Tom Hanks credited as playing...
Robert Langdon
- Robert Langdon: This is the original icon for male. It's a rudimentary phallus.
- Sophie Neveu: Quite to the point.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Yes, indeed.
- Robert Langdon: This is know as the blade. It represents aggression and manhood. It's a symbol still used today in modern military uniforms.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Yes, the more penises you have, the higher your rank. Boys will be boys.
- Robert Langdon: You say you hate history. Nobody hates history. They hate their own histories.
- Sophie Neveu: So now you're a psychologist too?
- Sophie Neveu: She has some things she wants to tell me... About my family.
- Robert Langdon: What will you do? The legend will be revealed when the heir reveals himself.
- Sophie Neveu: They just got the pronoun wrong. She said when Saunière died he took the location of Mary's sarcophagus with him. So... there's no way to empirically prove that I am related to her. What would you do, Robert?
- Robert Langdon: Okay, maybe there is no proof. Maybe the Grail is lost forever. But, Sophie, the only thing that matters is what you believe. History shows us Jesus was an extraordinary man. A human inspiration. That's it. That's all the evidence has ever proved. But... When I was a boy... When I was down in that well Teabing told you about... I thought I was going to die, Sophie. And what I did... , I prayed. I prayed... to Jesus... to keep me alive so I could see my parents again, so I could go to school again, so I could play with my dog. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn't alone down there. Why does it have to be human or divine? Maybe human is divine. Why couldn't Jesus have been a father and still be capable of all those miracles?
- Sophie Neveu: Like turning water into wine?
- Robert Langdon: Well, who knows? His blood is your blood. Maybe that junkie in the park will never touch a drug again. Maybe you healed my phobia with your hands.
- Sophie Neveu: And maybe you're a knight on a Grail quest.
- Robert Langdon: Well, here's the question: A living descendent of Jesus Christ... Would she destroy faith? Or would she renew it? So again I say, what matters is what you believe.
- Sophie Neveu: Thank you... For bringing me here. For letting him choose you, Sir Robert.
- Robert Langdon: You take care.
- Sophie Neveu: Yes.
- [They hug, Robert kisses Sophie on the forehead and they both walk away from each other]
- Sophie Neveu: Hey.
- [Sophie walks up to a nearby pond, sticks out a foot to see if she can walk on it and fails]
- Sophie Neveu: Nope. Maybe I'll do better with the wine.
- Robert Langdon: [smiles] Godspeed.
- Robert Langdon: [reading] "The Holy Grail 'neath ancient Roslin waits / The blade and chalice guarding o'er Her gates / Adorned by masters' loving art, She lies / She rests at last beneath the starry skies."
- Robert Langdon: There was every orb conceivable on that tomb except one. The orb which fell from the heavens and inspired Newton's life's work. Work that incurred the wrath of the Church... until his dying day. A-P-P-L-E. Apple.
- [Langdon is speaking into the intercom at the gate of Teabing's house]
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Robert! Do I owe you money?
- Robert Langdon: Leigh... my friend... care to, uh, care to open up for an old colleague?
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Of course.
- Robert Langdon: Thank you.
- [Sophie goes to shut the car door]
- Sir Leigh Teabing: But first, a test of honor. Three questions.
- Robert Langdon: [somewhat annoyed] Fire away.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Your first. Shall I serve coffee or tea?
- Robert Langdon: Tea, of course.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Excellent. Second. Milk or lemon?
- Sophie Neveu: Milk?
- Robert Langdon: That would depend on the tea.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Correct. And now the third and most grave of inquiries. In which year did a Harvard sculler out-row an Oxford man at Henley?
- Robert Langdon: Surely such a travesty has never occurred.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Your heart is true. You may pass.
- Sophie Neveu: A cryptex. They are used to keep secrets. It's da Vinci's design. You write the information on a papyrus scroll which is then rolled around a thin glass vial of vinegar. If you force it open, the vial breaks, vinegar dissolves papyrus, and your secret is lost forever. The only way to access the information is to spell out the password with these five dials, each with 26 letters. That's 12 million possibilities.
- Robert Langdon: I've never met a girl who knew *that* much about a cryptex.
- Sophie Neveu: Saunière made one for me once.
- Robert Langdon: My grandfather... gave me a wagon.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: And he who keeps the keys to Heaven rules the world.
- Robert Langdon: Women, then, are a huge threat to the Church.
- Robert Langdon: [reading] "In London lies a knight a Pope interred / His labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred / You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb / It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb."
- Robert Langdon: Women, then, are a huge threat to the Church. The Catholic Inquisition soon publishes what may be the most blood-soaked book in human history.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: The Malleus Maleficarum.
- Robert Langdon: The Witches' Hammer.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: It instructed the clergy on how to locate, torture, and kill all free-thinking women.
- Robert Langdon: In three centuries of witch hunts, 50,000 women are captured, burned alive at the stake.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Oh, at least that. Some say millions. Imagine then, Robert, that Christ's throne might live on in a female child. You asked what would be worth killing for. Witness the greatest cover-up in human history. This is the secret that the Priory of Sion has defended for over 20 centuries. They are the guardians of the royal bloodline. The keepers of the proof of our true past. They are the protectors of the living descendants of Jesus Christ... and Mary Magdalene.
- Sophie Neveu: Maybe there is something about this Priory of Sion.
- Robert Langdon: I hope not. Any Priory story ends in bloodshed. They were butchered by the Church. It all started over a thousand years ago when a French king conquered the holy city of Jerusalem. This crusade, one of the most massive and sweeping in history, was actually orchestrated by a secret brotherhood, the Priory of Sion and their military arm, the Knights Templar.
