Secrets of the Code Glossary: M - N

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Madonna of the Rocks The name of one of two paintings, both technically called Virgin of the Rocks, both painted by Leonardo da Vinci. The Madonna has come to be shorthand for the one hanging in the Louvre, while the second, a “watered down” representation, hangs at the National Gallery in London.

Led by the solution to the anagram “so dark the con of man,” Sophie searches the back of this painting for clues her grandfather might have left behind and finds the key with the fleur-de-lis on it as well as the initials P.S.—a fulfillment of his promise that one day she would get the “key” to many mysteries. As Sophie and Langdon escape the Louvre, chased by a security guard, they jump into her Smart Car and dash off to her grandfather’s house. On the way there, Langdon muses to himself and out loud about this added “link in the evening’s chain of interconnected symbolism.”
What he in the novel, and scholars in the real world, have remarked upon, is the complex history of the painting and its windfall of possible hidden meanings, all of them adding up to what Langdon calls “explosive and disturbing details,” some of which he enumerates—the John-blessing-Jesus scenario and Mary making a seemingly threatening gesture over John’s head.

Magdala The small town in the region of Galilee which scholars have identified as the place Mary Magdalene (also known as Mary of Magdala) most likely would have come from. There is controversy over the location of the town, but many scholars identify it with a village known to the Talmud as Magdala Nunayya, or Magdala of the Fishes, likely named so because of its proximity to the lake of Galilee. Magdala in Hebrew means “tower” or “fortress.” Jesus may have retired to Magdala after the multiplication of the bread and fishes.

Malleus Maleficarum Literally, the Witch’s Hammer, recalled in a bit of interior dialogue by Langdon as he contemplates the anagram “so dark the con of man” scrawled on the Plexiglas protecting the Mona Lisa. The Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1486 and created untold misery by providing the Inquisition’s inquisitors with a guidebook on the identification of witches. Such people were identified, prosecuted, and generally turned over to civil authorities to be burned alive at the stake.

Marcion Marcion, a second-century heretic, was born the son of the bishop of Sinope. He pronounced a heresy that proclaimed that the god of the Old Testament was actually a demiurge who had created the material world and invested it with his own inherent evil. Jesus, in Marcion’s heresy, was the son of another god, a greater god than the one who fashioned the world in seven days. This greater god sent Jesus to mankind in order to free them from the evil of the material world; therefore Jesus could not be a man at all, but was wholly immaterial and not incarnated in flesh.

In order to resolve contradictions between his beliefs and those of the standard gospels, Marcion heavily edited the New Testament, creating a shortened version of St. Luke that removed all references to Christ’s birth. He also included in his canonical works ten epistles of St. Paul, whom he considered to be the only pure interpreter of the word of Christ. He advocated vegetarianism, and by some accounts, sexual abstinence. Marcionism persisted into the fifth century, with significant modifications that brought it closer to traditional Gnosticism than Marcion himself intended.

Tertullian, another church father who fought heresy, gives us an idea of how much anger Marcion inspired in the early church, when he writes, “fouler than any Scythian, more roving than the wagon-life of the Sarmatian, more inhuman than the Massagete, more audacious than an Amazon, colder than its winter, more brittle than its ice, more deceitful than the Ister, more craggy than Caucasus. What Pontic mouse ever had such gnawing powers as he who has gnawed the gospels to pieces?”

Mary Magdalene Follower of Christ, understood by modern scholarship to have been his “companion.” What the word is supposed to mean is a recurring theme at the heart of The Da Vinci Code. Orthodox tradition has portrayed Mary as a sinner, often as a prostitute; newer interpretations of the Magdalene, mainly derived from the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi, position her as an influential and intimate companion of Jesus, perhaps even his wife (see Chapter 1).

Merovingians The Merovingians, according to Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code, were the Frankish royal family that the descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene married into, thus perpetuating the holy bloodline. The bloodline supposedly reached down to Godefroi de Bouillon, the founder of the Priory of Sion.

The Merovingians traced their ancestry back to Merovée, a semimythical personage who was born of two fathers: a king named Clodio and a sea monster that seduced his mother when she was swimming in the sea. Because of their ancestry, Merovée and his descendents were reputed to have supernatural powers and unnaturally long lifetimes. Other legends connected their origins to Noah and other Jewish patriarchs as well as ancient Troy. Other claims—that the Merovingians were descended from aliens, that they were the progeny of “nephilim” or fallen angels, and that George Bush and Jeb Bush are both descendents of Merovée—have received less attention. One homage to the red-haired monarchs almost made Merovingian a household word: a character in the blockbuster Matrix series is named “the Merovingian.”

