Dear peanuts88,
You can read Sandra Miesel's review of "The Da Vinci Code" online on
the Crisis Magazine website:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/feature1.htm
Just in case the article disappears in the meantime, here is the full
text (Copyright 2003 Morley Publishing Group, Inc., the publisher of
Crisis Magazine):
Dismantling The Da Vinci Code
By Sandra Miesel
“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When
Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily.
Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy 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 non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence
for the sacred feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239)
The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but
difficult-to-attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord
Stanley’s Cup. While the original Grail—the cup Jesus allegedly used
at the Last Supper—normally inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance,
Dan Brown’s recent mega–best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, rips it away
to the realm of esoteric history.
But his book is more than just the story of a quest for the Grail—he
wholly reinterprets the Grail legend. In doing so, Brown inverts the
insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a
container symbolically a woman’s body. And that container has a name
every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail
was actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the blood of
Jesus Christ in her womb while bearing his children.
Over the centuries, the Grail-keepers have been guarding the true (and
continuing) bloodline of Christ and the relics of the Magdalen, not a
material vessel. Therefore Brown claims that “the quest for the Holy
Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene,” a
conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the other
Grail knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the
Last Supper.
The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator
inside the museum. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy
professor of symbolism from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter,
burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Nevue. Together with crippled
millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one
step ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei “monk” named Silas
who will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the “Grail.”
But despite the frenetic pacing, at no point is action allowed to
interfere with a good lecture. Before the story comes full circle back
to the Louvre, readers face a barrage of codes, puzzles, mysteries,
and conspiracies.
With his twice-stated principle, “Everybody loves a conspiracy,” Brown
is reminiscent of the famous author who crafted her product by
studying the features of ten earlier best-sellers. It would be too
easy to criticize him for characters thin as plastic wrap,
undistinguished prose, and improbable action. But Brown isn’t so much
writing badly as writing in a particular way best calculated to
attract a female audience. (Women, after all, buy most of the nation’s
books.) He has married a thriller plot to a romance-novel technique.
Notice how each character is an extreme type…effortlessly brilliant,
smarmy, sinister, or psychotic as needed, moving against luxurious but
curiously flat backdrops. Avoiding gore and bedroom gymnastics, he
shows only one brief kiss and a sexual ritual performed by a married
couple. The risqué allusions are fleeting although the text lingers
over some bloody Opus Dei mortifications. In short, Brown has
fabricated a novel perfect for a ladies’ book club.
Brown’s lack of seriousness shows in the games he plays with his
character names—Robert Langdon, “bright fame long don” (distinguished
and virile); Sophie Nevue, “wisdom New Eve”; the irascible taurine
detective Bezu Fache, “zebu anger.” The servant who leads the police
to them is Legaludec, “legal duce.” The murdered curator takes his
surname, Saunière, from a real Catholic priest whose occult antics
sparked interest in the Grail secret. As an inside joke, Brown even
writes in his real-life editor (Faukman is Kaufman).
While his extensive use of fictional formulas may be the secret to
Brown’s stardom, his anti-Christian message can’t have hurt him in
publishing circles: The Da Vinci Code debuted atop the New York Times
best-seller list. By manipulating his audience through the conventions
of romance-writing, Brown invites readers to identify with his smart,
glamorous characters who’ve seen through the impostures of the clerics
who hide the “truth” about Jesus and his wife. Blasphemy is delivered
in a soft voice with a knowing chuckle: “[E]very faith in the world is
based on fabrication.”
But even Brown has his limits. To dodge charges of outright bigotry,
he includes a climactic twist in the story that absolves the Church of
assassination. And although he presents Christianity as a false root
and branch, he’s willing to tolerate it for its charitable works.
(Of course, Catholic Christianity will become even more tolerable once
the new liberal pope elected in Brown’s previous Langdon novel, Angels
& Demons, abandons outmoded teachings. “Third-century laws cannot be
applied to the modern followers of Christ,” says one of the book’s
progressive cardinals.)
Where Is He Getting All of This?
