A MESSIANIC BLOODLINE?

A MESSIANIC BLOODLINE?
THE GODS OF MEN, Part II:
Míceál Ledwith.

When I began this series of three articles on the relationship of Jesus to women I had not realized that the movie "Bloodline" would be released half way through. I have not yet seen the film but I have researched everything available on it thoroughly and am concerned to see some indications that the documentation claimed to be part of the discoveries on which the movie is based appears to be fraudulent. By that I mean I cannot see how they could have been written by a person whose native language was French, much less by an educated man such as the Abbe of Rennes-le-Chateau, Bérenger Saunière.

That being said, the courage of the movie makers in undertaking a work such as this has to be recognized. If there were ever shark-infested waters in relation to the reality and significance of Jesus, this is it, for it touches on many issues that have been for centuries, not just matters of acute sensitivity, but of absolute taboo. As a result the potential for controversy is of course almost incalculable, depending on the degree of credence that may be attached to whatever findings may emerge. For millions of believers any findings that might possibly come from an investigation such as this will inevitably conflict with the picture of Jesus that they have always taken for granted, and, as they see it, will conflict to its detriment. Precisely for those reasons it is essential that every step in such an investigation be scrutinized with the utmost care.

Nothing is needed more than some clarity on the controversial discussion of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. If as a result of this investigation evidence to vindicate the existence of some special personal relationship between them were to appear, many would react with horror, and yet many others would feel it sets Jesus in a much better light. Whatever about that, undoubtedly establishing such a relationship would do a great deal to redress the subjugation and inferiority in which all the religions, east and west, have held women for so long.

Initially I was somewhat surprised that the movie was made before the tomb could be fully investigated, but perhaps it was felt the investigation might be stopped prematurely and that tactically it was best to get something provisional into the public arena. . However I am concerned that the trend of this provisional investigation which the Bloodline documentary has now launched might be inspired by a concern to show Jesus was not all he was cracked up to be. In short if you believe the only function of Jesus was to be 'the suffering Savior" who came here and died for our sins so as to appease the vengeance of a savage God against us, then to discover his bones rotting in a tomb beside his wife, would of course be the ultimate catastrophe.

The truth of course is rather that Jesus is much more than he was ever cracked up to be throughout most of Christian history. This is where the real problem lies, as I am concerned that that perspective might be lost sight of by the Rennes-le-Chateau investigation. If it just tries to correct the conventional picture of Jesus as the dying and resurrected savior and highlights his relationship to Mary Magdalene, then the true picture of what Jesus was really all about will have been ignored. What Jesus really was about is far more fundamental even than whether he rose from the dead, or any relationship he may or may not have had with Mary Magdalene

If a scientific archeological investigation of this site were to be undertaken, and some finds were made of a body or bodies therein that proved to be of ancient near-eastern provenance, there would still remain the enormous difficulties of being able to definitively connect these remains with either Jesus or Mary Magdalene.

But to play the Devil's Advocate for a while, let's assume that eventually the Rennes-le-Chateau investigation is able to surmount all of these major difficulties, and that it was scientifically credible that the body of Jesus was in this tomb, then where would that leave us? Obviously we would have to say in that case that what all of those Christians down the centuries believed about Jesus was not true, because for them he is God's only begotten Son, sent down here by God the Father, to suffer and die for our sins so as to appease God's anger against us. And on the third day God raised him from the dead to vindicate him. If his body is in some tomb in the south of France, (or elsewhere), then the Resurrection on the first Easter morning did not happen, and there would be severe knock-on destructive effects for several other major Christian doctrines as well. In short, in the phrase I used above, Jesus would no longer be all he was cracked up to be, or as the catch-phrase would be likely to express it: "He was not divine."

To make such a statement would of course reveals two things: Firstly, if you say "Jesus is not divine because he did not rise from the dead," then, since presumably you can't lose your divinity if you ever had it, you must be assuming that the resurrection is what made Jesus divine. Conventional Christian doctrine has never claimed that the resurrection made Jesus divine. In the church's terms that would be heresy of the highest order for after nearly found hundred years of painful controversy and disagreement it formally asserted that Jesus was both divine and human from the first moment of his conception. Likewise the Church's doctrine has never claimed that Jesus raised his own body from the dead. The Church's position has always been that it was the God the Father who raised him.

So, even on the Church's own terms, whether Jesus rose or did not rise from the dead could not have anything to do with his divinity, only with what action God the Father deemed appropriate or not.

