The Templar Revelation. Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ. Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. Bantam Press. 1997. £17.99 (Hard-cover).

Many who have gazed at da Vinci’s potent portrait of John the Baptist have found it intriguing : the look, the gestures, the hermaphroditic face. Was Leonardo aware of the Renaissance identification of the Baptist with the divine messenger of Greek lore, Hermes? Behold! A face smiling in the wilderness! I read once that King Francis I of France used to stare at the painting for hours, convinced perhaps that ‘behind it’ lay a great secret. Leonardo, properly, remained verbally silent on the matter. The authors of this book have likewise gazed, and have generated a day-dream. Welles called cinema “a ribbon of dreams” but did not so dignify history. Is The Templar Revelation provocative? Yes. Disturbing? Yes - like a curtain of nightmares painted in Poussin’s dismal storms. History? No. The now-familiar mythology of a more or less pagan neo-Gnosticism is trotted out for renewed inspection : sexual sacraments’ twixt Jesus and the Magdalene; orthodoxy : a mistake; John the Baptist : the true messiah; the Templars : guardians of a magdalene-baptist cult (like summoning the full panoply of the Coldstream Guards to protect a safety deposit-box - a mythological Securicor). Now add Abbé Saunière, Rennes le Chateau, alchemy and Freemasonry to the blend : powerful snuff - or opium for those hostile to “the greatest story ever told”.
    Many today, suspicious of the churches’ clutches about the ‘growing boy’ (and girl), have sought the freshness and vividness of a ‘new’ spiritual dream : history as theology, theology as history; in short : mythology. But Joseph Campbell and his survivors would have us venerate the ‘myth’ as life-giving, linking ‘the self’ to authentic, pristine, unconscious archetypes - the dream again. But the characters of this book are types, not archetypes, for they have been used. Behind it all, the authors’ secret : a distaste for the “heavenly Archemaster” of orthodoxy. These are the luckless children of Simon Magus, the happy counterfeit and delirious forger - and perhaps the authors are right, in this, that the mythology of Freemasonry may itself be in some small part a portion of the heterogospel of the Gnostics and, if you favour this evangel, you may appreciate the heady speculation of this book.
    Personally, I think authors of such speculations should first dare to expose their theses to theological journals where they will receive the kind of detailed disrobing impossible for a review such as this, before exchanging their wares for cash. Alas! Few readers will have the knowledge to disentangle the wheat from the chaff, blinded not by the light but by the smoke. After reading it : a curious emptiness; I was no further forward in my quest for understanding than when I first started gazing into the face of Leonardo’s enigmatic joke, many years ago.
    Tobias Churton