Historiography – the Good, the Bad and the Relative
The historian must not consciously disregard one single trace. He must place his discovery, the work of his imagination, in an archipelago. In this archipelago there are obviously larger islands that meet the eye, just as there are smaller ones, by which the historian may sail past, moreover, there are vast stretches of water, where he can freely exercise his passion.
(George Duby)
It is from this chapter* that we learn that historiography can be done well in many different ways, yet not everyone becomes a member of the academy of sciences who pens stories. We can also read about whether genocide is a necessary part of the terrors of war, whether the papacy and medieval emperors indeed conspired against chronology, whether Leonardo da Vinci really was keeping the secret of the descendants of Christ, and whether aliens taught humans how to fly. We are mentioning these examples just to illustrate what we mean by someone doing science badly.
When a particularly biassed author’s book or a history-themed film is criticised for presenting a one-sided story, they routinely defend themselves saying that postmodern philosophers claim all accounts of the past are of equal standing – all fragmented, all subjective by definition – so why shouldn’t I also create my own story. The historiography of every period shows signs of the time, as the communist church historian writes, while correcting his own previous spellings of god to God.
Interestingly, however, the History Department of the Hungarian Academy of Science or those of universities don’t enthusiastically welcome everyone who writes about the past – to be awarded a doctorate, the candidate is required to be well versed in history and the general methodological rules of academic activity. Conferences on the ancient history of Magyars are organised in almost secret, as if there is little interest in the stories of self-appointed historians. Is this outdated old-fashioned conservativism, a disregard for postmodern thought, or the justifiable self-defence of a profession against quacks? And who are these quacks anyway?
For a chapter now let’s forget about science and look at a discipline, history, which has less ’hard’ features. If we are looking atthe boundaries of science, maybe it is not fortunate to only look at examples like astlonomy (as opposed to astrology), evolutionary biology (as opposed to creationism) or theoretical physics (in contrast with parapsychology, to be looked at in the next chapter). These disciplines have a strong existent consensus in terms of their methodology, theoretical and conceptual underpinnings, and to be able to understand or especially take part in the professional conversation there, a highly abstract and esoteric language must be acquired. But how about the so-called soft, scholarly disciplines like social studies and the humanities? Here there is usually less of a professional consensus, in terms of either the basic questions or the methods and concepts. The language used in these disciplines is less inaccessible to the general public than in the case of science. So we can expect that the demarcation line is here harder to draw, the boundaries are less obvious, and there no really sound arguments to keep out certain approaches as unacademic or peseudoscientific.
In the following we shall look at three examples to look at when it is successful for a historic account to argue the equal status of different narratives and when can a scholar refute an explanation on professional grounds. It is difficult to avoid ourselves taking sides while doing so, but please remember, we are not here to pass a verdict in any specific questions about pseudoscience – our goal is to present new case studies and draw general lessons from these.
Holocaust denial
Our first example is deliberately provocative. The question of whether there was systematic genocide during World War II, in which the Nazi war machine murdered between 5 and 6 million people, is not simply an academic question, but also a social one (Holocaust denial is punishable in several countries, removing the question from the realm of scientific inquiry). Is there an academic aspect to the debate, is Holocaust denial or revisionism the product of the often fruitful program of historical relativism, or is it merely “poorly done science”? Holocaust deniers often base their arguments on pointing out the weaknesses in their opponents’ positions. There is no definitive, unalterable position in historical science on many details of the genocide carried out during World War II; there are indeed questionable details, and experts organize conferences around the debates. Who exactly is responsible and to what extent, exactly how many people were victims, exactly how did the gas chambers work, what was the root cause of the Holocaust, etc.? However, while historians researching this period are divided into different groups based on their individual positions, there is complete agreement within the profession that there was a deliberately planned genocide, primarily based on ethnicity, a mass murder that killed 5 or 6 million people of Jewish or Roma origin, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, and other marginalized groups, mostly in gas chambers.
Holocaust deniers are right in saying that the account of the Holocaust is not perfect, but they use internal debates among historians—regarding details—to support opinions that contradict the convictions of those same historians. This is one of the basic strategies of Holocaust denial methodology: rather than trying to prove their own point of view, they seek to target the weaknesses of their opponents. For example, they often focus on the undeniable contradictions in the accounts of various eyewitnesses. Revisionists often use quotations that, taken out of their original context, seem to say something different from what their authors intended. According to historians, they conflate professional debates on specific issues with debates on the entire phenomenon, for example, searching for statements in the partly ethical and philosophical debate concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which they arbitrarily extract to support their own position. They focus intensely on details that we do not know and ignore what we do know. For a Holocaust denier, the testimonies given at the Nuremberg trials, in which numerous Nazi leaders admitted that they knew about the genocide, are inherently unreliable, arguing that the testimonies were made under duress. However, they do not attempt to gather positive evidence for this, and they ignore the testimonies of Nazi politicians who survived the trials and later made statements without any apparent coercion. The list could go on: historians put forward numerous arguments to support the view that Holocaust denial is not a marginal-but-courageous science, but rather science poorly carried out, a pseudoscience. The obvious question arises, for example, if there was no Holocaust, then where did some six million people disappear? Well, they left—is the answer—for Siberia, Israel, Los Angeles, etc. And why can’t their relatives find them? And what about the experiences of the Russian and Western soldiers who liberated the concentration camps, the sight of emaciated people, which was even photographed? The reply is that the Allies bombed Germany’s supply routes until it was no longer possible to feed the people in the labour camps properly. So those responsible are actually on the other side. Of course, it is not right to send people to labour camps, but this is a horror that happens on both sides in a war, the argument goes. However, practicing historians are not convinced by these counterarguments and consistently protest against Holocaust denial. But then why do Holocaust deniers keep writing such books if they clearly cannot change the opinion of expert scholars? The most likely explanation is that their arguments are not aimed at the historical community, but at the general public, who know less about the period. The reason why professional historians are not persuaded that the Holocaust was fabricated can be summed up as the convergence of evidence. They argue that the Holocaust is not a single event whose authenticity can be undermined by a single source that proves to be unreliable or a seemingly contradictory account, but rather thousands (millions!) of events about which a wealth of independent evidence has survived. These include written sources (letters, memoirs, invoices, Zyklon B orders, confessions, notes, speeches by Nazi leaders), eyewitness accounts (survivors, kapos, SS guards, local residents living near the camps, Nazi leaders), photographs (aerial photographs, photographs taken by the Allies at the time of liberation, photographs taken by the Germans themselves), physical evidence (the remains of the blown-up gas chambers, the barracks and fences of the death camps) and demographic facts (people are missing).