Historically, King Clovis consolidated the Merovingian hold over the Franks in the last part of the fifth century. During a battle with another tribe, Clovis swore to convert to Catholicism if he was allowed victory. He did, and France was won for the Catholic Church. From this point on, the Merovingian line became more and more diffused, ruling over a group of tiny, warring countries. The conflict between these groups culminated in the murder of Dagobert II, the last effective Merovingian king. Within a few generations the kingship passed to the Carolingian line, most famously in the reign of Charlemagne. Leaving no connection unturned, the infamous Dossiers Secrets supposedly claim that Dagobert’s child survived and carried the Merovingian bloodline into the present-day family of . . . Pierre Plantard.

Miriam Another name for Mary Magdalene.

Mithras Teabing mentions Mithras as a “pre-Christian god” whose attendant mythology closely resembles church legends about Christ. Mithras was a popular deity in ancient Rome, flourishing especially during the second through the fourth centuries AD. Mithras was derived from an older, Middle Eastern god named Mitra or Mithra who was worshipped across Persia and India. Originally Mithra was a minor deity who served the Zoroastrian god Ahura-Mazda.

Mithras was identified with the light of the sun, and was often worshipped along with or as Sol Invictus, the conquering sun, another popular Roman god. Devotion to Mithras was especially widespread among Roman troops and garrisons, where their prolonged stays outside of their home territory exposed them to new ideas and new deities. Mithras was one of the most successful “imported” gods.

The origins of many traditions about Christ and Christian worship practices may be related to the worship of Mithras. The celebration of the winter solstice, the nativity of the sun, which occurred on December 25, was central to Mithras’s worship. In many societies Mithras was reported to be born to a virgin, and was, in some traditions, a member of a holy trinity. Ritual baptism and a last supper legend permeate Mithraic worship. Some scholars believed that the burgeoning Christian faith appropriated the practices and beliefs of Mithraism, allowing the new religion to subsume the old.

Mitterrand, François Reluctantly riding to the Louvre with Lieutenant Collet, Langdon reflects on François Mitterrand, former president of France. He notes that Mitterrand’s affinity for Egyptian culture earned him the nickname “the Sphinx.” Later, inside La Pyramide, he debates whether or not to tell Captain Fache that Mitterrand commanded that 666 panes of glass be used in the structure (a claim unsupported by the facts; see Chapter 11)—a claim that cannot be true, since the pyramid is constructed of 698 panes of glass.

Born in 1916, Mitterrand was a powerful figure in twentieth-century French politics. An infantryman in World War II, he was wounded and captured by the Germans. After escaping, he returned to France and joined the French Resistance. After the liberation, Mitterrand was appointed the youngest minister in the new government of the French Republic. He gradually relinquished his conservative leanings and became the first socialist president of France on his third run in 1981.

One of Mitterrand’s “Grand Projects”—a series of renovations focused on restoring and rejuvenating France’s cultural and civic monuments—was the completion of the grand Louvre.

Mitterrand’s nickname “the Sphinx” seems to have been derived from his enigmatic and elusive character as a politician, not from his love of Egyptian art. His main nickname was “the Fox,” or “the Florentine,” for his masterful—some would say Machiavellian—manipulation of his opponents. The ubiquitous Pierre Plantard planted stories that he was also a member of the Priory of Sion.

Mona Lisa The Mona Lisa, perhaps Leonardo’s most beloved masterpiece (he carried it with him for years), is considered by many to be the world’s most famous painting. In The Da Vinci Code, Jacques Saunière leaves an anagram scrawled across the painting’s Plexiglas cover. While Sophie and Langdon approach the painting to read the message, Langdon ruminates on a lecture he once gave to a group of convicts about the mystery and popularity of the painting.

Many prominent scholars agree that the painting is of a young Florentine woman, one Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, a wife of a Florentine merchant. It is from the name Giocondo (which has the felicitous meaning of “happy”) that the painting receives the name La Joconde or La Gioconda. Near the end of da Vinci’s life the painting was sold or given to King Francis I of France, da Vinci’s patron, and it remained in the possession of the French royal family, who placed it in the Louvre.

Langdon seems to diminish the artistic mastery of the painting, crediting its fame with the secret it supposedly carries behind its smile. Many scholars and art historians have speculated on the nature of this smile and the secret it hides. Some maintain that the secret is the sitter’s identity: the painting is a well-disguised self-portrait in drag, a possibility that Langdon mentions in his lecture. Others suggest that Mona Lisa is a Medici princess, a Spanish duchess, and several other women of historical note. Scholars tend to dismiss Langdon’s claim that Mona Lisa is an anagram of the names of the Egyptian fertility god Amon and the Egyptian goddess Isis. It may be that the secret of Mona Lisa is her secrecy. Perhaps she owes her enduring popularity to the fact that she does have a secret, and we will never know what it is; and not knowing is far more intriguing than knowing will ever be.

