Secrets of the Code Glossary: C - D

To add more terms, simply click on the "EasyEdit" button and make your contribution.

A - B | C - D | E - F | G - H | I - L | M - N | O - R | S - Z

Caesar cipher A substitution cipher (similar to the Atbash cipher) developed by Julius Caesar to communicate with his generals in wartime. Using the English alphabet the Caesar cipher substitutes the third letter following in the alphabet for the first, thus d replaces a, e replaces b, f replaces c, and so on. Dan Brown would be written as “Gdq Eurzq.”

Caravaggio In a desperate ploy to seal himself off from his attacker, Jacques Saunière pulls a painting by Caravaggio off the wall of the Louvre. This desperate act sets off the museum’s alarms and drops a security gate between Saunière and his attacker. The plan works, but not in the way that Saunière had hoped.

Caravaggio was one of the foremost Italian painters of the Baroque period. Born Michelangelo Marisi in 1573 in a town in Lombardy called Caravaggio (from which he assumed his professional name), he led a hardscrabble life. When he finally achieved success and notoriety, he was unable to fully suppress the anger and violent temper he had honed during his poverty; a series of brawls and fights culminated in his murdering a partner in a tennis match. Thereafter, he fled from city to city, often narrowly escaping imprisonment. During one of his sojourns as a fugitive, he stopped in Malta, where he became a Knight of Malta. He died in 1610, awaiting a papal pardon that arrived three days after his death.

Caravaggio used intense lighting to create dramatic scenes, scenes that conveyed a sense of an arrested moment in time—in particular, an amazing flash of light into a dark space, especially good for communicating moments of conversion, epiphany, shock, or violence. Not surprisingly, some of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings include scenes that are simultaneously violent and spiritual, such as The Crucifixion of St. Peter, The Conversion of St. Paul, The Calling of St. Matthew, and The Deposition of Christ. He painted religious and mythological figures in a “vulgar” way—as if they were laborers or prostitutes; indeed, early in his career, such workers were often the only models that he had.

Castel Gandolfo The Castel Gandolfo appears in The Da Vinci Code as the location for both of Bishop Aringarosa’s meetings with Vatican officials. The Castel is famous for serving two functions: the summer residence of the pope, and the center of the Vatican’s astronomy program. It was once the site of the summer residence of the Roman emperor Domitian (ruled AD 81–96). Domitian built a sumptuous palace, with its own aqueduct, a theater for the performance of plays and poetry contests, and a cryptoporticus—a long tunnel-like structure built into one of the surrounding hills, designed especially to shield the emperor from the sun during long walks.

The palace fell into ruin after his death, and was destroyed and rebuilt several times over the next four centuries, a victim of a tug-of-war between various noble families and the church. The Vatican finally bought it from its last owners in the early 1600s. Urban VIII (pope from 1623 to 1644) launched major renovations, and it became the official papal summer residence in 1626. It is known for its simple and tasteful style and its beautiful gardens.

One of the oldest centers for astronomy in the world, the Vatican Observatory—the Specola Vaticana—was relocated to the Castel Gandolfo in the 1930s. When the glow of Rome began to outshine the stars for even the far-removed Castel Gandolfo observatory, the Vatican created a second astronomical center, where the bright lights of Italy’s capital could not reach: Tucson, Arizona. The original Castel Gandolfo, however, is still used as the pope’s summer residence.

Cathars The Cathars were a heretical Christian religious sect that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD. The word comes from the Greek katharos, meaning “pure.” The Cathars could be found throughout southern Europe—especially in the areas where the control of the Catholic Church was weakest—but they were especially strong in the Languedoc region of Provence, a wealthy section in the south of France, which was always known for its political and religious independence.
The origins of the Cathar heresy are obscure, but some scholars believe that the dualism which lay at the heart of their faith was introduced by heretics from the Byzantine empire on the eastern fringes of the Christian world. In any case, the Cathars subscribed to a common Gnostic idea—the world was created by an evil god, a god of the material world, who corrupted his creation from the start. Thus, all material things, including the human body itself, were evil; transcending and escaping the prison of flesh was salvation. The Cathars believed that the soul or spirit was trapped between spiritual good and material evil, and if the individual decided to embrace the gross impositions of the material world through self-denial, they would be reincarnated, again and again, until they made the right decision.
The Cathars were also protofeminists. Women could rise to the status of prefect just as easily as men could. The soul was sexless, the material body merely its prison. Spiritually, there was no natural superiority of either sex over the other.
The heretical beliefs of the Cathars frightened the orthodox church, which slandered the Cathars with rumors very similar to those leveled against the Templars—that they were devil worshippers, that they ate the ashes of burned babies, that they were inveterate homosexuals. When these slanders didn’t reduce the spreading popularity of the Cathar faith, Rome organized a crusade named for the small town of Albi, a focal point of Cathar strength. The Albigensian Crusade, from AD 1209 to 1229, used military might to crush the nascent faith. Whole towns and cities thought to harbor the heretical communities were sacked and destroyed.