Holocaust deniers often defend themselves with what we collectively call historical relativism. In the 20th century, many practicing historians and philosophers of history emphasized that historians inevitably select from the evidence available to them, highlighting some and putting others in parentheses. They then arrange them in sequence, edit them, and use them to construct a narrative. These are by no means innocent steps, through which historians bring their own personalities, background knowledge, and ideas into the narrative, dissolving the traditional ideal of “objectivity.” It follows that there can be many different narratives about the same past, because the past always responds to what we ask of it: different historians ask different questions and get different answers. In the 20th century, for example, instead of traditional event history—in other words, the history of wars, kings, ministerial cabinets, and the mere chronology of “important” dates— i.e., instead of all the things that today’s secondary school students have to learn if they want to graduate—many historians turned to new topics, asked new questions, highlighted new actors, and defined new methodologies. Researchers began to address topics that had previously been considered insignificant, such as everyday life, childhood, madness, death, women’s history, the history of customs and gestures, carnivals and nose blowing—in short, all the things that fundamentally defined the lives of people in the past, but about which we now know very little. These lines of research often defined methods other than traditional event history, often highlighted other sources, and thoroughly questioned the concept of historical fact. However, theorists of the relativity of historical accounts point out that this does not mean that anything goes. Although there is no single true and correct interpretation of the past, and it seems that several equally good accounts can be juxtaposed, there are still flawed interpretations that have nothing to do with the past. Holocaust denial, argues Hayden White, for example, is not an alternative history, but a traditional, albeit flawed, account of events. There is nothing radical about the revisionists’ arguments; their methodology is based on the simplest historical processes, and they have no new research techniques or critical procedures. They adhere to a similar concept of fact as their critics, they do not want to rewrite the history of the 20th century, they do not propose new content, as do, for example, many historians who have examined changes over long periods (longue durée) of time or social structures instead of events, or who have made previously unaccepted actors – women, children – as the main actors of history, or who have attempted to capture the perspective of the ordinary soldier in war. Revisionists do not innovate in a theoretical sense, they merely deny one single assertion. However, the rules of the game oblige every expert, say the experts, and even Holocaust deniers do not dispute this in their theoretical works. Even if we accept that there are many ways to approach the past, with many different questions, once we have defined the rules of the game, they limit us; we cannot claim any odd thing. We may write this or that story about a slice of the past, but we cannot write just anything.
Holocaust denial is not so much a scientific issue (there are no professional conferences organized around it) as it is an educational one. The legal prohibitions in force in certain countries do not apply to research (no one is researching the non-existence of the Holocaust), but to the promotion of revisionist views. Revisionists do not seek to convince experts, but rather a wider audience, not least a politically active segment of society. The goal is not to change what science considers to be true, but to convince a group of people. Holocaust denial therefore attacks a specific scientific thesis, while accepting the usual rules of scientific practice. Its argumentation is largely negative (i.e., it attacks the weaknesses of its opponents rather than supporting its own position), and thus the target audience is not professionals competent in the subject, but less informed laypeople. And what immediately makes the undertaking “suspicious” is the underlying motivation: the problem of the Nazi genocide is not a simple academic question of fact, but presumably goes beyond the scope of issues that can be discussed objectively and neutrally, as it has serious moral and ideological implications. Perhaps this is why many people do not need professional arguments to reject as untrustworthy those views that, under the guise of scientificity, at least in appearance, attempt to legitimize a message concerning one’s world view.
The ’Invented Middle Ages’ conspiracy theory
The author of ’The Invented Middle Ages’, Herbert Illig set out to prove that nearly three hundred years of the Middle Ages, between August 614 and September 911, did not actually happen, but were added to history retrospectively. He based his conclusion on Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar reform of 1582. At the time of Gregory, the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar showed such a discrepancy with real time, compared to regularly recurring astronomical events, that urgent intervention was needed. As a result of the thoroughly prepared calendar reform, the Gregorian calendar, which is still in use today, no longer counts leap years divisible by 100, except for those that are multiples of 4. The only problem was that the discrepancy resulting from the error in the Julian calendar also had to be corrected, so even though Thursday was followed by Friday, ten days were inserted into the calendar, which simply jumped forward a little, and October 4, 1582, was immediately followed by October 15. However, the discrepancy that had accumulated since Caesar’s time would actually have required a thirteen-day jump, Illig argues, but the fact that only ten days were inserted suggests that the pope was well aware that 300 years less time had passed since Caesar’s time than history teaches us. To the logical question of what led who to undertake to such an unusual step, Illig’s answer is that Byzantine emperor Constantine VII, Pope Sylvester II (who sent the crown to our King Stephen), and his disciple, Pope Gregory III were responsible for the trick. Their goal was to fabricate a powerful predecessor for Otto in the person of Charlemagne, and to ensure that Otto, whose reign thus began in the year 1000, would be seen as a ruler of millennial importance.
