4th century

The 4th century stands as the decisive turning point in the history of the Holy Grail and the sacred feminine, the era in which the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great—a lifelong pagan who was baptized only on his deathbed—deliberately reshaped Christianity to consolidate political power, thereby initiating the suppression of the goddess that the Priory of Sion has spent two millennia trying to reverse.

Constantine's Conversion and the Council of Nicaea

According to the novel, Constantine was not a Christian but a lifelong pagan who served as head priest of the cult of Sol Invictus, the Invincible Sun. By 325 A.D., the conflict between Christians and pagans had grown so intense that it threatened to tear Rome apart. Constantine, described as "a very good businessman," decided to unify Rome under a single religion and chose Christianity as the winning horse. To make the new faith acceptable to both pagans and Christians, he convened the famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea. At this council, many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon—the date of Easter, the role of bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, most critically, the divinity of Jesus. Until that moment, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless. The establishment of Jesus as "the Son of God" was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea, a relatively close vote that transformed Jesus into a deity beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable.

The Commissioning of a New Bible and the Burning of Heretical Gospels

Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after His death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man. To rewrite history, Constantine knew he needed a bold stroke. He commissioned and financed a new Bible that omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned. Anyone who chose the forbidden gospels over Constantine's version was deemed a heretic; the word "heretic" derives from that moment in history, the Latin word haereticus meaning "choice." Those who "chose" the original history of Christ were the world's first heretics. Fortunately for historians, some of the gospels Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive, including the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the 1950s and the Coptic Scrolls discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. These documents speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms and tell the true Grail story.

The Fusion of Pagan and Christian Symbols

Constantine fused pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, creating a hybrid religion acceptable to both parties. The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable: Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints; pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. Virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual—the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of "God-eating"—were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions. The pre-Christian God Mithras—called the Son of God and the Light of the World—was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans; Constantine shifted the Sabbath from Saturday to coincide with the pagan's veneration day of the sun, Sunday, which most churchgoers attend with no idea they are there on account of the pagan sun god's weekly tribute.

The Suppression of the Sacred Feminine

The Church's campaign to eradicate pagan religions and convert the masses to Christianity included a smear campaign against the pagan gods and goddesses, recasting their divine symbols as evil. The pentacle, a pre-Christian symbol relating to Nature worship and representing the female half of all things—the "sacred feminine" or the "divine goddess"—was distorted over the millennia. As part of the Vatican's campaign, the pentacle was altered by the early Roman Catholic Church; Poseidon's trident became the devil's pitchfork, the wise crone's pointed hat became the symbol of a witch, and Venus's pentacle became a sign of the devil. The Church's brutal crusade to "reeducate" pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific. The Catholic Inquisition published Malleus Maleficarum—The Witches' Hammer—which indoctrinated the world to "the dangers of freethinking women" and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women. Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, were banished from the temples of the world; there are no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—was recast as a shameful act. The male ego spent two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart, leading to what the Hopi Native Americans called koyanisquatsi—"life out of balance."

The Threat to the Priory of Sion and the Holy Grail

The 4th-century decisions set the stage for the Church's centuries-long war against the truth of the Holy Grail. The Priory of Sion believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever. The Church, in order to defend itself against Mary Magdalene's power, perpetuated her image as a whore and buried evidence of Christ's marriage to her, thereby defusing any potential claims that Christ had a surviving bloodline and was a mortal prophet. The Sangreal documents—tens of thousands of pages of unaltered, pre-Constantine documents written by the early followers of Jesus, revering Him as a wholly human teacher and prophet—represent the other side of the Christ story. The Church has sought to destroy these documents for centuries, and the Priory of Sion has guarded them, awaiting the right moment in history to reveal the truth. The 4th century thus marks the beginning of the great cover-up that the novel's protagonists are trying to unravel.