So if the body of Jesus were to be found in some grave somewhere is this a disaster for the reality of Jesus? By no means. Presumably what Jesus was before he ever took on that human body is still alive and well in dimensions beyond this physical one and is not in any way affected by what might be left in a grave. And with all due respect to St. Paul, our faith would not therefore be in vain, and the same holds true for us and our bodies.

If we realized that we also are alive and well in some other dimension after we lay off the physical form, such as the phenomenon of orbs shows us, then we would have been spared all those bizarre attempts to explain how our own bodies would be resurrected at a stage called "The Last Day" or some other time, in order to imitate the resurrection of Jesus. We know our bodies in the normal renewal processes of cellular growth are totally replaced over the course of every seven year period approximately in our lives, so that during an average lifetime we have had maybe ten or more bodies. With which body are we to be resurrected; the first, the last, or with all ten?

Not to mention that awkward fact that if tragically I lost a limb in World War II, Korea, Vietnam or Iraq, and it was atomized in some explosion there, how is it going to be reunited with me perhaps countless centuries afterwards in North America at the resurrection of my body? The logistics for whoever would have to take care of such things in the higher dimensions would be enormous, to be outdone in difficulty only by the amount of mental gymnastics on our part needed to accommodate the explanations we have invented for such beliefs.

Perhaps we should begin to suspect something has gone wrong when we are faced with such a paraphenalia of explanations that are byzantine in their complexity (and increasingly incredible to thinking people today). Maybe it's an indication that the whole matter became so complex for the simple reason we made a serious error in understanding what actually happened, and now we all find ourselves involved in an exercise that basically amounts to trying to square the circle. It's time to cut the Gordian Knot.

In short, to return to our main question and where all this relates to Jesus himself, the touchstone of the divinity of Jesus is not whether he resurrected on not on the first Easter Day, and neither did the church's doctrinal teaching ever maintain that it was. The Rennes-le-Chateau investigation would do well to clarify its thoughts on that position, and the Christian tradition would also do well to perform a reality check on what its own official beliefs actually are on this matter.

Secondly, if you say "The body of Jesus is still in this tomb, therefore he was not divine," you do not understand what 'divine' really means either. If the reality of Jesus the Christ is central to my life is that because he rose from the dead after suffering and dying for my sins? I don't think so, because that would imply that God went to the trouble of devising an incarnation of his beloved only Son only so he would be able to suffer an excruciating passion and death to appease God's anger and thirst for vengeance and let us off the hook. There's a lot that could be said about such a view, but suffice it to say for now that such a God could have nothing in common with the God that Jesus preached, nor by implication with what Jesus was.

Jesus did not come here to suffer and die for our sins, but for something much more wonderful and magnificent: to unveil the eternal in the heart of every man and woman and to show us how to access it. If we do that he promised we would do all the wonders that he did and greater. He did not come to be worshipped, but to lead. Jesus deserves to be central in a person's life because he came here to unveil the eternal that lies at the heart of every man and woman who ever walked on this earth. In brief, he came here to reveal that you too could, among other things, walk on water, heal the sick at a touch, raise the dead, and multiply food out of thin air. He taught that it could all be done from the Kingdom of Heaven which is not in some far distant dimension, but within us all. If that potential were brought into realization in us all, then most assuredly there would be an end to all "weeping and crying and sorrow" in this world, as the New Testament itself puts it. That is surely a far grander motive for the God who sent Jesus here, than to engineer out of a thirst for vengeance the torture and death of his blameless only Son.

So I say that if you can walk on water, heal the sick from incurable diseases at a touch, raise the dead, and produce food directly out of the quantum field into physical reality, then you richly deserve the description "divine." Why? Because If you can do such things then assuredly it must be because you have been able to bring into realization in the physical realm here, the power of the Zero Point Energy Field, which is how the scientists appear to be more at ease in referring to God. So if I were to be asked "Is Jesus divine?" my answer would be an emphatic affirmative. That answer would still stand even if his body were to be found at Rennes-le-Chateau, (or in any of the six other places that have also claimed to have his tomb) because allowing your physical body to live or die voluntarily is a matter of choice for such a being, with no further implications beyond that.

