Secrets of the Code Glossary: E - F

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Eglise de Saint-Sulpice One of the most exciting early episodes in The Da Vinci Code centers on the Eglise de Saint-Sulpice, originally the parish church of the domain of the St. Germain des Prés Abbey. Silas, convinced that he has discovered the hiding place of the priory keystone, enters the church hopefully but finds himself the victim of a cruel hoax.

Some authorities believe there has always been a church on the site of the Eglise. Nonetheless, the current structure was erected in 1646, with the first stone laid by Anne of Austria, Louis XIII’s wife, who appears as a central character in The Three Musketeers. The building was completed fitfully over the next seventy years, although at the close of construction in 1721 one tower was sixteen or seventeen feet lower than the other. Objects of interest in the Eglise are the meridian line (the rose line) that Silas follows to find the keystone; eight statues of the apostles, arranged around the choir; and the Lady Chapel, a beautiful chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Loreto.

Saint-Sulpice has numerous historical connections with the Priory of Sion. Bérenger Saunière apparently visited Abbé Bieil, director of the seminary at Saint-Sulpice, with the documents he recovered from the church in Rennes-le-Château. Francis Ducaud-Bourget, reputed Sion grand master (after Jean Cocteau) was trained in the same seminary. The seminary was a focus point, at the end of the nineteenth century, for the Catholic modernist movement, a school of thought that centered on bringing Catholic religious scholarship up to date with modern critical methods.

Ephesus A city of great importance in New Testament times, Ephesus was situated in what is today Turkey. Ephesus was the second largest city in the Roman Empire and the gateway to Asia. Ephesus was home to the spectacular Temple of Artemis (aka the goddess Diana), the Greek symbol of fertility. Artemis was often depicted with multiple breasts or other exaggerations of her femininity. The temple, built of 127 pillars sixty feet high, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Some scholars believe the Virgin Mary went to Ephesus at the end of her life, accompanied by St. Peter (AD 37–45), and you can see her “house” there today. A few legends also exist about Mary going to Ephesus after the crucifixion.

Escrivá, Father Josemaría The founder of Opus Dei, whom Silas calls the “Teacher of Teachers.” Escrivá (1902–75) was a Spanish priest who, on October 28, 1928, founded Opus Dei—a Catholic organization recognized as a “personal prelature” of the Catholic Church, dedicated to bringing the reality of Jesus Christ into even the most mundane moments of ordinary life. Some have criticized the organization as so authoritarian that it borders on being a cult; Opus Dei rejects the cult label. Along with papal fidelity and a lively devotion to the Virgin Mary, Escrivá especially preached raising one’s work up to God each day—and to do so with a great deal of self-sacrifice. That sacrifice includes a recommendation of self-mortification. Some reports say he practiced what he preached, including self-flagellation. The exact relationship of Opus Dei to the Vatican is unclear. It appears Opus Dei was helpful to the Vatican during the financial scandals of the 1980s that threatened to bankrupt the church, and that this particular personal prelature has enjoyed high standing with Pope John Paul II. After Escrivá’s death, sainthood was established extremely rapidly.

Female Pope In a discussion with Sophie about the tarot deck Langdon explains that the medieval card game was “replete with hidden heretical symbolism,” including a reference to a card named the Female Pope. In the tarot, she is supposed to represent hidden or esoteric knowledge and is usually portrayed as a seated woman wearing clerical dress and a triple crown, and holding an open book on her lap.

The primary source for what little we know about the female pope is a Dominican friar, Martin Polonus, who claimed that a certain thirteenth-century Pope John was really Pope Joan, who was only discovered to be female when she gave birth in the middle of a papal procession from St. Peter’s to Lateran. Polonus says church historians later eradicated her name “both because of her female sex and on account of the foulness of the matter.” In other accounts, she was stoned to death by the crowd on the spot when the deception was discovered. In some stories she was an Englishwoman educated in Germany who dressed as a man so as to become a monk; in other stories she hailed from Athens where she had demonstrated extensive knowledge of languages and theology. No historical records have ever been found to fully confirm the story of Pope Joan and it seems to have been discredited in the mid–seventeenth century by a Protestant historian. This legend may also have originated as an antipapal satire centering on the church’s fears about deceptions, women having too much authority, and the possibility of a sexually active pope. In any event, Pope Joan still has a tarot card in her honor. A book-length study is available by Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe.

