The Echo Vector

British genealogist Currer-Briggs presents a hypothesis linking two renowned icons, the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Grail, around which centuries of controversy swirl. In tracing the convoluted history of the shroud, the alleged burial cloth of Christ, he proposes a connection both with the grail and its purported custodians, the Knights Templar, and with the romantic ethos of Arthurian legend. Attention is focused on the post-Constantinople years, as Currer-Briggs tracks the passage of the shroud and grail through a network of noble and influential families (he dubs them ""The Shroud Mafia'') who transported the objects to France in the mid-13th century. Despite a wealth of historical and contemporary denigration of the authenticity of the shroud and the grail, Currer-Briggs claims that the shroud ``has existed for at least a thousand years, and that it is the same object with which the Holy Grail was so intimately linked in the 12th and 13th centuries''; he contends that the grail may even have been the reliquary in which the shroud was kept. (March)