The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

by Lynn Picknett

  Churton also adds as a note (to * above): `Perhaps the conceptual origin of Photography: `light-writing', from the Greek photos=light and graphe=writing; making an impression.'32 Is the Shroud of Turin actually a magical talisman, imbued with the DNA, not of the Son of God, but of the pretender to the rank of Grandson of God? There is real blood on the Shroud, after all, although it may be a mixture of Leonardo's and of certain chosen others. (There is even a suggestion of female DNA33 on the image, which would be in keeping with the artist-photographer's obsession with the Gnostic/alchemical androgyne. This can also be seen in Leonardo's sketch `Witch with a Magic Mirror', which at first glance simply shows a young woman admiring herself in a hand mirror. But look carefully and you will see that the back of her head takes the shape of an old bearded man - presumably Leonardo himself: not only the opposite gender, but also the end of the age scale of which she represents the beginning.)34

  Leonardo's experiments into the workings of the camera obscuras gave rise to his own increasingly dark reputation. As biographer Maurice Rowden writes:

  In Pavia he worked on his camera obscura, to demonstrate his theory that all vision is determined by the angle at which light falls on the eye: the upside-down image thrown on the wall from the camera's pinpoint of light was a more graphic argument than words, and it was little wonder that he got the reputation of being a sorcerer and alchemist 35

  Of course Leonardo's penchant for dissecting cadavers, some of which he had specially exhumed, would hardly help - nor would his friendship with Giovan Francesco Rustici, a known necromancer, with whom he was shut away for months creating their joint sculpture, John the Baptist, which now offers target practice for pigeons outside the Baptistery in Florence. (And which, of course, flourishes the `John gesture'.)

  Apart from his extreme reverence for the Baptist, Leonardo evinced a sort of worship not only for nature but also number - `let no one read my works who is not a mathematician', he wrote sternly - none of which would endear him to the ecclesiastical authorities, which sought total control over mind and spirit. The whole idea of the universe being controlled by a system other than that approved by the Vatican was naturally anathema. No one could control Leonardo's spirit. Irreverent, as we have seen, to the point of blasphemy, Leonardo would have been delighted by the commission to create the Holy Shroud Mark Two - secretly, of course - both the egregious heretic and naughty schoolboy in him would have been absolutely tickled to be asked to make the holiest of Christian relics.

  Yet there were always more serious and usually considerably more profound and even darker aspects to Leonardo's brilliant jokes, as we have seen with his paintings. In this, he was encapsulating a major principle of the secret Rosicrucian movement, officially still in the future when he died in 1519, but which he seems to have known and approved of. Certainly, occult historian Dame Frances Yates had no doubts that Leonardo exhibited `a Rosicrucian frame of mind',36 meaning he encompassed a heretical raft of intellectual pursuits that challenged orthodoxy head-on. Dr Yates also muses, courageously for an academic: `Might it not have been within the outlook of a Magus that a personality like Leonardo was able to co-ordinate his mathematical and mechanical studies with his work as an artist?'37

  It was in the early seventeenth century that documents began to circulate among would-be free-thinking intelligentsia. These were the `Rosicrucian Manifestos' issued from Germany, which described the existence of a secret brotherhood of Magi3s closely associated with alchemy (and which, it is claimed, would assist the rise of Freemasonry). The Order, consisting largely of alchemists, magicians, Hermeticists and Cabalists, claimed it originated with Christian Rosenkreutz, who had allegedly died at the vast age of 106 and been buried in a fabled tomb kept lit by an eternal but mysterious source of light. As `Rosenkreutz' means `Rosy Cross' - which owes little or nothing to the Christian symbol" - it seems his story was a metaphor for the continuation of the Rosicrucian `light' in secret places. If such an organization had existed in Leonardo's day, he might have been an enthusiastic member, but as it was, he probably was not an unknown face at more informal, but basically similar groups of magi and alchemists who wished to preserve secret knowledge away from the eyes of the Inquisition. He also shared another quality with the ideal Rosicrucian - a playfulness and sense of trickery and illusion. In his Foreword to Tobias Churton's The Gnostic Philosophy (2003), Dr Christopher McIntosh writes:

  The Dutch historian Huizinga, in his classic book Homo Ludens [Playful Man], deals with playfulness and its importance in human culture throughout history. This spirit of playfulness is, I believe, an important vein running through the Gnostic tradition ... Churton mentions an early example in the figure of ... Simon Magus 40

  Acknowledging that Churton's previous book, The Golden Builders,

  skilfully placed the Rosicrucians within the context of the emerging gulf between science and religion, a gulf which they wished to prevent by creating a universal system of knowledge, linking religion, science philosophy and art. The Rosicrucians embodied this vision in a brilliantly created mythology with a strong element of playfulness."