Let us now consider what we know about the aforementioned 300-year period. This is when the Magyars arrived in the Carpathian Basin, when prophet Muhammad lived, and when Charlemagne reigned. Unless we are particularly interested in history, it is likely that little else comes to mind. And this is precisely what Illig exploits, trying to cast the average person’s ignorance as the ignorance of science. However, researchers of the period know quite a lot about this era, and their knowledge is based partly on material remains (which Illig claims are all forgeries) and partly on written documents. Historians, for example, have reason not to be surprised by the ten-day modification mentioned above, as they believe that the three-day discrepancy had previously been corrected at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Illig, however, does not accept their argument, saying that it is not based on direct sources.
There were indeed forgeries in the Middle Ages, and the historians criticized by Illig are often able to uncover them, yet for the researchers it is incoceivable that the entire era would be one of these. Their argument is again based on the convergence of evidence. Too many independently survived traces (written documents, archaeological finds, architectural and artistic works, etc.) indicate that the above period was real. Then there is also a practical problem: how could such a Europe-wide fraud be orchestrated? In an age when neither email nor mobile phones were available to the conspirators, how could they notify all the centers of literacy at the time, how could they instruct dozens of royal courts and hundreds of monasteries without accidentally leaving written records of the instructions? According to Illig, some 350 monasteries began to forge sources from 300 years that never happened. But how could they ensure consistency between them? Why is it that they created serious literary works and lists of insignificant abbots, but wrote hardly anything about Charlemagne’s court? How were isolated and relatively uneducated monasteries able to produce outstanding literature, including Old High German poems? The sources already published from this period amount to more than seventy thick volumes, and then there are the unpublished manuscripts. To all this must be added the sources from the centuries before and after the fictitious period. Could such a massive flood of forgeries have been carried out without a single mistake, leaving no telltale signs, no genuine sources? Not to mention that European history can be cross-checked with the chronology of other cultures, such as Chinese and Arabic historical sources, where we have detailed sources for these 300 years – did they also participate in the Christian conspiracy? Or let’s just think about the precessional motion we know from the chapter on astrology: if 300 years less had passed since the recording of the data by ancient astronomers (specifically since Hipparchus, who demonstrated precessional motion), then the Earth’s axis would simply have to be somewhere else in its great cycle.
Illig’s strategy is reminiscent of that of Holocaust deniers in many respects, even if his arguments do not offend the feelings, memories, and tragedies of so many people. Illig primarily refers to the weaknesses of historiography that provoke criticism, without providing much positive evidence. However, if a historian were to take Illig’s theory seriously, they would try to identify the forgery workshops, document the connections and correspondence between them, demonstrate the formal similarities between their fabricated texts, and support the theory with other positive evidence. Illig works with isolated quotations, often citing medievalists who would never take the theory of a fictional Middle Ages seriously. He exploits internal disputes within the profession, as if the uncertainties surrounding certain specific research topics made his hypothesis more plausible.
Illig publishes a book every six months and references thousands of books and articles in each of his works. Perhaps there are many historians who would not be quick to refute the claim that scholars are superhuman beings who read a lot and write even more, but Illig’s output still seems excessive. There are virtually no source references in Phantom Time. Why is this a problem? The lack of source references, the seriousness of which is immediately apparent to any historian, may not sound as fatal to an educated layman. But how is it possible that a detail so important to historians is not necessarily understood by laymen? The reason lies in the nature of secondary school history education (which is where most of us acquire our historical knowledge): we learn dates, “facts,” and objective data, and it remains completely hidden that everything we know about, for example, the Árpád era in Hungarian history is ultimately found in documents that are difficult to read and interpret, not only because they are in Latin, but also because they use a system of writing and abbreviations that requires special, so-called paleographic knowledge to decipher. What we read as a single coherent story is in fact a string of countless small – and often uncertain – details. By the age of 18, we have a great deal of factual knowledge, but we know almost nothing about the actual practice of history. As historian György Galamb puts it: “The gap between textbook writing and the ‘profession’ is revealed by the fact that in secondary school history education—with the exception of a few experimental programs—the analysis of sources is pushed into the background, and the question of how historical knowledge is created does not even arise. No wonder, then, that history appears to the lay public mainly as a repository of lexical knowledge, rather than as a process of reinterpretation achieved through the criticism and synthesis of sources of the most diverse nature, the result of which is what we can call knowledge of history.” In other words, the historian’s job is not so much to develop his theories based on knowledge of significant “facts,” but rather to use his professional expertise to extract from fragmentary sources everything that education and popularization will present as fact. Illig, however, saves himself this work—just as self-appointed critics of the theory of relativity or the Big Bang wishing to enter the scientific world usually base their ideas on secondary sources and popular literature, while having no idea what laboratory research actually involves.
Finally, it is worth noting that Illig is only known outside Germany in Hungary, which is probably not unrelated to the sympathy that the theory of the stolen 300 years arouses in circles that cultivate the idea of a Hun-Hungarian connection. If Illig is right, then the Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin not in 895 but in 595, and then they could actually just as well be Huns.