- Sophie Neveu: But the Templars were created to protect the Holy Land.
- Robert Langdon: That was a cover to hide their true goal, according to this myth. Supposedly the invasion was to find an artifact lost since the time of Christ. An artifact, it was said, the Church would kill to possess.
- Sophie Neveu: Did they find it, this buried treasure?
- Robert Langdon: Put it this way: One day the Templars simply stopped searching. They quit the Holy Land and traveled directly to Rome. Whether they blackmailed the papacy or the Church bought their silence, no one knows. But it is a fact the papacy declared these Priory knights, these Knights Templar, of limitless power. By the 1300s, the Templars had grown *too* powerful. Too threatening. So the Vatican issued secret orders to be opened simultaneously all across Europe. The Pope had declared the Knights Templar Satan worshipers and said God had charged *him* with cleansing the earth of these heretics. The plan went off like clockwork. The Templars were all but exterminated. The date was October 13th, 1307. A Friday.
- Sophie Neveu: Friday the 13th.
- Robert Langdon: The Pope sent troops to claim the Priory's treasure, but they found nothing. The few surviving Knights of the Priory had vanished, and the search for their sacred artifact began again.
- Sophie Neveu: What artifact? I've never heard about any of this.
- Robert Langdon: Yes, you have. Almost everyone on earth has. You just know it as the Holy Grail.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: And this is from the gospel of Mary Magdalene herself.
- Sophie Neveu: She wrote a gospel?
- Robert Langdon: She may have.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Robert, will you fight fair?
- Robert Langdon: She *may* have.
- Robert Langdon: Now, as you can imagine, the female symbol is its exact opposite. This is called the chalice.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: And the chalice resembles a cup or vessel, or more importantly, the shape of a woman's womb. No, the Grail has never been a cup. It is quite literally this ancient symbol of womanhood. And in this case, a woman who carried a secret so powerful that if revealed, it would devastate the very foundations of Christianity.
- Sophie Neveu: Wait, please. You're saying the Holy Grail is a person? A woman?
- Sir Leigh Teabing: [indicating "The Last Supper"] And it turns out, she makes an appearance right there.
- Sophie Neveu: Hmm. But they are all men.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Are they? What about that figure on the right hand of our Lord seated in the place of honor, hmm? Flowing red hair. Folded feminine hands. Hint of a bosom, no?
- Robert Langdon: Have you ever heard those words before, Sophie, "so dark the con of man"?
- Sophie Neveu: No. Have you?
- Robert Langdon: When you were a child, were you aware of any secret gatherings? Anything ritualistic in nature? Meetings your grandfather would have wanted kept secret? Was there ever any talk of something called the Priory of Sion?
- Sophie Neveu: The what? Why are you asking these things?
- Robert Langdon: The Priory of Sion is a myth. One of the world's oldest and most secret societies with leaders like, uh, Sir Isaac Newton, da Vinci himself. The fleur-de-lis is their crest. They're guardians of a secret they supposedly refer to as "the dark con of man."
- Sophie Neveu: But what secret?
- Robert Langdon: The Priory of Sion protects the source of God's power on Earth.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: The Bible, as we know it, was finally presided over by one man: the pagan emperor Constantine.
- Sophie Neveu: I thought Constantine was a Christian.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Oh, hardly, no. He was a lifelong pagan, who was baptized on his deathbed. Constantine was Rome's supreme holy man. From time immemorial, his people had worshipped a balance between nature's male deities and the goddess or sacred feminine. But a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Three centuries earlier, a young Jew named Jesus had come along, preaching love and a single God. Centuries after his crucifixion, Christ's followers had grown exponentially and had started a religious war against the pagans.
- Robert Langdon: Or did the pagans commence war against the Christians? Leigh, we can't be sure who began the atrocities in that period.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: But we can at least agree that the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to tear Rome in two.
- [Langdon shrugs an agreement]
- Sir Leigh Teabing: So Constantine may have been a, uh, lifelong pagan, but he was also a pragmatist. And in 325 anno Domini, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion: Christianity.
- Robert Langdon: Christianity was on the rise. He didn't want his empire torn apart.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: And to strengthen this new Christian tradition, Constantine held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea. And at this council, the many sects of Christianity debated and, uh, voted on, well, everything from the acceptance and rejection of specific gospels to the date for Easter to the administering of the sacraments, and, of course... the immortality of Jesus.
- Sophie Neveu: I don't follow.
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Well, ma chere, until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by many of his followers as a mighty prophet, as a great and powerful man, but a man nevertheless. A mortal man.
- Sophie Neveu: Not the son of God?
- Sir Leigh Teabing: Not even his nephew twice removed.
- Robert Langdon: The Fibonacci numbers only make sense when they're in order. These are scrambled. If he was trying to reach out, maybe he was doing it in code. Would you hold this, please?
- [handing her the black light]
- Robert Langdon: This phrase is meaningless. Unless... you assume these letters are out of order, too.
- Sophie Neveu: An anagram.
- [he scribbles down "cardinal," then scratches it out]
- Sophie Neveu: You have eidetic memory?
- Robert Langdon: Not quite, but I can pretty much remember what I see.
- [scribbling "divine" and scratching it out, too]
- Robert Langdon: Whoa. Anagram is right. "O, draconian devil. Oh, lame saint" becomes "Leonardo Da Vinci. The Mona Lisa."
- Sophie Neveu: Professor... the Mona Lisa is right over here.