The Da Vinci Code (DVC) has been called many things: Boring, improbable, blasphemous, ingenious, derivative...
Why has an adventure novel attracted so much attention, stirred so much controversy?
Because it draws on a series of interlinked premises - some grounded in fact, some in fantasy, others in fabrication - that were first brought to wide public attention in 1982, with the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG) by three British researchers named Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh. Da Vinci fans may recognize Henry Lincoln from his recent TV appearances related to DVC. Baigent and Leigh are known for their lawsuit against Dan Brown, which they lost. Baigent also wrote the controversial book The Jesus Papers, which expands on a theory he first toyed with in HBHG: Jesus Christ faked the Crucifixion. As Baigent himself points out in the book, the theory isn't revolutionary: Muslim tradition and the Koran state that Christ was substituted for Judas on the cross, and Hugh Schonfield's 1965 book The Passover Plot laid out a strange theory that Christ and his followers staged a mock crucifixion by striking a deal with Pilate and drugging Christ so that he only appeared to be dead.

But I digress. It's easy to do with this material. The Grail Mystery, or The Secret, as it's called in DVC, is a twisted maze of myth and hidden history: Gnosticism, Christianity, Catholicism, architecture, Baroque art, codes and ciphers, secret societies, and symbols up the yin-yang (pardon the pun). This story is complicated, and it contains more dead ends, unresolved questions, and red herrings than any soap opera...even Twin Peaks. But DVC and its kin boil down to this set of ideas:

• Before or after the Crucifixion, Christ fathered a child by Mary Magdelene, establishing a bloodline that may exist to the present day.
• A "secret society" known as the Priory of Sion knows of this bloodline and has gone to great lengths to preserve and protect it through the ages.
• The Catholic Church, or a faction of it, also knows about the bloodline of Christ, and will stop at nothing to keep Catholics from learning about it - presumably because a legitimate descendent of Christ would have far more pull than a church founded by Peter the apostle. The Church has also systematically repressed all vestiges of the sacred feminine that existed in early Christianity.

I'm going to start at the "beginning", with the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, and work my way through the publication of HBHG, to the Priory of Sion hoax and the current controversies surrounding DVC, with many diversions along the way. It may seem complicated, but hang in there. Grail Quests are all about what is learned along the path, not what you get at the end.