Secrets of the Code Glossary: O - R

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Olympics The Olympics started out in BC 776 as a religious festival honoring the chief Greek deity Zeus. Originally staged in Olympia, near Zeus’s sanctuary, the games had clearly pagan origins. The original Olympics were designed to be a unifying event among Greece’s otherwise fractious city-states. Although the early Olympics had only one event, much time was taken up with a religious festival that included sacrifices to various and sundry deities major and minor. This pattern persisted for twelve centuries, until AD 393 when the Holy Roman emperor Theodosius declared “Games over.” The modern Olympic games were revived in 1896 at the urging of Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin. It was de Coubertin who, in 1913, designed the five interlocking rings that are the symbol of the modern Olympics. De Coubertin said the rings stood for the five participating continents, and the colors were those of the flags of every nation of the world. There are those who see in the Olympic symbolism a subtle homage to the polytheistic pre-Christian era.

O’Keefe, Georgia When Teabing explains to Sophie and Langdon that the rose has long been considered the “premier symbol of female sexuality,” he suggests the best example for understanding how the “blossoming flower resembles the female genitalia” is to look at the work of Georgia O’Keefe, who has long been associated with this theme. O’Keefe herself, however, long denied there was symbolism in her work, and that the sexual and often erotic associations with her work were, in effect, in the eyes of the beholder.

Opus Dei To sharpen his plot, Dan Brown conveyed what are arguably the extremes of the differing paths of religious belief since the life of Jesus. On one side, represented by Sophie’s grandfather and the mysteries the protagonists are trying to unlock, is the “radical” branch of the Gnostic tradition that believes in the marriage between Jesus and Mary and acknowledges humankind’s long legacy of paganism. On the other is Catholic orthodoxy, represented by what many consider to be the most conservative voice, Opus Dei. Both sides seek the evidence of the Grail, albeit for opposite reasons.

The objective of Opus Dei, in its own words, is “to contribute to that evangelizing mission of the Church. Opus Dei encourages Christians of all social classes to live consistently with their faith, in the middle of the ordinary circumstances of their lives, especially through the sanctification of their work.” Founded in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Opus Dei was dedicated to the notion that holiness was achievable for lay Catholics. This holiness involved a sanctification and perfection of the “normal” life of the layperson where every action is sacrificed joyously to God. Opus Dei members are required to follow the strictures and teachings of Catholicism rigorously.

Opus Dei won a powerful ally in Pope John Paul II, who made the organization a personal prelature: its members are under the authority of a prelate, who reports in turn to the Congregation of Bishops, entirely independent of geographical location or dioceses. Additionally, the pope canonized Father Escrivá in 2002. The attention paid to this organization was not merely related to the conservative roots that John Paul and St. Josemaría shared, but also to the growing popularity and power of the group. It is estimated that Opus Dei boasts has between 80,000 and 90,000 members worldwide, with estimates for the United States ranging from 3,000 to 50,000.

Controversy has dogged the group, mostly related to the practice of corporal mortification and what some critics consider the cultlike control the group is alleged to assert over its membership. There are two types of Opus Dei members: supernumerary and numerary. Supernumerary members make up about 70 percent of the membership; they concentrate on the sanctification of their work and family duties. Numeraries, on the other hand, often live within Opus Dei centers, isolated from members of the opposite sex. They pledge celibacy and hand over their income to the group. They also practice corporal mortification, ritualized self-punishment meant to purge one of sins and the urges that lead to them, using hairshirts (cilices), or disciplines.

Opus Dei has fought back against what it considers unfounded characterizations of its belief system and, in that connection, has set up a Web page critical of Dan Brown’s interpretation of the Bible in general, and the organization in particular. (See Chapter 5.)

Opus Dei Awareness Network (ODAN) The anti–Opus Dei group which, as The Da Vinci Code mentions, attempts to warn the general public about the “frightening” activities of Opus Dei. It, too, has its own website.

Paganism In its most general application, paganism is a set of religious beliefs that recognize a polytheistic (multigod) ethos. Paganism predates Christianity, and is considered to be intertwined with it, at least in its early history. Indeed, much of the history of Christianity has been a struggle to establish itself against the forces of paganism. In The Da Vinci Code, Sophie’s falling away from her grandfather began with her witnessing as a young woman his participation in a pagan ceremony. Not understanding what she was seeing—a replication of the pagan rite of hieros gamos—she was shocked at her grandfather’s engaging in sex before a group. Langdon later explains to her that sexual intercourse was considered to be the act through which male and female experienced God. The physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven.