  Therefore Leonardo would have been in every way the perfect Rosicrucian: his scientific, artistic and `religious' (i.e. Johannite) sensibilities being enriched and enhanced by his essential understanding of jokes and playfulness. This creates a mind that sees immense and often apparently contradictory possibilities in everything, that espies a unifying force beneath all nature - and that particular God is one of laughter, just like Goethe's Mephistopheles, but infinitely more powerful, hopeful and full of light. And it may be significant that a nineteenth-century poster advertising a Rosicrucian salon in Paris depicted Leonardo as Keeper of the Grail ...

  Cracking the Da Vinci Shroud Code requires the same sort of off-beat perception - which has absolutely no connection with academic standing or an intimate knowledge of Leonardo's brushwork - that will see for itself the giant phallus made of rocks towering above Mary's head in the Virgin of the Rocks, the femininity of the young `St John' or the disembodied hand clutching a dagger in the Last Supper.

  To those who eagerly quote the latest desperate outpourings from the usually rather acidulous pens of the remaining `Shroudies' (those who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, insist on believing that the alleged relic is genuine), let me point out certain key factors about the image on the shroud that prove, even to a child - indeed, especially to a child" - that it cannot be anything but a fake. First, the height of the man is literally impossible. As it is supposed to be Jesus' winding cloth, there is a front and a back image, roughly joined at the crown of the head - yet the man is two inches shorter at the back than he is at the front, which would indeed be a miracle. Shroudman is actually 6ft 10in at the front and 6ft Bin at the back, although nowhere in the New Testament does it remark about Christ's astonishing height (and uniquely sloping head). Although it is true that the Christian Bible is not much concerned with physical appearance, if Jesus were a giant surely some sort of remark would have crept in, especially in an era when great height was associated with kingship 43

  There is absolutely no doubt about this: in my capacity as a consultant for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television's exhibition, `The Unexplained', in 1999 I, along with Clive Prince had the golden opportunity to put our theory about Shroudman's height to the test. (Previously we had simply done the calculations.) The museum had made the full-length photographic reproduction of the Shroud the focus of a huge, otherwise completely bare room, displaying it on a massive, specially built light-box no more than two feet from the ground. This enabled the visitor to look down at the image, besides being able to stand back at a distance and see it from all angles - much more telling than being crammed shoulder to shoulder in a long line of pilgrims and shuffling along to see no more than a couple of inches of the real thing at roughly eye-height. Conveniently Clive is exactly six foot tall, so we were able to measure the height of Shroudman with some precision, by laying him
on the ground beside it, aligned with the top of the head. We also had assistance from the museum staff. And yes, Shroudman is enormously, impossibly tall ... Of course as a projected image he could be any height at all from tiny to gigantic, although in that case one has to wonder why a genius like Leonardo failed to correct such a blunder. But then, was it actually a mistake - could the ludicrous height actually have been left there deliberately?

  Remember this is the man who set a giant phallus on the Virgin Mary's head and got away with it for 500 years; the artist whose `St John' is a woman and whose Last Supper contains a disembodied hand clutching a dagger that virtually no one ever notices. Leonardo was the ultimate psychologist, knowing - even relying on - the fact that people only ever see what they expect or want to see. If that were not true, he would have been in serious trouble virtually before the paint dried on many of his masterpieces. He seems to be creating `errors' of a particular sort, but not for the masses to notice, because he had no intention for them to do so and was confident that they would miss them anyway, but perhaps to speak profoundly to `those with eyes to see'.

