The secret things belong to the Lord, the things revealed are ours and our children’s forever …

--Deuteronomy 29:29

Literary Inspirations

Like a good spy thriller, the plot of The Da Vinci Code book moves from one stunning secret to another--from one coded message to the next, from an ancient conspiracy to a modern one--exploring all the while some of the most fundamental secrets of the archaic past of human culture, and even of archaic areas of the brain itself, where primal myths and Jungian archetypes cavort and where secret fears, compulsions, and ancient traumas reside.

Dan Brown has said that Robert Ludlum is among his favorite writers, and you can see in The Da Vinci Code a touch of vintage Ludlum. Start with incredibly compelling, powerful secrets, throw an ordinary man (and a beautiful woman) into high-stakes action to figure out these secrets against the ticking clock of a threat to civilization, confront the characters with deep, dark secret societies no one thought still existed, bend their minds around conspiracies so intricate the reader can't ever really diagram the plot, and wrap it all into action fast-paced enough to make the reader forget the cardboard characters and the plot holes.

The role of secret societies in such plots--whether Ludlum, Le Carr, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, or Dan Brown--is not to be understated. In this chapter we focus on three secret societies at work in the action of The Da Vinci Code: the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, and Opus Dei. Along the way, we consider various other secret rites and practices, from modern-day Gnostics celebrating hieros gamos rites in twenty-first-century New York to the plethora of secret societies that grew out of the Templar massacre in the fourteenth century.

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Your Own Secret Societies

Do you know the history of a Secret Society -- real or fictional? How about a good tall tale? Have you read any other page-turners you'd recommend? Share your stories.

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Conspiracies

As The Da Vinci Code points out, everyone loves a good conspiracy. Everyone finds it interesting to be let in on a mind-boggling secret. In the case of the three most prominent secret societies in The Da Vinci Code, each one is a fascinating world unto itself. The book compresses the essence of these secret cultures into some easy-to-understand background material. But then it goes on to exaggerate greatly each one's power, influence, and history.

The Templars, for example, may have had some cult-like practices in medieval days that could be construed as sacred sex rites. Mary Magdalene may have figured more prominently in their culture than in contemporaneous Christianity. And they may well have found treasure in Jerusalem and built a nexus of power and influence. But it is extremely doubtful that they cared much for the theory of the sacred feminine or that they believed the Holy Grail had anything to do with Mary Magdalene’s womb and the royal bloodline of the offspring she may or may not have had.

The Priory of Sion, while interesting to speculate about, may never have really existed as anything more than a minor political arm of the Templars during their heyday. As for the modern era, the idea of the Priory may be a complete canard in its twentieth-century incarnation. Leonardo Da Vinci may well have been involved with secret sects, heretical philosophies, and unusual sexual practices--and his paintings may well have sought to pass on secret knowledge (or at least make insider jokes) to future generations. But it is highly unlikely that Leonardo served as a grand master of a functioning secret organization, while leaving not a single clue or bit of documentary evidence behind amid the tens of thousands of pages of notebooks he left to posterity. The same could be said about the other alleged grand masters. With all we know about the lives of Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau, Newton and Debussy, don’t you think there would be a scrap of corroborating evidence somewhere? And for an organization that is supposed to hold the sacred feminine in such high esteem (at least according to the novel), how come there are no prominent women on the list?

Opus Dei is certainly wealthy, powerful, and secretive. It may well be pledged to a religious philosophy and even a set of political goals that many find anathema. It may have a very interesting history of unexplained involvements with the CIA, the Vatican’s finances, and right-wing death squads in Latin Americas civil wars. But it is not dispatching albino monks to the streets of Paris to murder people over ancient religious secrets.

Dan Brown's Fictional Extremes

That is not to deny the concerns and fears some people may have about this or any other secretive group or conspiracy. Just the opposite is true: Dan Brown, like many novelists, exaggerates even to extremes and lets his imagination run wild for the express purpose of creating the right metaphors and the right thought provocations to rise above the clutter in this information and entertainment-saturated world. His approach has had demonstrable success. He got our attention for secret societies and esoteric knowledge, which we had heard of, vaguely, but knew little about.



See also:

• Codes and Symbols
• Da Vinci Code: History
  
• Glossary of Terms
• Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine

• The Da Vinci Code Effect
• The Dan Brown Revelations
• The Da Vinci Code Tour of the Louvre