Brown actually cites his principal sources within the text of his
novel. One is a specimen of academic feminist scholarship: The Gnostic
Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The others are popular esoteric histories:
The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of
Christ by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince; Holy Blood, Holy Grail by
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; The Goddess in the
Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine and The Woman with the
Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, both by Margaret
Starbird. (Starbird, a self-identified Catholic, has her books
published by Matthew Fox’s outfit, Bear & Co.) Another influence, at
least at second remove, is The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and
Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.
The use of such unreliable sources belies Brown’s pretensions to
intellectuality. But the act has apparently fooled at least some of
his readers—the New York Daily News book reviewer trumpeted, “His
research is impeccable.”
But despite Brown’s scholarly airs, a writer who thinks the
Merovingians founded Paris and forgets that the popes once lived in
Avignon is hardly a model researcher. And for him to state that the
Church burned five million women as witches shows a willful—and
malicious—ignorance of the historical record. The latest figures for
deaths during the European witch craze are between 30,000 to 50,000
victims. Not all were executed by the Church, not all were women, and
not all were burned. Brown’s claim that educated women, priestesses,
and midwives were singled out by witch-hunters is not only false, it
betrays his goddess-friendly sources.
A Multitude of Errors
So error-laden is The Da Vinci Code that the educated reader actually
applauds those rare occasions where Brown stumbles (despite himself)
into the truth. A few examples of his “impeccable” research: He claims
that the motions of the planet Venus trace a pentacle (the so-called
Ishtar pentagram) symbolizing the goddess. But it isn’t a perfect
figure and has nothing to do with the length of the Olympiad. The
ancient Olympic games were celebrated in honor of Zeus Olympias, not
Aphrodite, and occurred every four years.
Brown’s contention that the five linked rings of the modern Olympic
Games are a secret tribute to the goddess is also wrong—each set of
games was supposed to add a ring to the design but the organizers
stopped at five. And his efforts to read goddess propaganda into art,
literature, and even Disney cartoons are simply ridiculous.
No datum is too dubious for inclusion, and reality falls quickly by
the wayside. For instance, the Opus Dei bishop encourages his albino
assassin by telling him that Noah was also an albino (a notion drawn
from the non-canonical 1 Enoch 106:2). Yet albinism somehow fails to
interfere with the man’s eyesight as it physiologically would.
But a far more important example is Brown’s treatment of Gothic
architecture as a style full of goddess-worshipping symbols and coded
messages to confound the uninitiated. Building on Barbara Walker’s
claim that “like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral represented the
body of the Goddess,” The Templar Revelation asserts: “Sexual
symbolism is found in the great Gothic cathedrals which were
masterminded by the Knights Templar...both of which represent intimate
female anatomy: the arch, which draws the worshipper into the body of
Mother Church, evokes the vulva.” In The Da Vinci Code, these
sentiments are transformed into a character’s description of “a
cathedral’s long hollow nave as a secret tribute to a woman’s
womb...complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little
cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway.”
These remarks cannot be brushed aside as opinions of the villain;
Langdon, the book’s hero, refers to his own lectures about
goddess-symbolism at Chartres.
These bizarre interpretations betray no acquaintance with the actual
development or construction of Gothic architecture, and correcting the
countless errors becomes a tiresome exercise: The Templars had nothing
to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by
bishops and their canons throughout Europe. They were unlettered men
with no arcane knowledge of “sacred geometry” passed down from the
pyramid builders. They did not wield tools themselves on their own
projects, nor did they found masons’ guilds to build for others. Not
all their churches were round, nor was roundness a defiant insult to
the Church. Rather than being a tribute to the divine feminine, their
round churches honored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Actually looking at Gothic churches and their predecessors deflates
the idea of female symbolism. Large medieval churches typically had
three front doors on the west plus triple entrances to their transepts
on the north and south. (What part of a woman’s anatomy does a
transept represent? Or the kink in Chartres’s main aisle?) Romanesque
churches—including ones that predate the founding of the Templars—have
similar bands of decoration arching over their entrances. Both Gothic
and Romanesque churches have the long, rectangular nave inherited from
Late Antique basilicas, ultimately derived from Roman public
buildings. Neither Brown nor his sources consider what symbolism
medieval churchmen such as Suger of St.-Denis or William Durandus read
in church design. It certainly wasn’t goddess-worship.
