"Call me anyone." "I am one of the six billion people alive on this planet." "My age isn't important." "My race doesn't matter." "My sex doesn't, either." "All you need to know is that I tell stories." "And I tell them because stories create the world we live in." "Everything is a story." "History, faith, country, even God." "Each of us has a story." "Each of us is a character in someone else's story." "You might even say we're all part of the same story." "This is someone who also tells stories." "His name is Dan Brown, and in the spring of 2003, he published a book that became the fastest-selling adult novel in history." "Why did The Da Vinci Code generate such passion?" "Why did it spark such controversy?" "Why this book?" "Why now?" "Dan Brown has done a service to the debates by bringing things like the Divine Feminine, the Sacred Feminine, back into public discourse, if you like." "It's the theological equivalent of junk food." "The  Da Vinci Code gives us this kind of fantasy, to imagine our relationships on a personal level can be like Jesus and Mary." "The whole thing is a litany of lies, 'cause I think he wins the Guinness Book of Records prize for the number of mistakes historically that are made in a novel." "If you don't learn about Isaac Newton in your science class, and then your first encounter with the fellow is from having read  The Da Vinci Code, I'll take it." "The Da Vinci Code has done the world an enormous favor, um, and I think it's the beginning of hope." "If you want to learn about early Christianity, don't read  The Da Vinci Code, read a book about the history of early Christianity and get your facts straight." "My own sister came to me and said, "I just read  The Da Vinci Code." ""I didn't know all those things."" "And I looked at her and I said," ""Hey, you still don't know all those things."" "It's become a launching pad for attacking basic Christian beliefs and an institution within the Catholic Church." "In this case Opus Dei." "The fear of meaninglessness coupled with disillusionment about the various isms has generated a spiritual hunger." "A very broad swath of humanity simply does not find the Church's version of events credible." "It shows that there are thousands and thousands of people who're prepared to hear something different and who are trained to find by themselves, the truth." "The great thing about  The Da Vinci Code is it shows people are looking." "And my hope is that they'll keep looking." "They'll look through  The Da Vinci Code and find something deeper." "So The Da Vinci Code touches these raw nerves about secret knowledge, about sacred knowledge, the quest to find out these truths, about why certain people are on a mission to find these truths, and certain people are on a mission" "to preserve these truths, and why other people are on a mission to cover up or conceal these truths." "The Da Vinci Code begins with a murder at the Louvre museum in Paris." "Before dying, the victim arranges his arms and legs to look like a pentacle." "Like this." "Or this." "The pose is a clue." "It's the first of many clues that send Harvard professor Robert Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu on a 24-hour high-speed chase across Europe." "Paintings that lead to a chateau on the outskirts of Paris, a 13th century church in London built by Templar Knights, a chapel in Scotland where the Holy Grail is said to rest." "Langdon and Neveu are closing in on a secret that has been concealed by the Catholic Church for nearly 2000 years." "A secret so disturbing, it could change our view of history, and perhaps, of Christianity itself." "So in the book, they tell you something very important." "Jesus had a female companion, Mary Magdalene... and they have descendants remaining until today." "According to the novel," "Mary Magdalene is not the penitent prostitute the Church led us to believe." "A prostitute who finds redemption through Christ." "No, she is the most trusted apostle of Jesus, his closest companion, and the mother of his child." "Her spirit is the Sacred Feminine, and her body the Holy Grail." "And apparently, she has gone missing." "So you see in the very center of this commercial gallery is located very strange sculpture consisting in two opposite shapes." "One is the normal pyramid, what we call the Blade, which is mentioned to be the Blade of the male sign in the book, and we have an inverted pyramid in glass which is in the book mentioned to be the female sign." "Is it the Grail or is it the testimony of Jesus and Magdalene's descendants?" "But that's the place." "This is where the novel ends and our story begins." "Of course, I mean it's a strange place because you are in the center of a commercial gallery, you're close to Virgin Megastore, amongst the shops it's very modern, but sometimes, I mean, we are living in" "the 3rd millennium and sometimes we are looking for things in unexpected places..." "Maybe the Grail is close to us and we don't see." "For me one of the worst things I could imagine would be to open my newspaper in the morning, and see a big headline saying, "Holy Grail discovered."" "Because if it's been discovered, then there's nothing left to search for." "The real mystery is... is somewhere inside." "And you come to it by making the journey, by exploring." "We have people basically who are much more interested in treasure hunting." "They're looking for a chalice, they're looking for a cauldron, they're looking for a bloodline." "For me, it wouldn't be the Grail because it's what the Grail stands for, what it represents, what it contains, if you like, that's much more important." "But I am interested in finding the truth behind the myths, behind the stories, behind the mystery, and I think one of the ways that you can do that is to dig back far enough." "If you go back far enough, it's not necessary that you're gonna find an absolute truth if you go back to pre-historic times, but you are going to be closer to the earliest expression of these things," "to the... to the idea, when the idea was born, if you like." "Like the characters in The Da Vinci Code, we, too, are looking for a Grail." "Not the cup from which Jesus drank or proof of a bloodline descending from Jesus and Mary." "Nothing that we can see or touch." "But something in the heart and mind, and in the stories that define us." "We are seekers traveling down unknown roads, looking for answers to ancient questions, going back to a time when religion was new, and the Sacred Feminine was just evolving," "25,000 years ago, when our ancestors worshiped many gods, male and female." "Women were seen as most closely connected to the fecundity of the Earth itself." "You're with the... the feminine principle of the, sort of, Mother Earth, who gives birth to everything." "This is a very erotic experience." "Because what this, what this represents with these deeply polished grooves all coming in on a V here, is probably a vulva." "The vulva, the birth canal became very symbolic, as the portal to that, of that... that spiritual quest." "Nearly 85% of human figures represented in prehistoric cave art are female." "The richness of... of art in this area is sort of kept beneath the radar." "You can imagine why." "Caves and cavities were like a belly, the womb that gave birth, the womb that you had to get into, and you also had to come back out of it." "It's obvious from the architecture of the cave, and the... the art within it that we're within the Earth Goddess herself." "The vulva here represents the means of passage between our world and the inner world of the spirits." "The rock is sort of the membrane between the here and the beyond." "And the horse is the animal of passage that accompanies the shaman on that transcendental journey deep into the beyond and then safely back." "The reverence of our ancestors for the miracle of birth inspired the first expressions of spirituality." "This is probably the best evidence that I know of of a Sacred Feminine principle through prehistory." "I mean, this is it." "This proves the case." "The Sacred Feminine." "The Earth Mother." "The pagan goddess." "At the core of all religion, procreation." "The Glastonbury Tor is a ancient, pagan sacred site which many people come to as a center for the Divine Feminine." "And the hill itself has the appearance, if you look at it from a distance, of perhaps a breast, or almost as if the Earth is pregnant." "And with the tower on the top, it's the breast idea is accentuated because it's like a nipple." "One of the creation myths was that creation was God masturbating." "As the..." "As the great creation of the universe, sex was very much at the center of ancient spirituality, as you would expect it to be, because through sex comes life." "I mean, how incredible is that?" "Every single mystical tradition uses as a metaphor for the union between the human being and God, every one uses sex as