But we can go further and ask if the death and resurrection was actually in the original message about Jesus, at least in the form we now know? Two of the brothers of Jesus were among his group of close associates known as "The Twelve" in those days, now more familiar to us now as "the Apostles." Two documents written by his brothers are in the New Testament. They do not mention the death and resurrection. Don't you think they would have if those elements were as central to what he was as we are now led to believe? In fact in the New Testament Jude Thomas warns about introducing new things that were not in the original message. The Gospel of Thomas, (also written by Jude Thomas who was his twin brother), did not make it into the New Testament, but that Gospel does not mention the death and resurrection either.

JESUS, MARY MAGDALENE AND RENNES-LE-CHATEAU

Twenty five years ago Donovan Joyce was the first person in modern times to postulate that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child with her ("The Jesus Scroll," 1973). It hadn't been heard of in any notable way since the time of the Valentinians in the second century. Andreas Faber-Kaiser a few years later ("Jesus Died in Kashmir," 1977) said that Jesus had several children with a woman in Kashmir and was buried there. The book carried an interview with an individual who claimed descent from that couple and who was the current custodian of the famous Jesus Tomb in Srinigar. "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" five years later asserted that some of the descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene eventually became the Merovingian Dynasty. Allied to this the 2000 book "Rex Deus" stated that a Jesus Bloodline was part of a dynasty called "Rex Deus" ('God King'), that descended from 24 priests of the Jerusalem Temple and Jesus himself. Last year "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" was produced by James Cameron of "Titanic" fame, and Simon Jacobovici, which said that what is known as the Talpiot Tomb near Jerusalem was likely to be the Jesus family tomb and that it contains his bones and that of Mary Magdalene. The "Bloodline" movie claims that this tomb near Rennes-le-Chateau may well contain not just the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene but also a cache of what might be Templar treasure or the fabled treasure of Blanche of Castile, (Queen and Regent of the Crusader Louis VIII of France, and granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitane).

Rennes–le-Chateau today.

The Bloodline movie focuses on the person of Bérenger Saunière, priest of Rennes-le-Chateau, who died in April 1917. Rennes is an ancient place steeped in history and shrouded in mystery. Maybe it is because of Saunière's activities that much of Rennes-le-Chateau's past was resurrected a century ago. However, it is with some regret that I see its notoriety today linked so prominently with his name as he would probably be a relatively unknown figure were it not for the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and the flock of conspiracy theories that have been spawned as a result of their work around Rennes le Chateau.

According to the makers of "Bloodline" this movie is based on a series of discoveries made near Rennes-le-Chateau. In 1995 the English Researcher Ben Hammott (The Tomb Man) accidentally dropped his camera into a hole in a cave near Rennes-le-Chateau. When he managed to recover the camera later he discovered it had taken pictures of what seemed like a Templar Tomb.

There seemed to be a body inside as well as a substantial amount of ancient treasure. He returned to the site and took some better footage.

Hammott came back to the tomb in 2007 accompanied by the American film producer Bruce Burgess (well know for his interest in the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot and Area 51), and a better quality movie was made. I have not yet seen the movie but have researched any information available on it from the film's extensive website and the various media reports and reviews that have appeared.

According to a press release by the film makers the find was reported to the French Archeological Authority of Montpellier, "Direction Regionale des Affaires Culturelle - DRAC. The person the Bloodline people spoke to was a Jean-Pierre Giraud.

According to the reports circulating the DRAC authorities say that Bruce Burgess and Ben Hammott showed them a section of film and asked if they would like to see the tomb. Seeing that that is what DRAC is there for they readily agreed. Bruce Burgess and Ben Hammott agreed to take them there but in the event it seems they didn't return to do so. The DRAC authorities believe the filmmakers only came to them to get a quotation for the film and no more. Apparently the French authorities are angry and convinced the whole thing is a hoax. It is hard to sort out rumor and fact always in such situations and I am sure only time will clarify what is exactly the situation or what may have developed since.

DIFFICULTIES ABOUT THE DOCUMENTS

In the movie Ben Hammott claims in his searches around Rennes-le-Chateau to have discovered a series of hidden bottles with messages inside deposited by Fr. Bérenger Saunière a century or so ago. Apparently he was confessing in the bottle messages to a serious crime committed to hide an even graver secret: that he was implicit in the murder of another local priest to prevent something being revealed.

The first bottle contains a piece of paper that claims to have the signature of Bérenger Saunière.

