Et in arcadia ego.

[zotz]

A few months ago there was a news article about some ex-Bletchley park people considering a mysterious inscription on a monument in Staffordshire, reputedly containing information about the Holy Grail. Well, they don't think so. This is entirely unsurprising. The Holy Blood And The Wholly Specious has a lot to answer for, even if it has managed to indirectly pay for the Roslin Chapel's restoration.

There's a page about the Poussin in question here.

Rather more practically, here's an article about a possible treatment for rabies, previously 100% fatal once it became symptomatic (bar one single person in the sixties, I believe).

Comments

[taoist-goth.livejournal.com]

I would think that anyone would want a cryptic religious message to show the resting place of the grail - that is after all the most interesting thing that any cryptic message could say. Except for "We apologise for the inconvenience" of course.

So whenever you actually *find* such a cryptic message, people will inevitably postulate that maybe it provides the information necessary to recover said item of tableware. 'Tis a great work of optimism, is it not? Like anyone that knows where the holy goblet lies is gonna write down its position instead of going and getting it. Sheesh.

[zotz]

Maybe. The interest in the grail does seem to wax and wane, though. There's been a glut of conspiracy theory recently, ranging from the Good (Foucault's Pendulum) through the Bad (The da Vinci Code) to the Ugly (Holy Blood, Holy Grain, inevitably).
Whether the Grail is part of the local mindset depends enormously on where you are. Some churches and places do relics. Others don't. There's been a bit more interest in them lately than for a good while before, and of course they were huge in the middle ages. Take the Shroud, for instance. Relatively obscure for probably centuries until the seventies, when someone made a TV documentary abut it. Suddenly it was big business again.

[taoist-goth.livejournal.com]

And then there was Monty Python.

[zotz]

Ah, but they had a more intellectually rigorous approach to the subject.