It seems that this is not an academic issue again, as it is not the professional community the proponents of ’the stolen centuries hypothesis’ (while, for example, parapsychologists are fighting for professional legitimacy) but rather the general public, which has a moderate knowledge of history but does not always trust the profession. This public undoubtedly considers historians to be somewhat boring, timid characters, who do not have as broad a knowledge of various disciplines as Illig, but even if they do, they are wary of formulating such bold hypotheses. The reality, however, is that historians specializing in the Middle Ages do not shy away from various, sometimes quite surprising forgery hypotheses, it’s just that when it comes to proving their case, they use different methods than Illig, and base their arguments on the method we defined above as converging evidence.
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is not a scientific work, nor does it seek to present itself as such. So why does it provoke scientific debate? The book is a “cultural thriller” that uses the unraveling of a two-thousand-year-old conspiracy as a pretext to weave together the history of European and non-European culture, religion, and occultism, including the crucifixion of Jesus, the flight of Mary Magdalene, the Gnostic gospels, the search for the Holy Grail, the exhibition halls of the Louvre, the Christian church, the history of the Knights Templar, the structure of Gothic cathedrals, burned witches, the Merovingian dynasty, Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, Newton’s grave, and a series of coded messages waiting to be deciphered. While we learn about the details of this global conspiracy through the accounts of fictional characters, the book as a whole suggests that the theory is scientifically sound and therefore worthy of consideration by practicing historians. This impression is reinforced by the statements on the pages preceding the text of the novel (e.g., “The descriptions of works of art, buildings, documents, and secret rituals in the novel are true to life”) as well as the marketing strategy of Dan Brown and his American publisher, who state in interviews that the conspiracy theory is at least plausible. The book has sold tens of millions of copies, been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks, inspired computer games based on the story, and led to the publication of numerous articles promoting the theory. It seems that many readers draw their knowledge of the Bible, history, and art history from The Da Vinci Code rather than from the Bible itself and authoritative reference books.
The plot of the novel begins in the best possible place: in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, where curator Jacques Saunière is shot dead at night. Shortly after the murder, the main character, Robert Langdon, a professor of “religious symbolism” at Harvard, is accused of the crime. The professor flees with the murdered curator’s granddaughter, cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and together they try to unravel the mystery behind the crime. Throughout the novel, the whole world becomes a strange system of codes, and we wander through a rather exciting maze of signs, puzzles, and mysteries across 600 pages, slowly uncovering the secret through art history, “symbolology,” cryptology, and historical analyses. The secret is slowly revealed, which is actually not one conspiracy, but two. In short, Jacques Saunière was the grand master of a secret society, the Order of Sion, and his murderer was acting on behalf of a well-known Christian order, Opus Dei. The Priory of Sion is in possession of a momentuous secret, so much so that it was founded in 1099 in Jerusalem as a background organization for the Knights Templar specifically in order to safeguard it. This secret was guarded by its illustrious grand masters, among whom we find almost every mysterious and exciting figure in history, from Nicolas Flamel to Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, from Isaac Newton to Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau. The secret that Opus Dei considers so threatening that it wants to destroy it with a counter-conspiracy is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene, descendants of the House of David, i.e., of royal blood, were married and they had a child, and from them descended the dynasty of Frankish kings, the Merovingian family, which in time fell victim to the intrigues of the official church, which wanted to destroy the secret. Yet it did not die out: their descendants live among us, protected by the Order of Sion. The main characters learn all this from the eccentric millionaire and Grail researcher Leigh Teabing.
But how does the Grail come into the picture? The Holy Grail, whose discovery was the obsession of the knights of the Arthurian legends, is not actually an object, not the chalice that held the blood of Jesus, but – as the etymology of the word suggests: San graal, Sangreal, Sang real – royal blood, the royal lineage of the descendants of Jesus and Mary. This important but somewhat abstract and in any case intangible concept is accompanied by something more tangible: the sarcophagus containing the bones of Mary Magdalene, who fled to southern France after the crucifixion. The Grail is therefore not only a symbol of the royal lineage, but also of Mary (who, according to the theory, is in a sense the vessel that truly received the blood of Christ) and, indirectly, of the female principle that has been suppressed for the past two thousand years. Respect for sacred femininity is evident in the many works of the guardians of the Grail secret: in the structure of the medieval cathedrals built by the Knights Templar, in da Vinci’s paintings, in the five Olympic rings, and in Walt Disney’s cartoons.
It is no wonder that the Christian Church – which, according to the theory, decided in favor of Jesus’ divinity in Nicaea by a simple majority vote under the leadership of Emperor Constantine – had a vested interest in keeping this secret from coming to light: not only would Jesus’ humanity pose a threat to Christian dogma, but so would the fact, recorded in the apocryphal gospels, that Mary Magdalene was much more than just one of Jesus’ disciples. During the canonization process, the Church therefore got rid of the gospels now known as Gnostic, then suppressed the veneration of women, and finally took action against those who knew the secret, ruthlessly eliminating the Knights Templar, which was a subsidiary organization of the Order of Sion and thus itself a guardian of the Grail secret.
