The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed a theory, as tangled and complicated as the dossier secrets, yet entertainingly mounted and surprisingly well argued. Was there a connection, they wondered, between the heretical Cathars of thirteenth-century France, Sauniere's Rennes-le-Chateau, the Templars, and the omnipresent Priory of Zion?

But of course, they ventured. Lincoln and company hypothesized that the fabled Cathar treasure at Rennes-le-Chateau was one in the same with the Merovingian cache and the Templars' treasure of King Solomon. At some point, according to Lincoln et al., the treasure had passed from the Merovingians to the Priory of Zion, whose Templar operatives later hustled the precious hoard from the Holy Land to the French Cathars, who, on the eve of their destruction by the church, squirreled the lucre away in the Pyrenees.

But what if the "treasure" was something other than gold? After all, legend had it that the Cathar heretics possessed a valuable, even sacred relic, "which according to a number of legends, was the Holy Grail," itself. During World War II, the Nazis supposedly excavated various sites in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Chateau in their futile search for the Grail (which was dramatized in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

Was the lost Cathar/Templar/Merovingian/Sauniere treasure, then, the fabled Holy Grail, itself? By suggesting that it was, our trailblazing authors were not suggesting that the ominous Priory revolved around a mere religious relicãand a rusty old goblet at that. Lincoln and company had something more ambitious in mind. Boldly reinterpreting centuries of folklore, they proposed that the Grail of medieval romance might have been a coded reference to something much more controversial: the literal bloodline of Christ.