the human metaphor for that." "If you want to understand what the longing for union is, think about the longing in a sexual relationship." "You don't even need mystical traditions and heavy analysis to understand this." "Just think about when you're making love." "How many people say, "Oh, God, oh, God."" "Now, you don't say, "Oh, toaster."" "And you don't say, "Oh..." You know, you say "Oh, God."" "Why?" "Because that word is a code word for, kind of, the deepest, deepest connection, communion, union, intimacy." "Where do we come from?" "Where do we go after we die?" "These are the mysteries, the questions that have fueled our search for meaning from the beginning of time." "One of the most important tenets about what the Christians believe is that death is a transition from this life to an eternal life." "As a matter of fact, the term "cemetery" actually means sleeping place." "Slave, baby, woman, wealthy person, buried next to popes, noblemen..." "The catacombs offer a representation of the universality of the early Christian Church." "It was an absolute innovation in the Roman world." "There were many religions, promising all kinds of things, but each one of these religions had only a select elite few who could join the religion." "Christianity offered a God who loved everybody equally." "He didn't look at your color, he didn't look at your bank statement, he didn't look at your gender." "This God loved everyone." "To leave your body behind for a short while, waiting to be rejoined with the body the day of the last judgment in the afterlife." "This God wanted to save everyone." "Which is why the primary images of the catacombs are always those of salvation." "This position of the raised hands is called the orant, and it means "the figure in prayer"." "They always look straight out at the viewers, one of the very few images in catacomb paintings, which have a very direct relationship towards the viewer." ""Look, I am saved." "I am saved through prayer, you can do it, too."" "In the years following the death of Christ, there were many religions along the Mediterranean basin, each with its own traditions and mysteries, all under the thumb of the Roman empire." "Then, in 306, a general ascended to power, and according to Dan Brown, co-opted the message of Christ, while diminishing the role of Mary Magdalene." "Well, Constantine, he was declared Emperor by the troops in Northern England." "He was up there at York and..." "But he had a holy mother, who we remember as Saint Helena." "His mom was... was a Catholic Christian, so she was there." "And he was also aware of the fact there were millions of Christians in his empire, and, uh, he wanted some religious glue, and he found it there." "Constantine had a dream or a vision that in this sign, the sign of the cross, "You will conquer."" "So he got his soldiers to put that on their shields, and Constantine took over." "Changing gods takes time." "But it goes faster when the new story resembles earlier ones." "December 25th, the birthday of the Persian god, Mithras, becomes Christmas." "Isis nursing her baby Horus, becomes the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus." "Poseidon's trident changes into the devil's pitchfork, and the pentacle, the symbol of the Sacred Feminine becomes associated with evil, with witchcraft, with serial killers." "This is an ancient sacred site, which was adopted by the early Christians." "The whole place is steeped with mythology and with ambience of... of ancient spirituality, going right back, pre-Christian to pagan days." "The name "pagan" was used by the Roman Church, by Christians, to put down the old religion, and... and it kind of means country dweller or country bumpkin." "The truth, of course, is that the old religion, the old paganism, in its wider sense, was immensely sophisticated." "This is the philosophy of ancient civilization." "The civilization which gave us the pyramids, the Parthenon, mathematics, science..." "It's actually..." "Ironically, it's after Christianity took over..." "That..." "And all of that was destroyed, that we went back to this idea that the Earth was flat and that you could be killed for saying that..." "Denying that the Earth goes round the sun, and we had, well, the Dark Ages." "Religion, it's been about a big man in the sky with a beard, whose message is "Do what I tell you."" "And to women, the message has been basically," ""Shh." "Don't say anything."" "You know, "Don't do anything." ""You're not really involved in this."" "In fact, there was a whole debate in the Middle Ages, you know, whether they even had, women had souls." "And now we've all inherited that and think it's Christianity." "That's not what it was about." "And we've lost half of the equation." "We've lost the inner mysteries." "We've lost the mysteries of the Feminine." "After the crucifixion, various Christian sects arose, each telling the story of Jesus from a different point of view." "To create a uniform religion, the first Church fathers chose four gospels," "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which later became the first four books of the New Testament." "Dozens of other gospels were declared heretical and were hidden, lost to history until discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945." "The discovery of the Gnostic Gospels was really a surprise." "It was discovered by some villagers from a small town in Upper Egypt." "And much later, we learned that these had contained an ancient library." "It's really a treasury of early Christian writings, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Letter of Peter to Paul, the Secret Book of James, the Secret Book of John." "Over 50 writings attributed to Jesus and his disciples." "You know, we thought we knew something about the early Christian movement." "Now we find out that what we knew is really a small slice of a much wider range." "So instead of four gospels, as we have in the New Testament, you find dozens of others." "Now, we always knew there were dozens of others, because the fathers of the Church had said this." "They said heretics had written terrible other secret gospels." "And we never knew what they were." "We just knew that they were awful." "And now for the first time, these ancient Christians can speak for themselves and we can find out what the people called heretics actually said." "While the traditional Church sought to oversee a person's relationship with God, the Gnostics believed that spiritual revelation could only come from within." "No intercession was required by priests or rabbis." "If you wake up to what you really are and discover the Christ within, and recognize as that everything is one, that's gnosis, and you come into love with everything, that's heaven." "So the original message was by understanding this powerful myth, you can wake up to what you really are, and discover that we are all parts of one body, as Paul says." "We're all parts of the Christ, we're all one." "Back in the second century, Saint Iraneus, he's definitely supporting four gospels, four gospels, no more, no less." "He knows these Gnostic gospels." "He says they're garbage." "I mean, they're just invented, they're not the real thing, but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these are the four gospels." "People have to fudge the dates of these Gnostic Gospels to use them for their own purposes claiming they were there in the middle of the first century." "Well, that's a maverick claim that the overwhelming majority of scholars just don't accept." "One only needs to read the Gnostic Gospels from beginning to end to realize, well, thank God this never made the list." "It used to be easy, you'd say, "Well, which ones are true?"" "Well, the Church says, "These." "They're in the New Testament." ""After all, those are the real ones." "These are the fake ones."" "It's a lot harder now." "If you look at all of this range of text and say," ""What can you believe?"" "There are not just the four gospels in the New Testament, there were hundreds, probably, of Gnostic Gospels, many of which we now found." "And they're very mythological." "You can see that there's a natural continuum of a synthesis of pagan and Jewish tradition, and Jesus is a kind of ancient superhero." "He's like Batman meets Superman." "He combines the Messiah with the pagan God-Man, and has the attributes of both." "The most important myth in the ancient world is the story of a dying and resurrecting God-Man." "He changes water into wine at a wedding, performs these miracles, bringing back people from the dead, all of the things we associate with Jesus, right up to the really crucial things, of course, which is dying at Easter, sometimes through crucifixion." "He then resurrects and to share in eternal life, you take bread and wine to commune with God." "Now that's Christianity, and this existed before anyone had the idea of there being