A mysterious carved code at a British manor house, which has defied understanding for hundreds of years, is thought to be a cryptic message from an 18th century Christian sect, experts said on Thursday.
The series of apparently random letters inscribed on a monument at the Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire, central England, were analysed for months by veterans of Britain’s World War II code-breaking service.
The experts said on Thursday that a US researcher had now come up with a likely explanation for the code on the Shepherd’s Monument.
The marble tablet, commissioned in 1748, features a carved image of a painting by French 17th century artist Nicolas Poussin, with the letters ”DOUOSVAVVM” underneath.
According to popular legend, the code revealed the whereabouts of the Holy Grail, in Christian teaching the cup used by Jesus to drink from at the Last Supper.
In May, managers at Shugborough decided to invite experts from the famous World War II Bletchley Park code-breaking centre, along with their modern counterparts, to tackle the code.
The experts said that the US researcher, using a mixture of normal code-breaking systems and historical context, thought the letters stood for ”Jesus (As Deity) Defy”, a message from the Priory of Sion.
The Priory, a mysterious organisation perennially linked by conspiracy theorists to the Holy Grail, viewed Jesus as an earthly prophet rather than a son of god.
Such a message insisting on Jesus’s mortal status would have to have been put into hard-to-decipher code because it defied conventional Christian thinking, the experts said.
The new theory is buoyed by the fact that the Priory of Sion was a spiritual successor to the Knights Templar, an organisation which Poussin reputedly once headed.
The painting from which the carving is drawn, ”Les Bergers d’Arcadie”, is housed in Paris’s Louvre museum, and has long been subject to speculation about its supposed Masonic symbolism.
Poussin, the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion are frequently invoked by groups convinced that the Holy Grail is at the centre of some grand mystery concerning the Roman Catholic Church.
Such theories have acquired massive popular exposure through The Da Vinci Code, a best-selling novel by US author Dan Brown, which expounds the theory that Jesus had a number of descendants, a fact that was covered up by the Church.
The book has been so successful that France, where much of the action takes place, has benefitted from a mini-boom of US tourists visiting sights mentioned in the novel such as the Louvre and the church of Saint Sulpice on Paris’s Left Bank. – Sapa-AFP