Secrets of The Da Vinci Code - Recently Updated Pages

Dan Brown Interview

wetpaint — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:43:01 CDT

If we knew as much about Dan Brown as the man through whom he has chosen to live vicariously, we wouldn’t, in truth, know very much. From Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code we know that Robert Langdon is a Phillips Exeter Academy graduate, a respected Harvard professor renowned for his ability to crack codes and explain symbols, and that he is attracted to highly intelligent women of some accomplishment. There is not much more when it comes to revealing Dan Brown himself. From his publisher’s PR material, or the scant background information he provided during interviews in the days when he was still giving them, we essentially learn that he is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Amherst, where he had several influential teachers, that he wrote three books prior to The Da Vinci Code that achieved only modest success, that he has a strong preference for a quiet, ordinary New England life, a penchant for detailed research, and a writing discipline that includes hanging upside down in his gravity boots.

We begin our quest to know Dan Brown better, however, through a rare interview given when he began promoting The Da Vinci Code. We also find out how a person who has a joint major in English and Spanish makes use of Latin in his novels.

A Collision of Indiana Jones and Joseph Campbell
Craig McDonald Interviews Dan Brown

Craig McDonald hosts a website devoted to interviews with interesting authors (www.modestyarbos.com). As Secrets of the Code was researched, we found this to be one of the more revealing interviews with Dan Brown as writer that we came across.

You taught English at Exeter. What were some of the books you used in your teaching?

I taught both [literature and writing]. We’d teach books like The Iliad and The Odyssey, Of Mice and Men. You know, anything by Shakespeare. Anything by Dostoyevsky. The classics.

How long did it take you to sell your first novel?

You know, I got exceptionally lucky. My book sold in twenty days. The first editor who saw it bought it. Part of it had to do with the fact that it was an exceptionally commercial topic at that time. That being national security and civilian privacy. Electronic code-breaking. E-mail… National Security Agency [NSA]. It was a piece of fiction that had actual ties to the real world.

Would you write Digital Fortress differently if you were doing it in a post-9/11 world and with some of the controversies stemming from Homeland Security?

I don’t think so. You know what’s funny is when I first started writing that book and I learned about NSA, I thought, Oh my God, this is a huge invasion of privacy. I contacted a former NSA cryptographer and said, You know what you guys are doing? This scanning e-mail and cell phones--this is an invasion of privacy. This guy responded in a brilliant way. He faxed me the transcript of a Senate Judiciary hearing where the then-director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, testified that in one year alone--I believe the year was 1994--the NSA’s ability to infiltrate civilian communication had thwarted the downing of two US commercial airliners and a chemical weapons attack on US soil. What was funny, was, I must have done 150 different radio interviews after Digital Fortress came out and we'd get these callers who would call in and say, I can’t believe you’re supporting the National Security Agency--its basically Brave New World. And then, after September 11, people would call in and say, I don’t care what NSA needs. If they want to put a streaming video camera in my bedroom, that’s fine. Whatever they need to stop this, it’s fine. The entire feeling about national security, as a priority, shifted. Now, the question is, Have we gone too far? We’ll just bounce back and forth, I’m sure.

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Join the Discussion

What do you think of the mysterious Dan Brown? Really that mysterious or just a great publicity machine? Discuss this interview in the comments section.

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Given the subject matter, and its potential to offend some on a religious level, how do you account for The Da Vinci Code selling in such vast quantities?

I did a lot of research for this novel, and I really got the sense that people were ready for this story. It was the type of thing that people were just ready to hear. As far as my surprise with the success: I’m surprised with the level of success--the fact that this book is just breaking all records and we just found out it went back to number one on every list in the country, next week. I should say that when the book came out, I was a little bit nervous about the response. The response from priests, nuns--all sorts of people in the church--for the most part, has been overwhelmingly positive. There have been a few people for whom the book was shocking and was upsetting, but less than one percent.

Robert Langdon appears in your second and fourth novels. There have been some statements issued that you intend to focus on him as a series character. A number of crime and thriller writers launch a series, then rue the fact that they can no longer follow their muse in other directions. Why are you moving the other way?

Langdon is a character who has my own interests. I am fascinated with ancient mysteries. Art history. Codes. You spend a year, a year and a half writing a book, you better be darn sure your hero is involved in subject matter you are excited about. As excited as I was about NASA and meteors or the National Security Agency, my passions really do lie with ancient mysteries and codes and that sort of thing.

Have you always had that interest in the covert?

I have. I grew up on the East Coast, right in New England, sort of in the heart of prep schools and Ivy League colleges with all of their little fraternities and eating clubs and secret societies and all of that. I had associations early on with people from the National Security Agency. Secrets, I think, interest everybody and the concept of secret societies--especially after I visited the Vatican--just really captured my imagination.

Ah yes, your famously touted audience with the pope.

A lot of people have had an audience with the pope. It basically means that you are in his presence and that’s just a very sort of arcane and silly way to put it. I was in a room with a group of other people and that’s about the extent of it.

You were also purportedly afforded some unusual access to the Vatican grounds. …

That’s true. I have a very good friend who has a connection, extremely high, in the Vatican. The parts of the Vatican that we saw--such as the Necropolis … currently, something like eleven people a day are allowed in to see the Necropolis. That was probably the most secure area that we saw that was absolutely really, really memorable and special. The Vatican archives--only three Americans in history have been allowed inside. I was not one of them. Two were cardinals and one was a professor of religious studies, I think, at the University of Florida. All of the descriptions were accurate. But I was not allowed inside the secret archives myself. I was allowed inside the Vatican Library and the Vatican archives, but not the Vatican secret archives.

Think you might still be afforded that access after Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code?

Chances are slim.

There was a statement somewhere to the effect that you’re in possession of something like a dozen rough outlines for future Robert Langdon novels.

I am. Chances are I won’t get to write them all.

Given the plot complexity of the novels, I assume you must write to a pretty structured outline.

Oh my, yeah. The outline to The Da Vinci Code was over one hundred pages. The stories are very intricate and plot-driven. They have a lot of twists, a lot of codes. A lot of surprises. You can’t write those freehand--those come from careful planning.

You’ve indicated you spend about a year and a half on a books composition. How much of that time is committed to research?

About half.

You’ve taken on some fairly powerful entities in your books--the Catholic Church … the Masons … various alleged secret societies and government agencies. Are you starting to have any fears for your own safety?

I really am not. I work very hard to portray these organizations in a fair and even light and I think I’ve succeeded. Certainly, with respect to Opus Dei, as I say in the book, there are those for whom Opus Dei has been a wonderful addition to their lives. And there are those for whom Opus Dei has been a nightmare, and I talk about both.

Do you think these Langdon books would have been written if you weren’t married to an art historian?

My wife is an enormous influence--her knowledge and her passion for the subject matter certainly buoys the process when it bogs down. Writing a book is incredibly hard. I would not wish it on my worst enemy. There are definitely days when it helps to have somebody around--especially in the case of The Da Vinci Code who understands art and da Vinci and is passionate about it and can say, You know, lets go take a walk and talk about why we got into this in the first place—what’s so exciting about da Vinci and what he believed. So I’m very fortunate on that front.

Returning a little bit to September 11, 2001, I read an interview that you gave in 1998 and it’s particularly prescient, now, looking back on it. You were commenting on projects that were under way to monitor U.S. citizens for the reason specifically of preventing terrorist attacks, and you said, The threat is very real. … Americans hate to admit it, but we have a lot of enemies; we are a ripe target for terrorism and yet have one of the lowest rates of successful domestic terrorist attacks on earth. Such an attack was on your radar a bit before it was on most people’s radar. Why?