Jesus." "The Jesus story, if you stand back from it, it looks like a myth, it's the story of someone who's born of a virgin, for goodness' sake, and comes back from the dead, I've never met anyone who was born of a virgin" "or came back from the dead." "It looks like a myth because it is a myth." "The gospels you find in the New Testament like Matthew, Mark, tell you what Jesus preached out on the hills to thousands of people." "But Mark says that Jesus taught his disciples privately, secretly, secret things." "And he doesn't tell you what they said." "Now these other gospels often claim to be secret teachings and they were probably meant to be just for the few who were going on to a deeper level." "Now what's happened is that myth has been literalized." "It's become about a literal man who you literally believe came and literally died for your sins, as an historical event." "And what that's done is it's cut us off from that power, the power to actually transform us and help us experience gnosis." "The Gnostics were mystics." "Instead of worshiping Christ as a literal figure, a man of flesh and blood, they considered his life and teachings as allegories, stories that helped guide their journey toward truth." "So instead of speaking of Jesus as an utterly unique being on whom you must believe, they picture Jesus as someone who manifests what anyone could become." "And that is a very different kind of message." "The Gospel of Mary says the Son of Man is within you, follow after him." "You don't have to find Jesus of Nazareth, but you have to find what's within you." "Throughout the Gnostic scriptures, there is a little bone of contention between the fact that the disciples have been with Christ, but Mary has been with him slightly longer." "She's..." "She's been with him more." "She knows more of his secrets than... than they do." "She almost acts as someone of, not co-wisdom with him, but as someone whose questions of him show an intelligence and an understanding that the questions from the other of the disciples just do not show." "And so that closeness, um, has been seen, by many people who've read the Gnostic scriptures, as evidence of a personal and literal sexual relationship." "Certainly Dan Brown who wrote  The Da Vinci Code took off from a few lines that were found in some of these secret texts because they are very provocative." "The ones with which he started are from the Gospel of Philip which says," ""Jesus loved Mary more than all the disciples and he kissed her often on her..."" "And then the text breaks, and you don't know." "What actually happens in these texts is something rather different." "There, she is described as the companion of Jesus, and the language is erotic." "But it's the language of a mystical writer who talks about Mary as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit." "If you look at the mystical traditions of Judaism, of Islam and of Christianity, you find the Divine is often spoken of as the Father." "But there is also a mother or a daughter, someone who sits alongside and helps the Divine." "And in the Jewish tradition, um, that figure is the Shekinah, who is the presence of God." "She's seen as female." "In the Islamic tradition, um, she's called the Sakina and she behaves in a very similar way." "She is accompanying the soul through life." "In Gnosticism, she lives an ordinary life, and suffers and shares what we would understand as the human condition." "She makes mighty things to come about." "She is a very powerful lady indeed." "Dan Brown has given us the impression that Mary Magdalene gets this exalted point of being, the... the equal of Jesus." "The problem is that this cannot be." "Because Jesus is God." "So what is she, God?" "In which case, we don't have the same, we're not talking about the same religion." "I mean, you can't say this is something that the Catholic Church is hiding from you, because this is clearly not the same religion we're talking about." "There is one God, and there are no other gods." "I mean, I was under the impression this was kind of laid out in the Ten Commandments a while ago." "A lot of people today have been concerned with issues, both about women and feminine language." "But many people think it's a very new issue." "What's interesting is that it appeared at the very beginning of the Christian movement." "Sometimes people say to me, "Well, you know, that all sounds very new age."" "And I think, well, you know, 2,000 years is not so new." "It is here at Chateau Villette that Sophie Neveu is told of the church's role in denying the importance of the Sacred Feminine and of Mary Magdalene." "The center story about The Da Vinci Code, it's all experienced right here, at the Chateau." "The bulk of the story in history, actually, was told right here, in this room, and right on this sofa, actually." "And in fact, right in this sofa is where they hide the keystone, underneath this sofa." "The keystone in The Da Vinci Code is the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ." "Their story resonates with many people, but for some, the message does not go far enough." "Of all the things in  The Da Vinci Code that makes me the angriest, is that a man who is writing a book that's supposed to be about the Divine Feminine denigrates Mary Magdalene and says she is nothing more than the perpetrator of a bloodline," "instead of talking about her as a passionate preacher, as an independent woman in her own right." "If anything,  The Da Vinci Code suddenlyraisesallthesequestions that, you know, that have never been discussed publicly." "No." "It is absolutely clear." "The bad guys are the Catholic Church and Opus Dei." "The good guys are the Priory of Sion." "It is Indiana Jones all the way." "But it's against what we've been brought up to believe." "Yeah." "I..." "I..." "See, I, again, I think that when the book says this is what you were taught to believe, you don't remember, really, what you were taught to believe, but when they tell you that, you say, "Oh, yeah, that's right." ""Yeah, I was taught to believe that." "Because, hey, I slept through my classes."" "But he has a talent." "He made it a suspense." "It's a  polar." "It's the first book you read in two nights." "...because I read all these other books, and Dan Brown made a novel out of it, and much easier to read, and more interesting to read." "And I kept falling to sleep when I read  The Holy Grail, Holy Blood." "It was very difficult to read." " What do you think about..." " To use the name of Da Vinci?" "Da Vinci was one weird guy." "And I'm sure he put codes and things in there." "I just don't think they had anything to do with what." "The Holy Blood, Holy Grail or  The Da Vinci Code said." "Leonardo was an interesting person, and I don't think anybody understands him." "Maybe his mother." "Architect, engineer, inventor." "Leonardo was so complex, he was almost impossible to comprehend." "Which is why we have never stopped trying." "The  Last Supper is obviously one of the most famous paintings in the world." "In fact, it's probably one of two famous paintings, the other being the  Mona Lisa, both by Leonardo Da Vinci, um, and they're both very weird." "The core of The Da Vinci Code  is the symbolism in Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper." "We were the first people to notice what everybody now knows." "Um, and they say, "Thanks to Dan Brown."" "It's not "Thanks to Dan Brown," it's thanks to us." "Um, that's in fact the world knows that, or at least suspects, that, uh, the person sitting on Jesus' right hand in the  Last Supper is not the young St. John at all." "And you looked at it, and you think, "Wait a minute, that's a woman."" "Basically all you have to do is look at it with new eyes." "Well, Jesus is sitting there, sort of, going like this, isn't He?" "And she, it was, what, because it isn't..." "Oh, hang on." "I have to be Jesus." "Yes, that's what I'm saying, you're Jesus, but I was just doing..." "Yes, you're doing that." "And..." "And he or she is, you know, is sort of leaning away like this but almost as if joined, still joined at the hip." "Together they make a giant, spread-eagled M shape." "Uh, well, the M gives you a clue." "It's some, someone whose name begins with M." "Not the Virgin Mary." "It must be Mary Magdalene." "Oh, I see 12 male apostles." "I mean, if that figure is Mary Magdalene next to Jesus, where's John?" "Assuming that that figure is Mary Magdalene, a hand cuts across her neck visually." "Um, it looks like a disciple is leaning on her shoulder, like this, leaning forward, but in fact, visually the hand is threatening, um, and that disciple is, who's doing that, is Saint Peter." "The other interesting thing in that painting is that Peter is portrayed with his hand across Mary's throat, and with a knife." "Now what's that?" "Peter, Judas and, uh, Saint John in one group together." "Peter is so angry at