Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Both the BBC documentaries and the book advanced wild and largely unfounded theories about the Holy Grail.
In its simplest terms, the central theory said that the Grail was not an object, but rather a bloodline.
The story held that Joseph and Mary Magdalene had a family together and that their children eventually fled to southern France.
Once there, the children intermarried with noble French families, producing the Merovingian dynasty, which has a claim to the French throne.
Further, that bloodline had been guarded by the Knights Templar, and more specifically, a fictional group called the Priory of Sion.
So, in short, the bloodline of Mary Magdalene and Joseph was the Grail.
You would be forgiven for thinking this idea sounds ridiculous.
Our British historian Richard Barber certainly thought so.
He called the book the most notorious of all the Grail pseudo-histories, which proceeds by innuendo, not by reputable scholarly debate.
But of course, sensational stories are always popular.
Apparently, this Grail theory was worthy of a thrilling novel to continue the tale.
In fact, in short order, there were two.
The first was the 1993 book, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and the second, Dan Brown's 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code, which even made it to the big screen.
By the late 1980s, even as the Indiana Jones movie was reinforcing the comparatively old-fashioned Grail stories, newer narratives were exploring the legend with a greater level of symbolism.
During the late 20th century, there were also those who took a more light-hearted pass at the mythology of the Holy Grail.
Along with the questionable BBC documentaries from the 1970s, pop culture also received the gift of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a comical retelling of the Grail story that has been widely quoted by an entire generation of moviegoers.
The Monty Python film contrasted the loosening morals of the 1970s with the saintly rules of the original Round Table stories.
It was so popular that it spawned a stage production called Spamalot in the mid-1980s.
Then, as Indiana was selecting the true Grail on screen in 1989, the sacred cup even made an appearance on a two-part episode of the highly unserious TV show, MacGyver.
Next up, in 1991, a film starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges went all the way back to some of the earliest source material and brought back The Fisher King, setting a grail quest in modern New York City.
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