False Claims
If the above seems like a pile driver applied to a gnat, the blows are
necessary to demonstrate the utter falseness of Brown’s material. His
willful distortions of documented history are more than matched by his
outlandish claims about controversial subjects. But to a
postmodernist, one construct of reality is as good as any other.
Brown’s approach seems to consist of grabbing large chunks of his
stated sources and tossing them together in a salad of a story. From
Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown lifts the concept of the Grail as a
metaphor for a sacred lineage by arbitrarily breaking a medieval
French term, Sangraal (Holy Grail), into sang (blood) and raal
(royal). This holy blood, according to Brown, descended from Jesus and
his wife, Mary Magdalene, to the Merovingian dynasty in Dark Ages
France, surviving its fall to persist in several modern French
families, including that of Pierre Plantard, a leader of the
mysterious Priory of Sion. The Priory—an actual organization
officially registered with the French government in 1956—makes
extraordinary claims of antiquity as the “real” power behind the
Knights Templar. It most likely originated after World War II and was
first brought to public notice in 1962. With the exception of
filmmaker Jean Cocteau, its illustrious list of Grand Masters—which
include Leonardo da Vinci, Issac Newton, and Victor Hugo—is not
credible, although it’s presented as true by Brown.
Brown doesn’t accept a political motivation for the Priory’s
activities. Instead he picks up The Templar Revelation’s view of the
organization as a cult of secret goddess-worshippers who have
preserved ancient Gnostic wisdom and records of Christ’s true mission,
which would completely overturn Christianity if released.
Significantly, Brown omits the rest of the book’s thesis that makes
Christ and Mary Magdalene unmarried sex partners performing the erotic
mysteries of Isis. Perhaps even a gullible mass-market audience has
its limits.
From both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation, Brown
takes a negative view of the Bible and a grossly distorted image of
Jesus. He’s neither the Messiah nor a humble carpenter but a wealthy,
trained religious teacher bent on regaining the throne of David. His
credentials are amplified by his relationship with the rich Magdalen
who carries the royal blood of Benjamin: “Almost everything our
fathers taught us about Christ is false,” laments one of Brown’s
characters.
Yet it’s Brown’s Christology that’s false—and blindingly so. He
requires the present New Testament to be a post-Constantinian
fabrication that displaced true accounts now represented only by
surviving Gnostic texts. He claims that Christ wasn’t considered
divine until the Council of Nicea voted him so in 325 at the behest of
the emperor. Then Constantine—a lifelong sun worshipper—ordered all
older scriptural texts destroyed, which is why no complete set of
Gospels predates the fourth century. Christians somehow failed to
notice the sudden and drastic change in their doctrine.
But by Brown’s specious reasoning, the Old Testament can’t be
authentic either because complete Hebrew Scriptures are no more than a
thousand years old. And yet the texts were transmitted so accurately
that they do match well with the Dead Sea Scrolls from a thousand
years earlier. Analysis of textual families, comparison with fragments
and quotations, plus historical correlations securely date the
orthodox Gospels to the first century and indicate that they’re
earlier than the Gnostic forgeries. (The Epistles of St. Paul are, of
course, even earlier than the Gospels.)
Primitive Church documents and the testimony of the ante-Nicean
Fathers confirm that Christians have always believed Jesus to be Lord,
God, and Savior—even when that faith meant death. The earliest partial
canon of Scripture dates from the late second century and already
rejected Gnostic writings. For Brown, it isn’t enough to credit
Constantine with the divinization of Jesus. The emperor’s old
adherence to the cult of the Invincible Sun also meant repackaging sun
worship as the new faith. Brown drags out old (and long-discredited)
charges by virulent anti-Catholics like Alexander Hislop who accused
the Church of perpetuating Babylonian mysteries, as well as
19th-century rationalists who regarded Christ as just another dying
savior-god.
