GoKawiilThe Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published by Jonathan Cape in Britain on January 18, 1982. Delacorte released an American edition five weeks later, under the punchier title of simply Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Sales were strong right out of the gate, and in time the book grew into something of a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Taken only on its literary merits, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was an unusually well-crafted example of its pseudo-historical breed, but that was only a prerequisite to success, not a guarantee. In other ways, its success was a case of excellent timing, as media sensations always tend to be. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, the biggest movie by far of 1981, had told the story of a two-fisted archeologist on the trail of the legendary Ark of the Covenant, the vessel in which the Ten Commandments had supposedly been kept after Moses brought them down from Mount Sinai. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had much the same spirit about it, even if its legendary artifact proved to be a bait and switch in the end, being secret knowledge rather than a physical object.
Britain was just exiting an extended obsession with Masquerade, a lavishly illustrated puzzle book by a heretofore obscure artist named Kit Williams that could allegedly be used by the sufficiently motivated to reveal the location of a “golden hare” that had been hidden somewhere in the country. Also a Jonathan Cape book, Masquerade had left the British public primed for more of exactly the sort of obscure and intricate riddles in which the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail loved to lose themselves. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Day-Glo, “greed is good” 1980s America remembered by 21st-century popular culture was still a year or more away at the beginning of 1982, with the economy still struggling to exit an ugly recession. What better way to escape day-to-day troubles than by immersing oneself in the distant past and dreaming of the possibility of a Merovingian savior still to come?
In the United States, Delacorte’s cautious initial print run of 45,000 copies sold out within days, leaving the publisher scrambling to get more off the press. The book never topped the bestseller charts, but it hung around the lower reaches of the non-fiction top ten — operating on a fairly generous definition of “non-fiction,” of course — for months on end, selling steadily while the books above it came and went. In that chicken-or-the-egg equation that often holds sway with trends, bookstores that had at first simply shelved The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in their history section rushed to set up floor and window displays as the months went by and its sales showed no sign of slackening. Newspapers ran feature articles about what was now being called a “phenomenon” on their front pages. Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent became in-demand guests on television and radio. Lincoln in particular was markedly ebullient in these appearances. And why shouldn’t he be? He had managed to make his idiosyncratic vision of history a vital part of modern pop culture, not only in his home country but in the biggest media market on the planet; he had come a long way indeed from semi-anonymously penning workaday episodes of Doctor Who.
Exactly one year after the hardback, Delacorte launched the paperback edition of Holy Blood, Holy Grail with an initial print run of half a million copies. The book was by now being translated into a dozen languages, including French. It would sell well into the millions before the 1980s were over, making Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent enviably wealthy men.
All of this ignited a scramble in the press to figure out What It All Means, beyond the mere fact of the book being “controversial” and “provocative.” Catholic bishops, Protestant theologians, and professional secular historians found themselves in rare agreement when they said that the book was shoddy history, growing out of supposition and insinuation rather than proven fact, in addition to being “an attack on the very core of Christianity and the Christian ethos.” But even some of these folks had to give some measure of grudging credit to the compelling way the book was put together. Novelist Anthony Burgess of Clockwork Orange fame unwittingly forecast the future when he wrote that “it is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel,” thereby thrilling Richard Leigh, who had long held Burgess up as one of his literary heroes. As oblivious to irony as ever, he and his partners explained in a new foreword written for the paperback edition that
it was significant, and not just coincidental, that the most sympathetic responses to our book seemed to come from literary figures — from important novelists like Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, and Peter Vansittart. For, unlike the professional historian, the novelist is accustomed to an approach such as ours. He is accustomed to synthesizing diverse material, to making connections more elusive than those explicitly preserved in documents. He recognizes that truth may not be confined only to recorded facts but often lies in more intangible domains — in cultural achievements, in myths, legends, and traditions; in the psychic life of both individuals and entire peoples. For the novelist knowledge is not subdivided into rigid compartments, and there are no taboos, no “disreputable” subjects. History is not for him something frozen, something petrified into periods, each of which can be isolated and subjected to a controlled laboratory experiment. On the contrary it is for him a fluid organic and dynamic process wherein psychology, sociology, politics, art, and tradition are interwoven in a single seamless fabric. It was with a vision akin to that of the novelist that we created our book.
The most amusing response came from Pierre Plantard. The idea that the Merovingian kings were the direct descendants of Jesus Christ had never been a part of his agenda; it had sprung entirely from the mind of Henry Lincoln as he fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole during the 1970s. It turned out that, while Plantard was perfectly happy to be labeled the scion of a legendary French dynasty awaiting reinstatement to his throne, the suggestion that he was a literal demigod with the divine blood of Jesus himself coursing through his veins was a step too far even for his prodigious ego. “How can you prove a heritage of four centuries from Jesus to the Merovingians?” he asked on a French radio show. “I have never put myself forward as a descendant of Jesus Christ.”
Plantard would now begin to distance himself from Lincoln and his friends and the full-fledged cottage industry in conspiracy that their book would spawn. And this would in turn have an important effect on said industry. Deprived of its one tangible living link to its preferred version of the past, it would drift yet further away from real history toward castles in the air built out of magical geometry and New Age mysticism. There would be no really new evidence to point to, whether forged or genuine, issuing from Plantard or anyone else; nor would the Priory of Sion show any sign of emerging from hiding like the Phoenix to forge a better or at least different world order, as was mooted at the end of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. New theories about Rennes-le-Château and the holy bloodline would have to be arrived at by churning endlessly through the same old data points to arrive at new juxtapositions.
That the conspiracy was already reaching a point of diminishing returns was made manifest by the inevitable sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Published in 1987, Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent’s The Messianic Legacy had some of what had made its predecessor so alluring, but not enough of it. It endeavored to fill in the gaps of the story by embellishing both the pre- and post-Medieval stages of the secret history. After a lengthy, readable, and surprisingly accurate description of ancient Palestine and the most likely versions of an historical Jesus Christ, the conspiracy theories came back to the fore. The Freemasons were added to the list of secret societies privy to the great secret, and the Mafia and CIA were given roles to play, as was the Guardian Assurance Company, the biggest insurance firm in Britain during the peak years of empire. (Who says that insurance is boring?) “Those who believe in global conspiracies will enjoy the intrigue; others may be rightfully amused,” wrote Publishers Weekly, not even pretending to take any of it seriously anymore. The book sold well by the usual standards of its kind, but nothing like the first book had sold. This is the great drawback of enjoying such a singular success: the fact that it is so singular, that everything you do afterward is destined to pale in comparison. The first book may have spawned a cottage industry that would persist for decades, but in a broader cultural context its moment seemed to have passed.
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