Temple Church was originally built as a replica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Trailing "The Da Vinci Code" Though Europe

Just in Time for the Blockbuster Movie, Fans Flock to Unravel the Truth Behind Dan Brown’s Controversial Tale

By Amy Laughinghouse

    Stepping through the arched stone doorway into Rosslyn Chapel, a 15th-century Gothic church nestled in the green hills outside Edinburgh, Scotland, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimly lit recesses. Even before its renowned carvings of pagan figures and strange symbols came into focus, I was struck by the smell. It was not unpleasant, but it was distinctive, like the musky scent of moist soil. For a moment, it was easy enough to believe that there could be ancient secrets buried here, secrets that were recently unearthed by Dan Brown’s bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code.”
     If you’ve been marooned on a desert island or held captive by space aliens for the past two years, you may have escaped the hype surrounding Brown’s notorious novel. Forty million copies translated into 44 languages. With this month’s movie starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, it will soon permeate more parts of our planet than oxygen. So if you don’t want to know the details, you better paddle back to your island, flag down the aliens, and cease reading this article ASAP.
     In fact, it was “The Da Vinci Code” which brought many of my fellow visitors and me to Rosslyn Chapel that day. Not only was there a group of nearly a dozen journalists, both French and American, “set-jetting” around Europe to visit and report on the sites mentioned in the book and the upcoming film, there was also a Scottish TV crew to report on the reporters reporting on the sites. The chapel was the climax of our weeklong tour.

Rosslyn Chapel was commissioned by the St. Clair family in the mid-15th century. Some speculate that a mysterious vault beneath it holds the Holy Grail.

Controversy of the Code
     This fascination illustrates just how thoroughly Brown’s novel has rocked our world. In it, he asserts that Mary Magdalene was the bride of Jesus Christ, and that their descendents walk among us today. According to the book, the bones of Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Christ constitute the real Holy Grail, a revelation guarded by the Knights Templar and the shadowy Priory of Scion, which included Leonardo Da Vinci. Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and French code-breaker Sophie Neveu (“Amelie” ingénue Audrey Tautou) unravel this web of secrecy as the French police and a homicidal albino monk pursue them.
     The explosive theory about Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene has been addressed before, most notably in “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, published more than 20 years ago. But it took Brown’s action-packed thriller to thrust this allegation out of the dusty realm of theologians and transform it into incendiary water–cooler conversation.
    “There has been a growing interest in different takes on spirituality, the whole New Age thing, but ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has put an extra emphasis on the trend,” noted Iain Grimston, Visitor Services Manager for Rosslyn Chapel. “You can make connections in a work of fiction that you can’t make in a book that is to be taken seriously by academics,” he added.