Dan Brown has stated on several occasions that before writing The Da Vinci Code, he traveled to the main locations in his novel and conducted extensive historical research. This may well be true, and there is nothing to suggest that he did not conduct his own research, but at the same time, there is nothing to suggest that he did. The elements of the conspiracy have appeared in print many times, both individually and in context, and in the scene set in Leigh Teabing’s library, Brown correctly references his sources (pp. 356 and 366), as a true historian would do in footnotes. These include some controversial but academically serious works in the field of feminist research, such as Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospel, but mostly books whose “evidence” and “findings” are disputed in the profession. These include the works of Margaret Starbird, an author who identifies herself as Catholic (The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail), as well as Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s book, The Templar Conspiracy: The Secret Guardians of the True Christ. The latter pair of authors are also known for their books on solving the “Rudolf Hess mystery” and the Shroud of Turin (which, according to them, is not an imprint of Christ’s face, but a photograph by Leonardo da Vinci), while their work The Stargate Conspiracy is about UFOs. Their “historical detective work” on the Knights Templar corresponds to the story described in connection with the Holy Lineage Conspiracy: Jesus was a man not a god, who arranged his own crucifixion, but his plan backfired: before he could be taken off the cross alive, Longinus stabbed him in the side with a spear, so his wife, Mary, had to flee, and thus the bloodline, the Grail, and the Order of Sion continue to this day.
However, Dan Brown’s most important source is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The Priory of Sion: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which is the very first account of the conspiracy theory. This time, Brown acknowledges his debt openly in an Easter egg: the name of the millionaire who recounts the entire conspiracy, Leigh Teabing, is actually an anagram of the names of the authors Leigh and Baigent. It is quite funny when Leigh Teabing quotes the Leigh-Baigent book and calls its findings dubious (p. 367). Holy Blood, Holy Grail is an excellent work in its own right, offering a reasonably inventive explanation for perhaps every mystery of the past two thousand years, except for the Kennedy assassination, within the framework of a single, relatively coherent theory. It is not surprising that both this book and its descendants—most notably The Da Vinci Code—have been refuted by nearly a dozen books and countless articles in North America and Europe.
Before we outline the main points of rejection by Christian and non-Christian historians and the main arguments of their criticism, it is worth briefly discussing the extent to which the book touches on topics that have been the subject of professional debate in recent decades. One of the novel’s important “messages” is the reclaiming of the feminine principle, which has been suppressed by Christianity throughout history. In addition to proving to be a good marketing ploy for appealing to female readers, there is also a certain degree of truth in the fact, often emphasized by feminist historiography, that Christian culture, religion, and science in Europe over the past two thousand years have been male-centered, and that the feminine side of human existence has been relatively suppressed in Christian culture.
Dan Brown is also right in saying that alternative gospels that did not make it into the canon convey a message that is not found in the Bible. Although we know of not eighty, but only slightly more than thirty Gnostic gospels, and although (most of) these were found not in the Dead Sea Scrolls (which make no mention whatsoever of Christ or Gnosticism), but in the Nag Hammadi discovery, not in 1950 but in 1945, and do not support Dan Brown’s arguments to the extent he suggests, they can be read to a certain extent (especially the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, which was discovered in Cairo in 1896) as if to suggest that Mary’s role among Christ’s disciples was more significant than later tradition holds. Modern feminist biblical scholars (Karen King, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), who are naturally not supporters of the bloodline theory, argue that Mary, even if we do not immediately consider her to be Jesus’ spouse, may have played an important role in the early church, even as a rival to Peter. Biblical research dates the Gnostic gospels later than the canonical gospels, but there is no doubt that there is ongoing debate about the earlier dating of some of them (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas).
Whether Jesus was married is indeed a subject of scientific debate among biblical scholars. Those who view Jesus strictly as a historical figure argue that celibacy was not one of the virtues promoted by the Jewish religion, and that in those days, a teacher like Jesus would generally have been married. However, the majority of Christian scholars emphasize, for understandable reasons, that if Jesus had had a wife, it would not have gone unmentioned in the Bible. Celibacy was not unknown in that culture, as exemplified by the Qumran community. Furthermore, as these same Christian researchers point out, even if Christ had been married, this would not detract from his divine nature.
This is roughly how Brown’s claims relating to internal debates among historians can be summarized. However, the author makes a series of claims that historians consider unfounded.
For example, according to Brown, the teaching of Jesus’ divinity began only with the Council of Nicaea (325), and the Gnostic gospels, which emphasized his humanity, were destroyed by order of Constantine. In contrast, according to historical sources, the divinity of Jesus was already a central theme in the writings of authors prior to Nicaea, for which many even accepted martyrdom. It is difficult to imagine that Christian communities would not have been shocked to see such a radical change in the dogma of their religion. The Council of Nicaea did indeed deal with Christological issues, as the dual nature of Jesus as both God and man was a widespread view at the time, and it did indeed take a position in favor of the divine essence, while not excluding the human essence. The full divine and full human nature of Christ was proclaimed by the Council of Chalcedon (451).
Dan Brown often misrepresents facts that were yet correctly cited in the works he chose as his sources. The Olympics were not held every eight years in honor of Aphrodite, but every four years in honor of Zeus. The planet Venus does indeed travel in a pentagonal path across the sky, but only in a benevolent generous approximation, and its period is independent of the frequency of the Olympic Games, which have nothing to do with the worship of any goddess. The Merovingians did not found Paris, but only chose as their seat a settlement which by that time had existed for seven hundred years.
Brown refers to the papal court as ’the Vatican’ in a completely anachronistic manner, even though the papal seat only became the Vatican Palace in recent times. In the Middle Ages, Christianity was mostly governed from the Lateran, if they were in Rome at all, because for much of the 14th century, which Brown discusses most, the popes were known to reside in Avignon. In the 7th century, it is completely anachronistic to speak of “Vatican assassins” because at that time the area we call Vatican today was still a barren hilly area outside the city walls.