Fibonacci sequence The Fibonacci sequence is used by Saunière in the coded message he scrawls down as he is dying. The scrambled sequence alerts his cryptologist granddaughter, Sophie, to contact Robert Langdon.
The Fibonacci series begins with 0 and 1, and then produces more numbers by adding the last two numbers in the sequence. So the sequence progresses 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 . . . Langdon, in a lecture to his Harvard students, explains the ratio Phi is derived from the Fibonacci sequence: dividing any number in the sequence by the preceding smaller number produces a ratio that slowly approaches 1.618. The Fibonacci series and the ratio Phi appear, seemingly spontaneously, throughout natural and man-made designs (see Phi). But they are not the only numbers that recur in nature. Lucas numbers, for instance, are generated using the same addition as the Fibonacci sequence, except the first two numbers are 1 and 3; so the sequence is 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29, 47, 76, 123. . . .

There is a real question, however, as to whether Phi is universally applicable. As H. S. M. Coxeter, in his Introduction to Geometry, states: “It should be frankly admitted that in [the growth patterns of] some plants the numbers do not belong to the sequence of Fibonacci numbers but to the sequence of Lucas numbers, or even to the still more anomalous sequences: 3, 1, 4, 5, 9 . . . or 5, 2, 7, 9, 16. . . . Thus we must face the fact that [the Fibonacci sequence] is really not a universal law but only a fascinatingly prevalent tendency.”

Flamel, Nicholas The Da Vinci Code places Flamel as the head of the Priory of Sion from 1398 to 1418. Flamel was a leading alchemist, whose name has returned to fame in recent years. There is a reference to him in the Harry Potter series, a biotechnology company uses his name, and a growing number of tourists stop in at the Paris bar that was his former home.

Fleur-de-lis, fleur-de-lys In the political realm, the symbol represents both France (the French monarchy in particular) and the city of Florence. In Christian symbolism it signifies the Trinity. Experts debate whether it is supposed to represent a lily or an iris, each of which has special symbolic connotations. It is invoked in The Da Vinci Code in several contexts: translated, Dan Brown says (stretching), the phrase means “flower of Lisa,” a reference he says, that points to the Mona Lisa. The fleur-de-lis as a symbol also appears on the key given to Sophia by her grandfather with the words, “It opens a box . . . where I keep many secrets.”

The literal translation is “flower of the lily,” but the lys is actually an iris flower. Traditionally in French heraldry, the fleur-de-lys is yellow, and yellow is a common color for the iris flower, while the lily is traditionally white, especially in heraldry. As a widely used symbol in heraldry, the fleur-de-lys consists of three petal-like shapes, gathered by a horizontal bar. Sometimes the lower part is cut off, or represented by a mere triangle.

The fleur-de-lys became strongly associated with French kings from about 1200 onward. It can also be seen as strongly symbolic of the Trinity among Christians. There is a legend that an early French king, Clovis, picked an iris and wore it on his helmet in a victorious battle in 507. (A competing legend is that when King Clovis was baptized he offered it as a symbol of purification for both himself and the country as a whole.)

The symbol itself can be found in a wide array of ancient and modern cultures, and in many forms of expression: Mesopotamian cylinders, Egyptian bas-reliefs, Mycenean potteries, Gaulish coins, Japanese emblems, etc. Thus, this stylized figure, probably a flower, was used as ornament or emblem by almost all civilizations of the Old and New Worlds.

Friday the thirteenth In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown cites an incident involving the Knights Templar as the origin of the widespread superstition about Friday the thirteenth being unlucky. On Friday the thirteenth, October 1307, Pope Clement “issued secret, sealed orders to be opened simultaneously by his soldiers all across Europe,” Brown writes. The fateful and fatal orders said God had visited the pope in a vision and told him that the Knights Templar were all heretics, guilty of homosexuality, sodomy, defiling the cross, and all other manner of sins. The soldiers, who were in fact soldiers of the French king Philip IV, were directed to take the Knights into custody and torture them to learn the true dimensions of their crimes against God. Although Brown describes the Knights’ capture, torture, and burning at the stake in a way that makes it sound as though everything happened in one very hectic twenty-four-hour period, these events took place over the next several years rather than “on that day.”

The Knights’ real crime, it appears, was power. The Knights had grown both wealthy and influential because of their combination of papal protection and financial activities and they reputedly had secrets related to the Holy Grail. The pope felt the Knights were a threat to his power and had to go, so most—but not all—were rounded up on that Friday the thirteenth. The survivors presumably continued to guard the secrets of the Holy Grail.

While Brown cites this incident as the reason for continuing superstition surrounding this ominous day and date, Friday the thirteenth has had a lot going against it for a very long time, some of it predating the pope’s order by hundreds of years. In Norse mythology there were thirteen present at a banquet in Valhalla when Balder (son of Odin) was slain, which led to the downfall of the gods. Around BC 1000, Hesiod wrote in Works and Days that the thirteenth day is unlucky for sowing, but favorable for planting. Friday is the unluckiest day of the week for Christians, some of whom believe that Christ was crucified on this day. They also believe the number 13 to be unlucky because there were thirteen present at the Last Supper, including the thirteenth, betraying apostle.

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