I think because of my shock, well, you probably read the story about the guys who showed up at the campus of Phillips Exeter from the Secret Service.

Yes, you had a student who had written something in an e-mail and they came to investigate the student.

Right. That really was my first encounter with the National Security Agency. The more I read about them, the more upset I got. And I couldn’t believe that essentially highly trained American civilians would be working on projects to snoop other civilians. It made no sense to me, until I started to dig deeper and realized why it’s happening and why no matter what we say and what we want, it will continue to happen. And ending up getting lists of terrorist attacks that never happened because of NSA. I started to sense, Oh my God, we are under attack, almost daily, and just never hear about it. It’s important to remember about terrorists that their job is not necessarily to kill people, it’s to create terror. In the event that there is a bomb under the White House, or, say, a bomb in New York City that NSA is able to stop with three seconds left, they will make that bomb disappear and hope nobody ever found out about it, because whether or not the bomb goes off, the second you know it almost went off, it’s almost just as scary. So there is a lot of protecting our ignorance/innocence.

Looking at the dates, you were touring immediately after September 11 for Deception Point, I take it?

Yes.

What was that like?

It was awful. It was a tough time. I was working on Da Vinci Code on the morning of September 11. I have an office where I have no telephone, no e-mail, no nothing, where I go just to be totally alone. My wife walked over and just said, Something terrible is happening and I instantly knew that it had finally happened. For a couple of months after that, it was very hard to be motivated to write fiction. It felt totally unimportant. With so much going on in the world, how can you afford to allow yourself the luxury of moving fictional characters around in a fictional landscape--you know, how are you helping your country doing that? As it turns out, you are--at some point you’re giving people release from the pain of reality and some recreation. It’s just hard to remember that.

You have a background in music. Have you thought of using any musical themes or elements in your novels?

I have. One of my future novels focuses on a famous composer and his associations with a secret society, all factual.

There have been some mentions that your next book after The Da Vinci Code is going to be set in Washington, D.C.

That’s correct.

And, something about Freemasons . . . ?

Yep … Are you hoping I will say more? [laughing]

I thought I would leave some ellipses dangling there and maybe you would fill ‘em in … but I guess not.

That’s about all I’m allowed to say.

You do get a sense of readership through your readings and signings?

You know, that has been the most gratifying aspect of tour--to look out at these bookstores and see men, women, and a lot of teenagers. Kids have really reacted--especially to Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. It’s sort of like a more mature Harry Potter, I guess, is what a lot of kids are feeling. It has some of those ancient mystery elements that people like in Harry Potter.

That comparison is made in some of the press materials from your publisher.

The first time I heard the analogy was Janet Maslin in the New York Times, who wrote an absolutely glowing review. People called and said, Is Janet Maslin your mother, because she never says stuff like that. She invoked the holy name of Harry Potter and I believe she was first. I don’t read fiction, except occasionally to blurb somebody’s novel if I’m asked by my editor. That’s the other thing—I’ll get novels almost daily saying, Wouldn’t you love to read this and put a blurb on it? I have not read Harry Potter, but in my mind, anything that gets kids that excited about reading has got to be really good. I think it’s just fantastic.

Any of the books been optioned for film yet?

All kinds of interest. Because Langdon is a series character, I’m hesitant to sell the film rights. One of the beauties of the reading experience is that everybody pictures Langdon in his or her perfect way. The second you slap a character [in a script] no matter how you describe Langdon or any other character--they picture Ben Affleck or Hugh Jackman or whoever it happens to be, you know? So, I’m hesitant. Also, Hollywood has a way of taking a story like this and turning it into a car chase through Paris with machine guns and karate chops. So, I’m very hesitant, and yet I’m talking to a few specific individuals who are the kinds of people who could make this a smart movie, and that’s the only way I would sell, is if I had exceptional amounts of control.

See also:

Caesar cipher

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:46:35 CST

Resources

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The Dan Brown Revelations

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Da Vinci Code: Art & Architecture

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Da Vinci Code Movie

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Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:34:49 CST

What kind of a woman do you think Mary Magdalene was? To add more information to this page, click on the "EasyEdit" button and make your contribution.

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WAS MARY MAGDALENE A GREAT DISCIPLE? YES!
BUT WAS SHE MARRIED TO JESUS AND HARASSED BY THE CHURCH?

Mary Magdalene was a remarkable woman. As noted above, she was the first person to witness Christ's resurrection; a special honor indeed. In addition, she carried that message back to the male disciples who were hiding in fear. Because of this, the early church fathers christened her, "The apostle to the apostles." The Catholics made her a saint, built cathedrals in her honor, commissioned countless works of art and have celebrated her feast days for almost twenty centuries. Does that sound like they were conducting a smear campaign against Mary? Confusing her with the prostitute mentioned in the gospels was not a malicious act, intended to ruin her reputation.

In todays post-Christian society, what many don't understand about the Christian faith is that what a person was before coming to Christ isn't terribly important. If anything, the worse you were, the more celebrated you are after. It's viewed as a greater miracle of God's grace. The Apostle Paul wrote two-thirds of the books in the New Testament, but referred to himself as the "chief of sinners" because he had killed and imprisoned the followers of Christ at one time. Is the idea of Mary Magdalene being a prostitute any less offensive than the fact that she had seven unclean spirits cast out of her by Jesus; a reference commonly associated with mental illness by many Bible scholars? No, but it doesn't matter in the least. The important thing is what she was after encountering Jesus. She became one of the most amazing women who ever lived, which is exactly how the Catholics have viewed her down through the centuries. I have not seen a single quote by any Christian going back two thousand years that supports the accusation that she was looked down upon.

As for the marriage question, if you re-read the passage from The Gospel of Philip at the top of the page, you'll find it actually contradicts the idea that she and Jesus were married. It says the other disciples were offended at the special affection Mary received and wanted to be loved in the same way she was. However, if she was Jesus' wife, such a request becomes ludicrous. Did Peter, James and John want Jesus to start kissing them on the mouth and marry them as well? How could he ever love friends in the same way he loved a marriage partner? Imagine what your best friend would say if the next time you pick her up to go someplace, you get irate when she kisses her husband goodbye and begin demanding that she love you the same as she loves him! She would think you've lost your senses.

Another problem with the Gospel of Philip is that it was written in Egypt at least two centuries after Christ, by someone who admitted he was "not the original Philip". So how would he know intimate first-hand details like the ones in the above passage? In addition, there are many holes in the manuscript and 30% of the words are missing. In reality, the all-important sentence in question actually reads:

......................................................... " He used to kiss her [ __ ] on the [ __ ] " .....................................................................

For all we know, it said: "He used to kiss her gently on the cheek (or forehead)". If you find these things of interest, there is much, much more on the website: www.davincispeaks.com , including overwhelming evidence that Mary Magdalene is not in The Last Supper. This is where we find out if it's really true that The Da Vinci Code stimulates open discussion and has people searching these important questions. In my experience, there are an awful lot of DVC aficionado's who only want to hear one side of the story. However, that's not living up to Mary Magdalene's courageous legacy.
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WAS SHE A PROSTITUTE?