Cathedral of the Codes The informal name of the Rosslyn Chapel.

Chalice In Christian art the chalice signifies the Last Supper, the sacrifice of Jesus, and Christian faith. Langdon explains the nature of the chalice to Sophie during their brief stay at Leigh Teabing’s château. The chalice is the simplest symbol for the feminine known to man, the symbol of the womb and femininity. The Holy Grail is a more elaborate symbological variant of the chalice, associated with Mary Magdalene in her role as the preserver of the holy bloodline.

The opposite but complementary symbol, with which it is sometimes paired, is called the blade (the chalice and the blade). The blade is represented as a phallus, or a knife or spear. It is the symbol of masculinity and aggression. The blade and chalice, when united, form the Star of David, which Langdon identifies with the perfect union of male and female, and the highest principle of the divine.

The chalice and blade symbols have never left us, but exist in various forms throughout Western culture.

Château Villette Leigh Teabing’s sumptuous French home, Château Villette, is the safe haven that Sophie and Robert flee to after escaping from the Swiss bank with the priory keystone. The Château Villette is a real-life architectural landmark outside Paris. It was designed by François Mansart in 1668 for Jean Dyel, the Comte d’Aufflay and French ambassador to Venice. Another Mansart, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the nephew of François and a great architect in his own right, finished Villette in 1696. Versailles was designed at the same time by Hardouin-Mansart, and the influence of the design of the famous French royal residence is apparent in its smaller cousin. The château is luxury set in stone—eleven bedrooms and baths, a chapel, guest house, stables, gardens, tennis courts, and two lakes. Aspiring modern-day nobility can rent Villette for vacations, meetings, or weddings.

Cilice This French word is defined by the dictionary as “a coarse cloth, or haircloth.” As referred to in The Da Vinci Code, however, a cilice is the spiked chain worn around the upper thigh of Silas, the Opus Dei follower who has been sent to murder Saunière and his colleagues. Wearing of the cilice is practiced by some men and women adherents (called numeraries) of Opus Dei. The cilice is an extension of a traditional Catholic Church practice of “corporal mortification”: punishing one’s self to be able to identify with Jesus’ suffering and thereby resist temptation and grow spiritually. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, believed only direct pain would allow the sinner to repent. In his text The Way, fundamental to Opus Dei followers, he wrote, “Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain . . . Glorified be pain,” and, “What has been lost through the flesh, the flesh should pay back: be generous in your penance.” More traditional examples of mortification include practices such as fasting and celibacy.

Clef de voûte is a French term for the architectural device called a “keystone,” used as the top, central stone in a series of stones (called voussoir) that comprise an arch. As the central stone, it receives the weight of the others and holds the arch in place. In the vaulted ceilings of cathedrals, the keystone is the central stone that receives the weight of the ribs of the arch (see illustration). Keystones are often covered with designs (called the “boss”). In The Da Vinci Code the keystone is the legendary “map of stone” created by the Priory of Sion that—supposedly—leads to the Holy Grail. Langdon queries Sophie about whether her grandfather confided in her about the keystone, and when she is confused by the term, gives her a short lecture on the subject, telling her the keystone was a major architectural advancement and is deeply embedded in the symbolism of the Masonic orders. Some interpreters find the “royal arch” of the Masons a graphic representation of the zodiac, laid against an archway, with a prominent keystone at its summit.

Clement V, Pope Pope Clement V is mentioned in Langdon’s brief summary of the Templar persecution while he and Sophie drive through the Bois de Boulogne. Langdon avers that the pope devised a plan to take down the Templars because they had amassed so much power and wealth. Philip the Fair (Langdon calls him King Philipe IV) was acting in concert with the pope, and on an appointed day—Friday the thirteenth, October 1307—the Templars were arrested en masse and subjected to a trial infamous for its sensational charges of heresy and blasphemy, the brutality of its execution, and its fundamental unfairness.

