Languedoc Topics
Mysteries of the Languedoc
The Legend of the Holy Grail
| According to books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
and The
Da Vinci Code the secret of the Holy Grail was known to the
Cathars,
to a secret society known as the Priory
of Sion, to the Knights
Templar, and to the Abbé
Bérenger Saunière, a French priest of Rennes-le-Château
in the South of France.
There has been much speculation about the mysterious items evacuated from Montsegur on the night before the Cathars there surrendered. It is known that the Cathars besieged there had already evacuated their material treasure long before, so what could these mysterious items be but a spiritual treasure. The bald fact is that we do not know. Even if it was a spiritual treasure, it may have been no more than a book or some manuscripts - perhaps one of the many gospels that the Roman Catholic Church had tried so hard to suppress for so many centuries. Perhaps even the original version of one of the canonical gospels, before it was elaborated by the mainstream Church, or one of the Gnostic Gospels known to the Early Christian Church.. We know that many Gnostic gospels existed and that the Catholic Church dedicate great efforts to finding and destroying them. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon points out that men of culture would burn their whole libraries rather than risk the ascendant Christians discovering a work of which they did not approve. Some of these books we knew of only because of surviving mainstream Christian denunciations of them. But some, like the Gospel of Thomas were rediscovered in the twentieth century. They had been buried in the desert, presumably by local monks in the fourth century when they were instructed to destroy all but the 27 books which we now know as the New Testament. Another, much less likely, spiritual treasure that might have been taken from Montsegur is the Holy Grail - the cup used by Jesus at the last supper. Against this theory is the fact that the Holy Grail seems to have been an invention of the Middle Ages - an invention that matched the supposed discovery of tens of thousands of other relics dating from biblical times. These relics are clearly bogus. Not a single one has been shown to be genuine, and none is more efficacious as a miracle worker than any other holy relic - such as the seven heads of John the Baptist, the eleven foreskins of Jesus, or the thousands of bones attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary - who, the Pope now assures us, was body assumed into heaven. One Theory, outlined in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is that the term Holy Grail is an error based on a medieval misreading. According to this theory, the Holy Grail is not the San Grale ("Holy Grail") but the Sang Real ("Royal Blood"), a reference to the royal blood of David and hence of Jesus and his progeny. According to this book, and the more recent novel the The Da Vinci Code, Jesus was maried to Mary Magdelene and their descendents became the Merovingian kings of France. Furthermore, the Priory of Sion was created to restore this royal line, assisted by its military and financialarm - the Knights Templars. The objectives of the Priory were supposedly:
Also according to this theory, the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of Jesus' dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars of the Languedoc and the Templars. They did this through the Crusades against the Cathars and by establishing the Inquisition. Their objective was to maintain their own power (claimed through the apostolic succession of Peter in contrast to the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene's children).
If you want to learn more about these questions from experts like Henry Lincoln, on location in the Languedoc, you might be interested in Templar Quest Tours. If you are more interested in the Cathars of the Languedoc, you might be more interested in Cathar Country Tours.
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Recommended Books
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