The Inquisition could not have burned five million women as witches because if they had, Western culture would have died out. The highest estimated number of victims of the Inquisition between 1450 and 1750 is between 40,000 and 50,000, but not all of the victims were women, and not all of them were burned.
An important part of Brown’s theory is that he equates Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany (the sister of Lazarus and Martha) and takes the emigration of the thus united Mary character to Provence as a fact. The cult of Mary is indeed cultivated in southern France, and her relics, preserved in local churches, are held in high esteem. However, in order to give credence to Brown’s theory, we must disregard the fact that we have no sources regarding the presence of the relics there prior to the 13th century, and that the stories about Mary’s travels in the region date back to the 9th century. As for the identity of the two Marys, Western Christianity has been of the same opinion as Dan Brown since Pope Gregory the Great, but the Eastern Orthodox Church considers them to be two separate people and celebrates their name days separately.
Brown’s etymology of “Sang real” does not seem convincing to linguists at all. The peculiar term sangreal first appeared in the 15th century in Thomas Mallory’s La Morte d’Arthur, and etymological research actually rarely concerns itself with words that appear similar to each other in their present-day form. This is more the domain of amateur historians.
The Templars could hardly have encoded female principles into the architecture of Gothic churches, because they were essentially a fighting order, and although they were involved in banking, for example, they did not commission cathedrals (these were built on behalf of bishops). The architectural features identified by Brown as intimate parts of the female body had already been present in Romanesque architecture, which predated the Templars and was in turn based on Roman basilicas. If the cathedral is indeed the female body, and its portal resembles the anatomy of the female genitals (Brown even finds something resembling a clitoris above the gate), and its nave is a sign of reverence for the womb, then what could the transept be?
The Templar Order was not abolished by Pope Clement V, but by King Philip the Fair of France, who used the French pope as a tool. For this reason alone, Clement, who resided in Avignon, could not scatter the ashes of the burned knights into the Tiber. Although the order was indeed abolished, only about 120 of the knights suffered death by fire (including Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the order), and outside of France it was not typical for them to be tortured.
Leonardo da Vinci is a mysterious and exciting figure in many ways, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was the Grand Master of any order. According to art historians, the person sitting closest to Christ in The Last Supper is not Mary, but John, whom Leonardo traditionally painted without a beard and in a rather feminine manner. If it were Mary, then there would only be eleven disciples around the table, and we might ask where John had disappeared to. It is also not surprising that the chalice is not on the table (Brown concluded from this that the chalice is actually Mary), as the artist dramatizes the scene from the Gospel of John in which the Savior announces that one of the disciples will betray him. There is no mention of a chalice in this passage. Although Brown claims to have come to these conclusions during his art studies in Seville, he quotes the statements in The Templar Revelation almost verbatim. It is unworthy of an art history student that Brown clearly has no idea that the Madonna of the Rocks, which Sophie removes from the wall of the Louvre and uses as a shield, threatening to tear it apart by stretching it across her knees, is actually painted on wood.
Opus Dei does exist, but within the Catholic Church. Its founder was recently canonized by the Pope. Opus Dei has indeed become notorious for its conservatism—including the self-mortification of its members—but it is more a matter of rumor that the order is responsible for the mysterious death of John Paul I or the Vatican bank scandal. Understandably, the organization’s leaders were not happy with Brown’s portrayal of them.
The Priory of Sion also exists in reality, but it was not founded in Jerusalem in 1099, but in France in 1956 or shortly before. Its founder, Pierre Plantard, had previously been a member of several anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic organizations, and during World War II he tried to offer his services to the Vichy government (apparently to no avail). The “documents” stored in the Bibliothèque Nationale, from which Leigh, Baigent, and Lincoln painstakingly unraveled the secret of the bloodline, were most likely placed there by Plantard himself. If we read Holy Blood, Holy Grail carefully, Plantard’s motives also become clear: the secret bloodline lives on today in several families: the Stuart, St-Claire and—surprisingly—the Plantard families are descended from it. In short, the staunchly right-wing Pierre Plantard “de Saint-Claire” is in fact a descendant of the Merovingian rulers and, as such, a legitimate pretender to the French throne. His legitimacy is further strengthened by the fact that he is also a descendant of Christ and Mary, not to mention David and Benjamin. Brown, of course, uses only as much of the Order of Sion’s self-myth as is necessary for his novel, taking over the list of grand masters and the mystery of the bloodline, but he does not burden his story with the political goals of the order. Instead, as in The Templar Revelation, he presents the members of the order as secret worshippers of the feminine principle—omitting from this book the idea that Jesus and Mary were extramarital sex partners who were initiated into the erotic mysteries of Isis.
Although it cannot be considered a professional mistake, Dan Brown’s portrayal of the scholar conducting research is characteristic of his source criticism and treatment of facts—and is a major cause of professional outrage. First of all, there is no subject called ’symbolology’ taught at Harvard, whatever that word may mean. Secondly, we do not generally refer to research as scientific when someone arbitrarily grabs secondary literature published in the 20th century from the shelf and connects up everything that seems remotely similar. In any case, it is unlikely that there is a scholar who has learnt all the late ancient languages of the Near East.
However, let us consider for a moment how convincing these objections are to the average person. Are the historical references on which the rejection is based really part of the background knowledge of the educated average person? Are these arguments really convincing, or do they only seem convincing if we accept the rules of history as an academic fiels in advance and trust that the experts are not misleading us? And what if we assume that they too are part of a conspiracy to deceive everyone? Or that perhaps they have unwittingly become tools of the church in concealing the secret of the bloodline? Can we name arguments that would be convincing even to an outside observer who is not familiar with the facts and methods of the historical profession?