While Langdon seems to have the general story correct, some of the details are disputed. While King Philip is usually recognized as the prime mover of the persecution of the Templars, some scholars believe the initial arrests occurred without Clement’s knowledge; indeed, Clement was shocked and angered by the arrests which were made against a group that was legally accountable only to the pope. “Your hasty act is seen by all,” he wrote to Philip, “and rightly so, as an act of contempt towards ourselves and the Roman church.” Clement eventually came to see the arrests as necessary, particularly, it is said, after the torture-induced confession of Jacques de Molay, the last Templar grand master. With this justification in hand, Clement publicly assented to the propriety of Philip’s action.

Cocteau, Jean Famed French artist, writer, poet, novelist (Les Enfants Terribles) and filmmaker (Beauty and the Beast). Jean Cocteau is cited as a “Grand Master of the Priory of Sion” based on a set of documents probably concocted by Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey, the so-called Dossiers Secrets. Cocteau had wide-ranging interests; whether he was a twentieth-century neo-Templar or hieros gamos practitioner remains unknown. He appears in The Da Vinci Code as the last Priory of Sion grand master; his name also appears on the list the examiner finds as he searches Château Villette.

Codex The word codex, which many associate with the word code and the puzzles that word evokes, actually has to do with a genuine revolution in record keeping created in Roman times: it is a book made of individual leaves of paper, as distinguished from the previous tradition of writing on rolls or scrolls. Two of these ancient codices have direct relevance to the plot of The Da Vinci Code.

The Berlin Codex, known formally as “Papyrus Berolinens 8502,” contains the most complete surviving copy of the Gospel of Mary and was acquired in the Egyptian antiquities market in 1896 by the German scholar Carl Reinhardt. It was not published until 1955, when it was discovered that two duplicate texts were also found at Nag Hammadi. Two other small fragments of the Gospel of Mary from separate Greek editions were later unearthed in northern Egypt.

Codex Leicester reflects not a religious record, but the fertile artistic genius and technological curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci, written between 1506 and 1510 in medieval Italian and rendered in his inventive mirror-image script. It derives its name from its first owner, the Earl of Leicester, who acquired it in 1717. Its current owner, Bill Gates, bought it at auction for $30.8 million.

While trying to decipher Saunière’s illegible cursive script on the flight from France to England, Langdon recalls seeing this Codex Leicester at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. He remembers being let down by the text of the codex. It was, at first sight, entirely illegible. But a docent with a hand mirror helps him to read the pages, which were written in a mirror-image text Leonardo used to disguise his words.

Constantine I Known as “the Great,” Constantine is widely acknowledged to be the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire (reigned AD 306–37). Although historians dispute the details, by convening the Council of Nicea, he is largely responsible for legitimizing and enthroning the church as the preeminent authority over what was left of the Roman Empire.

Whether Constantine wholeheartedly accepted Christianity as his own one true faith remains a subject of debate. Crediting him for supporting the unification of the disparate strains of early Christianity, thereby assuring the church of a supporter and sympathetic emperor, is unquestioned. But did he have his heart in it? He continued stamping pagan symbols onto his coins, for example, and he was also a devotee of Sol Invictus, the pagan “Unconquered Sun” deity derived from Syria but imposed on the Roman people a hundred years before Constantine’s time. Many scholars believe he may have been straddling the fence, paying attention to both to assure the greatest support.

The Da Vinci Code goes even further. Leigh Teabing tells Sophie and Langdon that Constantine “was a life-long pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest.” He only chose, and then imposed, Christianity as the official religion of Rome because he was, in Teabing’s words, “a very good businessman.” Teabing argues, in effect, that the great cover-up by the church began with Constantine. Mainstream scholars stress Constantine’s role in adjudicating specific religious issues—the divinity versus humanity of Christ, for example. In The Da Vinci Code, Constantine is seen as covering up the role of the sacred feminine, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, dealing a body blow to the Gnostic tradition, and defining opponents of the mainstream church as heretics.

Coptic The Coptic language is a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, but is also a hybrid. It began to appear in the third century BC, following the Greek conquest of Egypt, and was used by Christianized Egyptians to translate the Bible and liturgical works. The Gospel of Mary and most of the so-called Gnostic Gospels were originally in Greek, but most of them only survive in the Coptic translation discovered at Nag Hammadi. The Coptic language is still used today among the Copts, a Christian sect in Egypt.