She is perhaps best known in history as a prostitute. But was she ever a prostitute? Did Jesus simply forgive her, and did she simply repent and change her ways--to illustrate traditional Christian principles about sin, forgiveness, penance, and redemption? Or was she not a prostitute at all, but a wealthy financial patron and supporter of the Jesus movement who was later declared by Pope Gregory in the sixth century to be identical to a different Mary in the gospels who was, indeed, a prostitute? And when Pope Gregory conflated three different Marys in the gospels into one, did he do this deliberately to brand Mary Magdalene with the stigma of prostitution? Was it an honest mistake of interpretation in a dark age when few original documents were in hand and biblical language was a mélange of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin? Did the church need to simplify and codify the Gospels and to play up the themes of sin, penance, and redemption? Or was it a far more Machiavellian stratagem (a millennium before Machiavelli) to ruin Mary Magdalenes reputation in history and, by doing so, destroy the last vestiges of the influences of pagan goddess cults and the sacred feminine on early Christianity, to undermine the role of women in the church and bury the more humanistic side of Christian faith?

Did it go even further? When Pope Gregory placed the scarlet letter of prostitution on Mary Magdalene--who would remain officially a reformed prostitute for the next fourteen centuries--was it the beginning of the great cover-up to deny the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and, ultimately, the royal, sacred bloodline of their offspring?

Did Mary Magdelene and Jesus Have Children?

Their offspring? Well, yes. If Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married or at least had an intimate relationship, there might well have been a child or children. And what did happen to Mary Magdalene after the crucifixion? The Bible is silent, but around the Mediterranean, from Ephesus to Egypt, there is legend and lore suggesting Mary Magdalene, with her child (or children), escaped from Jerusalem and eventually settled down to the life of an evangelist. The most interesting stories have her living out her years in France . . . a theme Dan Brown picks up and makes integral to the plot of The Da Vinci Code.

Representing issues about sin and redemption, the Madonna and the whore, penitence and virtue, the faithful and the fallen, it is no surprise that Mary Magdalene has always been a towering figure in literature and culture. Male churchgoers took to the stage to portray her in the passion plays, the very first theater works produced in Western Europe over a thousand years ago. And she has been a constant figure in church art ever since.

In much more recent times, Dan Brown is not the first author to be fascinated with Mary Magdalene, nor the first to play up the issue of her possible marriage to Jesus. Nikos Kazantzakis posited a romantic relationship between them in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ more than fifty years ago (well before Martin Scorsese turned it into a movie in the 1980s and raised the issue again). William E. Phipps addressed many of these same issues in his book Was Jesus Married?, more than thirty years ago. The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, another work that hails from more than thirty years ago, also assumes a romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Given our society’s interest in issues about gender roles, women as leaders, and all the permutations of love, marriage, and sex one can imagine, the new Mary Magdalene fits right in, and The Da Vinci Code is right on time.

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Join the Discussion

Share your opinions with us on Mary Magdalene and The Sacred Feminine by starting a discussion thread.

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The Unanswered Questions

In the pages of this chapter, some of the worlds leading experts on Mary Magdalene discuss and debate different versions of who she may have been in history, the meaning of her role in the traditional gospels, and how the Gnostic and other alternative Gospels may further augment our ability to understand her today. Some of the experts are interested in teasing out the meaning of only what is in the Bible. Others want to deepen and enrich the debate with new evidence and new interpretations. Still others are focused less on what texts say and much more on the meaning of Mary Magdalene in the context of archetype, myth, and metaphor.

Every issue that could be debated has come into the twenty-first-century debate about Mary Magdalene. Was she from Magdala on the Sea of Galilee and was she therefore likely to be a Jewish woman? Or was she from a similarly named town in Egypt or Ethiopia? Was she fair and auburn-haired as she was often depicted in medieval times or was she a black African woman? Was she an insider to the Holy Lands customs and way of life or was she an outsider, much like Jesus is sometimes portrayed? Was she very wealthy and able to finance Jesus movement from her personal means? How do we know that she was wealthy--because she came from a prosperous fishing town? Because spikenard, the perfume she used to anoint Jesus, was considered an expensive luxury product? Because she appears to have arranged for the food and lodging of Jesus and his followers who had renounced worldly things?

Since she is just one of several women who appear to be patrons of Jesus, what of the other women, several of whom are mentioned by name? Was she descended from the House of Benjamin, as some accounts suggest Jesus was descended from the House of David, and would their marriage have been politically important, bringing these two clans together? Would Jesus have been married in the normal course of events anyway? After all, most of the rabbis of Jewish culture in those days were married, and Jesus is called rabboni by Mary Magdalene and many of his followers in the New Testament. If he was a Jewish rabbi, wouldn’t the expectation be that he would be married? Weren’t Peter and several of the other apostles explicitly referred to as married? Why would Jesus have practiced celibacy when biblical language is so full of the injunctions to be fruitful and to go forth and multiply?

In the scene in the Gospels where Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus with perfumed unguents from an alabaster jar and washes his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair--is this really she or a different Mary? If it is Mary Magdalene, are these actions indicators of ceremonial respect or metaphors for sexual relations? And if sexual relations, is this an allusion to her former life as a prostitute? Is it a clue that Jesus and Mary Magdalene are actually married? Is it a poetic metaphor not just for sexual relations, but specially charged, sacred sexual relations, such as the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) practices that come from even more ancient Greek, Minoan, and Egyptian cultures? Could she be a prostitute in the sense that in some ancient cultures, men engaged in sexual acts with temple prostitutes in order to have ecstatic, divine, mystical, religious experiences? Is the wedding at Cana, described in the New Testament, really a metaphoric description of the wedding of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ and does it, in turn, hearken back to the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament? And don’t these stories, in turn, hearken even further back to what Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell would see as universal archetypes and myths of sacred unity between male and female, of the need for wholeness and the need for love--not just love in the New Testament sense, but love in the full-bodied, erotic, humanistic sense as well?

Are there sacred texts and other kinds of documents that shed light on the true history of what happened in Israel in the time of Christ and what happened between Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their followers? Could documents and relics referring to these events have been buried under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and become the Holy Grail sought by crusading knights? Could the Knights Templar have found this material, spirited it out of the Holy Land, and taken it to France in medieval days? And if this material is ever found, whether in the cavity under Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland or under the Louvres pyramid, or anywhere else, will it fundamentally change Christian history and belief the way the fragmentary Gnostic Gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls have already proven influential?

Dan Brown's Book Adds to the Debate

Dan Brown has done quite a job in The Da Vinci Code of alluding to many of those questions. In a handful of pages, in the midst of a murder mystery thriller detective story, he manages to refer to all of the key issues above and much more . . . most notably the possibility that Leonardo da Vinci knew and understood the real history of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene and that’s why he painted Mary Magdalene into The Last Supper. Moreover, the image of a leering Peter, slicing his bladelike hand in Mary Magdalene’s direction in the painting, is meant, according to The Da Vinci Code, to suggest the animosity between Peter and Mary Magdalene over the future of the church. In the novel, Sophie Neveu asks her late-night teachers, Teabing and Langdon, You’re saying the Christian Church was to be carried on by a woman? That was the plan, says Teabing. Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.

Your Contribution to the Debate

One can see why the issues of The Da Vinci Code have people talking, arguing, searching--however improbable some aspects of the plot may be and however rewoven or spun out of whole cloth the religious history may be. Share your perspectives.