Pentagram The pentagram first appears in The Da Vinci Code as a bloody symbol scrawled by Jacques Saunière on his stomach shortly before his demise. Langdon, brought to the scene of the crime, explains its significance as a symbol of Venus, the goddess of love and human sexuality, as well as its continuing association with nature worship.

The pentagram is one of the oldest symbols known to man. Its most recognizable form is a five-pointed star, possessing equilateral arms and equal angles at all of its points. When inscribed within a circle it is referred to as a pentacle. The pentacle was commonly known as a Venus or Ishtar pentacle, depending on the goddess being worshipped.

The origins of the pentagram are shrouded in mankind’s ancient past, but instances of its use have been cited as early as Sumerian times. Its original meaning and development are now matters of conjecture, but scholars have identified it as an early symbol of the human body, the four elements and the spirit, and the universe itself.

The Pythagoreans used it as a sign of recognition, and may have identified it with the goddess Hygeia (the Greek goddess of health).

The pentagram as symbol is still in use today. Wiccans and other esoteric organizations employ it as a symbol in worship and ritual. It appears in the decorations and rankings of military organizations, as a symbol of the five pillars of Islam, and, most infamously, as a symbol for the worship of the devil and other demonic forces—a use, as Langdon notes, that is historically inaccurate.

Peter the Apostle (St. Peter) St. Peter’s name was Simon when he initially met Jesus, who renamed him Cephas (“rock”); the Latinized version of this name is Peter. In the New Testament gospels Jesus seems to have had a special preference for Peter, who appears at certain key episodes in Jesus’s story. Famously, the New Testament has Jesus turning to Peter, saying, “Upon this rock I will build my Church.”
Peter is mentioned in The Da Vinci Code during Teabing’s long-ranging lecture on the nature of the Holy Grail. He quotes a passage from the Gospel of Mary, where Peter expresses disbelief that Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene without the knowledge of the other apostles. “Did the savior really speak with a woman without our knowledge . . . did he prefer her to us?” he asks. Teabing goes on to say that Peter was jealous of Mary because Christ actually entrusted the continuance of the church to her, and not to him. While, according to the Gospel of Mary, Peter may indeed be upset that Jesus spoke to Mary privately, there is no indication from this text that Jesus’s message to Mary had anything to do with the founding of the church.

Phi Phi (pronounced “fye”) is the never-ending, never-repeating number 1.6180339087. It is better known to nonmathematicians as the Golden Ratio, the Golden Section, and, in Brown’s terminology, the Divine Proportion. It appears in The Da Vinci Code as the centerpiece of a lecture that Robert Langdon recalls as he runs down a set of stairs to flee the Louvre with Sophie Neveu. (Not coincidentally, “phi” also forms the center of Sophie’s name.)

Langdon explains to his students that it represents a “fundamental building block of nature,” present in everything from honeybee populations to nautilus shell spirals, from sunflower seed heads to the human body (e.g., in the ratio of a body’s total height to the height of the belly button from the floor). And, in an echo of this natural beauty and proportion, Phi has been used widely in art (Dali’s Last Supper), architecture (the Parthenon), and music (Mozart, Bartók).

While this general description reflects reality, there are a few nits to pick. Dan Brown puts the term in all capitals in the book: PHI. In practice, mathematicians use “Phi” to mean the Divine Proportion and “phi” to mean its reciprocal. Symbologists—such as Langdon—would write the pairing as F and f. Langdon also says that “the number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence,” but the historical record indicates the number was known long before Fibonacci derived it from his famous sequence.

The first clear definition of what was much later to be called the Golden Ratio was “given around 300 BC by the founder of geometry as a formalized deductive system, Euclid of Alexandria,” according to the scientist Mario Livio. The Greeks labeled the ratio with the letter tau. The names “Golden Section” or “Golden Mean” were likely not to have been used until the nineteenth century. The word Phi did not appear until it was quoted by the American mathematician Mark Barr at the beginning of the twentieth century as a tribute to the Greek sculptor Phidias, whose achievements included the Parthenon and the Zeus in the temple of Olympia.