Council of Nicea The first ecumenical council ever held by the Christian church, the Council of Nicea was called by Emperor Constantine in AD 325 to settle various theological disputes, from the mundane to the highly theoretical. At this time in Christian history, church practice and doctrine was not uniform; the Nicene council was an attempt to settle these disputes once and for all. The council worked out most conflicts, from the dates to be set aside to celebrate Easter and other holidays to the most important question of the time—was Christ of the same substance as the Father, or was he inferior to Him, a created being that came into existence at God’s behest, and was therefore unable to share His divinity, as the Arians believed? At one point, legend has it, the debate became so heated that Saint Nicholas—the historical personality behind our modern Santa Claus—physically attacked Arius for his heresies.
Regardless, unity prevailed and all but three of the bishops present signed the Nicene Creed, a statement of church orthodoxy and a rejection of Arianism. Scholar Stringfellow Barr, in his book The Mask of Jove, maintains, “Constantine . . . instinctively knew that the Christian polis, around which he had planned to rebuild [the Roman empire] must achieve a unity of spirit if his plans were to succeed.”
Cross The art historian Diane Apostolos-Cappadone puts its succinctly: “An ancient, universal symbol of the conjunction of opposites with the vertical bar representing the positive forces of life and spirituality, and the horizontal bar the negative forces of death and materialism. There are well over four hundred varieties of this symbol.” The Da Vinci Code points out that the cross existed as a key symbol long before the crucifixion, and also highlights the differences between the “square” cross (used by the Templars) and the traditional elongated Christian cross.

Crux gemmata “Cross of gems,” containing thirteen gems, a Christian ideogram for Christ and his twelve apostles. The plain cross symbolizes the crucifixion (it often is displayed with Jesus’s body on it), while the crux gemmata symbolizes the resurrection. Langdon sees it on the tie clasp of Bezu Fache as they meet each other in the Louvre following Saunière’s untimely death, thus signaling the police captain’s pride in his religion.

Dagobert II The last of the Merovingian priest-kings, mentioned in The Da Vinci Code because Dagobert’s name was raised in the four parchments discovered by Saunière known collectively as the Dossiers Secrets. One parchment is supposed to contain a ciphered message which, when decoded, states, “To Dagobert II, and to Sion belong this treasure and is there dead.” This connection to the Priory of Sion is explored in the novel, as is Dagobert’s murder, “stabbed in the eye while sleeping,” according to Sophie. The act ended the Merovingian dynasty and a bloodline associated more with heresy than papal fidelity. (Dagobert’s son, Sigisbert, is said by Brown to have escaped and carried on the lineage, which later included Godefroi de Bouillon—the presumed founder of the Templars and the Priory of Sion.) The interconnection behind these various conspiratorial tales goes even further. When Dagobert married, he moved with his new wife into Rennes-le-Château.

Legend has it that Dagobert’s assassination by Pepin the Fat was ordered by the Vatican as a way to allow the Carolingians to take over—a dynasty closely allied with the interests of the church. Pepin is also rendered as Pippin, the name of a type of apple, a protagonist in a Steinbeck novel, and a 1972 Broadway musical and later a film directed by Bob Fosse. To create even more mystery—or confusion—Walt Disney has a cartoon character named Uncle Dagobert, a duck from Scotland, the location of the Rosslyn Chapel. Langdon even goes so far as to suggest that “it is no mistake that Disney retold tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White—all of which dealt with the incarnation of the sacred feminine.” Proof that Walt Disney was indeed a member of the Priory of Sion, while rumored, has never been found.

Dead Sea Scrolls Dead Sea Scrolls is a collective term for the remnants of approximately eight hundred manuscripts discovered in limestone caves flanking the Dead Sea at Qumrun. Bedouins exploring the site in 1947 first stumbled on the scrolls and sold a few of them to antiquities dealers and scholars, touching off a race to see who could recover the most documents from the same cave-pocked cliffs the fastest. Between 1948 and 1956, ten more caves were discovered and excavated, producing the trove of scrolls and fragments. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a baffling variety, including scriptures and writings relating to community life—scriptural commentaries, laws for community living, etc. One manuscript—called the “Copper Scroll” because unlike the other, mainly parchment manuscripts, the text was inscribed on thin copper—provides instructions on how to find vast quantities of hidden treasure.
Along with the Nag Hammadi texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls were one of the most important discoveries related to the modern understanding of both Judaism and Christianity. Much as the Nag Hammadi texts shed light on the many different faces of the early Christian movement, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain priceless information about an unorthodox Jewish group living at the height of Roman power and at the dawn of Christianity. Many scholars believe the ascetic sect known as Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there is a debate about this. Deviations in the scrolls from the traditional Jewish scriptural texts, and similarities between the teachings of Christ and the edicts of the scrolls, created a challenge for scholars and theologians of both faiths. The controversy over the identity of the authors, their immediate sources both political and theological, and the reason for their being hidden in the first place rage on to this day.