See also:

Codes and Symbols

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 09:53:17 CDT

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Anagram Fun

Anonymous — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:49:35 CDT

OH LAME SAINT

Secret Societies

Anonymous — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:11:41 CDT

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:

Saint Claire

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Mona Lisa

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The Early Days of Christianities

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 08:02:57 CDT

Hidden History in The Da Vinci Code

Consolidation, or Cover-Up?

In the beginning there was not one Christianity, but many. Sacred roots and twenty centuries of primacy in the Western world have led to the generally dominant view that modern Christianity evolved in a linear and direct way from the teachings of Jesus. The snapshot Western civilization has tended to see is a natural progression, starting with Jesus and followed by the preaching of the apostles as depicted in the New Testament, on through the establishment of the church by Peter, brought under the wing of Constantine and the Council of Nicea, and from there throughout the Roman Empire, Europe, and on into the modern world. If we think about debate, conflict, and heresy in Christian thought, our history and humanities classes tend to emphasize the comparatively recent experience of the Reformation.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code wants to acquaint the reader with the lesser-known, even hidden side of the story, the unanswered questions about the early history of Christianity:

Who was Jesus?
Who was Mary Magdalene?
Why did people accept the notions of a virgin birth or of resurrection?
Were Jesus and his fellow Jews seeking to define a different path for Judaism, or seeking to create a new religion?
How credible are the four accepted gospels, when we know they were written many years after the facts they describe, and their accounts are sometimes at odds with each other?
What can one make of all the other gospel-like accounts that we now know existed but did not find their way into the New Testament?
What should we think about the fact that very little contemporaneous material survives from the lifetime of Jesus--when nothing has yet been found in his own hand and what we do know of the gospel accounts has clearly been filtered and edited through the screen of the Roman and Greek translators?

Early Christian history proceeds to an untidy story punctuated by loose ends, unknowns, intrigues both political and personal, ironies, and considerable doses of what in today’s political vernacular might be called spin. As it turns out, the history of Christianity is primarily one of widely and sometimes wildly differing understandings of what correct Christian belief is, and considerable zeal in the identification and persecution of those thought not to believe correctly. These divergences, diversities, and differences may even go back to the very first moments of the Jesus movement. As we see throughout this book, the differences between Peter and others, the question of Mary Magdalene’s role, and the inner questions and doubts of Jesus himself are all becoming far more apparent given today’s scholarship, textual analysis, and archaeology than they were at any time in the last sixteen hundred years or so.

The New Testament and Judaism

Scholars have long known that there is roughly a forty-year gap (maybe less, but maybe much more) between the death of Jesus and the writing of the first gospel. During that period the followers of Jesus were consolidating their beliefs through oral tradition, and deciding who Jesus was and what his life and death meant. Each gospel was an evangelists telling of the story from a somewhat different point of view, based on the tellers own circumstances and audience. The Gospel of Luke beging by telling Theophilos that he (Luke) will tell his side of the Jesus history according to what have been related to him by some other witness. Eventually, four gospels and twenty-three other texts were canonized into a bible. This did not occur, however, until the sixth century.

As Deirdre Good points out in her lectures on Mary Magdalene and The Da Vinci Code, Virtually everyone in the New Testament should be thought of as Jewish unless you can produce any evidence to suggest they are not. Most experts agree that Jesus was a Jew. New Testament accounts repeatedly describe his involvements in Jewish temple life--from his precocious understanding of the temple service as a child to his attack on the money changers in the temple during his maturity. In all cases, it is the traditional Jewish temple to which he relates, and which he is trying to induce to change according to his vision.

Indeed, there was so much ferment in Judaism in those days--different cults, sects, clans, tribes, prophets, false prophets, rabbis, teachers, the Greek-influenced, the Roman-influenced--that the Jesus movement may not have appeared as anything shockingly new or different when it first emerged. The Jewish communities scattered across Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere all had their own traditions of modified beliefs and influences drawn from their surrounding cultures. Judaism in those days was a big tent, even if under it things were often unruly, fractious, and bitterly--even fatally--divided.

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Contribute to the Debate

One can see why the issues of The Da Vinci Code have people talking, arguing, searching--however improbable some aspects of the plot may be and however rewoven or spun out of whole cloth the religious history may be. Share your perspectives.

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The Birth of Christianity

It would certainly appear that for a long time after the death of Jesus his followers were not necessarily perceived as believers in a fundamentally different religion. What became Christianity was initially Jews preaching an increasingly different form of Judaism to other Jews. Sometimes called Nazareans by Jews and Christians by gentiles (non-Jews), some of the circles of Jesus’ followers required that males be circumcised and that the Jewish ritual and dietary laws be followed, yet they professed belief that Jesus was the Son of God and the sole path to salvation--beliefs inconsistent with Jewish orthodoxy. Ebionites, described recently as Christians still climbing out of their Jewish shell, insisted that to be part of their movement one had to be Jewish first.

Yet as Bart Ehrman, the contemporary expert on lost Christian beliefs and scriptures argues, the Ebionites believed deeply in Jesus, but they saw him as the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish scripture. The Ebionites believed that Jesus was a mortal man who was so righteous that God adopted him as His son and allowed his sacrifice to redeem humanity’s sins.

Saul, a Greek Jew, was strongly opposed to the Nazareans, but on the road to Damascus he had a vision in which Jesus told him to spend the remainder of his life spreading the gospel to the gentiles. Saul changed his name to Paul. His beliefs differed in significant ways from those then emerging from the Jewish tradition: Paul felt that male converts should not have to be circumcised, and that following Jewish law was not necessary, thereby setting up one of the earliest Christian conflicts. Paul concentrated his efforts on converting gentiles, while others attempted to convert from within the Jewish community. Paul traveled widely and established Christian churches throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Even more zealous than the Paulines were the Marcionites, who sought to cast off their Jewish heritage completely, even to the point of looking on the Jewish concept of God as a God that had failed.

The apostles, and later their followers, went forth to spread the good news (gospels). The spread of Christianity was a protracted, complicated, and decidedly messy process that must be viewed within the context of the political world in the early centuries of this era. This was the time of the Roman Empire. As the empire spread geographically, it incorporated populations whose religious beliefs were primarily pagan and naturalistic, tied to Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and other mythologies. These existed side by side, with the state taking no side.

It was within this theological stew that Christianity arose and developed. Against the dominant polytheistic religions, Christianity and Judaism were monotheistic, teaching an entirely different relationship of man to God (as opposed to man to gods), and a decidedly different path to salvation. Along the way, many diverse interpretations of the Christian belief system arose, some borrowing elements from the surrounding pagan traditions and others simply having alternate interpretations of key doctrinal beliefs.

A Developing Religion

Christianity morphed from belief taught by itinerant evangelists to small communities of believers organized in local churches--each with its own leaders, writings, and beliefs--with no overarching authority or hierarchy. Slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity, a formal hierarchy came about, and with it a need for doctrinal uniformity. Bishops met in synods to declare what was doctrinally correct. Other views were declared heresies and were to be eradicated. In doing so, they chose to glorify certain gospel accounts that reinforced their version of Christendoms message--even to select those accounts to be included in the Bible and in what orderat the same time as they vigorously rejected as heretical anything seen as politically or textually deviating from their own self-declared mainstream. These people, including Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Eusebius, became the editors, so to speak, of the Bible. Reacting as they did to the severe repression of Christians they had witnessed, these church leaders developed their own biases, and have to be understood in their own context. Meanwhile, Gnostics and others set off on very different paths, believing themselves to be good followers of Jesus even while holding to a very different cosmology. Despite the growing formal power of the bishops and church leaders opposed to them, they persisted in their beliefs, often at great risk to their lives.

