Turin Shroud
Picknett, Lynn & Prince, Clive
TURIN SHROUD: IN WHOSE IMAGE? THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CENTURIES-LONG CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince HarperCollins / 224 pages / $23 reviewed by MARK STEYN love that...
...He emerges triumphant: veni, vidi, da Vinci...
...But hell hath no fury like a STURPie shtupped...
...If they've been reduced to lawyers, why not F. Lee Bailey rather than some shyster from Spain...
...He's also the guy Society of the Turin Shroud Newsletter who authenticated the Hitler diaries...
...Ultimately, the simplest way to understand their radical overthrow of Shroud orthodoxy is to see it in Irving Berlin terms...
...To that end, Clive Prince spends the last half of the book holed up in his potting shed using fourteenth-century ingredients to project his likeness onto the back of a cheesecloth shirt...
...I don't know which is swashbucklers were played as the more banal—if modern science had Californian beach hunks with feathers in proved that the Shroud was the sheet that their hats...
...Air / ry...
...She concedes that she practised channeling "automatic" or "unconcious" writings which, when they were intelligible, were signed "Leonardo...
...they wanted confirmation grounds that statues in Mexico have of the result they'd already decided Negro features...
...by the same token, you upon...
...There is no more revealing dismissal in If you believe in the resurrection, it's our culture...
...By continuing to insist that it's Shroud Guild of New York, a founding the face of Jesus in the face of the evimember of STURP (the Shroud of Turin dence, the Shroudies have diminished its uniqueness, with the result that, since Mark Steyn hosts this summer's 1988, it's been languishing in iconic No Glyndebourne Opera broadcasts on Man's Land...
...therefore, he decided to pass himself off as the image of Christ as a joke on posterity...
...As always, the authors assert that certain events could have happened and then, presupposing that they did, assert that certain other events could have happened as a consequence...
...Then he had the nerve to turn down her poem about the Shroud on the grounds that the Newsletter doesn't run poetry...
...When they didn't get it, they could argue, on the evidence of its sought a second opinion, and then a third famous angular, chiseled heads, that and fourth—from the likes of Herr Easter Island must have been discovered Doktor Max Frei, the Swiss criminoloby Lyle Lovett...
...At this point, my unconcious channeled another telegram: "Don't you think it's odd that, after stacking up so many of history's all-time hotshots as Grand Master, the current leader is some Barcelona nobody...
...Its present Grand Master is a lawyer from Barcelona...
...but it's not as silly as exam- always supposed to have been...
...Pretty soon we're skimming back across the centuries like a frog on a lily pond...
...In between comes the big idea...
...John Jackson, whose cloth was, made by no means of reprohusband is a leading figure in the Holy duction...
...gist who found on the Shroud traces of In September 1993, The British pollen from Palestine...
...In both cases, history is useful wrapped the dead body of Jesus, or the only as an exotic backdrop against which fact that it didn't...
...Well, "early Christian writers referred to the Magdalene as 'the bride of Christ.— The authors think she was—literally...
...Yours truly, Michelangelo...
...were as curious about the scientific findGary Byrd, the black activist, claims that ings as Ceausescu used to be about elecAfricans discovered the Americas on the toral returns...
...to play out contemporary preoccupa- As things transpired, in 1988 scientions...
...Leonardo was a vegetarian and a homosexual...
...In fact, it's so widespread not such a leap to believe that, having that history itself is now history: it's arranged such a thing, God was also over, it's gone, forget it...
...To cut a long story mercifully short, within three weeks of meeting there, we began a two-year on/off relationship...
...and a U.S...
...Miss Picknett's principal opponent is the most distinguished of Shroudies, Ian Wilson: On the day that Ian Wilson was being laughed at for his gullibility about the Shroud, I was also part of the Wrekin Trust's audience...
...But a photograph—a photograph is real...
...Traditionally, Shroud theory has seen the relic as a garment, corresponding to the main theme of "Easter Parade": "In your Easter bonnet With all the frills upon it...
...W here to start...
...After Botticelli and Hugo and Debussy, you'd expect at least Oliver Stone or Snoop Doggy Dogg...
...THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CENTURIES-LONG CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince HarperCollins / 224 pages / $23 reviewed by MARK STEYN love that expression "You're histo- Research Project, Inc...
...Two years later Wilson and Picknett split, and he began telling British Shroudies that she dabbled in the occult...
...In its way, the past is a self-portrait—a mirror, if you like, to reflect back the values of the present...
...Such internecine feuding goes with the territory, as does the inevitable Deep Throat figure (an Italian called Giovanni) and the ritual break-in of the author's apartment...
...Image Analyzer to examine the Shroud...
