The novel is a well constructed suspense thriller that unfolds its clues in a clever and complicated manner, certainly a great pot-boiler if not a great work of art. It hits all the right buttons, follows the correct formula, and was, from the start, destined for the best seller list. The 60 million readers who have bought the book as of the fall of 2006 all seem to agree that it is an exciting and entertaining work.
But as the plot unfolds, we are introduced to many things that don’t normally find themselves into such a blatantly commercial work: the esoteric meaning of Renaissance paintings, pagan interpretations of the Pentagram, the role of secret societies behind world politics and religion, pagan sex rituals, Isaac Newton, the Gnostic Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Holy Grail, Masonic architecture, Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, the origins of Christianity, and so on.
True many of these elements have appeared in various forms in Hollywood movies and best selling books, but somehow The Da Vinci Code is different. From the very beginning when Robert Langdon explains to a cynical French police lieutenant the true meaning of the Pentagram after it is found drawn on a dead body at a crime scene, we know that author Dan Brown, while not always rigorous in his historical scholarship and not always correct in his interpretation of occult symbols, does present the five pointed star as a positive and deeply spiritual symbol, in his view a pictograph of the Divine Feminine. This is very different from the evil interpretations that usually accompany mass media’s treatment of occultism. It is the French policeman’s stubborn insistence that the Pentagram is an evil symbol and Langdon’s bold correction that somehow makes The Da Vinci Code a deviation from the typical paranoia-about-evil-demonic-secret-societies-taking-over-the-world formula. Just like the post Cold War James Bond films that could no longer posit the Russian government as the enemy and had to rely for their villains on insane renegade ex-Soviet generals, modern fiction finds it more and more untenable to posit occultists and mystics as pure bad guys. The bad guy has to be some renegade Grail scholar gone amok. The Pentagram is in fact a symbol being used by the good guys.
Yet The Da Vinci Code is not about the occult or occultists, although it does daringly venture far into the esoteric meaning behind religious symbols. It is no secret, and therefore not much of a spoiler, to point out that the mystery revolves around an ancient military order, the Priory of Sion, that protects the bloodline of Jesus Christ, and has been doing so for 2,000 years since the human-all-too-human Christ, married and fathered a child onto Mary Magdalene. It is the suppression of this knowledge that led to a violent and repressive patriarchy that destroyed the goddess religions and denied the sacred feminine its role in the spiritual economy of civilization, and caused all sorts of nasty stuff like the Crusades, the persecution of witches, the destruction of paganism, the persecution of Gnostics, the domination of the Catholic Church and every other bad thing you can possibly think of.
What is remarkable about The Da Vinci Code as a mass media entertainment is that it walks a fine line between heresy and reverence. While it smashes through the power structures of the Catholic Church and debunks the generally accepted stories about Christ, while it portrays the Vatican as an organization that is based on a lie and which suppresses one-half of our spiritual heritage, while it paints the Emperor Constantine as a brutal villain who destroyed paganism with intolerance and military force, while it accepts some of the more outlandish Gnostic gospels as truth and makes claims about Christ that reduce him to a mere mortal of flesh and blood rather than a God, it never once demands that we reject Christianity, but in fact, in the end, encourages that we deepen it, embracing spiritual wisdom and religious legacies from Judeo-Christian esotericism as well as from paganism and ancient goddess cults. In short, it attempts to re-unite the Aeon of Osiris with the Aeon of Isis, balancing one with the other, reintegrating our connection to the Divine by rediscovering the sacred feminine.
Not a bad ambition for a pot boiling best seller.
But the first step in assessing the truth behind the novel that attracted 60 million readers and launched an entire industry of books about Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, the Gnostic Jesus and Leonardo Da Vinci’s mysterious paintings, is to point out that Dan Brown derived his material about the Priory of Sion and the Bloodline of Christ from previous material, in particular a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, published in 1982, which in turn derived its material from sources as far back as 1956, relating to a series of events in a small village in the south of France sometime between 1891 and 1917. And our understanding of those events, all the source material that deals with those events, all the physical, documentary and historical evidence that interprets those events, is based upon an elaborate hoax. It is upon a series of fake documents, false claims, made up stories and fabricated genealogies that The Da Vinci Code has been built.
It is not my intention to debunk the novel in any way, since the labyrinth of claims it makes about Leonardo Da Vinci, the Catholic Church, or the Bloodline of Christ can be considered independently of the hoax that gave birth to the conspiracy theories. But by limiting my discussion to the pivotal base of the story, the secret treasure of Rennes-Le-Chateau and the strange career of Berenger Sauniere, the eccentric cure of that town, I intend to focus on how a complex forgery gave birth to a mythology that has been consumed by four generations of conspiracy buffs. We can gain much insight by examining how a book based on a hoax, on lies that were accepted as fact, on a secret society that made false claims, can lead to a best selling suspense thriller that ultimately unlocked a profound spiritual truth, and spoke to mass audiences all over the world in a way that has been unparalleled in modern publishing history.
continued in issue 32
