How It All Goes Down
- Back to the stunned Sophie and her two instructors.
- The Grail hasn't exactly been a secret. Teabing shows her a bunch of books that talk about how Mary was really the Holy Grail.
- Because she posed such a threat to the Church, Mary Magdalene gained a bunch of pseudonyms, including the Rose.
- (The rose's symbolism gets discussed at length. These two men can be exhausting with their love of academia.)
- Anyway, Mary was pregnant when Christ was crucified, so she was forced to flee to France (then known as Gaul) for her and her child's safety.
- She found refuge with the Jews there, and gave birth to a daughter, Sarah.
- Because she and her daughter were royalty to the Jews, they chronicled their lives prodigiously, and their subsequent family tree is amongst the documents contained in the Holy Grail archives.
- Those Holy Grail documents are suspected to also include pre-Constantine documents about Christ's works, and a "Q" document, that might have even been written by Jesus himself, and a diary written by Mary Magdalene.
- If you're confused, then so is Sophie. If Mary is the Holy Grail, why are the documents referred to with the same name?
- Oh. Because Mary's buried in a tomb with the documents. They're now one and the same. Ah ha.
- There's more. The Priory not only defends the secret of the location of the Holy Grail, but also the bloodline of Christ itself.
- In the fifth century, one of His direct descendants married into French royal blood, creating a lineage known as the Merovingian bloodline.
- The Merovingian family's pretty well-known in France, because they founded Paris.
- One of those descendants, Godefroi de Bouillon, is the guy who founded the Priory, and ordered the Knights Templar to recover the Sangreal documents.
- So. Teabing sums it up like this: The Priory have three jobs:
- 1: Protect the Sangreal documents.
- 2: Protect the tomb of Mary Magdalene.
- 3: Nurture and protect the bloodline of Christ.
- Sophie gets the chills. Her grandfather needed to tell her the truth about her family. He called her "Princess Sophie". Could she be one of the Merovingian survivors?
- Rémy rudely interrupts via intercom, requiring Teabing to meet him without Langdon and Sophie.