  Here he has created not only an impossibly tall Jesus, but the man's head is apparently severed. Indeed, there is a distinct demarcation line at the base of the neck, which can be seen perfectly, like many of the other details, when viewed in photographic negative. Once again, this is beyond reasonable doubt: we had the image run through a computer programme that turned it into a species of contour map," making the discovery that the image does indeed suddenly stop completely at the exact position of the line, picking up again at the upper chest. Why should this be?

  One reason was no doubt simply practical. It is obvious that the image of the head at the front was created at a different time from the rest of the front and the whole of the back. The face is actually a different size and scale from the body,45 being also narrower and proportionately smaller than the head at the back (which is also at a completely different angle) 46 The ears are missing, replaced by curious blank strips between the face and the hair, which gives an oddly neat frame to the face (unlikely were the body supine) 47

  In fact, we discovered very quickly during our experiments that this peculiar foreshortening is simply a side-effect of using a lens in the camera obscura, a sort of fish-eye effect. Leonardo is known to have ground his own lenses, even making himself a rather `cool' pair of dark blue spectacles. (But again, one wonders why? Why did he need to protect his eyes from intense light and heat? Did he make the glasses specially for his Shroud work, in which - as we discovered for ourselves48 - when creating similar images, both heat and light must be kept at a maximum for over 24 hours?)49 The question of a lens led us to make a particularly exciting discovery: we know Leonardo used one at least in his manufacture of the face of the Shroud of Turin because it can clearly be seen in the dead centre of the face - the bridge of the nose - as a dark circle on the negative and a light circle on the positive image. This is a photograph of the lens itself.50

  However, this being Leonardo, one layer of explanation will never be enough. Multi-faceted himself, he demands that we engage our brains, hearts and souls (not to mention our sense of the absurd): his unsettling representations striking at the core of the psyche, and sometimes giving a curious twist to the heart. As in his uncompromising satire on Marian virginity, The Virgin of the Rocks, his work may often be curiously dark in the literal, artistic sense, but it is also white-hot with anger - and that anger communicates itself loud and clear after 500 years to `those with eyes to see'.

  Considering all the bold and outrageous Johannite symbolism in Leonardo's paintings, was he also saying in his depiction of a very obviously separate head on the Shroud of Turin, that `one who was beheaded is "over" - morally and spiritually - one who was crucified'? Certainly that would be the neatest and ultimate symbol of the real `Da Vinci code' .. .

  It is almost certainly Leonardo's own face (see illustrations). He loved putting himself in his works - such as in the bottom righthand corner of The Adoration of the Magi or as Saint Thaddeus/Saint Jude in the Last Supper: the joke no doubt being that Saint Jude is patron saint of lost causes. It is even possible to see that Saint Jude's face is very similar to that of Shroudman, from the distinctive hairline to the large, knobbly nose.

  Various other devotees to the idea that Leonardo faked the Shroud" have suggested that he used his own face out of reverence for Jesus, literally in imitation of Christ. However, even leaving his personal heretical beliefs aside for the moment, from the viewpoint of his time and place that is simply inconceivable. He has represented himself splattered with Christ's holy blood, believed to be sacred and redemptive: to fake it would be absolute sacrilege. It would have been impossible for a believer, a true son of the Church, to have taken such a far-reaching liberty with the face and body of the Redeemer. To have faked Christ's broken and bloody body was neither for the squeamish nor anyone who entertained any hope of ever seeing Heaven. On the other hand, a passionate dyed-in-thewool `anti-Christ' would have welcomed the chance to render Jesus not only mortal, but also made in his own image - and Leonardo was quick to take such an opportunity. Not only did he think of himself as Grandson of God, but clearly had ambitions to be his own father! (For the illegitimate artist who suffered at the hands of his half siblings, especially over vexed problems of inheritance, presenting himself as the alleged Son of God would have had an extra piquancy. Unfortunately, this particular association passed Sigmund Freud by.)

  Of course, from an objective viewpoint, with the Turin Shroud Leonardo succeeded brilliantly, even though he could never have known that in the late nineteenth century his `magic' image would suddenly leap into incredible detail when it was photographed for the first time and seen in negative 52 (Although it seems unlikely, did Leonardo himself have some means of seeing Shroudman in negative? Did he know that he had created such a work of Luciferan genius - or was it merely a shot in the dark, a species of message in a bottle thrown into the seas of posterity with the hope that one day it would be recognized for what it is?)