In the novel, Dan Brown makes a point of telling the reader (through a lecture by Leigh Teabing) of the extreme extension of the church’s arguments against the heresies of this early era, which would be recycled a thousand years later in the Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1487 as the political platform of the Inquisition.

Perhaps it was inevitable that single-scripture Christianity would merge with single-power politics. To achieve primacy, the early church fathers believed they needed to turn Christianity into a force to unite and strengthen the empire, consistent with the empires values, politics, and social and military infrastructure. Those who led the Roman Empire in this pursuit believed that a key task was to distill a core ideology and cosmology out of all the various ideas that made up the Christian message.

Emperor Constantine

In 313 Emperor Constantine declared that it was salutary and most proper that complete toleration should be given by the Roman Empire to anyone who had given up his mind either to the cult of the Christians or any other similar cult. With this Edict of Milan, official persecution of Christianity and Christians was supposed to end. It is often said that Constantine converted to Christianity, but most scholars understand that this was not until very late in life. Possibly on his deathbed, possibly not at all.

Many historians believe Constantine’s decision can best be explained as politically astutea move that took into account the accumulating power of Christianity, and a way to put that power at his disposal. Moreover, it was a decision born of a fascinating mix of mystical, superstitious, military, and philosophical threads, in addition to the political impetus. As the historian Paul Johnson notes, Constantine was a sun-worshipper, one of a number of late-pagan cults which had observances in common with Christians. Thus, the followers of Isis adored a Madonna nursing her holy child, and the followers of Mithras, many of whom were senior military men, celebrated their deity in much the same way Christians would celebrate Christ. Notes Johnson, Constantine was almost certainly a Mithraic . . . Many Christians did not make a clear distinction between this sun cult and their own. They referred to Christ driving his chariot across the sky and held a feast on December 25, considered the suns birthday at winter solstice. Whatever the reality, this was a major turning point in Christian history. When the state became at least nominally Christian, the presiding bishops became judicial and administrative as well as scriptural authorities. Constantine and the church both gained power. Scholar Stringfellow Barr, in his book The Mask of Jove, sums it up this way: 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.

A major thorn in Constantine’s side was the ongoing controversy with the followers of Arius (Arians), who disputed the notion that Jesus was of the same substance as the Father. Only the Father was God, said Arius and his followers; Christ was not a deity. Constantine wanted the matter settled, and so in 325 convened the Council of Nicea, which declared Arianism a heresy. Heresies from the early church point of view had always been struggled against and denounced (see the Pagels and Owen essays in this chapter) and would continue to befrom the Sabellian heresy which said that the Father and the Son were different aspects of one Being rather than distinct persons, to the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. Although the various shades of opinion of Arians and Donatists and other heretical groups are foggy to us today, the historical record is quite clear that Constantine stepped in and personally presided over the Council of Nicea, even crafting some of the language that came out of the meeting as the ultimate statement on the controversies.

The Da Vinci Code Debate

What did and didn’t happen at the Council of Nicea is one of the key subjects of debate between Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and what many religious practitioners and scholars believe. But Brown's version is highly compelling in this key sense: this was a power struggle over the intellectual infrastructure that would rule much of European politics and thought for the following thousand years. Nicea was not about truth or veracity of religious or moral vision. Ruling some ideas in and others out was fundamentally about politics and power. From Constantine at Nicea to Pope Gregory nearly three hundred years later (and much in between) it turns out, at least in retrospect, to have been largely about developing the intellectual and political infrastructure of Europe for the next thousand years. You might say it was about codification of the code--the Roman Empire’s code.

See also:

O - R

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 08:05:53 CDT

Secrets of the Code Glossary: O - R

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

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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ashish

Anonymous — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:45:28 CDT

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

G - H

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 11:20:17 CST

The Grail lies Beneath the Rose Line in Turin, Italy
Secrets of the Code Glossary: G - H

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

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Gnosis Gnosis is a Greek term meaning, in English, a combination of “knowledge,” “insight,” and “wisdom.” Gnosis is understood as being a divinely inspired, intuitive, and intimate knowledge as opposed to intellectual knowledge of a specific area or discipline. Gnosis, as an experience, is generally the ultimate aim of a spiritual discipline that seeks union with God, the infinite, or the absolute—the reality beyond perception, or, for that matter, religious doctrine. Gnosis is almost always described as a personal revelation or exploration.

Some of the groups now identified as Gnostics may have believed that one way to achieve gnosis was through the ritual of hieros gamos, a celebration of the sacred marriage. As Langdon explains it to Sophie during their flight across the English Channel, “Physical union remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis—knowledge of the divine.”

The scholar and historian Elaine Pagels in her book The Origin of Satan has this to say about the meaning of the word: “The secret of gnosis is that when one comes to know oneself at the deepest level, one comes to know god as the source of one’s being.” The experience of gnosis and other mystical communications with the divine have been seen as a threat by established religious institutions—institutions that prefer to see themselves as the sole conduit to the divine.

The Gnostic Gospels The popularized name given the documents found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1947. The best known texts include:

The Gospel of Mary is invoked by Sir Leigh Teabing as one link in a chain of arguments meant to persuade Sophie that the grail is more than just a holy cup: The gospel, Teabing says, proves Jesus founded his church on Mary, and not on Peter.

The conclusions that Teabing draws from the Gospel of Mary—if this is his primary source—seem somewhat misleading. Contrary to what he says, Jesus never gives Mary Magdalene specific instructions on how to carry on his church after he is gone, at least not in this gospel. The more traditional view of the gospel is that although Mary did have a “special relationship” with Jesus, and the other apostles were jealous of it at times, there is no indication that Jesus chose Mary to carry on his church, or that he gave her any special instructions about how to do it.

The Gospel of Philip also makes an appearance during Leigh Teabing’s discourse on the nature of the Holy Grail. Teabing uses it as his source for the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, based on the translation that mentions Mary as Jesus’s “companion” and that the phrase “he kissed her on the m . . . [text missing]” proved they had a great deal of intimacy. As seen in earlier chapters of this book, there are several scholars and commentators who agree with this interpretation, although others see the kiss as more metaphoric than romantic.

The Gospel of Thomas contains many parallels with the orthodox gospels of the New Testament, including directly parallel sayings and proverbs. Yet they have remarkably enigmatic twists on the familiar canonical texts. Thomas says, for instance, “If two make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, ‘Move away,’ and it will move away.” Another mysterious example is, “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus [then] said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’” This Gospel of Thomas also emphasizes self-knowledge, self-exploration, and self-actualization in passages that are slightly reminiscent of Buddhist analects.

The Gospel of Sophia of Jesus Christ is highly mystical, this text concerns the creation of gods, angels, and the universe with an emphasis on infinite and mystical truth. Some scholars believe it may reflect a conversation between Jesus Christ and his disciples after the resurrection; others argue against it. The fulcrum of that debate relates to the date it might have been written. If it was written as far back as the first century it could reflect the true sayings of Jesus. If after that, this assemblage of sayings and proverbs might simply come from post-Jesus philosophers and Gnostics.

