What I find particularly amusing is that Random House, who’s defending Brown in the suit, is also the publisher of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Nice situation, that, defending one of its authors from another one.
Nonsense. The first edition, the UK one, was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and it has been thus in every subsequent UK edition, including both the current ones, as well as for most of the Commonwealth editions. You’ll be telling us next that there were never books called Schindler’s Ark or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Actually, it isn’t. Sure, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln didn’t invent the whole Rennes-le-Chateau business, but what is often overlooked is their interpretation of the material was radically different from that of their French predecessors. The idea of the bloodline was there already, but only as a descent from the Merovingian kings. Which is unsurprising, given that, in inventing most of it, this was all that Plantard (& co.) ever wanted to claim. No one before Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln took the step of then speculating that this bloodline extended back to Jesus. Similarly, the sangrael/sang-real idea wasn’t new either, but, crucially, it had never been applied to theories of an actual bloodline. Whatever else that can be said about them, there is no doubt that Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln did come up with a genuinely new idea. A fact that, for obvious reasons, always gets glossed over by those who would have us believe that they had unearthed a great secret passed down the centuries.
And it’s not the facts or even the interpretation that the lawyers for Baigent and Leigh are claiming can be copyrighted. Hence all the stress on the ‘architecture’ of the argument. (Yes, they’re almost certainly going to lose, but that doesn’t mean that their lawyers haven’t taken some care in choosing the ground on which to fight.)
Incidentally, one assumes that Brown will have already offered them very large sums of money to go away. But, as always, it’s the publicity they want.
Interesting. I actually own a copy of the thing (I bought it, read it and dismissed it as bunk long before the Da Vinci code ever came out) and it’s just called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I had no idea it had a different title in the UK.
I find that doubtful. I’ve no cites (I’ll try and dig up some) but I’ve read several books which talk of a bloodline from Jesus and the marriage to Mary Magdalene. You admit that the sangrael/sang real idea is not new. What do you think the ‘holy blood’ was referring to if not the bloodline of Jesus?
Not definitive, but here’s one site which speaks of early gnostice teachings involving a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene:
{i}There is a plethora of myths and legends in the oral tradition of Sophian Gnosticism, including various myths concerning the Holy Grail. In the Sophian Gospel, this holy relic is not created by Joseph of Arimathea, but by St. Mary Magdalene. While some stories speak of the Grail as an actual cup in which Mary caught some of the blood and water flowing from the side of the Savior, others clearly speak of Mary herself as the Holy Grail. This idea plays out in a number of different ways.
There certainly are teachings that tell us Jesus and Mary conceived a child through their sacred marriage, and that tell us about the mystery of the Sangreal as the lineage of the royal blood-line that followed.*
I’ll try ro find out which gnostic texts he’s referring to.
I don’t think the gnostic writers do actually spell it out, but the notion of a marriage between Jesus and Magdalene was certainly current in the early church.
"Hippolytus, a Christian leader from the late 2nd Century, was followed by Origen in the 3rd Century in saying that the Song of Solomon was a prophecy of a marital union between Christ and Mary Magdalene. "
It’s frustrating, because I know I read a couple of books in the 60s/70s which speculated on this marriage and tied the resultant issue to the Merovingian dynasty.
Memory, of course, “don’t amount to a hill of beans” but I’m sure it wouldn’t take much digging for the lawyers for Dan Brown to come up with specific books.
Robert Graves had to answer criticisms that his novel I, Claudius was just a rewriting of Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars.
For a nanosecond, I thought it might be Robert Anton Wilson. (Dan Brown’s pap is largely his work restated without irony or humour.)
Then I remembered that Bob is about as likely to do something so petty and classless as it is that Leonardo painted the Madonna of the Rocks from life, based on memories of his astral travels to the Sea of Tranquility.
Or Umberto Eco, for that matter, if you substitute “talent and artistry” for “irony and humor.”
But yeah, RAW would never do anything like that. He seemed bemused that the X Files occasionally borrowed from him, but never did anything about it.
Aye. (Although Foucault’s Pendulum’s plot bears an astonishing resemblance to Illuminatus! – not that it’s plagiarized, it’s just one of those eerie things that propogates itself throughout the noosphere. 
)
That some had previously proposed that Jesus had some sort of relationship with Mary Magdalene is, of course, very well-known and is not in dispute. But that is not the same as proposing a bloodline.
Like everyone else who thinks that ‘sang real’ is not the origin of the word ‘sangraal’, I don’t think that ‘holy blood’ refers to anything at all. It’s just an incorrect etymology.
But most of those who had previously touted the theory had interpreted it as a Eucharistic metaphor. Does one really have to point out that blood has a multiplicity of associations in Western Christianity, not least in Roman Catholicism? Given this, the idea that ‘sang real’ referred to a bloodline was so unobvious that it simply never occured to those earlier writers.
When I first heard of The Da Vinci Code, I thought, first, “Oh, so somebody’s written a bullshit novel based on that bullshit “nonfiction” book Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, and second “Shouldn’t that be The Leonardo Code?”
Accuracy wasn’t a premium for Dan Brown!
What occurs to me is that the writers of HBHG are total ingrates. How many copies of their book sold because Brown cited it?
And how many more will buy it because this lawsuit is now in the news? Anyways, assuming the judge isn’t an idiot and shoots it down, the suit won’t hurt Brown one bit, but will in fact probably help out the movie version at the box office. Everyone wins.
“This is paint.” “No! It’s blood! Holy Blood!”
-Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sante Sangre
IMHO, this is more of a homage than a smoking gun.
**Rucksinator[/B writes:
Pssst! The very second sentence of post #2:
Does this mean Garth Ennis needs to be on the lookout for a lawsuit as well?
I don’t care what Dan Brown says or what his lawyers “prove” in court- I will never accept that The Da Vinci Code is a memoir rather than a novel.
Oh man, you’re not gonna sue me, are you?