michael bent joined me for the research on the third film and it was while we were working on that third film that the hypothesis which became Holy Blood Holy Grail suddenly materialized it materialized out of a rather silly conversation which we were having somebody had said there's something fishy about these marians there a simple little sentence like that and that was all it took the penny dropped with a resounding clang fish of course one of the early symbols for Christ and we suddenly wondered at that moment Richard Lee and myself whether what was so fishy about the meav Indians was that they could have been descended from Christ that's how the hypothesis was conjured on this question of the interpretation of evidence people recount the story of beronia the priests of this Village but in fact we know nothing of B the priest of reh it's all heay evidence it wouldn't stand up in a court of law what we have to do always is interpret when you are LED into the areas which deal with secret societies hovering in the background the priy of Zion in this case well by their very nature secret societies our secret the secret that died with his housekeeper seemed to be something that the Catholic Church wanted to keep very much Under Wraps it could have been one of several things it could have been the uh secret of where the cathar had hidden the treasure from uh the Temple of Solomon and they are one of the groups of people that are suspected of having hidden it because they had a stronghold in uh Rena chatau 2o it could have been uh the fact that some important religious figure is actually buried in the church and in fact there is a yellow marking on the outside wall of the church which indicates that somebody Royal is buried there it could be a genealogy of Jesus Christ which is found there or the equivalent of what we would call birth certificates or marriage certificates relating to Jesus Christ and his marriage we think that his wealth came directly from the Catholic Church they were in the unfortunate position of knowing that somebody who they didn't know whether they could rely upon entirely or not was in possession of a great secret which could change the whole identity of the church and for that reason they would have been very willing to keep him quiet they also had enormous wealth of their own of course to to give themselves the ability to do this when it comes to the priy of Zion um things do get very complicated and very murky the known fact about the prior of Zion is that it exists it certainly does um how large an organization it is is a another question and it certainly exist as a matter of public record since um the mid1 1950s what we are led to believe is that the prior of Sion had the intention of reestablishing the maravian ruer of uh Europe back on the Thrones and probably being in charge again of the Roman Catholic Church that's what we're LED led to believe uh there are according to documents that were later found several uh Grand Masters who were extremely well-known figures in both the artistic and scientific worlds and these Grandmasters were discovered as a result of uh Henry Lincoln and CO's investigations at the bibliotech national in Paris I understand that uh a great part of the readership of the uh D Vinci Cod this thriller uh believe that it's based in fact because there exists in the French national library an assemblage of documents which are known as the dossier Suk the secret dossier that because they're there they are reliable they're not the documents are proof of absolutely nothing beyond the fact that they have been written that they exist when we were researching for Holy Blood Holy Grail we did a lot of checking on dossier suai and the list of grandm ERS and there did appear to be a certain validity but that's all they should not be looked upon as reliable evidence because they just aren't no document is reliable evidence of anything apart from the fact that it exists anybody can concoct any sort of document if you want to believe it well that depends the extent of your naivity or the amount of research which you've done there had been a number of alleged Grandmasters of the uh prior of s such as Jean CTO he was one of the latest uh there was also belli the painter uh Robert Doyle Sir Isaac Newton people of great stature and of great influence all of which uh had some interest some esoteric interest in either science or art and some of which were connected by Blood in 1956 the prior of Scion arose again into the public eye when it was registered by Pierre plantar who was a Frenchman who claimed uh descent from the marav Indian line and he got to know Henry Lincoln and the writers of the other writers of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and he in fact said that uh the prior of cion were the benefactors of the treasure which had been plundered by Emperor the Roman Emperor Titus in a66 from the Temple of Solomon and it was they in fact who were in charge of this immense wealth he has since been discredited despite the fact that he uh was very prominent in the French Resistance and a close Ally of char deal he has since been discredited as being basically a charlatan somebody who who had no connection with the mar inan family whatsoever and he disappeared from the prior of Scion as Grandmaster in the 1980s as the person behind the prior of Zion um and the material that it put out in the 1960s and70s um Pier plantard is obviously an important figure a lot of the material that Pier plantard responsible for is provably false it it is a hoax but the question that's never been answered is what his motive in that hoax has been no one's ever shown that he's gained anything financially materially from that and it was a a hoax he maintained for over 20 years close to 30 years we know nothing of them except what little they choose to tell us and how reliable is that going to be as for those figures which people become interested and excited by m Pierre plantar of the prior of Zion Grand Master I liked him he was a Charming Man probably the best poker player on earth given the opportunity I can remember throwing unexpectedly some very difficult questions at him and he didn't flicker he always had an answer but again those answers are merely what he chose to tell me so in fact we don't know anything about Bel sonier the priest we don't know anything about Pierre plantar we don't know anything about the prior of Zion we know and that's the word we know almost nothing the demonstrable and provable facts are very very few all the rest is hearsay evidence guesswork and interpretation none of the books that have been written including my own have any validity [Music] whatsoever Leonardo da Vinci is a figure which is familiar to just about everybody who lives in the west most people can name one of his paintings at least probably the Mona Lisa uh if not recognize more than one he's also known as an inventor and an artist and uh a student of anatomy and he had he was basically a man who typified the Renaissance at the same time as being this kind of Genius a very special type of Genius he also was not in favor of the way that the Roman Catholic Church was progressing dressing Leonardo was a heretic he was a rationalist he was a scientist I think he was more a scientist than he was a painter uh as we now know he really only completed 20 some paintings in his life and and most of them actually are not completed um he thought of himself he loved painting but he thought of himself as a scientist and inventor um he left thousands and thousands of pages of secret notebooks um with mirror writing and coded writing and obviously had a predil to keep important knowledge secret and only known to a handful of people and he had a kind of sneering attitude to the Roman