this news that Jesus will be betrayed, and he's... and he's right next to the traitor, whereas John is much more contemplative and tranquil." "And that's the normal way it's being understood." "Once you see that Peter in Gnostic mythology also represents ignorance, he is the, he represents each one of us at our most lost, and he is shown in Gnostic gospels as antagonistic to Mary, he's jealous of Mary." "Saint Peter was hugely jealous of her and kept going to Jesus and saying, "Lord, let Mary leave us 'cause women are not worthy of life."" "He doesn't like the fact that Mary has the ear of Jesus, all of this, allegorical of course." "Then you understand why Peter is there with a knife, and trying to silence Mary." "You know, Saint Peter founded the Catholic Church on the authority given him by Jesus." "Supposing he never got it." "Supposing the authority was given to a woman." "Mary Magdalene is not present in Leonardo's  Last Supper." "It is a painting that has been sitting on a wall for 500 years." "It's been looked at by some of the greatest art historians, some of the most keen observers, it has never been forwarded that the figure is Mary Magdalene." "It is not." "Sometimes the stories our ancestors told are forgotten or suppressed, but they remain in our collective unconscious waiting to emerge." "And like Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, we pick up the threads of these stories, hoping to find where they lead." "Mary Magdalene is a signpost." "She's not the destination." "She is a messenger, and in that case, she is a model to us all, because she, she keeps on, um, being a disciple." "She keeps on being faithful, even when people shout at her, and say, "No, you're wrong." ""We're..." "We know better."" "She is faithful and I think that's a faith that we could all learn from." "These are what I call 'Magdalene pilgrims' and they come here to Vezelay looking for Mary Magdalene, for what they call the true Mary Magdalene." "They define themselves as pilgrims and so they are also following in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims who were coming to Vezelay to venerate the relics of Mary Magdalene." "These Magdalene pilgrims want to contact in some way with her and with her energy because they think most of all that she is relevant for women." "They believe that Mary Magdalene was not only a simple disciple of Jesus but she actually was his teacher." "According to these pilgrims, it is partly thanks to Mary Magdalene's teachings that Jesus could do what he did." "Well, the Catholic Church treated Mary Magdalene in a quite ambiguous way because in the four gospels they do not say that Mary Magdalene is a prostitute." "This came out only later, in the sixth century because a Pope declared that, according to his point of view." "Mary Magdalene and two other female figures in the gospels were the same woman." "So, until 1969, the Catholic Church considered Magdalene as a prostitute and as a repentant sinner who converts at the moment she meets Jesus and at the moment Jesus heals her from seven demons." "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee." "Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." "Holy Mary, Mother of God, Saint Mary Magdalene," "Saint Joseph, all you saints of God, pray for us, sinners, now and at the hour of our death." "Amen." "Mind your head." "Mind your head." "Relics said to be those of Saint Mary Magdalene were acquired in the 11th century, and they were, in fact, ratified officially by the pope of the day, about the year 1050." "It meant that when the pilgrims came, they brought money for the building of the church, and this whole basilica was built with pilgrim offerings." "The kingdom of God is close." "And the evidence that his message is true is the resurrection." "And that's why Saint Mary Magdalene is so important." "She's the first person to hear, touch, see, smell our Lord risen." "He says to her, "Don't touch me."" "Meaning, "Don't cling to me, don't try and hold me in this world," ""I am ascending to the Father." "I've come, in other words, to take everything into heaven."" "She's the first person to communicate this knowledge to the world." "She goes to the apostles that first resurrection morning and they don't believe her." ""She's a woman, you know."" ""Silly woman."" "Why did he choose Mary Magdalene?" "I think for the real answer to that, you'd need to ask our Lord." "It's just part of God's humility." "The only way God can express it is by choosing a broken woman like Saint Mary Magdalene to be the first to announce the resurrection." "And the living experience that Christians have in their relationship with Saint Mary Magdalene." "She's alive, not dead." "She's died, sure, in terms of this life and this world, but in Christian terms, she's alive." "Spiritually, she's here and she's at work." "She's at work wherever the Holy Spirit's at work." "That doesn't mean to say she's some kind of goddess." "She isn't at all." "She's just a Christian saint, but a very important one." "There is no history whatsoever that she was married, and there's no history that she ever had children." "And she certainly didn't have any kind of relationship of that kind with our Lord." "That, that's sheer 20th century fantasy." "Not because the Church, as an institution, suppressed it, it just isn't there." "It's just not consonant with our Lord's life, nor with hers." "It has been said that Jesus, being a rabbi, would have been married." "But what if Jesus had lived among the Essenes, a community of celibate Jews along the western shore of the Dead Sea?" "One of the things we know about the Essenes, these people were so crazy about ritual purity." "For example, not only did you have to take a bath after you came back from going to the bathroom, but you had to go into the  mikvah which is a spiritual bath, twice a day." "These were a group of celibate men who were living out here according to the ancient writers." "These people were fanatical about ritual purity." "Who did Jesus hang out with?" "He hung out with the prostitutes, with the blind, the lame, the halt." "These are the type of people, from a Jewish point of view, you do not want to have anything to do with if you're an Essene." "And since Jesus hung out with these people," "Jesus would not even have been allowed near this place." "Well, it's clear that the Christians were influenced by these people, but was Jesus here?" "No way." "Not far from the sea of Galilee, where Jesus revealed his miracles, is the town of Migdal, said to be the birthplace of Mary Magdalene." "The Kabbala doesn't see as a forbidden subject that a woman would sit and learn with men." "Jesus was a Tanach." "Tanach means a... in order to be a Tanach, you have to work really hard at your inner cleanness." "You have to be a really purified person." "Jesus was... one of them." "And he learned not only the revealed part of the Judaism, of the Torah... but the inner part." "The secret part of the Judaism which is the Kabbala." "I don't think Jesus could have reached this high level without a wife." "He had to have a wife." "The Torah says that if you are not married you can't go into the Torah." "The role of the man is to bring the light." "The role of the wife is to reveal the light in the physical world." "If you tried to look at it through Kabbala eyes he should have had a wife and I think he had a wife." "There is a legend that tells of Mary Magdalene fleeing persecution in Palestine and arriving at the south of France in a boat without oars or sail." "This beautiful door represents the two Saint Marys with their servant, Sarah." "It is said here that on a boat, when the two Marys arrived there was also a girl, who was from Egypt." "The story is that Mary Magdalene had a child with Jesus Christ." "That would be Sarah." "I don't believe it at all." "I believe Jesus was totally dedicated to God." "I can't imagine that he would take the time to have human love." "It would be a contradiction with His mission." "Celibacy of the priesthood, that mirrors the celibacy of Christ." "It's only a question of time the time it takes to dedicate yourself to God and to others." "If you're married, you must spend a lot of time with your wife and children." "With or without child, the story of Mary was told throughout this region, and people listened." "The fact is, the first Christians arrived and brought the faith." "I believe in the beginning there was a rapid conversion." "The poor class were the first to be touched by the message of the Christians." "Jesus was a message of liberation and love." "And the disenfranchised were moved." "After Mary Magdalene arrived here with the other Saint Marys she just continued on her way." "Her story picks up again in Sainte Baume." "It's not too far from here, up in the mountains." "In the Middle Ages, Christians were told and believed that Mary Magdalene had ended