Sauniere was an erudite man who wrote good French in an elegant hand. This alleged signature has the wrong form of accent on his family name. (Some have said that there are other signatures of Sauniere extant that do have the wrong accent?). In French it is essential to put accents in their proper places - an incorrect or missing accent is a spelling mistake just as much as an incorrect or missing letter would be in English. In the signature of Sauniere which the "Bloodline" team discovered, the second last "e" in his family name has an accent "aigu" over it, which leans forwards. accent 'grave" which leans backwards. It is difficult to believe that a cultured Frenchman would make this sort of mistake, least of all about his own family name. Sauniere was an impatient and energetic man; sometimes in his haste the accent appears in some other samples of his signature as a mere dot, but it is difficult to imagine he would mix up the accents entirely in his own name. It is interesting to note that this signature with the faulty accent was not shown to the British handwriting expert Emma Bache when the Bloodline team consulted her about authenticating the messages. However, the signature apparently was shown to Antoine Captier a researcher of Rennes-le-Chateau, who condemned it as a forgery. The join between the 'a' and the 'n' is also untypical of other signatures of Sauniere that are extant, which is a further difficulty with this specimen.

In the Latin text on this piece of paper "occulttus" is incorrectly spelled with two 't's, as if you were to spell movie as "movvie." Hardly something Sauniere would do either.

Three or four more bottles were discovered by Ben Hammott with messages inside. Mistakes have been pointed out in the French phrases of those messages.

This is not real French but at least at first sight appears to be a very amateurish attempt, probably by an English speaking person, to translate the statement that Jesus did not die on the cross, but 22 days later. Bruce Burgess is asked to translate the document on the program, and he reads an English text that is different from what is being shown on the screen, which focuses on the fact that Jesus did not die on the cross but 22 days later and that the church has tried to keep this hidden.

The coins and other artifacts allegedly from the treasure trove that are produced to authenticate the find are genuine, but it has to be recognized that these are not unique items but ones that could probably be purchased from a specialized dealer in antiquities.

Perhaps all of these issues can be answered satisfactorily and any ambiguities resolved so that message can go out with all clarity, and I'm sure we all want to see the truth of the situation revealed, nothing more. But for now unfortunately there remain serious doubts about the authenticity of those parchments on which the significance of the entire find hinges. I do believe these written clues or at least the ones I've seen, are faked. By that I mean they could hardly have come as is claimed, from Bérenger Saunière. But of course if someone wanted to fake clues, it does not necessarily mean that what the clues are supposed to lead to is also a fake. The archeological investigation will solve that one. But if the clues are faked but lead to a find that is not faked but genuine, other tantalizing questions begin to surface. Who laid the clues and why?

When I first saw the very basic mistakes in French in those documents, and more so the English idiom in which some of the French is couched, I began to wonder if the Bloodline people were being led up the garden path so that the rug could be pulled from under them right when their movie had reached the zenith of its fame? That would successfully bury for a long time the significance of Rennes-le-Chateau and what it might tell us about Jesus himself, and about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Needless to say there is no shortage of powerful agencies who might possibly have a vested interst in doing that.

Or could the explanation be that a certain group wanted this information to come out now so that the tomb could be discovered and studied and that building on the legend of Bérenger Saunière they laid these clues? It is not too hard to find old paper or old ink if you have the right contacts. And could it be that that group was actually within one or some of the traditional relgious structures, which as Bishop Jack Spong said are now experiencing serious difficulties, and may even be on their last legs? What could better be calculated to inject new life into such an aged structure than to now reveal that we, this enlightened group, were at the heart of this organization all the time, and knew all of this information, but could not let it out because people were not ready to hear it until now. Of course that would be ironic seeing that one of the main reasons why people might not be ready is because of centuries of suppression by those very same organizations, but it could easily fuel another thousands years of life for such a beleagured organization.

As stated earlier Rennes-le-Chateau is an ancient and mysterious place and I give great weight to the fact that in May of each year at the little town of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, the European gypsies come to celebrate the arrival there of Mary Magdalene and her daughter Sara Kali. She was known as 'Egyptian Sarah' because of her color (and it should be remembered that the princes of the David line were very dark complexioned). Sara is the European Gypsy Patron Saint and is also the "Black Madonna" revered in those regions to the present day. Rennes is one of the most intriguing historical sites on earth and did not need a link to Berenger Sauniere to make it mysterious or significant. Tales of the Magdalene in that region abound. Personally I have no doubt that she spent time in the region around Rennes-le-Chateau.

