IDEAS UNDER SIEGE.

Like many people, I’ve been following with much interest the lawsuit filed by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three co-authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (in the U.S., Holy Blood, Holy Grail), against Random House, publisher of The Da Vinci Code and whose author, Dan Brown, has been a central figure in the proceedings. (Ironically, Random House also published Holy Blood, Holy Grail.)

Holy Blood, Holy Grail's third co-author, Henry Lincoln, declined to take part in the lawsuit.

Closing arguments in the case wrapped up on Monday, with the verdict not expected to be handed down for several weeks.

What makes this case so engrossing is that it may have bearing in the future on how far authors of fiction can go in relying on nonfiction sources for their background material and plotlines.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail focuses on the premise that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and begat children with her, and that following Mary’s immigration to what is now France, these children intermarried with the Merovingian dynasty, thus preserving Jesus’s bloodline unto the present day, with said bloodline becoming known as the Sang Real (Royal Blood) or Holy Grail.

As those who study esoterica know, these ideas are not new. Rather, they have been around for centuries. What Holy Blood, Holy Grail principally did was to popularize them, tying them up with a shadowy "secret" society called the Priory of Sion (which organization is now claimed to have been largely debunked), and the Church of St. Mary Magdalene at Rennes-le-Chateau, in Southern France.

Regardless of whether one believes all this or not, esoterica and its associated "secret" societies (since so much is known about so many of them, they are scarcely secret anymore) make fascinating subjects for fiction, and Brown is certainly not the first—or even the best—author to employ them, or to utilize the theories about Jesus and Mary Magdalene as the plot or subplot of a novel or other work.

So, is this lawsuit simply a case of "Where’s there’s a hit, there’s a writ"? It will be interesting to see how London High Court Justice Peter Smith rules.