STILL TRYING TO CRACK THE HOLY GRAIL CODE:

Da Vinci link may soon be revealed

Mar 16 2006 (ic Birmingham.co.uk)

By Shahid Naqvi

It has been billed as one of the world's great unsolved mysteries. Ten letters on a marble tablet that, legend has it, could help reveal the location of the mythical Holy Grail.

Many have tried to crack the code which, surprisingly, is not located deep within some catacomb in Jerusalem, but a stately home a short trip up the M6 from Birmingham in Shugborough, Staffordshire.

So far none have succeeded.

However the 258-year-old mystery might be about to be solved.

Canadian codebreaker Louis Buff Parry claims to have unlocked the secret message and plans to explain his theory to the world this weekend.

[...]

And the world, no doubt, is waiting with baited breath.

The "Da Vinci link" in the headline is awfully weak. It refer not to the actual Lenardo Da Vinci, but to an indirect allusion in Dan Brown's book:

Commissioned by Thomas Anson in 1748, the 20 ft high monument depicts a group of shepherds and shepherdesses contemplating the after-life.

The reason it has been linked to the Holly Grail is because the picture is a mirror-image likeness of a painting by artist Nicholas Poussin.

Poussin was rumoured to be a Grand Master of the Knights Templar and the original painting housed in the Louvre, Paris, was linked to the Holy Grail in Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code.

Here's a PaleoJudaica post on the Shepherd's Monument from November of 2004. There's a link there to a picture of the stone. The secret message reads "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M." This doesn't strike me as the sort of code that would be easy to decipher. It's very short and there's not much in the way of context. This is amusing, but hardly "one of the world's great unsolved mysteries," and not a very promising route for recovering the Holy Grail, for which there is no contemporary historical evidence anyway. (Yes, Jesus presumably did use a cup at the Last Supper, but there's no evidence it was kept and made an object of veneration. Grail legends first appear in the Middle Ages.)