One such possible argument is the internal inconsistency of the bloodline story. The members and grand masters of the Order of Sion, sworn to preserve the secret, leave behind clues that lead Langdon and Sophie Neuveu to the solution. The paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and the Virgin of the Rocks, offer the most clues about royal bloodlines and secret femininity. How is it that those whose job it is to keep the secret are the ones who talk about it the most? The incoherence of a theoretical system is, of course, not foreign to accepted science either; even complex physical explanatory theories have been known to contain internal contradictions, but such inconsistency is strange in a structurally simple explanatory story. A similar inconsistency lies in the research methodology of The Da Vinci Code. The author believes that every sign in the world refers to some further symbol, that every text conceals a deeper message—except for the biblical relationship between Jesus and Mary, because he is apparently unwilling to accept any metaphorical, mystical, or symbolic content in it, considering only a sexual interpretation possible.
The second counterargument may be that we are dealing with a conspiracy theory, whose main characteristic is that everything proves it and nothing refutes it. Those who could decide on its truth, namely professional historians, are themselves accused of complicity in deception. This effectively rules out any possible rebuttal. Finally, it should be noted that proponents of the bloodline theory do not attempt to convince the profession of the truth of their beliefs, for example at a conference. They focus exclusively on achieving success in the book market, and their audience is the more or less educated general public. The general public, having relatively little direct experience of the profession of historians, partly due to the failings of the profession itself and secondary education, as we have seen, perceives real science as more boring and dull than it actually is, and presumably thinks that that historians who deny such a floridly told conspiracy theory are somewhat dusty or perhaps not bold enough to posit such exciting forgeries. In fact, however, the science of history abounds in theories of forgery and conspiracy, even if these are generally of lesser importance: there have been meaningful professional debates about the authenticity of the correspondence between Abelard and Héloïse, the founding charter of the Abbey of Tihany, and the Sekler runic script—or at least their later origin than is generally believed. It is true, however, that these debates are not suitable for organizing clubs around them or for secret societies to elevate their magical content to a practical level.
Däniken and the extraterrestrials
According to Erich von Däniken, there are many mysterious things on Earth, such as drawings, maps, inscriptions, pyramids, giant earth drawings, stone structures, and statues suggest that extraterrestrials visited Earth in ancient times (40,000–10,000 years ago). They married local women, and their descendants became what we know as the Homo sapiens species. The extraterrestrials, the ancient space travelers, taught Earthlings how to fly, who then rose into the air and, upon descending, created the aforementioned map-like lines (e.g., the mysterious drawings on the Nasca plateau, which only make sense when viewed from the air) and structures (Stonehenge, Easter Island statues, etc.). The drawings show not only “aerial photographs,” but also the spaceships of extraterrestrials, and even the intelligent beings themselves, who are from another world. This ancient ability to fly, as well as the knowledge received from extraterrestrial space travelers, made the particularly advanced Sumerian astronomical knowledge possible. Finally, many religious texts refer to contact with alien beings, because the collective memory of the ancient humans preserved these beings as gods. Ezekiel’s visions in the Old Testament can thus be interpreted as descriptions of a landing spaceship. Däniken elaborates on his theory in several highly successful books, of which we have provided only a very condensed version here. One of the author’s basic arguments is that the outstanding technical achievements of the past would have been impossible without some kind of outside help. If this is the case, then we must look for an explanation. Däniken’s explanation is possible, at least logically.
Although it is often pointed out that Däniken had run into trouble with the law as a teenager, and later spent several years in prison for tax evasion, embezzlement, and other crimes, and that he has also faced accusations of plagiarism from time to time – Däniken, incidentally, sees all this as signs of a conspiracy against him –; it is important to note that these arguments are no stronger than in the case where the dubious morals of a single proponent of alternative medicine were used to ridicule the whole field of alternative medicine. This argumentation technique is called ad hominem reasoning, which, instead of refuting the validity of a position with professional arguments, seeks to undermine the credibility or reliability of the arguer. However, the morality, intelligence, background, or anything else about the person arguing for a position has nothing to do with whether the position itself can be taken seriously. So let’s look at counterarguments that attack not Däniken, but his theory.
The first problem with Däniken’s hypothesis is, as critics point out, that it’s hard to imagine any proof whose existence would actually induce the author to actually revise it. This criticism doesn’t necessarily expect the inventor of a hypothesis to actually revoke it at the emergence of one single contrary experience or a so-called decisive experiment – we know from the history of 20th century academia that science is not keen on doing this. But it puts a hypothesis in a delicate position is there is nothing in the world that can refute it and everything supports it. This is something characteristic of conspiracy theories.
The next problem is with the interpretation of ’possibleness’. If the greatest merit of the theory is that it is not unimaginable, then we have to take it seriously – but only to the same extent as we take seriously the infinite number of other theories we can put next to it which are also imaginable. Dänikan claims that people of old learnt how to fly from aliens and then drew their artwork and maps and devised their advanced astronomy. Well, it’s also possible then that people of old could not fly and yet drew their maps and artwork and came up with advanced astronomy like science claims, without external intervention. Or people of old learnt how to fly all by themselves and then drew the maps and artwork and devised advanced astronomy. Or the aliens who could fly drew the maps and lines and devised advanced astronomy but never ever communicated with the people of that time. Or the Spaghetti Monster is responsible for all of this and more. These theories are all possible and it’s difficult to see why Dänikan’s one should be the most convincing. To put it a bit more strictly: if we defend a theory merely saying that it’s ’possible’, since we can potentially devise an infinite number of possible theories, the probability of any one of them being true is close to zero. That is, accepting a theory can not rest on the condition of it being merely ’possible’: to consider it as a serious alternative it has also got to be ’probable’.
