In interviews, he's said all sorts of things are "true":
That there are well established folk legends saying that Mary Magdalen came to the south of France with the Grail and/or with her daughter Sara (there aren't - there is a legend that two of the other Mary from the Bible came to the south of France with their dark-skinned, Egyptian servant girl named Sara).
That the "Dossiers Secret" that he found in the Bibliotheque National that discuss the connection of the Merovingian bloodline to Jesus and mane the leaders of the Priory of Sion are legitimate documents (they aren't - and the people who invented them and put them in the Bibliotheque National have actually acknowledged doing so in public).
That there is no possible other historical reason known to historians for the Templars becoming so rich and powerful and then being exterminated by Phillip IV other than that they were in possession of documents proving that Mary and Jesus had a daughter (most historians note that the Templars were often given gifts of land by nobles they protected in the Holy Land, and also invented international banking, which would tend to make on rather rich, and that they were destroyed, like several other groups of people at the time, because Phillip owed them huge amounts of money and couldn't pay them back).
And so on and so on - those are just the first three examples that come to the top of my head. He presents the premise behind his novel as if all of the historical circumstances in it were supported by historical fact. It annoys me greatly.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-05-14 06:22 pm (UTC)That there are well established folk legends saying that Mary Magdalen came to the south of France with the Grail and/or with her daughter Sara (there aren't - there is a legend that two of the other Mary from the Bible came to the south of France with their dark-skinned, Egyptian servant girl named Sara).
That the "Dossiers Secret" that he found in the Bibliotheque National that discuss the connection of the Merovingian bloodline to Jesus and mane the leaders of the Priory of Sion are legitimate documents (they aren't - and the people who invented them and put them in the Bibliotheque National have actually acknowledged doing so in public).
That there is no possible other historical reason known to historians for the Templars becoming so rich and powerful and then being exterminated by Phillip IV other than that they were in possession of documents proving that Mary and Jesus had a daughter (most historians note that the Templars were often given gifts of land by nobles they protected in the Holy Land, and also invented international banking, which would tend to make on rather rich, and that they were destroyed, like several other groups of people at the time, because Phillip owed them huge amounts of money and couldn't pay them back).
And so on and so on - those are just the first three examples that come to the top of my head. He presents the premise behind his novel as if all of the historical circumstances in it were supported by historical fact. It annoys me greatly.