THE FABLED WEALTH OF ABBE BÉRENGER SAUNIÈRE

It is said that Sauniere mysteriously came into great wealth and spent three or four million dollars in renovation and construction. Anyone who has viewed his buildings will recognize their relatively modest scale and know they could have been constructed at a fraction of those costs, even in today's money.

I believe Saunière may have found something, but not the treasure of Blanche of Castille. There are much more prosaic explanations for what wealth he may have had at one stage in his life than that. Unfortunately it appears that "trafficking in masses" was the major source of his funds.

In those days it was customary for pious people to give priests an offering of money for their support, for which the priest would offer mass for their intentions or perhaps for the happy repose of their dear departed ones. Sauniere's account books are extant and Jean-Jacques Bedu in 1990 did an analysis of the trafficking in Masses from Sauniere's own records. ("Rennes-le-Chateau: autopsie d'une myth.") Sauniere had made a business of soliciting Mass offerings by placing small advertisments in magazines and newspapers, and by soliciting interested parties. The trafficking reached its height between 1900 and 1907. Bedu calculates that Sauniere had received funds for the celebration of approximately 100,000 Masses, which obligation, at the rate of one Mass per day, I calculate would have taken him about 275 years to fulfill.

In fact it was no secret. He was tried by the Diocese of Carcassonne for trafficking in Masses in 1910. Towards the end of his life he tried to make a living selling religious medals and rosaries to wounded soldiers stationed aat Capaque les Bains - hardly the fate of a man who had found a fabulous treasure or who was being paid vast sums of money by the Church to prevent him revealing a secret that would destroy its power, presumably that he knew where the body of Jesus was buried.

Most of the rumors of his fabulous wealth seem to be due to the media efforts of Noel Corbu, who purchased Sauniere's estate in 1946, and who wished to attract customers to a new restaurant he had opened on the property.

The newspaper report on "the millionaire Cure of Rennes-le-Chateau."

Corbu later met Pierre Plantard who was fascinated by the rumors now beginning to surround Sauniere. Plantard produced documents (supposedly it is said, forged by his colleague Phillippe de Cherisey), that Sauniere was supposed to have discovered when renovating his church, and which allegedly testified to the survival of the Merovingian line of the Frankish Kings. The documents were reproduced in a book published by Gerard de Sede in 1967, "Le Tresor Maudit de Rennes-le-Chateau." It was claimed that they were ancient and contained secret messages. The Prieuré de Sion, (Priory of Sion), is a name several groups have claimed, both real and fictitious. In modern times it refers to an organization founded by Plantard, founded and dissolved in France in 1956. Since the 1960s, it has also come to refer to a supposed secret society dating from the Middle Ages, which guards a subversive secret and which is plotting to install the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe. This is the theme that formed one of the main assertions of "Holy Blood , Holy Grail," in 1982, and which later was claimed as factual in the preface of the "The Da Vinci Code."

A "Priory of Sion" had been registered by Plantard in 1956. In 1989 it was re-launched, but now its date of origin was given as 1681, not medieval, and it was directly related to the Rennes-le-Chateau saga. A different list of Grand Masters was provided, including Roger Pelat, who was shortly afterwards investigated for fraud. Plantard was called to testify under oath. Such matters of course can be subject to enormous pressures, but whether it was true or not, Plantard confessed during the investigation of Pelat that the Priory of Sion was an invention of his own. Whether or not there actually is a real organization called the Priory of Sion is of course quite an independent question from Plantard's revelations.

In 1969 Henry Lincoln read "Le Tresor Maudit," and he went on to produce three documentaries for BBC 2 on the subject. In 1982 he joined with Michael Baigent and the late Richard Leigh to produce "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," and the book became an international best seller. The rest, as they say, is history.

SO WHERE DO WE STAND?

In my DVD "How Jesus Became a Christ" I pointed out that the original message of Jesus was seriously distorted in its transmission down the centuries so that nowadays it is difficult if not impossible to think of Jesus or of Christianity itself in any terms other than the Suffering Servant who struggled painfully up the Hill of Calvary to die on the cross for our sins. In fact he came to do something far more wonderful than that: in his own words to teach us how to do all the wonders that he did and more (John 14: 11-13). This is why recovering the enormous power we have as children of God is of infinitely greater importance than any sacred place, time or ritual, however exalted. For those who believe Jesus's only role was to come here and die for our sins, then to find his body rotting in a tomb beside his wife would of course be the end.