  As for the image of the terribly beaten and nailed body, that presumably came from unholy tinkerings with scourge, hammer and nails behind closed doors with one of the many corpses Leonardo used for anatomical research. This is an actual body that really had been subjected to the great abuses of beating, scourging and the dreadful piercing of hands, side and feet. (The head bears the marks of the Crown of Thorns, but perfectionist Leonardo would have endured the pain for the sake of his heretical art. In fact, the face itself is remarkably free from wounds and certainly far too composed for a man who had allegedly been tortured to death.) The body had truly been nailed upright, for the nail wounds are in the wrists and not the palms, showing a grim practicality. (Incredibly, some Shroudies have even suggested that no one could have known how to recreate the wounds of the crucifixion. Yet surely all one has to do is read the New Testament, which describes what happened to Jesus - and boldly set about some grisly experimentation.) And, although Leonardo never painted a crucifixion, there is an intriguing reference in a note that has long puzzled biographers, dating from c. 1489 that refers to a specimen that he had borrowed: .. the bone that Gian de Bellinzona pierced and from which he easily extracted the nail ...'S3 It seems that Leonardo was experimenting with crucifixion for some nefarious purpose of his own.

  It is significant that while there is no paint to speak of54 on the Shroud, there is real blood around the sites of the wounds. A painstaking - not to say nit-picking - genius, Leonardo was unlikely to spoil his masterpiece by splodging it with crude daubs of paint instead of blood. (Similarly, of all fakers a perfectionist of his genius would hardly have used linen straight from the loom for a relic that was supposed to be 1,500 years old.) So it might be said, albeit perhaps melodramatically, that in one sense at least he did sign away his soul to Lucifer in blood.

  Faking the `Shroud' of Turin was, arguably, Da Vinci's greatest hour - certainly as a Luciferan, whether one takes that t
o mean an agent of the Devil, as would most Catholics and all Shroudies, or merely as a daring experimental scientist. The fake is an astonishing joke - truly a commedia, a profoundly serious comment - but in this case, also a brutal nose-thumbing at the Church, even at its founder. As his first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, wrote: `Leonardo formed . .. a doctrine so heretical that he depended no more on ... any religion', although perhaps prudently this passage was removed from subsequent editions, being replaced by a brief and unconvincing note about Leonardo's death-bed repentance."

  Never officially endorsed by the Vatican, although it has come close once or twice, the Shroud for the most part is kept locked away from prying eyes and the depredations of modern life and the polluting air. From time to time it is displayed in the cathedral at Turin, where no doubt the shade of the old master enjoys the religious raptures of the pilgrims crossing themselves and murmuring devout prayers over a photograph of a sixteenthcentury Johannite heretic.

  Even to a non-Christian, the sheer chutzpah involved is breathtaking, almost shocking in both the literal and figurative sense. The image of the Shroud, particularly in minutely detailed negative, induces that peculiar abrupt lurching in the pit of the stomach that marks an encounter with something truly outrageous - as in suddenly seeing for oneself what he did with the dark rocks looming above the Virgin's head. Coming face-to-face with Leonardo's wilful, brilliant and intentionally blasphemous masterpiece is a moment of truth that many would rather not experience.

  Nor could Leonardo have guessed at another extraordinary sideeffect of using his own face as the model for Christ on the Shroud - although no doubt he would have exploded with laughter if he had. Although there had been depictions of Jesus as bearded before the Turin Shroud went on display in the late fifteenth century, after that watershed Christ's appearance in popular art changed specifically to resemble it. Suddenly the divine look was standardized into a very tall (although never quite so tall as Shroudman, for obvious reasons), broad-shouldered man with reddish hair parted in the middle, a long nose and hauntingly beautiful, regular features. In other words, our general cultural perception of what Jesus looked like is none other than Leonardo - another shocking triumph for the inspiration of The Da Vinci Code. Just think of all those plaster statues, the countless stained-glass windows and twisted bodies on crucifixes not as images of a first-century Jewish teacher and mage at all, but a fourteenth-fifteenth-century Italian homosexual heretic who hated Christ with all his Johannite heart. Again, there is that disturbing shift in the pit of the stomach, as yet again the foundation of our collective unconscious lifts - and shudders slightly.