Däniken is a businessman is showbiz, his 26 books have been published in 20 languages, his name is widely known. Although he regularly claims how sad he is about his alien theory not being accepted by the scientific community, his main goal is to work his audience. Even though he denies the theory of evolution, the basic tenets of disciplines like prehistory, Egyptology, Sumerology and others, he doesn’t define a new interdisciplinary methodology that could make his findings convincing. His methods involve a simple recombination of already known facts while disregarding the inconvenient explanations that don’t fit into his theory. His main argument is the same as Illig’s: the scientific community doesn’t accept his ideas because there is not a single scholar whose horizon is wide enough to synthesise all the different types of data he uses. Considering the popularity of interdisciplinary research these days it sounds rather bizarre as an argument.
Let’s imagine that there are indeed aliens and the at least some of the alleged UFO-sightings are indeed what they are claimed to be. Let’s imagine that intelligent aliens do regularly visit Earth for scientific reasons or to make friend or war. This would elevate the status of today’s doubtful pseudoscientific fields like UFO-logy to that of real science. Even this, however, wouldn’t make Däniken’s theory more scientific, since it wouldn’t make biologists change their minds and claim that we are descended from aliens or archeologists say that all large ancient structures were built by astronatuts.
Daniken’s theory, just like that of Illig, is not the summary of a narrower or wider heretic tradition, but the brainchild of one single person (joined by followers, who are also laypeople). There is nothing wrong per se about this: the history of science is full of stories when one outstanding scientist’s view went against the grain of the accepted scientific tradition of the time and went on to completely transform it. However, in order to transform it, they had to open a dialogue with its representatives, addressing the profession, conduct proper debates. Academics might be conservative and hard-headed, but we still see how even the most revolutionary idea found supposrt among them once there were strong enough arguments in its favour. However, if someone doesn’t even attempt to defend their ideas on the professional stage but tries instead to get the general public to support it, they can’t expect academia to accept these notions, since they had not passed the academic quality tests – in fact they didn’t even appear within the field of science.
All this becomes pseudoscience when the representative of these ideas wants to create the impression to the outside world that what they are doing is, in fact, science.
What follows from all this?
In this chapter, did we not do exactly what we warned readers against doing in other cases? It is possible that in discussing the various debates, we abandoned our impartiality and slipped into the role of arbiters of truth. We were not content to summarize the arguments and counterarguments, but took a militant stance on the side of one party, the representatives of “orthodox” science, becoming the mouthpiece for their arguments. Why is this behavior acceptable in these cases, and to what extent can it be generalized? Do we have the right to proceed in a similar manner with all other theories that seem pseudoscientific to us?
In this book, we argue that this would be very dangerous. Reconstructing the various debates surrounding rejected sciences, it seems that although they undoubtedly have in common that they are not accepted and valued by contemporary science (or only to a small extent), the reasons for their rejection vary considerably in each case, and it would therefore be extremely misleading to dogmatically and uniformly label them as “pseudoscience.” Their structure, content, and claims alone do not make them inherently unsuitable for a culture to accept them as meaningful forms of knowledge. some of them (e.g., astrology) have or had the status of science in other eras, while others (e.g., acupuncture) have or had that status in other cultures. For this very reason, when assessing individual traditions and their critics, we must attempt—even if this is strictly speaking impossible for us, the children of Western thought who formulate the criticisms—to keep an equal distance from both sides and take an “outside” perspective when presenting the debates surrounding the theory.
This cautious approach may give the false impression that the authors of this book support the idea of “let all flowers bloom”, take their children to the doctor with a medical school certificate with the same confidence as to a doctor who radiates healing powers through their TV set, and never give anyone a bad grade in their university courses because they evaluate every answer as an equal and alternative truth. In fact, we are convinced that in the case of any tradition that differs from our science, we must examine the arguments used to exclude a given candidate for knowledge, and that the historical and sociological factors of rejection are no less important than the substantive reasons. However, this does not mean that we consider all statements to be equally scientific, meaningful, and valuable. We believe that there are indeed theories and statements that appear scientific, which do not claim to represent some kind of alternative concept of truth and methodology, but rather make claims in accordance with the most traditional scientific methods, and within the framework of a given science, we can claim that something is false or, where bad faith can be proven, an outright lie.
Perhaps all our readers would agree with this, but the difference lies in what each person classifies as a mistake or a lie among the forms of knowledge not supported by our current science. In examining the four examples in this chapter, we have attempted to find criteria that, when met, justify the use of the otherwise dubious label of “pseudoscience.” In addition, we tried to argue that these theories are not the products of another tradition that seems foreign or even incomprehensible to us, and that there is no alternative worldview behind them that we need to explore before taking a position on what we can do with a given theory. They are part of the same scientific tradition that gave rise to the claims they refute, they believe in the same research methodology and logic, and they consider similar methods of proof to be valid. However, once we have accepted the rules of the game of proof, they become binding, and we will be forced to accept the arguments of those who apply these rules more correctly than we do.
*This text is a chapter of the book Kutrovátz Gábor – Láng Benedek – Zemplén Gábor: A tudomány határai (Bp. Typotex 2008) (’The Boundaries of Science’). We are thankful to the authors for allowing us to use it.
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