DCPJ: Direction Centrale Police Judiciare The French law enforcement organization which in the book employs Captain Bezu Fache and Lieutenant Jerome Collet. Langdon calls the DCPJ the rough equivalent of the FBI. The DCPJ is the French law enforcement institution dedicated to the coordination of technical and scientific police organizations. In the words of the Franco-British Council, “It is responsible for countering theft, terrorism, organized crime, trafficking of human beings, drug trafficking, theft and resale of works of art, and currency counterfeiting and distribution.” Given its status, it seems unlikely that Bezu Fache, a high-ranking official within the DCPJ, would actually have been leading a hands-on investigation, let alone the chase, with gun drawn as he runs into the men’s room at the Louvre.

Didache Didache, or Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, is considered the oldest surviving piece of noncanonical literature, dating from about AD 70 to 110 Didache is an instructional guide for new Christian converts, and though ultimately not included as one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, Didache was highly regarded as being the wisdom and teachings of the twelve apostles, though the direct authorship was unlikely to have been theirs. There is much practical advice in the Didache, including an extensive section on itinerant ministers. Such ministers are to be received as the Lord. They may stay one day or two. If they stay three days, they are false prophets or charlatans. If, upon leaving, the minister takes anything but bread, he is likewise a false prophet.

Disney, Walt Langdon states as fact the famed cartoonist “made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story,” and compares him to Leonardo in the way he “loved infusing hidden messages in his art,” many related to the subjugation of the Goddess. Among those listed by Brown/Langdon are Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid, which, Langdon notices, has a replica of George de la Tour’s seventeenth-century painting The Penitent Magdalene in Ariel’s underwater home, with its “blatant symbolic references to the lost sanctity of Isis, Eve, Pisces the fish goddess, and, repeatedly, Mary Magdalene (de la Tour is noted for having depicted Mary Magdalene as pregnant, and figures prominently in the mysterious legends surrounding Rennes-le-Château). No doubt to honor Disney, Robert Langdon, the Harvard don in Harris tweed, doesn’t wear a Rolex, but a Mickey Mouse watch. A recent real-world book, The Gospel in Disney, purports to teach the major lessons of Christianity through the plots of Disney animated movies. One problem this analysis raises is the distinction between Walt Disney, the person, and his namesake studio. By the time The Lion King and Little Mermaid came out, the famed cartoonist had been dead for many years. Are his successors supposed to be consciously following his religious ways as well as his professional ways? Was that one of the recent issues turning the board against CEO Michael Eisner? Is it merely coincidental that Langdon’s reverie about Disney gets interrupted by the cold reality of the clicking of Teabing’s crutches in a big hallway?

Divine Proportion Also known as the Golden Section, Golden Ratio, and Golden Mean, the term refers to the geometric proportion produced by dividing any line so that the smaller part stands in relation to the greater part as the greater part is to the whole line (see Phi). While mathematicians debate the origins of the rigorous application of the Golden Section as a geometric element, there is evidence suggesting that it was first used in the fourth century BC Some ancient sources credit its discovery to the secret society of mathematicians, the Pythagoreans, who used the pentagram as a symbol of their order.

Areas within objects using the concept of the Golden Section/Phi appear throughout art and nature. Whether that is literally true or not, the mystical associations with geometry and the Golden Section have not faded, but remain as codified aspects of modern secret societies and brotherhoods.

Dossiers Secrets Descriptions of the Dossiers Secrets in The Da Vinci Code as well as in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (from which Dan Brown got much of the inspiration for his plot), would have readers believe they form an impressive literary pastiche, from tables of genealogy to complicated maps and works of allegorical poetry. The documents are said to cover the Merovingian dynasty, the Priory of Sion, and the Knights Templar. While some documents were deposited into the national library of France during the 1950s and 1960s, those who have researched them are generally disappointed to find they are twentieth-century typewritten materials, filled with odd details and occult references. Most experts believe the Dossiers Secrets, as well as the Priory of Sion itself, are all part of an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Pierre Plantard, who billed himself as the mid–twentieth-century Grand Master of the Priory.

A - B | C - D | E - F | G - H | I - L | M - N | O - R | S - Z