her days in Provence at the top of this mountain called La Sainte Baume, which means 'the grotto'." "And she contemplated and repented for her sins." "In order to do so, she divested herself of her clothes, because this meant that she was close to God in holiness." "She wasn't concerned with her worldly goods and her worldly life." "She didn't eat, she fasted, she wept." "And in order to keep her covered, in order to make her decent, her hair grew down, around her body." "Everyday she was taken up to heaven by angels who gave her heavenly sustenance, spiritual sustenance." "She had no need of human food." "But this is where she came, and this is where pilgrims from the middle of the 13th century came to pray and to think about her." "Sweet Lover of God." "I mean, that exemplifies the whole medieval concept of Mary Magdalene, that she was the sweet friend or lover of God." "They've been coming here since 1250, and are still coming on their pilgrimage to see where Mary Magdalene spent her last days." "This is the final end of the pilgrimage to the grotto where Mary Magdalene spent the last 30 years of her life." "We're entering in this huge cavern, which amazed believers, pilgrims." "And they wrote back, wrote memoirs on how miraculous it was." "They would come here, pray and think about Mary Magdalene, the apostle, and the person who converted France to Christianity." "This is the crypt where Mary Magdalene's bones were believed, in the Middle Ages, to lie." "When the monks claimed to have her relics, or her bones here, they said they had her entire body minus an arm." "The skull, you can see, is of a woman around the age of 50." "Claiming to having her relics, would bring the Church money from the..." "the pilgrims that came in their thousands." "The more powerful the saint, the more money you would have coming in." "With a powerful and popular saint like Mary Magdalene, the economic ramifications were enormous." "When I was writing my book, people said to me why did I want to bother to write a book about a prostitute, or a repentant prostitute and I said I wasn't, and they said, "Well, what are you writing about?"" "And I said, "Well, a woman in her own right." Which is what I felt she was." "Um..." "And when I finished my book, I was so angry at what the Church had done to women in the name of Christianity," "I didn't want to think about it any longer." "I was stone-cold angry about what had happened to us." "And having done Mary Magdalene, it showed what women could have been in the last 2,000 years and what women can do now, and what men can understand women to be able to do now." "The guilt of, uh, sexuality, and procreation goes back to the Garden of Eden, because Eve has eaten of the apple, and Adam has eaten of the apple, too, they're expelled from the garden." "The blame of the guilt is heaped solely and squarely upon woman, upon Eve, rather than upon just Adam and Eve." "And we are living with the consequences of that, and it's... it's a very powerful story that affects so much of the modern world." "More than 5,000 years ago, we began to rewrite the ancient stories." "In time, one God replaced many, and the Sacred Feminine was changed into a temptress who brought sin into the world." "We've been taught a very, very different form of Christianity, which was to do with blind belief that somebody else had died for us because we had original sin, and that if we just believed that," "then we'd go to heaven when we died." "And if we didn't, we'd go to hell, and be tortured forever, by a God of love." "It's the last of the acceptable prejudices, putting the boot into the Catholic Church." "And, I mean we have, there's a big shadow side there, but, I mean, if it's as bad as that, why is it still there?" "People have three hungers, really." "People want to live." "They want to find meaning, and want to love and be loved." "I think the three basic human hungers are for life, meaning and love." "And I think faith, real faith, answers those hungers." "But as a Catholic Christian, I find life and meaning and love in Jesus." "I mean, He satisfies my hungry heart." "The men of the formative church were so terrified that Mary Magdalene's legacy would come down through the centuries." "They said, "We're not having any more..." ""Any..." "Any likelihood of another Mary Magdalene" ""coming out of, you know, the flock," ""so we are going to suppress all women." "We're going to lie about it." ""We're going to lie about what Jesus said."" "And the whole of the last 2,000 years has been a result of t-the men of the Vatican, the very, very early Church fathers essentially, about them reacting against Mary Magdalene and her image." "Well I..." "I love Mary Magdalene." "I'm a priest because of her really." "My mother, before she got married, went to the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in, uh, Paris, and prayed that if she had a son he'd be a priest." "And I'm the result, so I'm happy being a priest." "I'm grateful to Mary Magdalene." "The idea that she was vilified by the official Church is just nonsense." "I mean, here in Rome we have a lovely church with Mary Magdalene very prominent there on the facade." "So, she's a very notable figure in early Christianity and uh, remembered as such with... with affection and gratitude." "In many ways, what books like The Da Vinci Code  do, is it puts in, beginning, beginning, beginning new storylines." "Here's a new storyline." ""Oh, Jesus was really married and had a child."" "Now, right now, that is as fanciful as any religious story one could ever imagine when it was first told." "The interesting thing is, 500 years from now, 1000 years from now, when millions of people have heard that story, when in generations, it becomes a part of the expansive nature of the earliest stories," "it just gets grafted on, and then we see how it begins to affect society." "I think  The Da Vinci Code has done a great job, uh, because it stirred things up." "I think it's a great sign that people are no longer happy with the traditional history and meaning of Christianity." "And it's pointed quite rightly to the fact that that traditional history just does not stand up to scrutiny." "But it's, uh, it... it in itself, is very superficial." "It itself created..." "Creates a whole new mythology, which it then literalizes which is this... this idea, that Mary comes to France and... and there's a bloodline and all this." "There's no evidence for that." "How depressing would that be, if all of these people throughout history had risked their lives to keep this precious secret alive." "And it was an aristocratic bloodline, just at the point where we're going, "We don't need that anymore."" "In fact, the real Da Vinci Code is much more shocking than that because, um, you know, basically Leonardo was saying, um," "Jesus was a fake messiah." "Leonardo da Vinci was in fact a Johannite." "He believed that John the Baptist was the true Messiah, not Jesus." "One of the most Johannite, uh, works of Leonardo da Vinci, is  The Adoration of the Magi." "So in... in the foreground you have the wise men and they're presenting frankincense and myrrh and you think, "Wait a minute, where's the gold?"" "In Leonardo's time, gold represented perfection and kingship so that's being withheld from the baby Jesus." "Look above the Virgin Mary to, behind her, essentially, and there's the roots of a tree." "There's a tree." "Um, a carob tree represents John the Baptist and there's a group of young people standing around this tree, worshiping, or apparently worshiping this tree." "And these young people are, uh, well, obviously young, and they're vibrant and healthy and glowing and they're the John the Baptist's worshipers, but the Jesus worshipers in the foreground are horrible, old things." "To be fascinated with a Christian saint is not heresy in itself, of course." "But to be fascinated and obsessed to the point where you believe that that saint is superior to Jesus, that's heresy." "Heresy means choice in Greek but for the church, it came to mean the enemy." "Philosophers with unorthodox views, noblemen who disobeyed papal edicts people accused of being witches." "Dan Brown tells us that the Catholic Church burned five million witches at the stake." "That would have depopulated Europe." "I mean, it's absurd." "In fact, about 50,000 women and men died over all the centuries in..." "At Salem and a-also in Europe." "And that was evil and wicked, but five million," "I mean, he... he multiplies the real number by a hundred, because it sounds much better." "I mean, there were things about the Spanish Inquisition which are not good, but there were things..." "At that time many people preferred to have their case heard by them, because they thought they'd get justice." "And the number of people executed by the Inquisition was minuscule." "I mean, it's, uh..." "Somehow it got a very bad name." "No one