Catholic Church which he was unable to express openly and the way he did this was through the codings in some of his paintings I think if we could figure out what the coded messages in Leonardo's paintings were they would be fascinating The DaVinci Code is um the is made up of the symbolism and um other references that Leonardo left in his artistic works that revealed his own religious beliefs um his own ideas um this is the idea that Dan Brown has taken from our book the Templar Revelation the the first chapter of which is actually called the secret code of Leonardo da Vinci and Dan Brown's taken that idea of all this symbolism um hidden in Leonardo's paintings which can be decoded to give a coherent message and he's taken that and used that as the basis of his uh Thriller um you know that's the thing that actually kicks the whole um the whole story off in his novel Lynn and I have looked at and decoded Leonardo's painting to reveal what we think motivated Leonardo um what his beliefs were both his beliefs concerning the church and what he thought about it basically he didn't like the church he was very critical of it and um so in a way it reveals what he thought was false and it also reveals what he thought was true the religious ideas the heretical ideas that motivated and drove him um and although Dan Brown has used much of our decoding that we came up with our interpretations of those paintings he goes in a very different direction to the one that we took um because he then mixes his plot with ideas taken from other books primarily the holy B and holy grail um to come up with you know a good you know rip roing plot the research that ly and I did that led to um led us to look at Leonardo's paintings actually began with the shroud of chin um which is where our interest in Leonardo started from we wrote a book back in 1994 in which we argued that um the shroud of churin is actually um the world's least known Leonardo da Vinci um that he actually created that um that great hoax the Shroud of Turin is a very interesting artwork if you like um in the 1970s I think it was in 1970s or the 1980s scientists were allowed to analyze the Turin shroud for a very short period of time and they carbonated carbonated the Shroud itself to a period which dates to about the 1200s 12 1300s the cloth itself so it couldn't possibly have been used to wrap the body of Jesus Christ Leonardo da Vinci I feel is a very strong Contender for being the person who actually created the Shroud of Turin he is unique among artists of his day in never having produced a crucifixion he had a total of probably 17 paintings which were attributed to him but none of them was a crucifixion and that is very very it's not only unusual it's Unique what he may have been doing by creating the Shroud of Turin was uh putting this up as a kind of crucifixion substitution and the analysis that some people have put upon the image itself is that it is actually burnt on top on the the top layer of the fibers of the um material and this could be done by using what is known as a camera obscurer which actually takes light and burns onto a material that is one explanation he used a um very primitive photographic technique to get the image on there um and even more outrageously he actually used his own face as the image on there um because that's something that would have appealed to his sense of humor sense of irony um now put like that um it will sound pretty much outrageous and certainly more outrageous than a Dan Brown plot Leonardo da Vinci had a habit of um painting himself in a lot of his paintings in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock appears in a lot of his films Leonardo da Vinci liked to play a cameo role in his own works at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown has a murder of son in the Lou the vetruvian man is uh a depiction of man and the sacred geometry that makes the parts make of the whole it is used by danam Brown as the way in which the murdered man at the beginning is discovered but Dan Brown has him actually stretched out in the form of a pentangle which is as we can see what the vetruvian man is the image of the vetruvian man is also one of the most recognized images in the world in the western world today similar to chavar or in fact the Mona Lisa and in fact its last outing as an image occurred on the one Euro coin in Italy the other most instantly recognizable of Leonardo's works is the Last Supper um giant Fresco um from a church um in Italy uh which I mean now you see reproductions of it everywhere you know on sort of everything from sort of table mats to you name it really um and um and yet everybody recognizes it and art historians you know have restored it they've been over you know with a fine tooth comb but nobody seems to have noticed certain interesting facts about it um which in the D Vinci Code um Dan Brown very kindly brings to people's attention um uh for example um Jesus is is uh sitting at the center of the table of course um but leaning away from him um almost as if joined at the hip is this um character who is supposed to be the young St John um but in the in the New Testament the young St John is described as leaning against Jesus this is a little odd um and if you look at this young St John he's effeminate to the point of femininity um and you begin to look look a little more uh closely and uh I can't remember exactly which way around it is but Jesus is wearing um i a a a red um robe and a blue cloak and this character is wearing the opposite like his other half um and so what with one thing and another and the fact that their two figures together form a giant spre spread eagle m shape this indicated to us when we discovered this and not Mr Dan Brown um that um it would suggest that Leonardo is trying to say that Mary Magdalene the Giant M woman uh the Lady M um was at the Last Supper sitting next to Jesus in a position of some status um and also as his other half and which is quite a big statement I think very interesting things are going on in the Last Supper although I would caution that the Last Supper painting has been restored so many times including as far back as the 1700s that we're not sure when we look at the Last Supper today that we're actually looking at the painting that Leonardo painted but there is a very threatening uh you know face on the face of Peter um there is a very uh unexplained uh extra hand in the painting there is a very threatening knife in the painting we know there is no uh chalice or Holy Grail in the center of the painting I mean Leonardo was a master um psychologist he understood that people only see what they expect to see um or or are told to expect to see and you don't really want expect to see disembodied hands doing things when we wrote to Templar Revelation um we said rather pompously perhaps but um that Leonardo's symbolism in his paintings was always serious um and always subtle and there was never anything that was um uh the equivalent of sticking a red nose on St Peter um well since that book came up we've made at least one major discovery which shows that he was quite willing to do something much worse than that but first the serious stuff I mean um Leonardo's symbolism for posterity I mean this was his only crack at it let's be honest in those days um you know to to hand a message down to us today all he had was his paintbrush basically um so go for it and he went for it there are two versions of the Madonna of the Rocks one is in the Lou and one is in the National Gallery the first one that uh Leonardo da Vinci painted was unaccepted by the monks of the church that had commissioned it and it was not accepted because he hadn't painted Halos on the figures the actual painting depicts the flight of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist from Herod during the massacre of the Innocence and Jesus Christ is with his mother Mary and the angel Uriel is looking over them some people say that it it it is unaccepted by the Catholic church because of the Jos of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ John the Baptist being the person who was actually older than Jesus Christ he was a descendant of the Aon line which made him a priest Messiah Jesus Christ was a descendant of both the Aon line and the davidic line which made him not only a priest messiah in the same way that John the Baptist was but also a king Messiah and the fact that John the Baptist baptized Jesus Christ as the Son of God the Roman Catholic Church would prefer us to believe that it would be Jesus Christ who was doing all the baptizing and therefore what is John the Baptist who on Earth does John the Baptist think he is coming along and baptizing the Son of God it doesn't quite add up up uh in fact if if you look at the genealogies of the family it adds up perfectly correctly but that is something the Catholic Church would like to sideline so the whole juter position of of um Jesus Christ and John the Baptist is awkward at best for the Roman Catholic Church the serious stuff in the Madonna of the rock well first of all there are two uh versions there's um one in the L which is which figures largely in um the D Vinci Code um and that's really the truly heretical one and there's one in London's National Gallery which is another version a sort of toned down version although there still are certain features in it which are a bit naughty um the the serious stuff um is connected with his elevation of John the Baptist over Jesus um and it's in all his works um as far as he can get away with it um and a lot of people think that Leonardo was an atheist he must have been he was a scientist you know that's a kind of glib thinking but he wasn't he was a heretic he had very very specific and very passionate beliefs which come over quite clearly in his work but they're absolutely nothing like the normal Christianity which he despised in the Madonna of the Rocks um the BL version the heretical version you have um a very beautiful but but slightly distracted Virgin Mary um with her arm around a um a child who is who is kneeling um and you have um another little boy who looks almost exactly the same um who is sitting there basically blessing the other child and with his or her or its arm around him is um an angel and it's the angel Ur now this is this scene actually um is is is not from the New Testament it's actually from um um it's it's a it's a church tradition it was invented to um cover up the Deep embarrassment of the idea that in later Life John the Baptist would actually have the authority to perform a ritual on Jesus so they invented this this idea that in Egypt they they all got together as children and um and Jesus bestowed the authority on him for later in life to have the authority to baptize him was all very convoluted but that's what it was this commissioned work purports to show but you look at it and you think wait a minute there's something wrong here um because why you know because obviously I say Obviously in in in quote um the child who is kneeling to receive the blessing has um the Virgin Mary's arm around her shoulders and in church um iconography and church tradition the Archangel urial is John the Baptist's um protector so and um so why are they children apparently with the wrong Guardians why is the kneeling submissive child with the Virgin Mary um but if you actually turn it around and they with their right Guardians you have the baby John the Baptist being the one in Authority even there and blessing the kneeling Jesus who is accepting his authority um it is quite I mean there's lots and lots of other details and it's in our book the Templar Revelation and in my book about Mary Magdalene too but there is something else which I would draw attention to which we discovered and this is the the bit that I was talking about that is much worse than sticking a red nose on St Peter and all I will say is um it is connected with the proliferation of rocks in the um painting and it's it's a shape formed out of the Rocks which grows as it were out of the Virgin Mary's head and goes right to the skyline um and basically this is Leonardo's saying she ain't no virgin have a look once you see it you will never ever see Leonardo's work in the same light again it's pretty clear he's Leonardo is trying to communicate something there and the phallic symbols that Lynn picnet has emphasized uh are very much in evidence in the painting uh what exactly the message of that is I'm I don't have an answer to that question I think it would be quite interesting to to if we could learn the answer like hundreds of thousands probably millions of people worldwide um Clive and I read Holy Blood Holy Grail um and found ourselves our interest in these subjects the the true origins of Christianity if you like uh rekindled the notched a bit um it was it's an exciting story um very soberly told um not Sensational in its presentation at all um and it certainly made us think and um inspired us to take it further what we did in the book and what I want to do now is to make a clear distinction between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of History we're not talking about a descent from Christ in fact Christ I repeat is a a figure of Faith but Jesus the man who walked on the Sands of Palestine is a real historical figure and he we felt we could research it's been said that what we have written is in some sense an assault on Christianity and it's also been suggested that some people have been led to turn away from a faith which they' grown up with that Grieves me because there is nothing in our work which is in any sense an assault on that figure of Christ what we are doing is looking at the man who walked on the Sands of Palestine if you choose to believe that that Jesus was born of a virgin and walked on water and rose from the dead then that is a gift your faith is a gift and nothing that we can say about Jesus should affect what you choose to believe but you must remember that religion is essentially a matter of opinion it's a question of Faith what you choose to believe and when we were looking at the possibilities of a blood descent we were looking at a balance of probabilities is it more likely that a man should be born of a virgin and walk on water and rise from the dead or is it more likely that he should have been born as other men are born married and raised a family on a balance of probabilities which is more likely that's solely the hypothesis which we present in Holy Blood Holy Grail well as you know the main thesis is that Jesus was married and being raised Roman Catholic I thought that was total blasphemy in fact I almost dropped the book I fled from the library I didn't want a thing to do with this book I was horrified it was um it was almost obnoxious to think that that Jesus might have been married coming from my background and my my um Orthodox Catholic position when Holy Blood Holy Grail first appeared there was a a shocked reaction from the general public we got ourselves onto the front pages around the world it was as if this had never been said before but of course ideas like that have been in the air four centuries one might say the only thing original in Holy Blood Holy Grail was a blood descent from Jesus and that his wife was Mary magdalini had this been a story not dealing with Jesus but let's say uh William Shakespeare or Richard the lionart any sort of discoveries made about him in the sense that we did and made an hypothesis anything in association with let's say ordinary characters would have been taken on board and