The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 as part of an art-reproduction plot by a remarkable Argentine con man named Eduardo de Valfierno. Once the painting went missing, a talented art restorer named Yves Chaudron would produce as many copies as possible; Valfierno would sell the copies to eager art collectors, and then return the original to the Louvre. Paris went into a frenzy on news of La Joconde’s disappearance; numerous suspects were rounded up, including most of the Louvre’s staff and a confused Pablo Picasso, who came under suspicion because he had purchased two stolen sculptures from a friend who had stolen them from the Louvre.

The scheme worked for a while, and copies were sold; but one of the workmen that Valfierno enlisted to help steal the original tried to sell it to a Parisian art dealer. The dealer turned him in to the authorities. The Mona Lisa was discovered in the false bottom of a wooden trunk in the workman’s apartment, not far from the Louvre. Valfierno, who had not revealed his identity to his henchmen, pocketed the money from his illicit sales and lived out the rest of his life in satisfied opulence, giving the Mona Lisa, perhaps, a new reason to smile.

Montanus A second-century convert to Christianity who, around the year 156, told his followers he was a prophet and the sole bearer of divine revelations. Montanus prophesied the second coming of Christ, and imposed a very severe form of asceticism and penitential discipline. Montanus had many followers, and as his popularity spread, opposition grew ever more strident. Some people considered Montanism to be caused by a demon, and attempted to exorcise it. Eventually, Montanus and his followers split from the church.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus A renowned late-eighteenth-century composer, Mozart (1756–91) was an avid Freemason, and Masonic elements appear in many of his works, one of which is forthrightly titled Masonic Funeral Music. Mozart is also reputed to have been associated with the Priory of Sion, in part for works such as The Magic Flute. While enjoying the music, many may not recognize that the words carry themes of Christian symbology reflecting the struggle between darkness and light, good and evil, and incorporating Egyptian and hermetic elements as well.

Nag Hammadi The name of the town where, in 1947, some of the most important texts relating to early Christianity were found (see Gnostic Gospels, as well as Chapters 1 through 4). The texts were bound as pages (as contrasted to early written works on scrolls; e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls) and had covers of leather—the first known use of that material for books. While these codices do much to enrich understanding of that period, some scholars estimate that of all the texts from the early Christian tradition that are known to have existed, only 15 percent have been recovered. Many more interpretations of Mary’s story may be awaiting discovery—and another potential bestseller.

Newton, Sir Isaac The sheer number of titles that Newton (1642–1727) can rightfully claim—mathematician, physicist, philosopher, natural scientist, theologian, political philosopher, to name a few—would make him a leading figure in the intellectual life of any era. But the revolution he staged in physics and mathematics establishes his preeminence among history’s greatest thinkers.

Newton’s achievement is often understood as the triumph of the Enlightenment values of reason and science over the still dominant, “superstitious” medieval conception of physical science. Despite this identification with the intelligible, scientific values of the Enlightenment, Newton was heavily steeped in esoteric learning and the occult. Before his breakthroughs in physics in the mid-1660s, Newton was a scientist of his time—an alchemist who spent years trying to unlock the divine secrets of the natural world through experimental chemistry, a discipline that at the time was not differentiated from magic. Not surprisingly, he conducted his studies in secret.

Newton has been identified as one of the grand masters of the Priory of Sion in The Da Vinci Code, probably based on the controversial Dossiers Secrets. Although this assertion cannot be confirmed, Newton was known to associate with leading Masonic figures and his beliefs share many similarities with Masonic doctrine.

Although technically a heretic who denied the holy, he was granted a special exemption by King Charles II which allowed him to pursue his studies without having to have direct involvement in the Anglican Church. He did try to unlock what he saw as the hidden secrets of the Bible, and also attempted a reconstruction of the floor plan of the Temple of Solomon, which he regarded as a cryptogrammatic symbol for the universe itself. Intriguingly, one scholar has uncovered what he believes are various Christian and heretical symbols hidden in the diagrams of The Principia—Newton’s crowning work in the physical sciences.

Nicene Creed The statement of faith, created during the Council of Nicea, that summarized the orthodox beliefs that made up the backbone of the church’s teachings. The creed explicitly rejects Arianism (see Arius) in its first few sentences:

"We believe (I believe) in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, and born of the Father before all ages. (God of God) light of light, true God of true God. Begotten not made, consubstantial to the Father, by whom all things were made".

The Nicene Creed is still spoken in Christian worship services.

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