Tracking the Protagonists through Paris
     As I retraced the frantic steps of Landon and Neveu — and the Hollywood movie crew — through Paris, London and finally Edinburgh, I attempted to sort fact from fiction behind Brown’s plot. Like Langdon, I began my adventure in Paris.
     While Langdon sped about in one of those tiny Parisian clown cars that could be swallowed whole by a Volkswagen beetle, I enjoyed a leisurely two-hour stroll with Matt Anderson, a freckle-faced kid from Kansas City, Mo. who led Classic Walks’ “Da Vinci Code Tour.” He ushered our group from the Hotel Ritz at the Place Vendome, where Langdon was awoken by police at the start of the novel, toward the Louvre, where a murder kick-starts Brown’s tale. Anderson explained that it would be impossible for the police to drive Langdon to the museum along the route Brown outlines — unless the lieutenant drove through a fence and down a set of stairs. And if you ever need to get to the American Embassy in a hurry, as Langdon did, you definitely don’t want Brown at the wheel.
    Hmmm, I thought. If the author could confuse such minor details, what else might he have gotten wrong in his research? Perhaps that is why, when Anderson herded us into a vast underground mall beneath the Louvre to gaze upon I.M. Pei’s inverted glass pyramid, my heart failed to skip a beat. The pyramid was indeed stunning, a cone of captured sunlight casting rainbows across a ring of upturned faces looking for meaning in its glassy depths. But I couldn’t get worked up at the notion that, as Brown asserts, I was actually standing before the headstone of Mary Magdalene, the final resting place of the Holy Grail.
     I wanted to hear, as Langdon did, “a woman’s voice … whispering up from the chasms of the earth.” I listened intently, but if there were any whispers of ancient wisdom, they were drowned out by the rumbling of my stomach, anticipating a crispy baguette and some deliciously stinky French cheese.
     I would return to the Louvre’s Denon wing later by myself to ponder the enigmatic Mona Lisa and the other paintings that play a role in the opening scenes of “The Da Vinci Code,” but the next major stop on the tour was the Church of St. Sulpice. From the Louvre, we crossed the Pont des Arts to the terminally hip Left Bank neighborhood of St. Germain des Pres. It was quiet so early on a Sunday morning, but in the evenings, the narrow cobblestone streets would be awash with a river of pedestrians flowing in and out of art galleries, trendy boutiques and cafés.
     By the time we reached the church, we had seconds before the next service to slip inside and see a soaring obelisk bisected by a shiny brass line that slices north to south across the stone floor. Brown wrote that this was a continuation of the Rose Line, the world’s first prime meridian, and that it was “an ancient sundial of sorts, a vestige of the pagan temple that had once stood on this very spot.”
     There is some truth to Brown’s assertions. The original prime meridian did run through Paris, and the obelisk in St. Sulpice does mark the path of the sun. But, as a terse letter posted on a wall of the church explained, that is where the similarities end. “Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent bestselling novel, this is not a vestige of a pagan temple,” the note (written in three different languages) avowed. “[The brass line] does not correspond with the meridian … which serves as a reference for maps.” Oh yeah, and one more thing. “Please also note that the letters “P” and “S” in the small round windows at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the church, not an imaginary Priory of Scion,” the note snipped.
     Good thing the letter addressed that last bit about the initials, though, because I surely would have thought “Aha! Gotcha!” when I noticed them. You see, despite our skepticism, the longer my tour group pursued our quest, the more we found ourselves interpreting everyday objects as “signs” relating to the Priory of Scion, the Holy Grail and the Sacred Feminine.
     In the lobby of Le Meurice, my hotel in Paris, I found myself nodding knowingly at an elaborate chair shaped like a rose, a symbol of both secrecy and the womb of the goddess. A pub we stumbled into in London — the Lamb and the Flag, on Rose Street, no less — turned out to have a lamb as its symbol (as in Jesus, the lamb of God) holding aloft a white flag with the red, even-armed cross of the Knights Templar, alleged protectors of the Grail. (This refuted my previous theory that the British come up with the pub names by throwing darts at random words in the dictionary.) But we knew we had really been brainwashed when Ethan, one of my colleagues, asked me to pass the “Priory and the Scion” at lunch one day — nodding at the silver salt and pepper shakers engraved with a “P” and an “S.”

According to “The Da Vinci Code,” the Holy Grail is buried beneath I.M Pei’s Pyramide Inversee at the Louvre.