was safe from the church's pursuit of spiritual purity." "Not even an order of knights that had been formed to protect pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land." "The Knights Templar are traditionally said to have been a group of nine knights who were formed in the Holy Land around the year 1118 or 1119." "The non-orthodox, or the speculative version of the Templar story holds that the Templars requested to be based on the... the Temple platform so that they could actually carry out excavations underneath what they believed was the Temple of Solomon." "Well, those writers would suggest that the Templars did find some documents that proved something about the origins of Christianity which they then used as a bargaining tool back in Europe." "They initially had no money, they were basically very impoverished to start with and then they became very successful." "Within about 10 or 15 years, the Templars were, by modern day equivalence, um, sort of multi-millionaires." "In some stories, the Templars were said to be the guardians of the Holy Grail." "But it was tales of secret rites and heretical beliefs, that, in time, led to their destruction." "Well, on Friday, the 13th of October, 1307, all of the Templars in France were arrested on the orders of the French king, Philip the Fair, on the grounds of heresy basically." "Uh, denying Christ, spitting on the cross, institutional sodomy, worshiping a devil..." "A group of charges that was pretty severe." "Within a few years, the Templars were gone." "Either killed or in exile." "Today all that remains, are their ties to the Grail and the places they built." "Following a false clue," "Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu come to Temple Church where they encounter a murderous albino monk who belongs to Opus Dei, another secret organization that has been viewed with suspicion." "I mean, there have been conspiracy theories about Opus Dei since the late 1920s." "But what Dan Brown did, is, he took those conspiracy theories to the mass market." "And then they've got to ask themselves the question," ""Why are so many people willing to believe" ""that they are this kind of Darth Vader-esque," ""you know, boogie-man who is hiding under the bed" ""of every nefarious thing that happens in the Catholic Church?"" "Well, Opus Dei is portrayed, uh, completely distorted and there's no reality at all based on what he's written and the reality of Opus Dei." "Uh, first of all, there are no monks in Opus Dei, albino or otherwise." "I got hooked on the book myself." "I..." "I..." "I wondered who on earth is the evil teacher." "I didn't like the fact that the killer was an albino." "That's..." "That's not very nice." "I mean, there are albinos in our world." "One of my colleagues is an albino." "It's a group of lay people and, uh, it has nothing to do with people running around in religious garb or being cloistered in convents or monasteries." "Opus Dei is all about a way of finding God in work and in your ordinary life." "That's its essence." "One of the problems of Opus Dei is, it's not so much they're secretive, they're just unique." "They do things in a way that is very different than how most secular organizations do business." "And it's hard for people on the outside to understand." "Uh, but, on the other hand, it is also historically true that they had been very leery about outsiders and leery about curiosity and so forth." "Not that intrigue and conspiracy theories haven't been around for a long, long time, but, look around, everything you see." "Do I know the truth?" "Do I know the story?" "Uh, what if I believe this, am I a dupe?" "You think that you've got some discernment, some intelligence about you if you can question everything you see." "You have a..." "An enormous range of people out there in the secular world who are hostile to, skeptical of, uh, institutional Christianity in such a profound way that they are willing in some ways, to swallow a... a version of events" "that is just demonstrably false, but nevertheless, they find that more appealing and in some ways more credible than the story that is being peddled by officialdom." "Uh, and therefore I think, the kind of examination of conscience that has to go on within institutional Christian churches is," ""Why is that?"" "From what we know of the human condition and human experience, it is more plausible that a man should lay claim to a throne, be married and have children, than that he should be born of a virgin," "walk on water and rise from the dead." "25 years ago, Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln wrote a book that includes much of the intellectual architecture underlying The Da Vinci Code." "The chief components of our hypothesis were, one, that Jesus had a rightful claim to the throne of Palestine at the time." "Secondly, that like any Jew of his time, like any man of his time, in that context, he would have been married." "Thirdly, if he was married, there would have been children." "Fourthly, the Magdalene escaped Palestine and landed in the south of France." "If she had a child, or if she were pregnant with a child, yeah, uh, Jesus' bloodline would have, uh, been transplanted to France along with her." "That bloodline, descended from the Magdalene and Jesus, intermarried with the royal line of the Franks, from which arose the Merovingian Dynasty." "Holy Blood, Holy Grail was based on a set of documents called the Secret Files, which contained genealogies linking Jesus and Mary to the Merovingian Royal Family and to the Priory of Sion, a secret society dedicated to protecting this bloodline." "We knew, uh, there was a secret society, or semi-secret society in France." "We didn't know how powerful they actually were." "We still don't." "We were mystified by their agenda, we were mystified by the fact that here were a group of people in France, some of whom were very well connected, some of whom had access to the corridors of power," "whose stated objective was to restore the Merovingian bloodline." "That sounded bonkers." "Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln got talking to a guy called Pierre Plantard, who claimed to be the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion." "Plantard saw himself as the last of an illustrious line of Grand Masters which included Isaac Newton," "Jean Cocteau, and of course, Leonardo da Vinci." "Pierre Plantard, he wanted to be king of France or savior of France." "And after Holy Blood, Holy Grail  came out, uh, the stakes were raised and, uh, he decided he would like to also be a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene." "Uh, I think the man died without convincing anyone at all of his claims, but I always thought he was tuned into something and that it was hidden behind the Priory of Sion." "So everyone's kind of swung between, you know, one end of two extremes." "It's either kind of believe everything about the, uh, Priory of Sion that you read in  The Da Vinci Code, or that it's all just this cheap modern hoax." "Um, in fact, the research that we've done shows it's neither of those." "There was no Priory of Sion in Leonardo da Vinci's day." "It only..." "It was only formed in 1956." "So, Leonardo died in 1519, so there's a bit of a gap." "Um, but, um, I don't know whether Leonardo was Grand Master of anything." "Um, but if anybody should have been, he should." "On page one of The Da Vinci Code," "Dan Brown asserts the Priory is real." "Others, however, disagree." "The Church makes a point of saying that contrary to fancible allegations in a recent best seller, that the P and the S, the two letters in the small round windows at both ends of the transit refer to Saint Peter and Saint Sulpice," "patron saints of the Church and not to what they call an imaginary Priory of Sion." "Now, of course, the Priory of Sion is not imaginary but the question is, whether it has anything whatever to do with what we're looking at here at the moment." "Did the Priory of Sion really exist?" "Was there a succession of Grand Masters protecting a sacred bloodline?" "Did Leonardo include a woman in  The Last Supper?" "For that matter, did Moses part the waters?" "Did Jesus rise from the dead?" "When and how does a story become sacred doctrine?" "Many of the intrigues that run through The Da Vinci Code come together in a town in the south of France." "We don't know which of them are true, but we do know they inspired Dan Brown and Richard Leigh and fired the imaginations of readers around the world." "In 1890, a backwoods yokel priest in a backwoods village, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, suddenly and mysteriously coming up with the equivalent of £37 million." "Where did the money come from?" "What did he discover?" "A treasure, or a secret, or both?" "Berenger Sauniere was a young priest." "He was 33 when he was posted to Rennes le Chateau." "After a few