...But, she insists, Wilson's the one hung up on mediumistic sources: in The BSTS Newsletter, he ran an approving story about "an Egyptian medium who channels Jesus (and yes, he confirms that the Shroud is genuine...
...In other words, it wasn't just the carbon she was interested in dating...
...Leonardo modeled the "Mona Lisa" on his own face...
...The only reason for mentioning this painful episode is to show why I became yet more interested in the Shroud in the year following the carbon dating...
...It's only when you linger longer on any one lily that you begin to wonder whether it can really bear the weight Picknett and Prince are placing on it...
...In the 15th century, they looked into the Holy Shroud of Turin and saw the face of Jesus...
...You might think it's arrogant of fists finally carbon-dated it to somewhere Shirley MacLaine or Anthony Newley to within the years 1260 and 1340, which insist that they were once Cleopatra or means that the Shroud can't be what it's Richard III...
...Jesus and Mary married, had children, and their bloodline (which includes the Merovingian dynasty of French kings) has been protected across the centuries by the Priory of Sion, a secret society whose Grand Masters have included Botticelli, Leonardo, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau...
...Now it turns out we should have been paying attention to the middle eight: "The photographers will snap us And you'll find that you're In the rotogravure . . ." In other words, if I can keep up with the authors, Leonardo invented the bicycle hundreds of years before anybody else...
...So Picknett and Prince are what in Britain are known as "anoraks" or "trainspotters"— the fellows who sit at the ends of railway platforms all weekend not for the romance and glamour and anticipation of train travel, but simply to jot down lists of engine numbers in little notebooks...
...But ining the life of Richard III and conclud- diehard Shroudies, as they're known, ing he was just like Anthony Newley...
...In straightforward American: nerds...
...But how can he say that when they'd just carried a poem called "Hymn to The Shroud" about...
...The hip media are bored by Jesus: to them, he serves no purpose as an icon...
...Today, we look into the Shroud and see the prototype of a photo shoot for Vanity Fair...
...European Catholics are still hung up on miracles—all those weeping Madonnas...
...Having climbed on Leonardo's bicycle, Picknett and Price are now peddling it into the sunlit uplands of Shroud cuckoo land...
...It said: "Time to start reading another book...
...This was The Shroud is unique: the image on the the theory of Mrs...
...To the English, nothing could be more embarrassing...
...So the substitution is made: a God-given image is transformed into a manmade image, with glamour and cachet—a self-portrait by a vegetarian sodomite, a sort of Florentine Robert Mapplethorpe...
...Yours, Bishop Henri de Poitiere...
...According to the authors, the face on the shroud is Leonardo da Vinci's, and he put it there himself: the world's first photograph by the world's first photographer...
...In this ingenious if unlikely solution to the problem of the Shroud, the clash of cultures between the age of faith and the age of celebrity finds its most dramatic battleground...
...therefore, he invented photography, too...
...ran a piece entitled "Was the Shroud the The Shroudies have missed the point...
...p icknett and Prince are British, and their Britishness is, I think, important: Britain is one of the most godless nations in the world, and if you want an example of how state protection saps the life out of anything it touches, look no further than the official and enfeebled Church of England...
...You see it, at capable of arranging a unique record of one extreme, in the reduction of the great it...
...But the minute you seek scientific classical texts to prosecution exhibits in confirmation of what is (literally) an artithe indictment of the racist, sexist, homo- cle of faith, you're already on the defenphobic European male—or, more pro- sive: whatever the Shroud is shouldn't saically, in the recent moronic re-make affect your belief in the risen Christ one of The Three Musketeers, where the way or the other...
...Now Lynn Picknett and Channel 4 in Britain...
...And, as with all factional hatreds, you wonder whether the arcane disputes about the merits of ultraviolet spectrophotometry over infrared spectroscopy—never mind thermographic correction—aren't merely a code for some more primal struggle...
...171 The American Spectator July 1995 69...
...Clive Prince have come up with a solu68 The American Spectator July 1995 tion, one that is such an audacious act of cultural appropriation it could almost be the ultimate emblem of a great struggle in our secular age—the battle between religious faith and scientific rationalism—carried to the most potent and defining image of Christ himself...
...By now, I was also beginning to channel unconcious writing...
...meaning you're through, Force physicist who used a NASA VP-8 you're finished, you're irrelevant...
...Their doggedness has set them at war with the Holy Shroud Guild, the BSTS, STURP, CIELT, magazines like Sindon and Shroud Spectrum International, and Professor Whanger of Duke University—virtually the whole of "the international Shroud community...
...therefore, he put a photograph of himself on the Turin Shroud, too...
...Tablecloth of the Last Supper...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