But the documents from the brothers of Jesus give an entirely different priority to what Jesus was about. So one is led to ask whether the real magnificence of what Jesus was and did and what he taught would actually be far more confrontational to conventional religion than hypothetically finding his bones in a tomb besides his wife's could ever be?

Undoubtedly we need a much wider dissemination of information on what Jesus really was, rather than the pictures conventional thought has retailed for centuries, and no doubt controversies can sometimes serve that, but sometimes the controversy only makes the problem and enslavement worse.

If such discoveries were proven to be true at Rennes-le-Chateau then undoubtedly they would break that ancient stranglehold which so many organizations have exercised over the fundamental beliefs of humanity for so long, but if that is all they want to do in this investigation then the point has been missed, and all it would amount to is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If as a result of the discoveries at Rennes we were to simply say Jesus is not all he was cracked up to be, and no more, then for many people this is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater, for we end up throwing out the divine element within the human person and the hope that that guarantees. That is what Jesus really came to remind us of and show us how to regain.

Besides there is other information which has been hidden for a very long time, and perhaps it is time to look at those sources now more closely. We hear little if anything nowadays of the ancient sources that tell us he did not die on the cross, but was resuscitated. Indeed some go farther and say that he was never crucified at all, but was substituted for on the way to Calvary, as the Koran itself teaches. If he was never crucified there would of course be no need to rise from the dead. And if he was on the verge of accomplishing his mastery it would make perfect sense that the very powerful teachers he must have had would rescue him so that he could complete his course. And further still what admiration and gratitude we should have for the one who volunteered to substitute for him, Simon of Cyrene?

What matters to us about Jesus is that he did ascend and ascension is a very different thing indeed from resurrection and of infinitely greater significance. What matters for us about ourselves is that we set about accomplishing what that offers to us by way of hope. Bloodlines, dynasties and the epiphanies that were the inspiration of ancient legends may very well all be true, but true or not they are far indeed from the heart of the matter as to why we are here.

Why then is it still so important to address a question such as whether Jesus was married? Because so much bad theology and even what the Christian churches themselves must acknowledge as downright heresy, lies at the foundation of most of the arguments against that proposition. If it is thought in certain quarters that it is tantamount to blasphemy to even raise what I called - in my previous article - the taboo question as to whether Jesus was married or not, you have to ask on what disastrous estimate of womanhood does such an opinion rest, and how could any credible program for human evolution in a religious setting ever hope to flourish in a system where such a belief held central sway?

It begins to appear as the result of calm research that the tradition that Jesus was celibate could not have come from an early apostolic tradition but rose to prominence only after Christianity had started to compromise its teachings with pagan religious views that were hostile both to women and marriage. So did the elements that have come to define so much religion today, and which so many fundamentalists regard as the very touchstone of orthodoxy, actually come from a pagan influence rather than from the original source?

Now, as they say, wouldn't that be something!

I am delighted this movie was made, for like other elements in the same tradition such as "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," 'The DaVinci Code,' and many others, they give a vocabulary for anyone to be able to speak about these ancient issues that are so important and that still matter so much to us today. I remain suspicious that at least some of the documents in the bottles that I have seen are fraudelant, but they are so badly faked one can't help wondering if the mistakes were deliberate and if so, why? But what sets "Bloodline" off completely from all the other publications is that the makers of this movie have a tomb waiting to be investigated. If the find is as significant as they hope it won't matter much whether the clues were faked or not, the question then will be: " Why did they leave those clues and who is going to benefit from making this information public?" Are we on the verge of a new dawn with this discovery, or are old organizations just trying to re-invent themselves? One can only surmise at this point. But if in the unlikely circumstance that apparently for the very best of reasons, insurmountable obstacles to the archeological investigation start to appear, or the investigation is endlessly deferred, or too many people die of sudden brain hemorrhages or cardiovascular problems, or all goes suddenly very quiet and we never hear more than a whisper about it again, then all bets are off, and the decision to make the movie now rather than after the investigation will have been thoroughly vindicated. The age old mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau will just have had a new chapter added.

To these topics we will return next month in part 3 of "The Gods of Men."

Miceal Ledwith normally provides on this website an extended and sometimes illustrated version of his monthly articles published in The Bleeping Herald, The Bleeping Herald versions are not illustrated.

Most of the images used in this version of the article are used with thanks from the "Bloodline" movie.

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