years his bishop sends him to Narbonne." "And I think this is when a deal was made between Berenger Sauniere and those who wanted to find something over here." "When he came back he had in his pocket 3,000 gold francs which had been given to him by the niece of the Emperor of Austria." "We are talking of the most powerful man in the world at the time and that man is interested in something at Rennes le Chateau and he's willing to pay." "So they knew some documents of the highest importance had been left, hidden." "They needed somebody they could trust to find them again... and Berenger Sauniere was the right man in the right post." "Dan Brown chose to name the man murdered at the Louvre after Berenger Sauniere." "Both men had access to secret knowledge and both feared for their lives." "From the moment he has found something, yes, he is immensely rich but on the other hand, he's frightened." "He locks himself in the house." "He spends days and days locked in the Tour Magdala." "He doesn't meet with the people in the village." "And he's right to be frightened." "Did you know that two of his closest friends were murdered?" "Murdered." "Presumably for knowing about the documents that Sauniere had been paid to dig up." "Legend links these documents to the Cathars, a sect of Christians who flourished in the region during the 11th and 12th century." "The Cathars were considered so heretical, that they were subject to the first crusade against Christians." "The military campaign against the Cathars and their supporters, effectively finished and what actually took its place was the Inquisition." "The Inquisition was formed to root out heresy, to root out Catharism, and to instruct people in the ways of righteousness." "Mont Segur then became the last stronghold of the Cathars, and there was a long standoff in 1243, where the French crown and the crusading soldiers surrounded Mont Segur." "One of the interesting myths about Mont Segur, is that the..." "That the Cathars possessed a treasure, which some people have thought was the Holy Grail." "So this is another link between the Templars and the Cathars, because the Templars were also traditionally said to have been the guardians of the Holy Grail." "The end of the Cathar movement was close." "They were surrounded by the armies of the King of France and they had to surrender." "Four Cathars escaped from Mont Segur at night." "They climbed down the rocks on ropes and took away what is alleged to be the treasure of the Cathars." "The Cathars were known to have smuggled something out of Mont Segur shortly before the citadel fell." "So, whatever it was that the Cathars smuggled out, was never seen again." "When you mention treasure, people think of gold, jewels, material treasure." "The treasure was a spiritual treasure, probably it was documents something written which they had kept secret on which they based their religion and they had to keep it safe." "They knew their end was coming and it was more important to them to save those documents than to save their lives." "Is it something to do with what the Cathars knew?" "With the revelation that Mary Magdalene was not just the prostitute?" "Did she play a much more important role in the life of Christ?" "Maybe Berenger Sauniere found the proof of that." "Maybe he found documents, maybe he found the papers which prove that." "Everything points towards Mary Magdalene." "We don't know what the Knights Templar found under the ruins of the second temple, what the Cathars smuggled out from Mont Segur, or what Sauniere unearthed at Rennes Le Chateau." "All we know is that secrets compel people to reveal them." "Not openly, but in codes, ciphers, and symbols." "He left messages and clues everywhere, desperately trying to tell us something or trying to tell to those who were able to understand, those who were able to cope... with the news, something, and keep the secret at the same time." "Let me show you a few things." "It's unusual to be welcomed in a church by a devil and look who's there." "You know the Cathars said that the world had been created not by God, but by the devil." "This is the perfect answer to those who say, "Well if your God is so good why has he created such a world where there are murders and wars and why does mankind behave so badly?"" "Behind the altar on your left and on your right you have a statue of Joseph holding baby Jesus." "Virgin Mother and she's holding another baby Jesus." "Two baby Jesus." "And that's another thing the Cathars used to say." "They used to say that Christ had a brother." "Another clue, another sign." "The Burial of Christ." "Everything seems to be normal." "Look at the top of the picture." "Look in the sky on the left." "What do you see there?" "The full moon has been added by Berenger Sauniere himself." "If there is a full moon, it means we are at night." "The Jewish religion forbids to bury after the sunset." "Christ dies on a Friday." "On Friday sunset, Shabbat starts." "They're not burying Christ, they are taking him away." "If they take him away during the night, then it means that he's maybe not dead." "He never died on the cross." "And that also is something that the Cathars said... that Christ survived his crucifixion." "The origins of the Cathars remain cloaked in mystery." "But their end was all too clear." "Surrounded by the French army, they were given a choice." "At the very last minute they were always offered the choice in front of the fire... to renounce their religion and none of them did." "They all jumped at Mont Segur, more than 200 people men, women, kids jumped into the flames singing canticles and praying." "I believe that there is a biological human urge to understand who we are and what we are doing on this planet." "And in some ways, The Da Vinci Code, the word, "code", has something to do with the genetic code and the DNA code and what makes us think the things we think and the ideas that we have." "And what happens, it may be a flaw in our genetic code, is that we become wedded to certain beliefs and certain tellings of these stories." "People are willing to die for a certain interpretation of the story." "And people are willing to kill for a certain interpretation of the story." "And at bottom, all these stories have much more in common with each other because they are all trying to explain the special nature of life and of the human experience." "The act of sacrificing one's life for God is repeated throughout history, among all people, all nations, all religions." "This was a symbol of resistance." "This was a place in 66 AD, a small band of Jews came up here, chased the Romans out of here and then three years later, the Romans decided to set up a siege camp here." "We can see the camps." "We can see three camps over here, we see the siege wall running along here." "There's perhaps 8,000 Romans down below." "There's 960 refugees up here." "They've been up here since the year 66 AD." "And what do these people do?" "They are faced with this dilemma." "Are we gonna become slaves the rest of our lives?" "Or are we gonna commit suicide and die as free men?" "In Judaism, it's forbidden to commit suicide, so each man took his family, and the father gathered all the goods." "He killed his wife." "He killed his children and somebody then killed him." "In the beginning, this probably was a story of heroism." "But what a lot of people don't realize, the people who came up here were a bunch of political, religious fanatics." "When they weren't fighting against the Romans, what were they doing?" "They were fighting against their fellow Jews." "Not far from here is a place called En Gedi." "People from En Gedi wouldn't participate in the revolt." "What did they do?" "They went in and they killed 700 of their fellow Jews." "Most people don't know that part of the story." "But if you look at the whole thing, the whole picture, we're looking at, I think, religious fanaticism." "I think one could draw a strong parallel between what was happening 2000 years ago and what is happening today." "No one in The Da Vinci Code ever sets foot in Jerusalem." "But without this city, there would be no Crusades." "No Holy Grail, no Abraham offering to sacrifice his son." "No Prophet Muhammad ascending to heaven." "No place for the Messiah to return." "What makes Jerusalem holy?" "The actual temple that was built there?" "Or it was holy before the temple and that's why the temple was built there." "I have prayed at the wall hundreds of times." "And there are times I stand at that wall and I say, "This is just a bunch of rocks."" "And the fact is, any wall I can impose meaning on." "A wall is just a way of saying that there's a kind of stability here where I'm gonna rest myself on, I'm gonna lean on this wall." "But, if I use difference to exclude other people, if I use difference to make myself superior, then I've turned that wall not into a meeting place, but that