accepted as part of the mainstream of scholarship it's only because the figure that we're dealing with is Jesus this figure of faith and that's what creates the fuss at first I didn't know what to think and then I thought well I'm going to go investigate this and as I got into the material I finally told a friend of mine about it and she said well that's ridiculous nobody I mean the church would have told us and I said yes I believe that too so I said I'm going to pray about this book and my friend said I think you should and when I did I opened my scripture one day praying about Holy Blood Holy Grail thinking I'm going to burn this book and I re I looked down and I saw this passage in my scripture said restore my wife whom I espoused to me and I thought that was so uncanny that I should have opened a page that said that in the scripture that I said you know maybe I should take this seriously for a minute and go see if there's any evidence that could support it and that's when I launched on my journey to search for the holy the Holy Grail which I believe is the sacred feminine and the lost bride I was assigned some uh paper to write for a class I was taking in interpreting the gospels at Vanderbilt Divinity School [Music] and when I asked for help finding a passage and opened my scriptures I was looking at the passage in mark from the anointing of Jesus by the woman with the alabaster jar at the banquet in Bethany and I thought well that's an interesting passage so I went out and started investigating first of all I found out that the anointing scene occurs in all four of the canonical gospels there are only four stories that do one is the baptism of Jesus the multiplication of Loaves and Fishes the crucifixion and the anointing by a woman which gives you an idea how very special that passage is if it was collected in all the communities that wrote gospels that passage that story was so powerful that it made it into all four so I went out to investigate anointing and find out what I could and I found out that the anointing is actually has sexual connotations in the ancient world and that the anointing by the woman was a nupal right in the ancient cultures we should say Cult of the sacrific bridegroom King King there are many Many religious leaders who arise in this time period and Jesus is one of them and he's a rabbi everyone in the New Testament is Jewish until proven otherwise uh it was commonplace for Jewish rabbis to be married in fact it was the rare exception of a Jewish rabbi of that time period who was not married Jesus Christ was required as a member of the davidic line to marry Not only was he required to marry he was required to sire two sons by the age of 40 the Feast of Kaa is mentioned in the Book of John he doesn't describe the actual wedding itself but only the feast and what jars in this particular story is the fact that Mary that is Jesus's mother says to the servants that they should do whatever he tells them to so when they are told to go and get more wine they have to oblige the only person at a wedding who would be allowed to do that would be the groom himself Mary Magdalene is depicted as anointing Jesus Christ on two occasions with an ointment called Spike ND which was only allowed to be used by those of the davidic line then it became a question okay who was this woman then who is the bride if there is a bride who is she it has to be the woman who anoints him and in three gospels she's not named but in John's gospel it actually literally says that the woman who anointed Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair was Mary the sister of Lazarus and she's the same Mary that shows up in Holy Blood Holy Grail and in all the legends that they talk about from the coast of France where it's Mary the sister of Lazarus who brings the Holy Grail the sangral to France and of course the way they spell that if you divide it after the G it means the blood Royal the word SRA s a n g r a a l in old French if you divide it after the N you have a word that says holy grail but that would be like dividing the word Montreal after the N it wouldn't mean Royal Mountain anymore it would mean something unintelligible but if you divide the same word sangral after the G it means blood Royal so the legend says that Mary Magdalene and her friends traveling with in this boat with no ores brought the blood Royal to to the coast of France and you don't carry the blood Royal in a jar with a lid it flows in the veins of a child so I think the fossil in the legend is that the child actually existed whatever happened to her I have no idea and I don't think the genealogies are necessarily relevant I really think the child is there to prove the union the sacred Union of the masculine and feminine energies the mythology if you will of the Sacred Union at the heart of the Christian story that the child proves that rather than uh anything else that you could think of of that would prove it we don't have a birth certificate for this little girl if you ask almost anybody who Mary Magdalene was they'll say oh wasn't she that um prostitute who Jesus forgave and she sort of tagged along and did the equivalent of first century equivalent of making the coffee for the men um sort of hanging around in the background um or perhaps if they were familiar with um particular Victorian art they say oh she she's the woman who you know was forgiven by Jesus but she's still spent the rest of her life blubbing in remorse with actually strangely with her they always painted her with her clothes hanging off her presumbly you can't be remorseful without being half naked I don't know um but um but the but the point is that um well there quite a few points actually uh she's never described in the New Testament as a prostitute um in fact she's really described at all she's n Only named a few times the big problem down through the centuries has been too many Marys um and there is another Mary of Bethany who washed Jesus's feet with her hair and there's another independent story in Galilee of some prostitute that washed his feet with her expensive oil and hair and that Anonymous prostitute is identified with the Mary of Bethany because they both did the same act though in different parts of the country and Mary Being Mary they are identified with Mary Magdalene about whom there is the record that Jesus cast six demons from her and so all of those things were put together into the medieval identification of Mary Magdalene as The Prostitute there's not a sh spr of historical evidence for that false assumption the Roman Catholic Church at the second Vatican Council finally renounced that false idea well the historical evidence for Mary Magdalene is very small she's mentioned in all four gospels with that same epithet that the Magdalene but there's not a lot said about her it says she was a woman of wealth who supported Jesus by her means with the other women who were supportive of his ministry and then it says that she met Jesus at the tomb resurrected on Easter morning she also stood at the cross there are eight lists where several women are listed in the go in the gospels and on those eight lists on seven of them Mary Magdalene is mentioned first so you the scripture never comes out and says this woman was first lady it just mentions her first every time except one um I think we can't know exactly anything about her but what we can see is what she did by her actions what did she do she showed up at the tomb to mourn her bridegroom and found him resurrected which in the ancient mythologies is the role of the Bride it's the role of the Bride to anoint and also to meet the Risen bridegroom at the tomb and so in that in her role she lives out the mythology then of this sacred Union so historically speaking we know very little