The Golden Ratio is said to be a technique used by Leonardo in some of his most famous works. Not all experts are persuaded. The mathematical model for the Divine Section was not known in Italy until it was published by Pacioli in the last decade of the fifteenth century, after Leonardo painted or drew many of his most important works.

Philip the Fair, King (also known as Philipe IV) Philipe IV, King of France (nicknamed “the Fair” because of his striking good looks) is mentioned in Langdon’s brief summary of the Templar persecution while he and Sophie drive through the Bois de Boulogne. Langdon claims that Pope Clement V devised a plan to bring down the Templars because they had amassed so much power and wealth. Philip the Fair (Langdon calls him King Philipe IV) acted in concert with the pope, and on the appointed day of 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, torture, and execution.

Langdon seems to have some of the details wrong. Philip the Fair, and not Clement V, is generally seen as the prime mover behind the arrest of the Templars. Philip initiated the persecution; in fact, many historians believe, his initial Friday the thirteenth arrest was executed without Clement’s knowledge. Clement strongly rebuked Philip, but was politically weak and, some say, too beholden to Philip to have countered this move against the Templars.

Plantard, Pierre While Pierre Plantard is not mentioned in The Da Vinci Code, he is essential to the mythology that pervades it.

Pierre Plantard (1920–2000) was a real person, a citizen of France and the self-proclaimed grand master of the Priory of Sion, having been elected in 1981. He came to widespread public attention when he became one of the focal points of the investigations of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln in their bestselling book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Their book inspired Dan Brown, and Plantard’s place in the Holy Blood, Holy Grail investigations would be analogous to Jacques Saunière—last grand master of the Priory of Sion and a descendent of Merovingian kings.

It is often hard in the case of Plantard to find the line between what is known and what is good story. The Dossiers Secrets supposedly deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris purportedly claim that Pierre Plantard is a descendent of Jean de Plantard, who was himself a lineal descendent of Merovingian kings.

Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh declared that in the course of their investigations into the legend of the Holy Grail that “all trails seemed to lead ultimately to [Plantard].” He appears to have been the chief source of information for many stories surrounding Rennes-le-Château, and provided investigators with many snippets of enigmatic information concerning the Priory of Sion—usually raising more questions than he answered. A representative example is that when interviewed about the Priory by the French magazine Le Charivari, Plantard said merely that “the society to which I am attached is extremely ancient. I merely succeed others, a point in a sequence. We are guardians of certain things. And without publicity.” He is described in Holy Blood, Holy Grail as “a dignified, courteous man of discreetly aristocratic bearing, unostentatious in appearance, with a gracious, volatile but well spoken manner.” He disassociated himself publicly from the conclusions drawn by Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh, yet offered to correct the French edition of the book. He remained equivocal, however, on the descent of the Merovingians from Jesus’s bloodline.

There also seems to be a dark side to the Plantard story. Plantard has been accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite, associated with several right-wing publications and organizations before and during World War II. He may have been imprisoned for embezzlement and fraud in the 1950s; he may have fed the Bérenger Saunière story to the author who popularized the Rennes-le-Château mysteries as part of a financial arrangement. His claims of Merovingian descent have been discredited; many of the documents he used to prove the bloodline were created by him or his associates and deposited pseudonymously in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

It seems that for every assertion put forward by Plantard and the Priory, there are immediate counter-assertions; and those, in turn, are undermined by further accusations. Codes within codes, stories within stories. The twists and turns of the myth of Pierre Plantard are an appropriate foundation for The Da Vinci Code.

Pope, Alexander Sophie and Langdon’s trail of clues includes a poem, penned by Sophie’s grandfather, one line of which says, “In London lies a knight a Pope interred.” At King’s College they come to realize that “a Pope” was not a Catholic Pope, but rather famed eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), and that the knight was Sir Isaac Newton, whose funeral, Brown says, “was presided over” by the poet, who “gave a stirring eulogy before sprinkling dirt on the tomb.” It is true that Pope admired and knew Newton, but while he was undoubtedly at the funeral, there is no record that he presided—Newton was such a prominent figure that the pallbearers included a lord, two dukes, and three earls. The bishop of Rochester read the service.

There is no question whatever that Pope wrote Newton’s epitaph about four years later when a monument was erected to the scientist. One of the most famous epitaphs in history, partly in Latin, partly in English, these lines read:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said Let Newton be! and all was light.