wall into a separation place." "No other place brings more faiths closer together and keeps more people further apart." "The Temple Mount, I mean, if any..." "if anywhere symbolizes for me the madness and the sadness of literalist religion, it's got to be there." "We have started to divide, to spread you are an American, I'm an Israeli, you're a Jew, he's a Christian, he's a Muslim," "Everything is divided." "What does it matter?" "Now, all the fundamentalism, all over the world, Jews, Muslims and Christians the thing that drives them it's not love, it's hatred." "All of us yearn to be on journeys in which we will arrive." "No one wants to be on a journey in which they never arrive." "Apocalyptic stories are arrival stories." "And they make sense of the destruction and messiness in all of our journeys." "But we have to be very careful, apocalyptic stories can become predictive and then, what people do is, they build policy on creating destruction so they can escape the pain of this world into some ultimate final solution." "And me, I'm not into final solutions." "If we carry on taking the myths literally, then the myths of the... of the end of days," "Armageddon and all the stuff you get in Revelations is gonna turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy." "Once you've got people who believe that not only is this stuff to be taken seriously, but it would be a good thing if it happened, and you've got those people with their finger on the nuclear trigger," "which we now have, you know, it's a real danger that we could... we could kind of go into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy." "Has the final chapter been written?" "The Da Vinci Code doesn't say." "It pursues the stories that begin the Bible." "We are drawn to the one that ends it." "To the Book of Revelation, to Armageddon." "Now, can you imagine this vastness?" "Millions and millions of soldiers in it?" "Fighting, battling?" "If the Bible is the literal truth, then this is where the countdown to the end of time begins." "It actually talks about the blood being slain here will be so much that the horses..." "It'll be up to the horses', uh, breast." "The Word says what we war against is the demonic forces." "But I still can't help but think at some time in the future, there will be a battle here." "I don't fear Armageddon as far as happening, or I don't fear of dying in it if... if I would be here," "I fear for the very people and the souls that are lost within it." "The joy and the happiness that we have, is knowing that the promises in the Bible are true." "And that this battle that, uh, we're talking about, that there's only going to be one winner out of this, and that will be, uh, the Lord Jesus Christ." "So I try to focus on more of the end of it." "The glorious kingdom is coming." ""And let him who thirst come, whoever desires," ""let him take the water of life freely." ""For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book," ""if anyone adds to these things," ""God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book." ""And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy," ""God shall take away his part from the book of life." ""He who testifies to these things says, 'Surely I am coming quickly.'."" "No wonder the book ends by saying, "Come, Lord Jesus."" "You know, let's get to this heavenly matrimony as quickly as possible, 'cause there are many good things in this world, but it's still not going to satisfy the hungers of our human heart completely." "Revelations, um, doesn't read significantly different from, um, testimonials of people on acid trips or people who drop mescaline or psilocybin for the first time or schizophrenics." "No wonder it's popular." "It's..." "It's like  Harry Potter, or like, uh, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings." "People love those stories about cosmic battles between good and evil." "And that's a cosmic battle between good and evil." "A real one." "At some time in the future there will be a battle here." "And it will be literal." "This is not to be taken literally." "This is spiritual allegory, and it can unite us instead of dividing us, because there is no us and them." "There's just us." "There really in reality, there is no Jews, Muslims, Christians." "There's just us." "The end of the journey for Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu is Rosslyn Chapel." "They came looking for their Grail." "We come looking for ours." "Our congregation here in Rosslyn, welcomes people from Christian faiths, other faiths and those of no faith at all." "Rosslyn, if you break out from Celtic into English, it means a place of hidden knowledge." "It's been said, that the cubes in the chapel's ceiling, are a code that leads to the Holy Grail." "Well, the thing that brought me here, was the musical mystery at this end of the chapel." "The reason we have a musical connotation to it is because at the beginning of each arch is an angel playing an instrument and there's 13 of these angels all playing different instruments." "They are quite distinct symbols." "We found them in... in one science called Cymatics." "The vibrations of a single note, um, form a pattern into a symbol on a sheet plate glass with sand." "There's a figure eight right underneath the bottom cube there." "Above us, the sign of infinity." "Below, a grave in which two souls await eternity." "This building was inspired by a woman." "Um, William Sinclair paid for the chapel to be built." "Elizabeth Douglas was very much the love of William's life." "She was actually the inspiration behind it." "And this place was her dream." "As the work had begun on the chapel, just as the foundations were laid, and the first beginnings of the walls were taking shape, she died." "And she was buried down in the crypt." "And they believed that on the Day of Judgment, these black slabs would open and they would be taken to paradise." "I don't think Rosslyn Chapel would be as elaborate and have had so much care and love put into it if it wasn't for the fact that this was the place that William was gonna spend eternity with his wife." "Stuart Mitchell unlocked the code, and the building sang to him." "I can't give an answer to when our Lord is going to return." "Um, it doesn't matter a rap, in... in... in a sense, because the return has already begun and, uh..." "I can't get to heaven quick enough." "We have no way of knowing and that is why there are so many stories in the New Testament in which Jesus always reminds us that we never know the day, we never know the hour, and so we must always be alert." "Love stands for eternity." "We..." "I don't love people to have my heart broken at the end." "I wanna be with them and, of course, with Jesus, the one I try to love as much as possible." "And that, uh, that love says you will not die." "Love, uh, uh, love is... is a protest of eternity, that our love is forever." "I'll be loving you always." "The powerful part of a, uh, apocalyptic story, is that, it helps make sense of what's going on and in a sense, it's incredibly hopeful." "It says, "Look, look, of course we're going through destruction," ""but on the other side of the Apocalypse is incredible renewal."" "God intended us to eat of the apple of the knowledge of good and evil." "The..." "The seed that was in that fruit, it was not ripe at the time that they ate it, but the... the seed is ripening in us." "That we will find the ways of knowledge." "We are the stories our ancestors told." "And the stories we tell today create the world our children will inherit." "Live out one story and create this." "Or this." "Live out another and end up like this." "Or this." "Whichever choice we make, we are always part of this." "Six billion people." "Six billion stories." "No single truth large enough for everyone." "For the truth, like the universe, is expanding." "¶ Rose, time of our lives no one knows" "¶ People and places we chose" "¶ For you, the stories and times that we've told," "¶ The truth, that there's nothing more" "¶ The dreams, ambitions so cold" "¶ The tree of life will unfold" "¶ We feel life will lead us" "¶ So real, we wound and gracefully heal" "¶ Love that we endlessly seal, so soft" "¶ Our hearts we reveal" "¶ It's dream time" "¶ Time for the roses" "¶ Time for devotion" "¶ Now is the time" "¶ It's dream time" "¶ The Lord said to Moses" "¶ It's time for your people" "¶ Now is your time" "¶ For you, the stories and times that we've told," "¶ The truth, that there's nothing more" "¶ The dreams, ambitions so cold" "¶ The tree of life will unfold" "¶ We feel life will lead us" "¶ So real, we wound and gracefully heal" "¶ Love that we endlessly seal, so soft" "¶ Our hearts we reveal" "¶ It's dream time" "¶ The Lord said to Moses" "¶ It's time for your people" "¶ Now is your time" "¶ It's dream time" "¶ Time for the roses" "¶ Time for devotion" "¶ Now is the time" "¶ It's dream time ¶"