Unsurprisingly, Brown misses no opportunity to criticize Christianity
and its pitiable adherents. (The church in question is always the
Catholic Church, though his villain does sneer once at Anglicans—for
their grimness, of all things.) He routinely and anachronistically
refers to the Church as “the Vatican,” even when popes weren’t in
residence there. He systematically portrays it throughout history as
deceitful, power-crazed, crafty, and murderous: “The Church may no
longer employ crusades to slaughter, but their influence is no less
persuasive. No less insidious.”
Goddess Worship and the Magdalen
Worst of all, in Brown’s eyes, is the fact that the pleasure-hating,
sex-hating, woman-hating Church suppressed goddess worship and
eliminated the divine feminine. He claims that goddess worship
universally dominated pre-Christian paganism with the hieros gamos
(sacred marriage) as its central rite. His enthusiasm for fertility
rites is enthusiasm for sexuality, not procreation. What else would
one expect of a Cathar sympathizer?
Astonishingly, Brown claims that Jews in Solomon’s Temple adored
Yahweh and his feminine counterpart, the Shekinah, via the services of
sacred prostitutes—possibly a twisted version of the Temple’s
corruption after Solomon (1 Kings 14:24 and 2 Kings 23:4-15).
Moreover, he says that the tetragrammaton YHWH derives from “Jehovah,
an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the
pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.”
But as any first-year Scripture student could tell you, Jehovah is
actually a 16th-century rendering of Yahweh using the vowels of Adonai
(“Lord”). In fact, goddesses did not dominate the pre-Christian
world—not in the religions of Rome, her barbarian subjects, Egypt, or
even Semitic lands where the hieros gamos was an ancient practice. Nor
did the Hellenized cult of Isis appear to have included sex in its
secret rites.
Contrary to yet another of Brown’s claims, Tarot cards do not teach
goddess doctrine. They were invented for innocent gaming purposes in
the 15th century and didn’t acquire occult associations until the late
18th. Playing-card suites carry no Grail symbolism. The notion of
diamonds symbolizing pentacles is a deliberate misrepresentation by
British occultist A. E. Waite. And the number five—so crucial to
Brown’s puzzles—has some connections with the protective goddess but
myriad others besides, including human life, the five senses, and the
Five Wounds of Christ.
Brown’s treatment of Mary Magdalene is sheer delusion. In The Da Vinci
Code, she’s no penitent whore but Christ’s royal consort and the
intended head of His Church, supplanted by Peter and defamed by
churchmen. She fled west with her offspring to Provence, where
medieval Cathars would keep the original teachings of Jesus alive. The
Priory of Sion still guards her relics and records, excavated by the
Templars from the subterranean Holy of Holies. It also protects her
descendants—including Brown’s heroine.
Although many people still picture the Magdalen as a sinful woman who
anointed Jesus and equate her with Mary of Bethany, that conflation is
actually the later work of Pope St. Gregory the Great. The East has
always kept them separate and said that the Magdalen, “apostle to the
apostles,” died in Ephesus. The legend of her voyage to Provence is no
earlier than the ninth century, and her relics weren’t reported there
until the 13th. Catholic critics, including the Bollandists, have been
debunking the legend and distinguishing the three ladies since the
17th century.
Brown uses two Gnostic documents, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel
of Mary, to prove that the Magdalen was Christ’s “companion,” meaning
sexual partner. The apostles were jealous that Jesus used to “kiss her
on the mouth” and favored her over them. He cites exactly the same
passages quoted in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation
and even picks up the latter’s reference to The Last Temptation of
Christ. What these books neglect to mention is the infamous final
verse of the Gospel of Thomas. When Peter sneers that “women are not
worthy of Life,” Jesus responds, “I myself shall lead her in order to
make her male.... For every woman who will make herself male will
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
That’s certainly an odd way to “honor” one’s spouse or exalt the
status of women.
The Knights Templar
Brown likewise misrepresents the history of the Knights Templar. The
oldest of the military-religious orders, the Knights were founded in
1118 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Their rule, attributed to
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, was approved in 1128 and generous donors
granted them numerous properties in Europe for support. Rendered
redundant after the last Crusader stronghold fell in 1291, the
Templars’ pride and wealth—they were also bankers—earned them keen
hostility.