Elaine Pagels, the Princeton scholar whose book Gnostic Gospels introduced much of this subject matter to the American public more than twenty years ago, now says she no longer refers to these documents as Gnostic Gospels, owing to negative connotations associated with Gnosticism today. Pagels, as well as other scholars, including James Robinson and Bart Ehrman, emphasize that the Nag Hammadi finds do offer specific, documentable facts about early Christian history, as much as they suggest the diversity of thought about religion and philosophy that prevailed in the first few centuries of the Common Era. The suppression of these “alternative scriptures” represented the triumph of what we now know mainstream church doctrine to be over a rich variety of other ways of thinking.

Gnosticism Gnosticism is a term used to describe various sects and religious groups, mainly Christian but also Jewish and Egyptian, that hold gnosis at the core of their beliefs and practices. Gnosticism as a religious force probably predates Christianity. James Robinson, an expert on the Nag Hammadi Library, states, “Gnostics were more ecumenical and syncretic with regard to religious traditions than were orthodox Christians, so long as they found in them a stance congenial to their own.”

Gnosticism comes into focus early in the Christian era as a major rival to the influence of apostolic Christianity. Gnosticism’s personal communion with the divine, its often loose church structure, its secret explication of a higher, hidden knowledge that faith could not reveal: all of these traits made Gnostic streams of worship highly problematic for the coalescing Catholic orthodoxy. The result was a steadily increasing stream of denunciation and accusations of heresy so effective that Gnosticism became marginalized as a movement by fifth century AD.

A few of the major strands within Gnosticism are that the direct, intimate, and absolute knowledge of the divine and of truth itself (gnosis) is necessary for spiritual fulfillment; the belief in a union with, or a discovery of, a “higher self” that is identified with or identical to the divine; and that the world was created by a lesser god, a demiurge, who is responsible for the evil inherent in it. The only escape from the evils of material existence was contemplation, self-knowledge, and gnosis with the uncorrupted spiritual. The belief system continues forward to this day; there is a Gnosis Society, for example.

Godefroi de Bouillon French king, leader of the first Crusade, and founder of the Priory of Sion in Jerusalem in 1099. According to the genealogies allegedly collected as part of the Dossiers Secrets, de Bouillon was a descendent of the Merovingian kings. As Langdon further explains to Sophie while they pass through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi, “King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret that had been in his family since the time of Christ.” To protect it he formed a secret brotherhood, the Priory of Sion, that had a military wing to it as well—the Knights Templar. After a detailed exposition of the ins and outs of this history, Langdon reveals that de Bouillon dispatched the Knights Templar to find corroborating evidence of his “powerful secret” beneath the ruins of the former Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem—and that they did find something very compelling there. The implication is that the secret is the information about the Sangreal, better known as the Holy Grail, and that the Templars found the Grail—documents, records, relics, the bones of Mary Magdalene, etc.—and then brought these items back to France.

Gregory IX Born in 1145 as Count Ugolino of Segni, Gregory IX spent his time as pontiff presiding over a turbulent conflict between the church and the secular Holy Roman emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Gregory IX was well known for his fierce opposition to all heresies and partook in the last years of the Albigensian Crusade which nearly wiped out the Cathars, who were centered in the area of France known as the Languedoc.

Hammer of Witches The Malleus Maleficarium was written by Pope Gregoruy IX as a torture manual for dealing with those who were believed to witches by the churc

Hanssen, Robert Former FBI agent turned Russian spy. For almost twenty-two years during the Cold War period, Hanssen sold crucial intelligence information to the Russians. Hanssen was a member of Opus Dei and turned out to be not only an embarrassment to the country but to that organization. He engaged in some unusual sexual practices that came to light during his trial, including photographing himself and his wife having sex to show to his friends. In May of 2002, Hanssen was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, the judge saying, as quoted by Dan Brown, “Hardly the pastime of a devout Catholic.”

Hieros gamos The hieros gamos appears in The Da Vinci Code as an ancient sexual rite that Sophie remembers traumatically witnessing her grandfather practicing in secret. Deep in a chamber below his home, Saunière and a female member of the Priory of Sion are having sex while the other members, masked and robed, chant prayers to the sacred union. Sophie watches, unseen, then flees the house and cuts off all contact with her grandfather for some time.

He was likely to have been involved in the rite of hieros gamos, sometimes referred to as theogamy or hierogamy, a term loosely meaning “sacred marriage” or “divine marriage.” This marriage, in the words of scholar David H. Garrison, is “the holy marriage, the union of goddess and god that provides the paradigm for all human unions.” This holy marriage was reenacted, in various levels of realism, throughout the early religious history of mankind; remnants of the practice still remain with us today—as depicted in the recent movie Eyes Wide Shut. Some Eastern belief systems have analogs, such as Tantric sex rites.

Holy Grail There are as many theories about how and where the Grail story originated as there are Grails: critics and writers have identified Celtic and western European pre-Christian myths, Byzantine mythologies and Eastern orthodox Christian traditions, a code for the secret bloodline of Christ, ancient Persian cult practices, nature worship ceremonies of the pre-Christian Middle East, alchemical symbology, and more, ad infinitum.

The modern version of the Holy Grail story was launched in the last quarter of the twelfth to the first quarter of the thirteenth century by a number of writers in an amazing variety of languages including French, English, German, Spanish, and Welsh. The earliest Grail romance still extant is the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes.

The Grail as object is described differently by different authors. It has been depicted as a stone, an object made of gold with precious stones, a reliquary, and a cup. The quest for the Grail also has variations: in one, where the guardian of the Grail is known as the Fisher King, finding it would mean a return to health and prosperity for the kingdom. The quest is also rendered more personally: it means for many a spiritual inner journey toward enlightenment and communion with God.

Whatever its history and meaning as relic or idea, every character in The Da Vinci Code is involved in its quest, and Brown’s version of the legend goes where it has never gone before. “The greatest cover-up in human history,” exclaims Teabing. “Not only was Jesus Christ married, but he was a father. My dear, Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel. She was the chalice that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ.”

Hugo, Victor Mentioned in The Da Vinci Code as one of many notable authors and artists whose key works secretly passed along the banished notion of the Holy Grail, the sacred feminine, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene as husband and wife. Langdon cites Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (along with Mozart’s Magic Flute) as a work that was “filled with Masonic symbolism and Grail secrets.” Hugo is often cited as having been a Priory of Sion member.

Hyssop “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean,” Silas the Albino quotes from Psalms as he prays while dabbing blood from his back as the result of self-flagellation. John 19:29, describing Jesus’s last moments on the cross, writes, “Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar; and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put upon it hyssop, and put it to his mouth.” Hyssop has culinary uses as well as medicinal ones: it is technically a vegetable and shows up in salads presented at restaurants. The biblical herb also is used in the making of the liqueur Chartreuse.

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Dan Brown Revelations nothing new for me!

emodHst — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 07:37:51 CST

THE TRUTH SHALL SET US FREE...