Poussin, Nicholas Considered by many to be the greatest French painter of the seventeenth century, Poussin achieved his notoriety in Rome, painting romantic and poetic works out of classical mythology. Poussin is remembered by Sophie as her grandfather’s second favorite painter after Leonardo, and plays an interesting role in some of the source material Dan Brown uses for The Da Vinci Code. In the book, Poussin is the subject of several textbooks written by Jacques Saunière. These textbooks, it seems, are some of Langdon’s favorites, dealing specifically with hidden codes in the works of both Poussin and Dutch painter David Teniers.

One of Poussin’s paintings, Les Bergers d’Arcadie (The Shepherds of Arcadia), executed in 1638, features a group of shepherds standing before a tomb. The Tomb has on it the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia Ego, or in English, “And in Arcadia I.” The phrase has often been interpreted as a romantic allusion to the presence of death even in the idyllic realm of the shepherds; however, there is a connection between the painting and the Rennes-le-Château mystery. One of the parchments supposedly recovered by Bérenger Saunière from the parish church of Rennes-le-Château contained a coded message that read:

SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY; PEACE 681 BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE [DESTROY] THIS DAEMON OF THE GUARDIAN AT NOON BLUE APPLES

There seems to be a reference to Les Bergers d’Arcadie in the message. Several authors on the Rennes-le-Château mystery have claimed that a tomb in the vicinity of the hamlet resembles the tomb in the painting. Was Poussin connected to a hidden secret in Rennes-le-Château? Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, mention a letter sent from Abbé Louis Fouquet to his brother, the superintendent of finances to Louis XIV. The letter describes a visit Fouquet had with Poussin in Rome:

He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail—things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever rediscover in the centuries to come.

Shortly after receiving this otherwise unexplained letter, Nicolas Fouquet was arrested and imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Priory of Sion Dan Brown announces, on page 1 of The Da Vinci Code, that the Priory of Sion is a real organization, founded in 1099, and that parchments in the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal in their membership a list of the leading lights of literature, art, and science. The Priory is certainly a real organization, but what more can be said of it with certainty is open to question. The Priory can claim a documented existence in France beginning in 1956 (nothing existed before then), when the Priory registered and submitted statutes for the organization of the group with the government. Its spokesperson for most of its modern history was Pierre Plantard, a man whose claims about himself were as confusing as the claims the Priory made about itself. Indeed, it often seems unclear how much real difference there was between Plantard and the Priory of Sion.

The Priory, through what is said to be contained in the Dossiers Secrets and the public statements of Plantard and his associates, provides a sketchy history at best. It is claimed the secret organization was founded in the last decade of the eleventh century by Godefroi de Bouillon. In seems generally accepted that the Priory ordered the formation of the Knights Templar, and then split with them almost a hundred years later, beginning their own line of autonomous grand masters. Around this time, the Priory began to also name itself “le Ordre de la Rose-Croix Veritas”—The Order of the True Rosy Cross—thereby connecting itself to the Rosicrucians. The group says that Bérenger Saunière discovered the parchments that sparked the Rennes-le-Château controversy on direct orders from Sion. And they list a series of grand masters from the 1188 split with the Templars to Thomas Plantard, Pierre’s son.

Onto this bare sketch, presented in poetic, allusive language and quasi-historical formats, hundreds of authors have projected their speculations and theories regarding the Priory and its place in history. They are too numerous to list in their entirety, but The Da Vinci Code is based on one of the more famous and persistent notions, exhaustively described in Holy Blood, Holy Grail—that the Priory is the age-old guardian of the bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene. Other theories hold that the Priory is a front for several other esoteric organizations; others still claim that the group advocates a theocratic “United States of Europe.”

Every accusation about the real origin or nature of the group, from the mundane to the vicious, has been defended by counter-assertions from the Priory and its defenders. It would seem that the Priory exists in what one commentator calls “a hermeneutical hell”—a nether land of conflicting interpretations, hypotheses, and evidence that seems, by its very scope and inclusiveness, to undermine the possibility of discovering any truth at all. Perhaps that is where the continuing appeal of the Priory lies; its very nature, as far as we know, is so indeterminate that it allows anyone to bring their hopes, fears, and fantasies to bear on its interpretation.