Brown maliciously ascribes the suppression of the Templars to
“Machiavellian” Pope Clement V, whom they were blackmailing with the
Grail secret. His “ingeniously planned sting operation” had his
soldiers suddenly arrest all Templars. Charged with Satanism, sodomy,
and blasphemy, they were tortured into confessing and burned as
heretics, their ashes “tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber.”
But in reality, the initiative for crushing the Templars came from
King Philip the Fair of France, whose royal officials did the
arresting in 1307. About 120 Templars were burned by local
Inquisitorial courts in France for not confessing or retracting a
confession, as happened with Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Few
Templars suffered death elsewhere although their order was abolished
in 1312. Clement, a weak, sickly Frenchman manipulated by his king,
burned no one in Rome inasmuch as he was the first pope to reign from
Avignon (so much for the ashes in the Tiber).
Moreover, the mysterious stone idol that the Templars were accused of
worshiping is associated with fertility in only one of more than a
hundred confessions. Sodomy was the scandalous—and possibly
true—charge against the order, not ritual fornication. The Templars
have been darlings of occultism since their myth as masters of secret
wisdom and fabulous treasure began to coalesce in the late 18th
century. Freemasons and even Nazis have hailed them as brothers. Now
it’s the turn of neo-Gnostics.
Twisting da Vinci
Brown’s revisionist interpretations of da Vinci are as distorted as
the rest of his information. He claims to have first run across these
views “while I was studying art history in Seville,” but they
correspond point for point to material in The Templar Revelation. A
writer who sees a pointed finger as a throat-cutting gesture, who says
the Madonna of the Rocks was painted for nuns instead of a lay
confraternity of men, who claims that da Vinci received “hundreds of
lucrative Vatican commissions” (actually, it was just one…and it was
never executed) is simply unreliable.
Brown’s analysis of da Vinci’s work is just as ridiculous. He presents
the Mona Lisa as an androgynous self-portrait when it’s widely known
to portray a real woman, Madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco di Bartolomeo
del Giocondo. The name is certainly not—as Brown claims—a mocking
anagram of two Egyptian fertility deities Amon and L’Isa (Italian for
Isis). How did he miss the theory, propounded by the authors of The
Templar Revelation, that the Shroud of Turin is a photographed
self-portrait of da Vinci?
Much of Brown’s argument centers around da Vinci’s Last Supper, a
painting the author considers a coded message that reveals the truth
about Jesus and the Grail. Brown points to the lack of a central
chalice on the table as proof that the Grail isn’t a material vessel.
But da Vinci’s painting specifically dramatizes the moment when Jesus
warns, “One of you will betray me” (John 13:21). There is no
Institution Narrative in St. John’s Gospel. The Eucharist is not shown
there. And the person sitting next to Jesus is not Mary Magdalene (as
Brown claims) but St. John, portrayed as the usual effeminate da Vinci
youth, comparable to his St. John the Baptist. Jesus is in the exact
center of the painting, with two pyramidal groups of three apostles on
each side. Although da Vinci was a spiritually troubled homosexual,
Brown’s contention that he coded his paintings with anti-Christian
messages simply can’t be sustained.
Brown’s Mess
In the end, Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously
researched mess. So, why bother with such a close reading of a
worthless novel? The answer is simple: The Da Vinci Code takes
esoterica mainstream. It may well do for Gnosticism what The Mists of
Avalon did for paganism—gain it popular acceptance. After all, how
many lay readers will see the blazing inaccuracies put forward as
buried truths?
What’s more, in making phony claims of scholarship, Brown’s book
infects readers with a virulent hostility toward Catholicism. Dozens
of occult history books, conveniently cross-linked by Amazon.com, are
following in its wake. And booksellers’ shelves now bulge with
falsehoods few would be buying without The Da Vinci Code connection.
While Brown’s assault on the Catholic Church may be a backhanded
compliment, it’s one we would have happily done without.
Sandra Miesel is a veteran Catholic journalist.
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