When I heard the first time about the Da Vinci Code I went to buy it fast and read it even faster.
Much to my surprise was the revelations in this book knowledge I recieved already before via dreams, intuitions and inspirations.
Mary Magdalena had the choice to marry Jesus or Matthew, the apostle; but she chose Jesus. She was NEVER a whore. This has been invented by the church to insure when the truth comes out, Christians wont believe it, because they wont believe he married a whore.
Constantine is not only responcible for the writing of the bible but also for most of the truth going missing.
I dream that he was LUCIFER incarnated; and he is back too and a very famous carismatic preacher in South-Africa. He ones stated in an interview, that he is a salesman, and he sales Jesus because he believes in his product!
Who is he to sell something that does not belong to him?
Interesting is that he was a bouncer in a nightclub before he became a pastor, and he claims to earn more then 10 times as much as the everage person, divorced his wife to marry a three times divorced women and told the congregation never to name his first wifes name...you get the picture?
I also dreamed that Jesus was born again in September 2002, and Mary, his mother in September 2006.
Josef was born in march 1999.
The prophets Elijah, Moses and Joshua are also back and in their late 50's. They are all 3 jews. Moses and Elijah are the 2 witnesses to come in the endtimes.
The girl who was Jesus daughter 2000 years ago, is now his mother.
Mary Magdalena is also back on earth.
I guess this might be an indication how far away the kingdom of God and the day of the Lord still are. Elijah has to first pave the way and restore all things, as Jesus predicted. Then the kingdom comes, and then Jesus will rule...
Interesting is that I'm not the only one having this dreams and vision...
So far over 500 dreams of mine have come true. Therefore I take them very seriously...
Even Satan is back again as a man, for that is what he was; a man (not a snake) who slept with Eve. Abel was the fruit of that adultery and hence the 2 sons of Eve hated each other because they had different fathers.
Believe it or not...

Secrets Behind The Da Vinci Code

Code_Fan — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:15:33 CST

The Da Vinci Code: History or Fiction?

Uncover the Truth Behind the Book

Welcome to Secrets Behind The Da Vinci Code, a community where anyone can contribute and edit information exploring the history and stories that inspired the world-famous book and the movie.

Search for the proof! Some topics you'll find on this wiki:

Was Mary Magdalene really a prostitute?	Were Jesus and Mary Magdalene married?
Do Secret Societies Exist? Brush up on the terms and history in the extensive Da Vinci Code Glossary. Discuss the Gnostic Gospels.	Discuss the art and architecture featured in The Da Vinci Code book and movie. Take the "Code Tour" of the Louvre!
The Da Vinci Code movie opened to controversy Discuss the movie	Meet the man behind The Da Vinci Code Rare Interview with author Dan Brown
And there's more! Dig deeper into the codes and symbols. Read fun facts about The Da Vinci Code phenomenon.	Do you have a topic you'd like to discuss with others? Each page offers a comments section at the bottom. Start a discussion today!

The Sacred Feminine

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:11:36 CST

The sacred feminine is that other face of God that has not been honored over the two millennia of Christianity--at least not as a fully equal partner. -- Margaret Starbird

As readers of the The Da Vinci Code will recall, almost on arrival in the middle of the night at Leigh Teabing’s Château Villette, Sophie Neveu finds herself immersed in explanations and theoretical pyrotechnics from Teabing and Langdon about the Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene, and the sacred feminine. Langdon tells Sophie: The Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess…The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean. ... When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the lost Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be searching for the chalice were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.

The Case for the Sacred Feminine

The case for the sacred feminine/suppressed goddess/Mary Magdalene analysis that Langdon and Teabing lay out for Sophie in the book raises some of the most intellectually fascinating questions. To be sure, it is implausible in many respects, especially the way this set of mysteries has been wrapped into the enigmas of the plot. But it is profoundly interesting. In making his late-night case, the fictional Langdon draws heavily on Margaret Starbird, Elaine Pagels, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Riane Eisler, and others.

These experts put forward their own arguments about the role of the sacred feminine in the development of Western culture, thought, politics, philosophy, and religion. They recall the goddess-worshipping cults in Egypt, Greece, Crete, and Rome, and gender roles in the context of the Judeo-Christian biblical era. They sift through the Christian experience of the early and medieval church. And they examine spirituality, myths, legends, and traditions that associate special sacred significance with women in general, and with Mary Magdalene in particular.

God Does Not Look Like a Man

An Interview with Margaret Starbird

Two of Margaret Starbird’s real-life books are specifically mentioned in The Da Vinci Code when they attract Sophie Neveu’s interest on Leigh Teabing’s library shelves in Château Villette: The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail and The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine. In the interview below for this book, Starbird briefly explains her view of the sacred feminine. She also declares that characterizing Mary Magdalene as an apostle, equal to Peter, or perhaps even more important than Peter, does not go nearly far enough. Our interview presents an introduction to Starbird’s thinking.

How does the concept of the sacred feminine differ from the way most religions seem to assume the primacy of male deities?

More and more, we are becoming aware that the Divine we call God does not really look like the patriarch on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. For two millennia Christians have been attributing exclusively masculine images to God, using masculine pronouns when speaking of the Creator. But intellectually, we realize that God is not male. God is beyond gender, the weaver beyond the veil and beyond our ability to conceive God. So we limit God by ascribing attributes to Him. God is neither male nor female, which is why the Jews were always told never to make images of God. But Christians dropped this idea, and ascribed to God and Jesus the epithets Father and Son. When the Greek words for Holy Spirit were translated into Latin, they became masculine: Spiritus Sanctus. The entire trinity was characterized as masculine from the fifth century onward in Western Europe.

The sacred feminine is that other face of God that has not been honored over the two millennia of Christianity--at least, not as a fully equal partner. The Virgin Mary certainly embodies one aspect of God as feminine: the Blessed Mother, our advocate at the throne of her Son. But in Christianity, the paradigm of partnership, the life-giving principle on planet earth, has not been celebrated or even acknowledged.

I believe we need to reclaim the lost feminine at all levels: physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. We have been gravely impoverished by the loss of the bride and the mandala of sacred partnership that was to have been the birthright of Christians. We have suffered the loss of Eros/relationship and deep connection with the feminine--the body, the emotions, the intuitive, the kinship of all the living, the blessings of the beautiful and bountiful planet.

____________________________________________________________________________

What do you think?

Was Mary Magdalene really the wife of Jesus? How does this change current religious perspectives and beliefs? Share your opinions.

____________________________________________________________________________

Who is the lost bride of the Christian tradition? How does she tie in with the concept of the sacred feminine?

There is only one model for life on planet earth--and that model is sacred union. In ancient cultures, this fundamental reality was honored in cults that celebrated the mutuality and symbiosis of the masculine and feminine as intimate partners. Examples are Tammuz/Ishtar, Baal/Astarte, Adonis/Venus, Osiris/Isis. In these cultures, the joy from their bridal chambers spread out into the crops and herds, and into the people of their realm. Similar rites were acknowledged in various liturgies throughout the Near East. The Song of Songs is a redaction of ancient liturgical poetry from the hieros gamos rites of Isis and Osiris. Invariably the king is executed and his bride seeks him, mourning his death, and is eventually reunited with him. In The Song of Songs, the fragrance of the bride is nard [spikenard, an eastern perfume or ointment] which wafts around the bridegroom at the banquet table. And in the Gospel, again it is nard with which Mary anoints Jesus, and the fragrance filled the house (John 12:3).

On seven of eight lists of women who accompanied Jesus, Mary Magdalene is mentioned first, and yet, her status as first lady was later denied. It suited the church fathers of the fourth century to officially elevate the mother of Jesus as Theotokos (God-bearer, Mother of God) but to ignore his bride/beloved. The result has been a distortion of the most basic model for life on our planet--the sacred union of devoted partners.

You just referred to hieros gamos, which is mentioned in The Da Vinci Code and is understood to be a translation from the Greek of sacred marriage. But what does it really mean? And how is it connected to Jesus?

