Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32302 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 614 pages

Synopsis
A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees, which enables him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The author's conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material riches, but a secret - a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than...the Holy Grail.

From the Publisher
"One of the most important and thought-provoking works to appear in recent years." The New Humanity

From the Back Cover
The most shattering secret of the last two thousand years

The first publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982 sparked off a storm of controversy that continues to this day.The enigma: a discovery at Rennes-le-Château that offers little in the way of material wealth, but whose secret rocked the foundations of contemporary politics and the Christian faith.The players: the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago.The conclusion: as persuasive, controversial and explosive as it was when first published over twenty years ago.The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is not just a classic of its kind, it’s a book that’s impossible to put down.

‘All the ingredients of a classic 19th-Century mystery novel…a book that will be hotly denounced and widely read’ Financial Times

‘Has all the ingredients of an international thriller…incredible’ Newsweek

Customer Reviews

Amusing rubbish
Consider this: Leigh and Baigent sued Dan Brown and his publishers because The Da Vinci Code was ripping off their ideas of Jesus having been married etc. It seems to me you can only do this when your own book is fiction as well -- and so it is.

I found it a tedious read, and offering no proof that Jesus was ever married. No decent scholar these days would make that claim: there is simply no proof whatsoever, anywhere. The 3 authors decided what the conclusion was going to be and then set out to find the "evidence" to fit their thesis -- guys, this is not how it works.

It baffles me that such total rubbish pretending to be serious research is bought by people.

Semi-Entertaining work of "Fiction"
Having been only a toddler when this first came out in 1982 I missed out on all the controversy back then. To be honest, having read the book now, I can't see what all the fuss was, and still is, about.

This is pseudo-history, plain and simple. The authors throughout state that this is where the evidence has taken them, even reluctantly. However, one gets the impression that the authors know where they are going from the start, and are making their conclusions fit the evidence. This evidence, it should be noted, includes hypotheses that later on become facts. Similarly, questions which they pose themselves, and are rarely answered, later on become a basis for further "facts" upon which to build their hypotheses.

This is mildly entertaining though, hence the three stars. The bits about freemasonry, grail romances and the links, however tenuous, between the so-called Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, is pretty mundane reading. The book only gets interesting, for me, when it looks in to the gospels, the last section of the book.

As we now know, the Priory of Sion, with its "Dossiers Secrets" was a hoax, and it is apparent that the authors fell for it.

In conclusion I'd recommend it to anyone interested in this sort of topic, but take it with a pinch of salt.

Mind boggling - until you realise it was all a hoax
I read this book in the early 90's when I was a student and it's adventurous musings completely blew me away.

UNFORTUNATELY...

BBC2's Chronicle, if memory serves the programme the author's worked on when they unearthed the books 'mysteries' and hit the big time, did a follow up programme years later and discovered that Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (and Chronicle for that matter) had been had big time. The creepy little French bloke claiming to lead the Prieure De Sion (or however it's spelt) - and therefore by extension was a blood relative of Jesus Christ himself - was actually a professional con man who saw Baigent and Leigh coming a mile off and fed them just enough information to string them along for years!!!

Baigent and Leigh refused to accept the evidence (and well they might because it made them look like complete pratts, not to mention threatening their cash cow) but the evidence was pretty damning. As for all their subsequent speculations concerning the Dead Sea scrolls and their radical reinterpretations of the bible, that mostly turned out to be the result of inept research combined with three extremely vivid imaginations.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted! And at least they made a lot more money out of it than the conman!!!