about her but we know that the mythology is that she was bride the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene uh were married is is quite plausible rendered more plausible by finding these tantalizing tidbits in the Gnostic Gospels such as the reference to Jesus kissed Mary frequently on the perhaps the word is mouth in Coptic um there's a lot of interesting hints that this may have been the case uh if the prior of Zion is meant to be a metaphor for this important and Powerful secret that Jesus was really a human being um that he was a mortal human being that he was an important historical character um that he came out of the Jewish tradition that he was probably married that he following the biblical injunction to go forth and be fruitful and multiply probably had children um and that that some history of those descendants is now lost to us well that's a very interesting story I don't know of anyone British nobility a Japanese nobility um who can actually Trace their bloodline back 2,000 years if Jesus had descendants I think they would be untraced trable today they may have been traceable 200 ad 300 ad um but they would not be traceable today I've been told that the authors of Holy Blood Holy Grail didn't know exactly what it was they were looking for and they weren't sure that the bloodline existed themselves at first but I think what happened was that they were so steeped in the mythologies and the Legends in the scriptures and in the art the medieval art that suddenly one day they just looked at each other and it came to them in a Flash like Eureka we've got it I think what happened was that they're talking here about the bloodline of Jesus and that then they wrote their book based on that intuition that they had but that it was already derived from their study of the art the legend the myths and um all all of their medieval studies you might say all Gathering momentum as they went and finally pointing them to this particular conclusion I don't think it was made in a vacuum and I certainly don't think it was an accident I think they actually were on to something but maybe they didn't even know themselves exactly where they got the idea but when they passed it around they realized that it fit all the scenarios that they had envisioned here and that they realized that it was the key to the whole story was this lost bride thing but when I read their book I said to myself oh my gosh there this this peace that's been lost all this time it's something my prayer community and I had been praying over for years we had been shown that there was a missing piece from the foundations of the church and we didn't know what it was but we were told to search for it and when I realized that what was lost here was the bride everybody went off and talked about the bridegroom without the bride well what's a bridegroom without a bride so I went off searching for the bride and realizing that the key to the whole thing was the anointing at Bethany by the woman who then later carries the Chalice or what we know to be this the Holy Grail as a child to the shores of France so that whole connection came to me out of scripture and out of my own prayer community and my own prayer life connecting to reinforce what I had discovered in Holy Blood Holy Grail which I thought at first was Blasphemous but then when I went and discovered that it was all tied in with what we'd been shown was the missing piece then it wasn't blasphemy anymore but it was truth as I say in Matthew Mark Luke John Mary Magdalene barely exists um in these other gospels she's the star apart from Jesus Mary's there absolutely dead dead center Jesus defers to Mary she even gets him to change in in one of the gospels these other gospels she even gets him to change his teaching um she is feisty she's assertive she's certainly not um you know I mean the church has used her over the centuries as a sort of brand name for female shame and she's actually the least ashamed woman in history um uh she actually annoyed the male disciples very much because she had such power over Jesus this these other gospels make very clear you one thing I want to say for sure in here is that I have twin pillars for my research and Ne none of them are from the nagadi gospels but the nagadi gospels actually state in the Gospel of Philip it states that Jesus was married or that Mary Magdalene at least was his intimate partner or consort that word has sexual overtones the quanon that they use there has overtones of being intimate partnership it says the companion the intimate companion of Jesus is Mary Magdalene and he used to kiss her often and the other Apostles are jealous of their intimacy it is said that uh Martin Luther at the time of the Reformation uh suggested that Jesus and Mary were married and there's some bits which make it extremely clear as to why the church did not want um these these books in the New Testament and I think it's the Gospel of Thomas disciples go to Jesus and they say Lord why do you love her more than you love us why are you always kissing her on the mouth and you think what do you think you fool you know um but and and the there's a lot of this in these for bidden books um and it made cve and I realize that um there was a lot more to the choosing of these Magdalene unfriendly gospels going into the New Testament than you might think um and also um Mary Magdalene is I actually believe and I know this is the most astonishing statement bold statement but I think she's the most important woman in the world in world history not for what she said or did particularly but because of the reason that the church fathers were so afraid of her image from these other gospels from The Forbidden gospels from what they knew they really knew what she was really like that she was powerful that Jesus loved her that Jesus almost certainly slept with her whether it was merely a ritual sort of sacred sex thing or it was the usual the usual passion um but they knew that she had power over him and they didn't want the women in their emerging churches getting upper and acting like her so they so they whole of History the way that the church has treated its women is actually because of their Terror of Mary Magdalene in Leonardo's Last Supper um this magdalin figure this very feminine figure um is leaning away from Jesus rather pointedly um and St Peter his his hand is slicing across her neck um and he's sort of staring at her or part slightly past her in this rather horrible way which is very interesting because in the Lost gospels that many of which have been recovered and translated one of the things that comes out very strongly is that St Peter hated Mary Magdalene Peter told her to shut up she didn't have any special Revelation and then another disciple Levi saying well heck if Jesus told us something special we ought to listen to it so that this back and forth is there in the nagadi texts so that you can sense some restiveness on the part of women over against the male hierarchy why would people have made up the Rivalry of Peter and Mary why would someone in that time period have written Peter as a jealous character um why would someone who was just writing a story have suggested that Jesus may have left his ministry and his work to Mary um what what about the worldview of that time would lead people to make that up if that was not their belief now I'm not saying that's what happened but I do think the people who wrote these things believed what they wrote and I find it very interesting that we have some of the these interesting little tidbits which I thoroughly emphasize are not contemporaneous historical documents but are written several hundred years later but it's still fascinating to think that people in 300 ad 400 ad were impugning motives of jealousy to