La Pyramide La Pyramide is the glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei as the new entrance to the Louvre. It is one of the first things seen by Robert Langdon as he is summoned to the murder scene. La Pyramide also has an inverted counterpart, Pyramide Inverse, extending into the earth as the original stands above it; this is the pyramid which figures prominently at the end of Brown’s book.

La Pyramide is the signature of the Louvre’s makeover and emblematic of the wide-ranging architectural changes in the building instigated by Chinese-born architect I. M. Pei. La Pyramide centered all the entrances in one location, leading to a new underground concourse that provides access to the galleries as well as restaurants, shop spaces, and vital new storage and support areas for the museum itself. Pei’s structure, while now generally accepted and even admired by Parisians, was met by uproarious public debate and outright attacks in the Parisian press when the plans were announced.

La Pyramide is constructed out of 698 panes of tempered, very light, transparent glass—not 666, the so-called “Satan’s number,” as claimed by Brown/Langdon and many conspiracy buffs. The lightweight panels, connected by equally lightweight steel supports, combine to create an extremely powerful form—a squat pyramid that only stands seventy-one feet high and is at once lofty yet powerful. The glass reflects the Parisian skies, a moodstone for France’s capital.

“Q” Document “The Q document,” Teabing tells Sophie and Langdon in the instructional he gives them on the secret history of Christianity and its cover-up while they are all gathered in his library, is “a manuscript that even the Vatican admits they believe exists. Allegedly, it is a book of Jesus’s teachings, possibly written in his own hand.” Moving beyond his just-spoken caution, he puts a rhetorical question to Sophie, “Why wouldn’t Jesus have kept a chronicle of his ministry?”

Whether he did so or not has preoccupied scholars since an Englishman, Herbert Marsh, first hypothesized a Q-like source in 1801, based upon the belief that someone wrote an Aramaic version of the sayings of Jesus. He labeled it beth, a Hebrew letter fashioned after the shape of a house. Several German scholars took up the cause later in the century, generating great controversy: since the gospels of Matthew and Luke show some independence of each other, could there be a different source other than the synoptic gospels for the sayings of Jesus? If so, which was the “right” one? As some doubt arose about the authenticity of the collection of sayings, the German scholar Johannes Weiss devised the more neutral Q, after the German word quelle, meaning “source.” There things stood, with scholars adding layer after layer of reconstructions until the 1960s, when translations of the Nag Hammadi documents in 1947 revealed a Gospel of Thomas, which was translated by James Robinson and Thomas Lambdin.

Does the Gospel of Thomas really reveal itself as the direct source of Jesus’s sayings? The answer lies in part on determining the dating of the documents, an unsettled issue. If it comes from the mid–first century, the link can seem persuasive. If, as the more conservative scholarship has it, the Gospel of Thomas was written after the first century, then there is a greater chance it was composed by accumulated memories (i.e., a less direct history).
Professor Robinson, the “godfather” of this debate, answers the question this way: “The reference to Q, and as to whether Jesus himself wrote it? Of course Jesus didn’t write it. That is another one of those places where Dan Brown sort of fudges the evidence to make it more sensational than it is.” The debate will continue, with the hope that more texts from the early Christian era can be found to clarify this and many other controversies.

Rennes-le-Château Few places on earth, from Stonehenge to the Bermuda Triangle, have been the focus of as many conspiracy theories as Rennes-le-Château, a small French village situated on a mountaintop on the eastern edge of the Pyrenees. While it makes no appearance in The Da Vinci Code, it is at the center of the conspiracy that concerns the book.

Rennes-le-Château, like most of Europe’s villages and cities, has a deeply layered and complex history, passing from prehistoric camp to Roman settlement to medieval stronghold. By the eve of the French Revolution, the village had, through a complex series of intermarriages, fallen into the hands of the Blanchefort family. It is rumored that Marie, Marquise d’Hautpol de Blanchefort, a titular descendent, at least, of the Templar grand master of the same name, passed a secret to her parish priest upon her death. This priest, an Abbé Bigou, whom the revolution forced into exile in Spain shortly after her demise, was the clerical predecessor of the most intriguing resident of Rennes-le-Château: Bérenger Saunière.

