The Ark of the Covenant, also known as the Ark of the Testimony or the Ark of God, is a purported religious storage and relic held to be the most sacred object by the Israelites.
The Holy Grail is a treasure that serves as an important motif in Arthurian literature. Various traditions describe the Holy Grail as a cup, dish, or stone with miraculous healing powers, sometimes providing eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance, often guarded in the custody of the Fisher King and located in the hidden Grail castle. By analogy, any elusive object or goal of great significance may be perceived as a "holy grail" by those seeking such.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, mainly known as the Knights Templar, was a French military order of the Catholic faith, and one of the wealthiest and most popular military orders in Western Christianity. They were founded c. 1119 to defend pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, with their headquarters located there on the Temple Mount, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.
Galahad, sometimes referred to as Galeas or Galath, among other versions of his name, is a knight of King Arthur's Round Table and one of the three achievers of the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend. He is the illegitimate son of Sir Lancelot du Lac and Lady Elaine of Corbenic and is renowned for his gallantry and purity as the most perfect of all knights. Emerging quite late in the medieval Arthurian tradition, Sir Galahad first appears in the Lancelot–Grail cycle, and his story is taken up in later works, such as the Post-Vulgate Cycle, and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In Arthurian literature, he replaced Percival as the hero in the quest for the Holy Grail.
A Bible conspiracy theory is any conspiracy theory that posits that much of what is believed about the Bible is a deception created to suppress a secret or ancient truth. Some such theories claim that Jesus really had a wife and children, or that a group such as the Priory of Sion has secret information about the true descendants of Jesus; some claim that there was a secret movement to censor books that truly belonged in the Bible, etc.
Rosslyn Chapel, also known as the Collegiate Chapel of Saint Matthew, is a 15th-century Episcopal chapel located in the village of Roslin in Midlothian, Scotland. The chapel was founded by William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness with a ground-breaking ceremony in 1456. After the Scottish Reformation in 1560, it was largely abandoned but, following a visit by Queen Victoria, it was rededicated in 1862. It was the target of a bombing in 1914 during the suffragette bombing and arson campaign. The interior contains some fine carvings which many historians have sought to interpret.
Laurence Gardner was a British author and lecturer. He wrote on various topics including historical-religious speculation such as the Jesus bloodline.
Francis Joseph Collin is an American former political activist and Midwest coordinator with the American Nazi Party, later known as the National Socialist White People's Party. After being ousted for being partly Jewish, in 1970, Collin founded the National Socialist Party of America. (N.S.P.A.) In the late 1970s, his planned march in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois was challenged; however, the American Civil Liberties Union defended Collin's group's freedom of speech and assembly in a case that reached the United States Supreme Court to correct procedural deficiencies. Specifically, the necessity of immediate appellate review of orders restraining the exercise of First Amendment rights was strongly emphasized in National Socialist Party v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977). Afterward, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the party had a right to march and to display swastikas, despite local opposition, based on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Collin then offered a compromise, offering to march in Chicago's Marquette Park instead of Skokie. After Collin was convicted and sentenced in 1979 for child molestation, he lost his position in the party.
The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant is a pseudoarchaeological 1992 book by British author Graham Hancock, in which the author describes his search for the Ark of the Covenant and proposes a theory of the ark's historical movements and current whereabouts. The book sold well but received negative reviews.
John Matthews and Caitlín Matthews are English writers. Together, they have written over 150 books and translated into more than thirty languages. Their work also includes Tarot decks, a card-based storytelling system, screenplays, and songs.
Richard Harris Leigh was a novelist and short story writer born in New Jersey, United States to a British father and an American mother, who spent most of his life in the UK. Leigh earned a BA from Tufts University, a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The Jesus bloodline refers to the proposition that a lineal sequence of the historical Jesus has persisted, possibly to the present time. Although absent from the Gospels or historical records, the concept of Jesus having descendants has gained a presence in the public imagination, as seen with Dan Brown's 2003 best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code and its 2006 movie adaptation of the same name that used the premise for its plot. It is dismissed generally by scholars. These claimed Jesus' bloodlines are distinct from the biblical genealogy of Jesus, which concerns the alleged ancestors of Jesus, and from the documented Brothers of Jesus and other kin of Jesus, known as the Desposyni.
Bruce Burgess is a documentary filmmaker. Burgess has written, directed and hosted a series of documentary specials that relate to conspiracy theory and fringe theory subject matters like Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, the mummified corpse of Mary Magdalene in France, ancient history, alien abductions, as well as on the British Royal family, paranormal claims, CIA assassinations and global terrorism.
The original historic Knights Templar were a Christian military order, the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, that existed from the 12th to 14th centuries to provide warriors in the Crusades. These men were famous in the high and late Middle Ages, but the Order was disbanded very suddenly by King Philip IV of France, who took action against the Templars in order to avoid repaying his own financial debts. He accused them of heresy, ordered the arrest of all Templars within his realm, put the Order under trial and many of them burned at the stake. The dramatic and rapid end of the Order led to many stories and legends developing about them over the following centuries. The Order and its members increasingly appear in modern fiction, though most of these references portray the medieval organization inaccurately.
The Prieuré de Sion, translated as Priory of Sion, was a fraternal organisation founded and dissolved in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard in his failed attempt to create a prestigious neo-chivalric order. In the 1960s, Plantard began claiming that his self-styled order was the latest front for a secret society founded by crusading knight Godfrey of Bouillon, on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, under the guise of the historical monastic order of the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion. As a framework for his grandiose assertion of being both the Great Monarch prophesied by Nostradamus and a Merovingian pretender, Plantard further claimed the Priory of Sion was engaged in a centuries-long benevolent conspiracy to install a secret bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe. To Plantard's surprise, all of his claims were fused with the notion of a Jesus bloodline and popularised by the authors of the 1982 speculative nonfiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, whose conclusions would later be borrowed by Dan Brown for his 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code.
Margaret Leonard Starbird is the author of seven books arguing for the existence of a secret Christian tradition that held Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, calling it the "Grail heresy", after having set out to discredit the bloodline hypothesis contained in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
Henry Soskin, better known as Henry Lincoln, was a British author, television presenter, scriptwriter, and actor. He co-wrote three Doctor Who multi-part serials in the 1960s, and — starting in the 1970s — inspired three Chronicle BBC Two documentaries on the alleged mysteries surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château — and, from the 1980s, co-authored and authored a series of books of which The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was the most popular, becoming the inspiration for Dan Brown's 2003 best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. He was the last living person to have written for Doctor Who in the 1960s.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, published as Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States, is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The book was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London as an unofficial follow-up to three BBC Two TV documentaries that were part of the Chronicle series. The paperback version was first published in 1983 by Corgi books. A sequel to the book, called The Messianic Legacy, was originally published in 1986. The original work was reissued in an illustrated hardcover version with new material in 2005.
Philip Coppens was a Belgian author, radio host, and commentator whose writings, speeches and television appearances focused on areas of fringe science and alternative history.
America Unearthed was an American entertainment television series and the first original series to air on the A&E Networks channel H2. The show premiered on December 21, 2012, and was produced by Committee Films of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The program was hosted by Minnesota-based geologist Scott Wolter, who investigates mysteries and artifacts believed to reveal an alternative history of the North American continent before the United States.
