Modern myth and the Plant bloodline
For many years, I have been trying to concentrate on the true facts of the origins of the Plant name; and, to this end, I have been trying largely to ignore the myths of the so-called Razes genealogy. However, as this fiction is now more widely known than the academically established facts, I feel obliged to make some comment. I apologise wholeheartedly if the following fiction, not of my making, offends anyone's beliefs.
Dan Brown's fiction The Da Vinci code is based on the pseudo-history of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in which a bloodline descends from Mary Magdalen through the Merovingian kings, the French Plantards, and the English Planta and Plantagenet families. The first link in this chain is particularly controversial; and, to be fair, it is rather more discussed than stated unequivocally in both of the above books. Nonetheless, the possibility, or lack of it, that the Magdalen had a child has attracted some serious debate. For example, in this new age of political correctness, it has been suggested that the harlotisation of Mary Magdalen by the early church fathers was a deliberate attempt to discredit the role of women in the church; many feel that a more respectful myth for her is overdue. Dan Brown, in this connection, refers often to the `sacred feminine'.
In the 1993 book Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, Susan Haskins comments:Rabbis were often, if not usually married, so it has often been suggested that Christ must also have been, although there is nothing in the Gospels to suggest this. We have no evidence of a child and the Merovingian link is very unlikely.In the Nag Hammadi codices, which were discovered in Egypt in 1947, the early Christian Gospel of Phillip 63.34-35 states:
The Saviour loved Mary Magdalen more that the disciples, and kissed her on the mouth often.However, the same Gospel had stated earlier:
The promise comes from the mouth, for the Word has come from there and has been nourished from the mouth and become perfect. The perfect conceive through a kiss and give birth. Because of this we also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which we have among us.There is some confusion here in connection with the so-called "Creation is Birth" metaphor, whereby conceive could be related to physically giving birth, such as is literally believed by many for the Virgin mother of Christ; or, conception can be related metaphorically to that of mental creativity. Ester de Boer explains this in her 1996 book Mary Magdalen: Beyond the Myth with:
Mary Magdalen is made fruitful through the grace which is in Christ. Receiving his grace makes her born again.Deidre Good, in Dan Burnstein's 2004 book Secrets of the Code, adds:
In both the Second and the Third Apocalypse of James, Jesus and James kiss and embrace each other as an indication of their special relationship. In the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, Jesus reveals the mysteries of the kingdom of God to a young man he loves. In the fourth-century Coptic text Pistis Sophia, Philip, John, James, and Matthew, along with Mariamme (Mary), are all spoken of as beloved by Jesus. This probably indicates their special capacity for spiritual insight.In the better known Gospels, which were included in the Roman canonical Bible, Mary Magdalen is apostle to the apostles in as much as she brought word of Christ's resurrection to the disciples. Hence, as well as conjectures about her being the holy chalice of a blood-line, she has been seen as a source of wisdom. Diane Apostolis-Cappadone of the Centre for Muslim-Christian understanding at Georgetown University considers that the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva church in Rome was so-named because of a connection between Mary Magdalen and Minerva as goddesses of wisdom.
Mary Magdalen's greatest fame has been as a reformed prostitute and this dates back to Pope Gregory the Great, who declared in a sermon in 591:
She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary [of Bethany], we believe to be Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark.There was then a presumption that the named sinful woman was a prostitute, though her seven devils could have implied a passing mental illness. This conflation of references to (?different) Marys was officially rescinded by the Roman Catholic Church in 1969, so that the Magdalen has lost this aspect of her status as Christianity's most beloved penitent. A different story was current in the different times of the first evidence for the Plant name in England however.
The main empire of Geffrey Plante Genest, count of Anjou, forefather of the English Plantagenet kings, was the region that is now western France. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, huge pilgrimages grew around the more famous shrines: pilgrims flocked from all over France to touch the tomb of Mary Magdalen in the French town of Vézelay in Burgundy. Some came from as far as England. As Susan Haskins explains in Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, an excuse for not exposing the remains appears in a late twelfth-century manuscript which told of an occasion when the abbot of Vézelay had decided to remove the Magdalen's relics from the little crypt where they had been found to put them in a precious reliquary. The church had suddenly been plunged into darkness and all those present had suffered. It had henceforth been decided to relinquish all ideas of opening the holy tomb. By the thirteenth century a confusing array of stories existed of how the Magdalen's body had arrived in Provence (SE France) where she had been buried between the years 882 to 884. This has been elaborated into tales of the Black Virgin and the arrival of a bloodline from Mary Magdalen in France. Most recently, fiction has dwelt on a contentious link through the bloodline of the Merovingian kings to the names Plantard, Plantevelue, Plantagenet, and Planta in France and England.
The red rose of the Plant blazon evidently relates to the mid-fourteenth-century submission of the de Warenne descendants of Geffrey Plante Genest to their distant Lancastrian cousins. Roses were related to a variety of female saints, but Mary Magdalen was not one of them. Dan Brown suggests in his fiction that the rose has always been the premier signal of female sexuality. However, Diane Appostolos-Cappadona notes that the rose was the flower sacred to Venus or Aphrodite who was concerned with romantic love, not just sexual. The rose became a symbol of Mary the Mother's role in human salvation. For early and medieval Christians, there were only four colours of rose: white signified innocent or pure love; pink, first love; red, true love; and yellow spurned love. It is not clear that the gold rose of young Edward I and the red rose of his brother Edmund of Lancaster, in the mid-thirteenth century, related to that scheme. Some early illustrations of the thirteenth-century epic poem Roman de la Rose included sexual and romantic as well as religious scenes, a mix that is often called `courtly love'; and such love was a feature of early Plantagenet times.