Peter were talking about whether the church should be left to a woman we're talking about what this kiss is between Jesus and Mary and there's a lot of debate in one of the gospels he actually says to Jesus let Mary leave us for women are not are not worthy of life and in a later text it actually has her going to Jesus and saying Peter has threatened me he's threatened my life um he for he hates me and all the race of women and I think that's so interesting because that personal obviously clash of personalities um it prefigures what actually hap was to happen with the hugely misogynous Church of Rome and their notorious attitude to women um it started with its founder I think Mary Magdalene was the outstanding female disciple and that is very important particularly in our Latter day when women are not supposed to be ordained because none of the TW apostles were female uh well over against that there were women in the Inner Circle and this is very important well let me put it simply all of the 12 apostles were male all 12 were Jews all 12 lived in the Holy Land there wasn't a single Gentile Apostle nobody from Poland so what so that this is just pure Church propaganda and over against that we ought to emphasize that Jesus gave women a prominent role in his ministry there are records of women accompanying the male disciples uh and providing food and funds and Performing the rights that are reserved for women Mary magdalene's prominence is not at all surprising Dan Brown again through the D Vinci Code is calling our attention to facts like Mary Magdalene may have been um a partner in the creation of uh Christian belief she may have been the chosen follower of Jesus to be the Apostle to the apostles and so on um it may not have been so extraordinary in that time period to have had female religious leaders um there's nothing in the New Testament that uh says the priests should could be men there in fact is this rather unusual line which when you think about it starts to sound like it was inserted in there about Peter Upon This Rock I build my church like I think maybe you know the colleagues of Peter wanted to make sure that the legitimacy of Peter was put in there and why would they need to do that because maybe some people thought that Jesus intended to leave his his following to to Mary Mary Magdalene has of course been a big factor in the feminist movement the feminist have been eager to distance her from any taint as to her morality and to emphasize the importance she had for Jesus in his ministry Dan Brown does a very aan provocator job of presenting the notion that perhaps these anti-materialistic Jewish charismatic leaders Jesus Mary and the other early creators of Christianity uh had a very different worldview than the Romans of Constantine basically Pagan Sun worshippers who became the editors of the Christian Bible who became the decision makers about how Christianity should be practiced in Roman and Medieval Europe um very much divorced from the culture of the desert people to whom Jesus spoke so you know Dan Brown sets us all up for that discussion and debate and I think that people today find that a very interesting debate to engage in the feminists have been eager to distance her from any taint as to her morality and to emphasize the importance she had for Jesus in his ministry Dan Brown does a very aan provocator job of presenting the notion that perhaps these anti-materialistic Jewish charismatic leaders Jesus Mary and the other early creators of Christianity uh had a very different worldview than the Romans of Constantine basically Pagan Sun worshippers who became the editors of the Christian Bible who became the decision makers about how Christianity should be practiced in Roman and Medieval Europe um very much divorced from the culture of the desert people to whom Jesus spoke so you know Dan Brown sets us all up for that discussion and debate and I think that people people today find that a very interesting debate to engage in the other gospels that were basically banned um in the in the 4th Century U by the emerging Church who was trying to standardize its beliefs um these other gospels were were hidden um which actually is interesting because it makes them purer than the ones that we've had all the time that's been subjected endless you know editing and changing and and so on in 1958 a letter was discovered in a monastery near Jerusalem which had been written by Bishop Clement of Alexandria in which he requested the receiver of the letter Theodore to Omit two parts from The Book of Mark which were inconvenient to the Roman Catholic Church the first part was the part which describes Lazarus crying out from the tomb when in fact he was supposed to be according to our presid present version of the Bible dead if he was dead he obviously couldn't cry out what actually happened as far as Lazarus was concerned was that he had been excommunicated the rules for excommunication were that if you were not delivered within a period of 4 days then your soul was banished to Hell forever more on the third day Jesus Christ got to hear about this and was going to release Lazarus from this banishment of his soul and therefore restore him to life effectively the way that this story is depicted in the Bible is that Jesus Christ actually physically restored life to Lazarus his physical body whereas in fact it was his soul but Bishop Clement of Alexandria saw that this as being rather out of out of kilter with the rest of uh Christian belief the other part of the Gospel of Mark which uh the bishop Bishop Clement of Alexandria want had admitted was the part when Jesus and his disciples visit the house of Mary and Martha Mary is depicted as being hesitant in move in leaving the house what in fact happened was according to the original Book of Mark was that Mary actually stepped outside the house when Jesus Christ arrived the disciples told her to go back inside because women were only allowed to leave the house when their husbands gave them permission so this was another indication that in fact Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus Christ so I think that what we can say is that although Jesus was a person of his own day and age and uh we should not modernize him inappropriately still he was more open to the role of women in his activity than were his disciples and the hierarchy that gradually emerged of an all male kind when I went back to investigate the anointing I found that in the ancient cult it had sexual connotations and that the anointing by a woman was actually a marriage right in the ancient Cults of the sacrificed bridegroom King and in those Cults the anointing nuptuals occur the woman actually chooses her consort anoints him um they celebrate their Union in the bridal chamber and then their whole realm rejoices because the Joy from the bridal chamber spreads out into the crops and herds and so the whole nation celebrates um with the rituals celebrating this Union which is actually the life force that they're celebrating and they're not it's not just about male female but it's about the life force and the uh recycling of the nature the resurrection and then the dying off of vegetation it's a a whole vegetation cult but but it's uh celebrated in these ancient uh symbiosis celebrated I guess in Osiris and Isis that cult also tamuz and ishar deui and Nana way back in Sumer they had many many goddess couples which manifested this uh celebration of the recycling of life so when I realized that then I looked at the later ramifications in this cult the sac the bridegroom celebrates with his wife his bride his sister bride and then later he sacrificed mutilated tortured executed laid in a tomb usually after a pause of about 3 days he his bride goes to the tomb to seek him or to