Product Description

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees which enabled 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 contraversialproportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village to all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than the Holy Grail.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78907 in Books
• Published on: 1996-07-10
• Released on: 1996-07-10
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .71 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh, authors of The Messianic Legacy, spent over 10 years on their own kind of quest for the Holy Grail, into the secretive history of early France. What they found, researched with the tenacity and attention to detail which befits any great quest, is a tangled and intricate story of politics and faith that reads like a mystery novel. It is the story of the Knights Templar, and a behind-the-scenes society called the Prieure de Sion, and its involvement in reinstating descendants of the Merovingian bloodline into political power. Why? The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail assert that their explorations into early history ultimately reveal that Jesus may not have died on the cross, but lived to marry and father children whose bloodline continues today. According to the authors, their point here is not to compromise or to demean Jesus, but to offer another, more complete perspective of Jesus as God's incarnation in man. They claim that the power of this secret, which has, they say, been carefully guarded for hundreds of years, has sparked much controversy. For all the sensationalism and hoopla surrounding The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and the alternative history which it outlines, the authors are careful to keep their perspective and sense of scepticism alive in its pages, explaining carefully and clearly how they came to draw such combustible conclusions. --Jodie Buller

About the Author
Michael Baigent graduated from Christchurch University, New Zealand. Richard Leigh followed up his degree from Tufts University, Boston, with postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago and Stony Brook New York State University. They are co-authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, The Messianic Legacy and The Temple and the Lodge. Henry Lincoln has been a writer for over twenty-five years, having produced more than 100 television scripts, as well as a body of poetry. He has lectured extensively, and is best known for the presentation of his own programmes on B.B.C television.