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Lynn Picknett (born 1947) is an English writer of books that are mainly about religious history and popular conspiracy theories, the paranormal, the occult, and historical mysteries.
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Lynn Picknett (born 1947) is an English writer of books that are mainly about religious history and popular conspiracy theories, the paranormal, the occult, and historical mysteries.
Born in Folkestone, Kent, England, in April 1947, Picknett grew up in an alleged haunted house in York, attending Park Grove Junior School and Queen Anne Grammar School. After graduating from university with an Upper 2nd (hons) degree in English Literature, she briefly became a teacher, a shop assistant, and a stand-up comic before moving to London in 1971 to join Marshall Cavendish Publications as a trainee sub-editor.
In the 1980s, Picknett was Deputy Editor on The Unexplained and contributor to many other publications. She was also a regular contributor on various radio shows, including Michael van Straten and Clive Bull's on LBC and Talk Radio. She was also a television presenter for both Anglia and Southern TV.
In 1990, Picknett was guest curator for the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition The Unexplained at Bath, performing the same function in 1999 for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford.
In the early 1990s, Picknett teamed up with fellow researcher and writer Clive Prince. Their first book, Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History, claimed that the characteristics of the Shroud of Turin could be reproduced using only a pinhole camera (camera obscura) and that Leonardo da Vinci, in producing the image, used his own face for the model of Jesus. This is inconsistent with the first exhibition of the Shroud of Turin, authentic or not, which was in 1357, almost a century before the birth of da Vinci, [1] although Picknett and Prince counter-argue that the relic predating da Vinci "was not the same one as today's." [2]
The 1997 book The Templar Revelation by Picknett and Prince was credited by Dan Brown, both in The Da Vinci Code and in the 2006 court case ( Baigent & Leigh v Random House ), as the main inspiration for his novel. [3]
Picknett and Prince perform most of the research for their books themselves, but also have collaborated with others. Between 1998 and 2003, they produced three books in partnership with researchers Stephen Prior and Robert Brydon, including Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up (2001). [4] They have credited Keith Prince as a contributor to Turin Shroud, and Philip Coppens for help with The Stargate Conspiracy (1999), which they dedicated to him. [5]
Picknett and Prince make a brief appearance in the film The Da Vinci Code . The pair appear on a London bus as the protagonists are travelling to the Temple Church, off Fleet Street in central London. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) leaves his seat to join Sophie (Audrey Tautou) at the back of the bus, and Picknett and Prince are seen sitting on the left.
Picknett is the co-author of:
Picknett is the author of:
The Last Supper is a mural painting by the Italian High Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to c. 1495–1498. The painting represents the scene of the Last Supper of Jesus with the Twelve Apostles, as it is told in the Gospel of John – specifically the moment after Jesus announces that one of his apostles will betray him. Its handling of space, mastery of perspective, treatment of motion and complex display of human emotion has made it one of the Western world's most recognizable paintings and among Leonardo's most celebrated works. Some commentators consider it pivotal in inaugurating the transition into what is now termed the High Renaissance.
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.
Prince George, Duke of Kent, was a member of the British royal family, the fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary. He was a younger brother of kings Edward VIII and George VI. Prince George served in the Royal Navy in the 1920s and then briefly as a civil servant. He became Duke of Kent in 1934. In the late 1930s he served as an RAF officer, initially as a staff officer at RAF Training Command and then, from July 1941, as a staff officer in the Welfare Section of the RAF Inspector General's Staff. He was killed in the Dunbeath air crash on 25 August 1942.
Laurence Gardner was a British author and lecturer. He wrote on various topics including historical-religious speculation such as the Jesus bloodline.
Stargate is an adventure military science fiction franchise.
The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ is a book written by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince and published in 1997 by Transworld Publishers Ltd in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. It proposes a fringe hypothesis regarding the relationship between Jesus, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, and states that their true story has been suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church through, among other tactics, the conscious selection of the texts that make up the canonical New Testament, their campaigns against heresy, and their propaganda against non-Christians.
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance painter and polymath who achieved legendary fame and iconic status within his own lifetime. His renown primarily rests upon his brilliant achievements as a painter, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, being two of the most famous artworks ever created, but also upon his diverse skills as a scientist and inventor. He became so highly valued during his lifetime that the King of France bore him home like a trophy of war, supported him in his old age and, according to legend, cradled his head as he died.
The Da Vinci Code, a popular suspense novel by Dan Brown, generated criticism and controversy after its publication in 2003. Many of the complaints centered on the book's speculations and misrepresentations of core aspects of Christianity and the history of the Catholic Church. Additional criticisms were directed toward the book's inaccurate descriptions of European art, history, architecture, and geography.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery thriller novel by Dan Brown. It is Brown's second novel to include the character Robert Langdon: the first was his 2000 novel Angels & Demons. The Da Vinci Code follows symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris causes them to become involved in a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene having had a child together.
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.
Massimo Polidoro is an Italian psychologist, writer, journalist, television personality, and co-founder and executive director of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences (CICAP).
The Prieuré de Sion, translated as Priory of Sion, was a fraternal organization founded 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.
The Royal Library of Turin is a library located within the ground floor of the Royal Palace of Turin, itself a World Heritage Site in Turin, Italy.
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.
The portrait of a man in red chalk in the Royal Library of Turin is widely, though not universally, accepted as a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. It is thought that Leonardo da Vinci drew this self-portrait at about the age of 60. The portrait has been extensively reproduced and has become an iconic representation of Leonardo as a polymath or "Renaissance Man". Despite this, some historians and scholars disagree as to the true identity of the sitter.
The History of the Shroud of Turin begins in the year 1390 AD, when Bishop Pierre d'Arcis wrote a memorandum where he charged that the Shroud was a forgery. Historical records seem to indicate that a shroud bearing an image of a crucified man existed in the possession of Geoffroy de Charny in the small town of Lirey, France around the years 1353 to 1357. The history from the 15th century to the present is well documented.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.
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.
Dominic Selwood is an English historian, author, journalist and barrister. He has written several works of history, historical fiction and historical thrillers, most notably The Sword of Moses. and Anatomy of a Nation. A History of British Identity in 50 Documents. His background is in medieval history.
Noemi Gabrielli was an Italian art historian, superintendent, and a museologist.
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