Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code

-If it’s Tuesday this must be a conspiracy-

 

By Ron Corson

 

“Everyone loves a conspiracy theory.” These are the fitting words of the Kings College librarian to the protagonists in the best selling book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. As every Librarian knows Dan Brown knows about conspiracies though probably not as well as Lemony Snicket.

 

The Da Vinci Code is the story of Robert Langdon, a symbologist as he is called into a police investigation of a murder at the Louvre museum in Paris. A symbologist in this case is someone who sees the sacred feminine in everything from paintings to architecture to the little girl down the street. If you happen to be an Art History Major you too may someday work on exciting cases involving conspiracies between the Roman Catholic Church and various secret societies. Or at least you can read about it while you stand in line at the unemployment office.

 

 What Robert Langdon discovers is a web of intrigue between secret societies, the Priory of Sion (Religious house of Zion), and the Roman Catholic group of traditionalist known as Opus Dei (Musical God). The traditionalist Catholic musicians want what the Zionists are hiding.

 

One of the villains in this book by some strange fiction writers credo is a large albino man named Silas. Now I have never met an Albino human being in person but it is likely according to many writers that if I do, he will be criminally inclined. A couple examples would be Lemony Snicket’s powder faced women and Dean Koontz’s happy albino anarchist Corky in The Face

 

The traditionalists of the Roman Catholic Church are in a fight to the death for the Holy Grail, the Priory have it secreted away and others want it. This well written book has plenty of puzzles and surprises in store. The book opens with the account of the murder of the curator of the Louvre, who after setting off the alarm is shot in the tummy. Despite his intense stomach ache he manages to hide clues in the form of puzzles and symbols behind some famous painting and on his body and on the floor he writes a message and recreates a famous naked man drawing of Da Vinci. He also composed an ode to a parquet floor but that will be revealed in the sequel entitled, “The Da Vinci Code II Revenge of the Impressionist Masters”. Who the sequel will reveal recast the Holy Grail as a field of yellowish flowers. It may also reveal how the Dutch Masters interpreted the Holy Grail as a rather rotund naked woman at a picnic with several fully attired men. The curator is secretly the Prior of Sion. Prior in this case does not mean someone that did something previously though prior to being murdered he was the chief mucketymuck of the Priory of Sion. It means that he was the head guy of the secret organization which models itself on an Abbot like system. An Abbot of course is a monastery for men, and in this case their goal is to protect the secret of the sacred feminine. Whatever implications this brings to your mind is purely coincidental.

 

Robert Langdon, bachelor hero and named one of top ten intriguing people in Boston is assisted by Sophie Neveu a police cryptographer and secret granddaughter of the famous and now dead curator of the Louvre. Crypts are stone graves used to bury prior living people but Sophie does not take pictures or make drawings of crypts. A cryptographer is someone who decodes secret messages often used in conspiracies. Since everyone loves a conspiracy cryptographers are very popular. Robert and Sophie must solve all the riddles and puzzles and symbology to discover the secret of the Prior who is the guardian of the worlds most powerful and most probably useless secret. Together using their esoteric knowledge of symbols and puzzles the two run from the police and solve the mystery.

 

By attention to detail the author has placed in his book many facts that lead the reader, if they have little knowledge of history to conclude that most of his facts are true. Most of us know nothing of the Priory of Sion or the Knights Templar the inquisition or even the reasons behind the Crusades. As such these areas as well as the more general history of early Christianity can easily be manipulated to create the desired effect. The Priory of Sion seems to have actually been formed by a small group of people in 1956 and the document found in the 1970’s which includes the list of all the famous members is pretty certainly a forgery, which by coincidence has disappeared. This mysterious disappearance however is not mentioned in the book.

 

With some semi-credible assertions the book tells the story through the lens of Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that through Mary, Jesus’ royal line of kings has been preserved. However the mean folks of the Christian church through the agency of Constantine changed the Matriarchal Paganism to Patriarchal Christianity by demonizing the Goddess worship. In The Da Vinci Code Jesus is just a man who many years later was raised to Divinity by the Church. Interestingly he uses a quote from the Gospel of Mary found in the Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi to show us that Mary was married or sexually “knowing” of Jesus (“the Savior knows her very well”). The fact that the book is dated to the 3rd century and the book seems to begin at an appearing of the Savior after the resurrection seems to have no impact upon Dan Browns theory. What the author may have done with John the Beloved disciple with his method of interpretations would send shivers through most Christian’s spines. Thankfully the book does not go in that direction though others have actually gone there. If Christians don’t accept the conjecture that Jesus and John had homosexual relations, it will know doubt be attributed to the homophobia of Christians in the mind of Politically Correct Distortionists.

 

Unlike the pseudo scientific Bible Code (Drosnin 1997) technique, known as Equidistance Letter Sequences (Eliyahu Rips) The Da Vinci Code does not offer a method to see the hidden secret messages in the Bible. The Da Vinci Code of the book is simply the hidden symbolic messages found in certain works of the Italian genius. One of the figures in the Last Supper painting looks remarkably like a woman in the face and symbolically there are shapes that the author analyzes as symbols for the masculine and feminine, with hands in the painting making gestures that symbolize the removal of Mary Magdalene from her rightful place of the “sacred feminine”. The author uses “sacred feminine” several times but never once uses “sacred masculine”. Da Vinci was not really at the last supper nor was he really in the Priory of Sion so he could pretty much paint what he wanted to without needing to hide the sacred feminine everywhere. But of course if a bowl or a cup or a “V” or “U” shaped space can be a symbol of the sacred feminine we must admit that they are everywhere. In fact we are adrift in this type of symbolism between the sacred feminine bowls and the stuff that is longer then it is wide, phallus symbols.  

 

The Da Vinci Code attacks Christianity in a rather Ham fisted way. The Gnostic Gospels are accepted as truth while the Biblical Gospels are rejected. Even though the Gnostics were written much latter and are really kind of silly.  Christianity came from the Jewish tradition which was certainly patriarchal so it is hardly likely that the Christian tradition rejected the Earth Mother in favor of Father God. Though both religions would reject the Pagan matriarchal religions as well as the Pagan patriarchal religions.

 

In the book: "The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever." This is somewhat true, thank God, of course Constantine was not happy with the excessive number of holidays the Pagan religions had and the Christians only wanted one day a week for a sacred day so he did have some other reasons for promoting Christianity. According to the book throughout history the Roman Catholic Church continues this deceit. Producing the impressive conspiracy that everyone loves, the Protestants, with over 1,000 denominations  are not included in this conspiracy since it would be a little hard for them to get together to produce such a massive conspiracy.  Thus the Roman Catholic Church also had to fool all those Protestants, this is indeed a really big conspiracy.

 

So if you enjoy rooting for the underdog this book is for you. The protagonists are on the run with only their knowledge of fictitious history and obscure ancient nature worship to save themselves and all the linage of the Merovingian bloodline. And if you care about the Merovingian’s of French history you will love the French phrases which infest this book. However unlike the literature of Lemony Snicket this book gives us a happy ending. With the mystery nearly solved the conspirators return to keeping secrets and maintaining their conspiracies, because everyone loves a conspiracy.