I believe that Jesus embodied the archetype of the sacred bridegroom and that he and his bride together manifested the mythology of hieros gamos. Their union was, in my opinion, the cornerstone of the early Christian community, a radical new way of living a partnership. In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul mentions that the brothers of Jesus and the other apostles travel around with their sister-wives, a phrase that is often translated as Christian sisters. But it actually says sister-wives. What is a sister-wife? There is another place in Scripture where sister and wife occur together and that is in the Song of Songs. There, the bridegroom calls his beloved my sister, my bride. This phrase speaks of an intimate relationship that is beyond that of an arranged marriage. It is a relationship of mutual interest, affection, and special kinship. According to Paul, these apostles were traveling as missionary couples, not as pairs of men as we have been inclined to believe. I firmly believe the model for this relationship was Jesus traveling with his own beloved. It is this intimacy to which the Gospel of Philip alludes when it states: There were three Marys who walked with Jesus. His mother, his sister, and his consort were each a Mary, and goes on to say that Jesus used to kiss Mary Magdalene and the other disciples were jealous.

What is the significance of the chalice--or grail--symbolism?

The chalice or vessel is ubiquitous as a symbol for the feminine container. I have a picture of a pitcher with breasts from about 6000 b.c.e. It represents the feminine as nurturer. Marija Gimbutas [pioneering archaeologist and commentator on goddess symbols and goddess-worshipping cultures of pre-historic Europe and the Near East] noted examples of the letter V on cave walls dating from prehistoric times. The downward-pointing triangle is universally understood as the female pubic triangle, and the hexagram is a very ancient symbol for the cosmic dance of the chalice and the blade, the male and female triangles representing the deities Shiva and Shakti in India.

What role did women play in the earliest days of the Christian church?

Before the Gospels were ever written, women were apparently very much involved in the leadership of the early Christian communities. In his epistles, written in the 50s c.e., Paul mentions various women, including Phoebe, a deaconess, Prisca, and Junia, who exercised leadership in early Christian communities. In the epistle to the Romans (16:6,12), Paul commends several women--Mary, Persis, Tryphosa, and Tryphena--for their hard work. Wealthy women supported Jesus ministry from the beginning, and were faithful to him until the end, standing at the foot of the cross while the male apostles cowered in hiding. Women opened their homes as meeting places and communal living space in the early community, and some served as deaconesses and even priests in the early days of the church. Dr. Dorothy Irvin has discovered and published numerous murals and mosaics from early Christian communities depicting women in priestly robes and regalia. Following the guidelines found in the epistle 1 Timothy, the hierarchy later denied women the right to teach and prophecy in the assembly.

How do you feel about efforts by modern feminist scholars to recast Mary Magdalene as the preeminent apostle?

Although I’m very much in sympathy with research establishing Mary Magdalene as the most faithful of all those who accompanied Jesus during his ministry, I don’t think that styling her as an apostle, equal to Peter, or perhaps even more important than Peter, goes nearly far enough. There is no doubt that Mary Magdalene shows total devotion and faithfulness to Christ. But the Gospel also tells a different story. In the earliest Christian texts, Mary Magdalene is not merely equal in status to Peter. She is identified as the archetypal bride of the eternal bridegroom and provides the model for the quest and desire of the human soul (and the entire human community) for union with the Divine. She models the way of eros relatedness, the way of the heart, and together with her bridegroom, provides the paradigm for imaging the Divine as partners. Her role of apostle or emissary fades in comparison.

Some people, taking this argument too literally, seem to feel that styling Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus somehow demeans her. The argument seems to be that it defines her in terms of her relationship with a man which somehow diminishes her own stature. I believe this is far too narrow a view. One needs to realize that the sacred marriage we are discussing here is not merely about a first-century Jewish rabbi and his wife. It is really about the archetypal pattern for wholeness, the harmony of the polarities and the syzygy of logos/sophia (reason/wisdom) representing the Divine as a union of opposites.

Throughout the Gospels Jesus is presented as bridegroom, but it is now widely claimed that he had no bride. In the ancient rites of hieros gamos, the royal bride proclaimed and even conferred kingship by her anointing of the bridegroom. Clearly the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed Jesus embodies that ancient archetype, immediately recognized in every corner of the Roman Empire. There was nothing subservient in the mythic act of recognition and endorsement Mary performed in anointing Jesus in the rite of hieros gamos.

See also:

An Open Letter From the Da Vinci Speaks Webmaster

heidianna — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:31:22 CST

What follows is a section from the book: Da Vinci Speaks. It deals with the common opinion that The Da Vinci Code can't be a big deal because it's merely fiction. While this may seem valid, there are consequences to consider when a large group of people are portrayed in a very negative light based on their religion. That is the definition of prejudice. Chapters from Da Vinci Speaks are available to read on the website davincispeaks.com.
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Is The Da Vinci Code really harmless since it's "only" a work of fiction? Good question. Here are some things to consider:

The Vril Society

To embrace an opinion such as "it's only a novel," one must first make the assumption that people can't be influenced by fiction. But, the Nazi philosophy of superior races and the Aryan superman was greatly influenced by a 19th century novel called The Coming Race. The Nazi's preoccupation with the "Vril" force in that book, led to the formation of the "Vril Society" by Hitler's buddy, occultist Karl Haushofer. The group was obsessed with many of the same things as Dan Brown (the Templars, Freemasons, Kabbalah, etc).

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The last chapter in my book is on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That, too, began as a novel (in 1864) and morphed into "true history." That, too, was based on a conspiracy theory; the Jews secret plan to rule the world (I think Seinfeld and Woody Allen are the masterminds). Hitler quoted The Protocols in Mein Kampf, and it became a rationale for the Holocaust and the pogroms in Russia. Without exaggeration, that book has been instumental in the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews and it's still a best seller around the world despite being total nonsense. That book was "only a novel" too.

King Jesus

As most people are aware, Holy Blood was the forerunner of all these "holy grail" books. Those authors got the absurd notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were the reigning King and Queen in Judea at the time of the crucifixion from a 1946 novel called King Jesus, by Robt. Graves. However, in Graves' fictional scenario, Jesus was king because he was the son of Herod Antipater, which is about as likely as him being the son of Caesar; not Julius, but Sid Caesar, the Jewish comic! What kind of author would take the fanciful speculation in a work of fiction and claim it's true with absolutely no evidence to support it?

Holy Blood is supposedly non-fiction, despite the authors statement that they were "writing the book as "novelists". Why? So they "wouldn't have to stick to the facts". Henry Lincoln even admitted there are no facts to support any of their claims. But when Dan Brown read their book, he apparently didn't notice any of this and proudly announced later on CNN, that "ninety-nine percent of The Da Vinci Code is true"! He believed the theories just like the authors of Holy Blood, who, at times, have a hard time distinguishing reality from the Twilight Zone. He is someone who rarely goes beyond the superficial. To use his own words, "I'm not real big on details."

Our book, Da Vinci Speaks, is about the art of deception and how to know when you're being manipulated. The DVC, Holy Blood and the Gnostic Gospels are merely the tools we use. Why is spotting deception and misinformation important? One reason is the strange occurrance in 1933 when the German people elected Adolf Hitler in a free, open and democratic society. That remains inexplicable since it happened nine years after Mein Kampf laid out all his plans in advance. This stands as an eternal testament to the too-trusting nature of the public. Not everyone was fooled though. Right before the election, Albert Einstein went on vacation and when Hitler emerged victorious, he didn't return home. If we learn to look at things a little more carefully, perhaps we can avoid such mistakes in the future.

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