mourn his death and finds him resurrected and when I read these about these ancient goddess Cults I thought oh my goodness this is the same story the exact same story that we find in the gospels and everybody in Roman times knew it because the Roman Empire Still celebrated these Cults in various domains around the uh around the area and so they were all cognizant and I would recognize right away this liturgy really of the sacrifice brim the nuptuals the anointing and then later the uh death and Resurrection I was terribly shocked actually when I first discovered that Jesus was only one of many dying and Rising Gods um that proliferated and and had done for hundreds of years thousands of years before he was born in the general area of the Mediterranean there was dionisis tamos uh Adonis um there was of course the great Egyptian god Osiris um who most resembles Jesus in many respects or of course it's the other way around Jesus resembled Osiris um and Osiris was the consort of um the beautiful uh mother Goddess Isis who is also goddess of magic and sexual magic um and the priestesses of Isis would enact um they would become in in a holy ritual of sacred sex they would become the goddess and some chapping off the street would go into the temple and have sex with them and become the idea was they would actually the men would become spiritually enlightened simply by having sex with the Priestess who temporarily had become possessed by the goddess or became the goddess um and the interesting thing is that women wouldn't have to do the equivalent of this because women according to the Isis religion were were not only sexually enlightened but spiritually enlightened just by the very nature of being women totally the opposite of Christianity now you have Jesus the only dying and Rising God without who according to the Christian Church who doesn't have a consort who doesn't have a a magical feminine balancing presence but of course if you look at the The Forbidden gospels there she is uh and also very interestingly in the the story of the Risen Jesus more or less bumping into Mary Magdalene in the in the garden um and she doesn't recognize him through her tears and he says why are you weeping and she says they've taken my Lord and I don't know where they've put him and those that is actually the Assyrian mystery plays every year the worshippers of airis and Isis um enacted their mystery play um which where the God had actually been Torn to Pieces by his uh the wicked God set and his bits of his body have been scattered everywhere and Isis goes weeping throughout the land trying to find them and magically reassemble them and the priest says woman what Elsey why are you weeping and she said they've taken my Lord and I know not where they put him I mean it's Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt dying and Rising God myth and a lot of people have a lots of several Scholars and commentators have thought that there's so much paganism um and so much Egyptian ISM in um the New Testament but it must mean that basically Jesus never existed that he was just created um as a another dying and Rising God but there was absolutely no need to do that it was we think there is so much more evidence that shows that actually Jesus and Mary were all basically of that religion or an offshoot of that religion which may also tie in very closely with a very very ancient form of Judaism which was goddess worshiping the whole point to me is that there is only one model for life that really works on this planet and that's Union and so if you're not if you're not teaching that if you well what we have in Christianity is a celibate God and a virgin mother together in the bridal chamber no wonder we have a dysfunctional family it's incredible that a bottle like that would not produce some aberration and that's because when you when you have a fall it's As Above So Below [Music] well my impression of Constantine is a fascinating character in history and one who is not really very well understood a general student of the last 2,000 years of History if you've taken a world history class one has the impression that Constantine is this great guy who uh converts to Christianity who discovers the importance of Christ Christianity and brings Christianity to the Roman Empire it's unclear that Constantine ever converted to Christianity and if he did so probably was on his deathbed his greatest interest in Christianity apparently was aroused when he as a very superstitious Pagan found that some of his soldiers who were Christians who were carrying a cross on their Shield didn't die in battle and and weren't wounded and he became interested in what whether this cross had actually protected them or not um he said about expanding Roman power in that time period And I believe he and his advisers saw in Christianity and monotheism really uh a very powerful set of political ideas with which to unite the disperate uh Empire and he saw great potential in bringing together Emperor and Pope and being able to control a world stretching from Ireland to Turkey and Beyond um with a single belief system that found resonance with the populace and so finally Constantine wised up um he had an army the majority of who whose foot soldiers were Christians and they didn't want to fight a pagan Emperor's Wars they didn't want a fight to start with they were pacifists and so he had this convenient vision of a cross in the sky saying this is the sign in which you will conquer and he announced that good news to his soldiers most of whom were Christians and so they decided to fight and so Constantine had a fight F in Army and won the battle so that in a certain sense there are rather cynical realistic ways of understanding this whole process when Constantine was faced with the possibility of Christianity increasing its influence he jumped on the bandwagon in fact his father had jumped on the bandwagon before as a supporter of Christianity and one of the reasons was that the existing religions of the time which as Soul Invictus and mithraism had similarities to Christianity so all three could blend together into something which he could lead at the same time as satisfying the people Constantine saw the opportunity to blend all the religions together but at the same time he didn't want to change what had previously been the holidays of mithraism and Soul Invictus to the holidays which existed in Christianity previous to uh Constantine the date which celebrated Christ's birth was January the 6th but in order to pacify or in order to blend the religions further he brought about Christmas Day occurring on the 25th of December which was the old mithis and Solin victus celebration of The Rebirth of the sun he introduced a version of Christianity which also played on many of his Pagan beliefs and for example is thought that he was a worshipper of the Sun God mithos and it is thought that the sun god mithos in in uh that tradition's belief system has a birthday around the time of the winter solstice I.E around December 25th and as we all know there's nothing about December 25th in the New Testament then the next uh holiday had to deal with was Easter and in fact there was a celebration held under mithraism and Solen victory which was called a so he basically hijacked that Festival as well and brought about it celebrating the death and Rebirth of Jesus Christ the actual dating though of uh Easter as a permanent fixture they tried to sort out the Council of NAA but they weren't able to come to an agreement which is why we now have Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the ver Equinox the Roman interpretation of Christianity merges these ideas and these traditions and so we end up sometime in the post Constantine period of the church deciding that December 