History Illuminated in London
     Having recently arrived in London via train, we were in the middle of an intensive daylong excursion led by Henrietta Ferguson of British Tours. A vivacious blonde who makes history sound as juicy as your favorite soap opera, Ferguson has not only worked as a guide for the past nine years, she also served as the coordinator of London locations for Howard’s movie.
    “Ron Howard was so down to earth, such a nice guy,” Ferguson said, recalling how the director graciously greeted a fan that asked him for his autograph in a coffee shop. “He signed a Starbucks application,” Ferguson remembered with a laugh. “I think that’s going to be on E-bay.”
Throughout the day, we trekked between the various sites mentioned in “The Da Vinci Code.” We glimpsed the London headquarters of Opus Dei (an unassuming, sunny little townhouse at No. 6 Orme — not No. 5, as Brown wrote), stopped at the Temple tube station (where it is unlikely that anyone, aside from an Olympic pole-vaulter, could jump the tall turnstiles as Langdon and Neveu did in the book) and toured Westminster Abbey (where there is no metal detector. Sorry, Mr. Brown).
     We did, however, find the elaborate tomb of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey, just as Brown described: “a reclining statue of Newton … two winged boys … a huge pyramid … and … an enormous orb.” In fact, Newton is one of more than 3,000 famed historical figures buried or memorialized at Westminster. We joined the throng shuffling slowly past the gilded tombs of Queen Elizabeth I, and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. We paused in Poets’ Corner, where a little girl in striped stockings skipped between stone markers emblazoned with the names of Chaucer, Robert Browning and D.H. Lawrence, cheerfully proclaiming, “Someone died there and there and there!” Finally, we took a moment to examine the ancient gilded wood Coronation Chair, where scores of royals have been crowned, and which scores of school children have defaced by inscribing their names and initials.
     Although Westminster Abbey refused to allow Howard to film within its sacred walls, Temple Church, where Langdon and Neveu sought an answer to a crucial riddle in the book, has welcomed its newfound notoriety. According to Robin Griffith-Jones, the Master of the Temple, the fee moviemakers paid to film there will be used to keep the church open to visitors seven days a week.
Every Friday from 1 until 2 p.m., Griffith-Jones leads a tour of this 12th-century house of worship.
     With his silvery white hair and bright red sweater, Griffith-Jones possessed all the ruddy-cheeked good cheer of Santa Claus as he welcomed us into the oldest part of the church, a circular stone structure built by the Knights Templar to recreate Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. We tiptoed among the effigies of ancient knights that reclined upon the floor, their crossed legs indicating those which actually fought in the Crusades, before Griffith-Jones paused in front of the tomb — a long, carved slab without a figure — mentioned in Brown’s book.
    “The film crew brought in a smoke machine to make it look terrifically dark and mysterious,” Griffith-Jones recalled. “Tom Hanks was prancing about [the tomb] for four days, as I stood there in my scarlet cassock offering myself for a cameo.”
     Griffith-Jones admitted he found the book to be “a real page-turner,” and said he even tried to emulate Brown’s style when writing his own book. “But you try writing a book on the teachings of St. Paul with a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter,” he noted wryly.
     Griffith-Jones refuted Brown’s theory about Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, explaining that the Gnostic Gospels wrote about their relationship metaphorically to symbolize our human yearning for a reunion with the divine. But he certainly wasn’t frothing with fury. “Almost everything Dan Brown claims [as] historical fact is not,” Griffith-Jones said. “But good heavens, it’s a novel!”

Unraveling Reality at Rosslyn Chapel
     Rosslyn Chapel in Edinburgh, the final stop of our “Da Vinci Code” tour, has also received increased attention since the release of Brown’s book. In August 2005, visitors to the tiny chapel peaked at 800 people a day. “They would allow more,” Grimston said, “but we can not make the chapel any bigger!”
     Many of those pilgrims believe, as Brown asserted, that the Knights Templar built the chapel to replicate Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, where they allegedly uncovered the Holy Grail in a subterranean chamber. In fact, the Knights Templar were rounded up, imprisoned and executed in the early 1300s, more than 100 years before Rosslyn was erected. Yet some scholars theorize that many knights escaped persecution, and that future generations built the chapel.
     Brown also described a Star of David inscribed into the floor of the chapel, symbolizing the union of the blade (i.e. the masculine, Jesus Christ) and the chalice (i.e. the feminine, Mary Magdalene). But the floor is covered with a red carpet. “No, it’s not hidden under the carpet,” Grimston insisted. “Or is it?” he added with a sly smile. “I’ve never rolled it back to have a look.” I was tempted to try it myself, but I couldn’t get anyone to help me move the pews.
     There are two undisputed facts, which Brown recounted about Rosslyn. First, there is indeed an unexplored chamber beneath it, and there has been plenty of speculation about what it contains. A spaceship? The Holy Grail? The mummified head of Christ? The most accepted premise, however, is that it is a burial vault for the knights of the St. Clair family, which commissioned the chapel. Secondly, the authorities have refused to allow it to be dug up. “If we excavate, there is a suspicion that the whole thing will collapse,” Grimston explained, brushing away any insinuation that the Rosslyn Trust is attempting to keep “the truth” buried.
     Ornate carvings cover nearly every surface of the chapel, including the magnificent vaulted ceiling. There is a fallen angel, a horned Moses and numerous depictions of grinning “Green Men” (an ancient symbol of fertility), and no one is sure how they tie together. Brown suggested the symbols might reveal what is in the vault or even “the true legend of the Grail.” Grimston, too, believes they tell a story. “We just don’t know how to read it yet,” he admitted.
     But that doesn’t keep coach loads of the faithful from coming to try. Among them, on the day I visited, were two older women who gazed at the carvings in silent contemplation, their wizened features framed by a handkerchief tightly knotted beneath the chin. As I studied their reverent expressions, I was reminded that for many, Rosslyn Chapel is much more than a movie set. It’s the culmination of a spiritual quest, whether it was inspired by Brown’s novel or another “Good Book” that has topped the bestseller list for centuries.

Photos courtesy of Amy Laughinghouse

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