Rose The rose is rich in symbolism and The Da Vinci Code explores quite a bit of it. The cryptex in the rosewood box Sophie holds as she and Langdon escape the Swiss bank in an armored truck has a rose on the lid, which she associates with great secrets, and which Langdon immediately links to the Latin phrase sub rosa (literally “under the rose”), meaning whatever is said has to be kept confidential. The rose has also been the symbol used by the Priory of Sion as a symbol for the Grail. One species has five petals, associating it with pentagonal symmetry, the movement of Venus in the sky, and the sacred feminine. Then there is its use as a compass rose, meant to point one to the “True Direction.”

As he explains all this, Langdon has an epiphany, grasping that the Grail is likely to be hidden sub rosa, that is, underneath the sign of the rose in some church with its rose windows, rosette reliefs, and cinquefoils, the “five-petaled decorative flowers often found at the top of archways, directly over the keystone.”

Later in the book, Teabing ties the rose closely to womanhood, the five petals representing “the five stages of female life—birth, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, and death.” He also tells Langdon and Sophie that the word rose is identical in English, French, German, and other languages and that the anagram of the word is Eros, the Greek god of sexual love.

Many other meanings have been given to the rose—an emblem of Christ, a symbol of the nativity, and the messianic prophecy. In Greco-Roman culture, the rose represented beauty, spring, and love. The rose also referenced the speedy passage of time, and thus the approach of death and the next world. The Roman feast of Rosalia was a feast of the dead. Gothic cathedrals feature rose stained-glass windows, with Christ at the center of each, at the three entrances of these churches. The rose in this context is said to symbolize the salvation that lies within, and which has been revealed by God. Later Christian art, from the thirteenth century forward, often portrays Mary holding a rose, or in a rose garden, or in front of a tapestry of roses. The rose symbolically represents the union of Christ and his church and God and His people.

Finally, the rose is the same color as the apple, which ties it right back into the plot of The Da Vinci Code. In the last line of the poem penned by Sophie’s grandfather that leads to Newton’s tomb, we find the words

You seek that orb that ought to be on his tomb.
It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.

Langdon finds this last sentence a clear allusion to Mary Magdalene, “the Rose who bore the seed of Jesus.”

Rosicrucians The Rosicrucian doctrine was first expounded in The Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World, published in 1614. It claimed that Christian Rosenkreuz, a German noble, journeyed as a youth to the East, gathering knowledge and becoming an adept of secret wisdoms. These wisdoms amounted to an ecumenical approach that advocated simple, moral living and the common worship of a supreme being or god. Alchemical metaphors were deployed to symbolize the magical transformation of the human soul.

Some scholars believe that Rosenkreuz was merely an invention of the German theologian Johann Valentin Andreae, claimed by the Priory of Sion as grand master from 1637 to 1654. Many claim that Andreae wrote one of the Rosenkreuz books, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, as a satire of occult obsessions of the era. Fictional progenitor or not, the Rosicrucians still thrive today as an esoteric society based on the Rosenkreuz writings. Rosicrucianism became popular within Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, when it incorporated many Rosicrucian symbols, the foremost of which were the rose and the cross. (The most prominent use of the rose and cross symbol before that was probably as it appeared on Martin Luther’s coat of arms.) The order continues to exist, albeit in a great variety of forms.

Rosslyn Chapel Heading toward the final scenes of The Da Vinci Code, Saunière’s second cryptex leads Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu to the Rosslyn Chapel outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Various occult and New Age commentators have, for years, believed that the Holy Grail resides at Rosslyn, having been taken there after the massacre of the Templars in France in the 1300s. Scottish Masonic groups have been seen as some of the heirs to the Templar tradition.

Work on the Rosslyn Chapel—also known as the Cathedral of Codes—began in 1446 at the behest of Sir William St. Clair, or Sinclair, a hereditary grand master of the Scottish Masons and a reputed descendent of the Merovingian bloodline. Sir William exercised personal control of the chapel’s construction, which halted shortly after his death in 1484. Only the choir—the part of the church occupied by the choir and the clergy, where services are performed—is completed. The chapel is filled with codes, symbols, alphabets, and imagery that suggest a sort of universal symbolic language. Christian and Jewish symbols coexist, as do Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and other languages, and references to Norse, Celtic, and Templar history. At the end of their visit to Rosslyn, Robert and Sophie seem to learn that the Holy Grail, if it ever was at Rosslyn, has been moved.

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