25th is you know in effect the birthday of Jesus Christ uh when there's no even suggestion or hint of that in biblical literature um when Dan Brown makes his suggestion that this great great cover up has gone on that these true early Christian beliefs have been replaced with all these Pagan ideas and Pagan symbols and Su God imagery um a lot of people get nervous uh and and become uh instinctively critical of The Da Vinci Code but I think Dan Brown's actually on a pretty good historical footing with some of these uh suggestions at least RIT large his detail may be wrong or maybe designed to serve um his fast-paced plot but the big picture question of how Constantine and subsequent Roman emperors reshaped Christianity to serve their own purpose of political theory for the Empire is a powerful and I think largely valid argument so he ordered that all documents referring to the gospels before the 4th Century which was the era in which he lived be destroyed whether they written by Pagan writers orever and the gospels were then Rewritten from this point onwards the four accepted gospels that are in the New Testament that everyone agrees are part of the New Testament uh Heritage all of the archaeologists serious independent biblical Scholars uh linguists Etc believe that those four documents were written at their earliest 30 or 40 years after the death of Jesus and at their latest perhaps 100 or 120 years after the death of Jesus so the The Landmark bright line test for whether something is true by biblical standards we have to remember when we look at these documents interesting as they are powerful as they are powerful as the story they tell is that they were all written written long after the fact um if we think about our own experience and we think what it would be like for my son or my grandson to describe for example I don't know the impeachment of Bill Clinton when we think how much people have forgotten about the impeachment of Bill Clinton just a few years after the fact imagine if that story were being written as contemporaneous history and eyewitness observation 70 years from now um so the gospels are interesting because they clearly do contain information that appears to be fact they're at odds with each other on a number of points um and they were clearly as Dan Brown suggests chosen from among many other accounts and someone most likely in the circle of Constantine from that time to the time of Pope Gregory three 300 years later someone or someone's went through an editing process and said these are in these are out these are Blasphemous these are heretical we don't want to hear about this line of reasoning and in most cases destroyed or burned the the heretical um alternative Scriptures it was basically as if the president of America rewrote American history to make it appear that he was the savior of America Constantine came to the conclusion rightly or wrongly that Jesus Christ the purpose of Jesus Christ was to liberate the Jewish people from the Roman occupation and in fact he had failed and Constantine's rationale was that he had actually saved Christians who were the descendants of the Jews or so he thought and it was he who was the new Christ and not Jesus Christ himself so he basically remodeled the religion based upon him the Knights Templar were a real historical organization every medieval historian will tell you that they did play a very powerful and important role during the Crusades they did occupy the Temple mount in Jerusalem for a period of years we don't know if they found the Holy Grail or anything else while they were occupying the Temple Mount we do know that they became very powerful uh we do know that they became the early Bankers to the church the early ambassadors of church power the early uh Guerilla Warriers of the Crusades the special forces the elite uh uh Delta squads um and we do know they became so powerful that they became a threat to Emperors of France and popes and eventually many of them were massacred the Knights Templar were the Playboys of the Middle Ages they everybody wanted to be a Knights Templar they had a fantastic reputation they basically had a lot of money they swaggered around they uh were able to cut their hair but they weren't able to cut their beards uh they fought to the last they were undefeatable in battle and they were ostens possibly the people who were supposed to guard the way to the Holy Land so pilgrims who were going there were protected by the knight's Templer in fact their agenda we can we are led to believe or we can believe was somewhat different what they did when they arrived in Jerusalem was basically take over the site of the of the Temple of Solomon and they their main remit was to find the treasure that they suspected had been hidden there that was their main intention they were fabulously rich in their own right Philip the far of France was very jealous of their power and their wealth in addition to being indebted to them to vast amounts the tune of vast amounts of money so on Friday the 13th of October 137 he arranged for all the Knights Templar throughout France to be exterminated at exactly the same time the plot against the Knights Templar um was probably planned in advance of course we know mainly orchestrated by the king of France Philip IV and um Pope Clement V they were both in power at the time and as the Templars were a religious order remember um the pope had a lot of say over their jurisdiction and the King it is now believed resented this and there was a bit of a severe power struggle um as the historical record shows between the two um King Philip IV clearly owed the templar's money um it is widely believed Now by historians he wanted their land and of course significant assets um so therefore that was one possible motivation um among others the threat of the power of the order of the temple by that time which was quite extensive King Philip had a bit of a problem convincing other kings in other countries about the guilt of the Templars because again they had been viewed as being very Pious austere devout um even fanatical Christian Martyrs for uh in the holy land and no one could simply believe that the this list of charges would apply to the Templars it was a shock it's as though we wake up today the front page of the the newspaper tabloid goes on about um every executive being rounded up for an international uh Banker organization suddenly without any prior warning we've often heard of the saying today um Friday the 13th unlucky for some and this saying is said to have arrived from the from the original arrest of the Knights Templar in 1307 and in fact on Friday the 13th at dawn um there was a very sudden raid on every no and Knight Templar in all of Europe in especially France and um this was a shock to everyone at the time um by and large it was um just found to be rather unbelievable that the powerful great Knights Templar could be guilty of such charges in the 19th century it is said it was said that the Knights Templar worshiped bamet who was the uh figure who became the icon of the Christian idea of of the devil whether or not this was true we don't know what we do know is that the leader of the knight's Templar Jac de mle who was burnt to death one he he made two statements as he was being fried on sticks first that uh all that the Knights Templar were guilty of was lying under torture and secondly that Philip the fair and the pope of the time who had brought about the extermination of the Knights Templar in France he would see them in death within the year and in fact both of them died before the year was [Music] out [Music]

Channel: Journeyman Pictures

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Length: 96min 7sec (5767 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023