Current mood:	bitchy
Current music:	Miles Davis -Well You Needn't

The Privy of Sion
Notes:
1) no relation to Black Xion
2) a privy (pronounced with a long "i") is American English for an outhouse; in cartoons it has a crescent moon carved in the door

Right. The Privy of Sion is a mostly French group that holds a great secret. The Privy is also literally the One True Outhouse whose location is also a closely guarded secret but is thought to be somewhere in the Pyrenees, near the village of Rennes-le-Chateau. It is reserved exclusively for the direct descendants of Jesus (from a secret marriage to Mary Magdalene), some whom were the Merovingian kings of early France. Their origin is shrouded in mystery, but their line ended officially on 23 December 676, when the young Dagobert II was assassinated in the royal woods after a good long crap. "Dagobert's Revenge" is the humorous local term for a certain disorder afflicting British tourists and house-hunters not yet used to the local water-borne intestinal flora.

The Privy and its secrets are guarded by a select group of "Janitors," presided over by successive Grandmasters. Their duties include keeping the Privy in good working order and of course identifying those who have right to use it. They may not use it themselves of course. Obviously, all are sworn to secrecy, yatta yatta yatta. Grandmasters have counted in their number many prominent Frenchmen. Rarely are foreigners so honored, but suspected "auxiliary" Grandmasters in the U.S., include Flash and Melle Mel. A sub-group of Janitors known as "Plumbers" do the actual dirty work of maintenance and also of "wiping after" unwise Janitors who give out their secrets. The Privy's chief enemy is the Vatican, not so much for its implications for Christianity so much as its offense against Papist prudery.

Oooooookay.

The preceding scatological rant is courtesy of a short reading of the middle of The Da Vinci Code. S. is reading it right now and I opened it to the part about a certain French "conspiracy" that claims to be ancient but is more likely Freemasonry with a little local color. After ten minutes of reading I realized TDVC was Left Behind" for nonbelievers. A quick and lazy G**gle search turns up another go at the book.

Maybe I'm jaded, but I think the P****y of S**n was used to better effect (and more wittily) in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, as well as in comics series like Preacher and The Invisibles and the odd computer game.

I wish Jacqueline Susann could have lived to write TDVC, because the Catholic writer I mentioned earlier says there's not enough sex in it.

I guess what also bothers me about people who (positively) go for stuff like the Privy of Sion, besides them being self-aggrandizing idiots like the members of the half-dozen or so Orders of Malta is the reek of ultra-monarchism. They're not backing just any pretender to the throne, but the One True Monarch--Divine Right taken to its extreme--descended from a man whose existence means little to about half the planet.

It does make for a cool story, but Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum was much better. Hell, even Gore Vidal's The Judgment of Paris was a better treatment of the theme.

And finallyyyy....

Today I got a spam from the Democratic National Committee, promising me rock-hard elections. Thanks, you're much better than the Saturday crowd. Don't let anybody tell you any different.