WHAT IS THE REAL MESSAGE OF “THE DA VINCI CODE”?
Dr Mathew Clark – ATS
Dan Brown’s book has been a world best seller, and has received as many brickbats as if has much acclaim. Criticisms have ranged from “ridiculous plot”, plagiarism, “poorly written” to “anti-Christian.”
Fact is it has been widely read, and is therefore (for better or worse) influential. With the fickle public its story will soon be forgotten, but perhaps its message will linger on in the sub-consciousness of the world. It is this continuing impression of which Christians need to take note.
If the Da Vinci Code has a message that will linger, what is it? Phrased differently, what is it in the Da Vinci Code that makes if attractive and acceptable to the 21st century reader/viewer?
Let’s look first at some of the “startling information” the work claims to reveal for perhaps the first time:
- “New” information from the Da Vinci Code
1.1The Priory of Sion and Opus Dei
The authoritarian nature of the mediaeval church and its commitment to repressive political rule make it a fair target for suspicion when it comes to the development of “secret societies.”
The dynamical interaction between the Christian groups of East and West, between Islam and Christendom, and between the church and various reforming and/or ascetic groups within its midst, provided fertile soil for all sorts of intrigues and rumours of intrigue. It is a fact that numerous sub-groups within Christendom came into existence, from the Franciscan and Dominican orders to the Knights of St John and the Society of Jesus. Their involvement in politics, religious reform and intrigue varied between them according to their stated aims and the character of their leaders.
Brown claims the Priory of Sion is such a “secret” organisation whose historical membership has only recently been unearthed in a Paris library of ancient documents. Brown here reveals what becomes normal throughout his work: a total lack of critical analysis when it comes to documents or alleged documents that support his thesis. This is forgivable in a writer of fiction. However, the Priory of Sion should probably be taken as seriously as the so-called Illuminati. Conspiracy theories always sell well!
Wikipedia claims that the Priory of Sion ” ultimately, has been shown to be a hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, a pretender to the French throne. The evidence presented in support of its historical existence has not been considered authentic or persuasive by established historians, academics, and universities, and the evidence was later discovered to have been forged and then planted in various locations around France by Plantard and his associates.”
As for the Roman Catholic group Opus Dei, it exists. It makes no secret of its existence. Its use of “pain-makers” to encourage spiritual and physical discipline is admitted. Time magazine published a fully-detailed and well-researched expose of the group in its 24th April 2006 edition, in which the group co-operated fully. Once again the notion of a conspiratorial group works well in fiction but probably not in fact.
1.2Da Vinci and his codes
Leonardo Da Vinci is probably one of the greatest Renaissance enigmas. He is like a man outside of his own time. Indeed, some science fiction writers maintain that he was precisely that: a time traveller from the Renaissance’s future that became stranded in an earlier age. Something like Mark Twain’s A Yankee in the courts of King Arthur.
What is certain is that he was a man of insight and intelligence and curiosity beyond the norm of his time. There were no secrets of life and science he did not snuffle around, and his intelligence and playfulness find full expression in his art, where all sorts of humour and innuendo can be discovered. That such a character should embed “coded messages” in his art and writings is only to be expected. Whether those messages, real or not, need to be taken seriously, is entirely another matter. If a novelist wishes to do so, and thus enrich himself, this is surely a valid pursuit in the world of art and entertainment. Da Vinci would have approved. Whether the codes that Brown sees in Da Vinci’s art actually exist, is another matter.
Da Vinci was not the only such encoder. According to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times (14th April, 2006: “Art mystery”):
“In some cases -- particularly in works from the Renaissance, the golden age of ‘coded’ art -- the images originally were meant to be mysterious. To demonstrate their erudition, the artists packed their paintings with so many symbols, allegories and allusions that viewers were forced to resort to reference books in which the most popular emblems of the day were unpacked and explicated.
In other cases, the artists never intended the works as riddles to be worked out by their first viewers, many of whom would have understood them with little trouble; the shroud of mystery that attaches to the images is the result of the knowledge and context that has since fallen away. A painting that was perfectly legible in the 16th century can seem, to the average viewer in the 21st, like the work of an artistic Sphinx. “
1.3The “Divine proportion” – PHI – 1.618
Many people first encounter the startling mathematical structure of nature when reading the Code. Here Brown’s hero Langdon describes the ubiquity of the ratio 1.618 throughout nature. For many this is direct proof that the natural world is the product of intelligent design. For the Bible-believing Christian such an assumption is not a problem, but care needs to be taken before advancing this as irrefutable evidence of such design.
It is a fact that the world of nature and physics reveals a tremendous amount of mathematical regularity. For instance, the gestation period for the eggs of most birds consists of multiples of 7 days. The natural world is also very finely tuned: should the 50th decimal place in the gravity coefficient be changed by one digit, then nuclear fusion could never take place and our universe with its stars and our carbon-based life-forms could never exist! While these sobering facts urge us to give thought to the nature of the universe, they cannot be infallible proof of the existence of intelligent design.
The divine proportion is not an absolute in nature, but is closely linked to the human perception of what is aesthetically pleasing – e g in the relationships between notes in a major scale in music. There may therefore be an element of subjectivity in its perception.
1.4The cryptex
Brown describes a coded cylinder in which secret documents could be hidden. If the cylinder were forced, or not opened according to a secret code known only by the author and the intended recipient, the document would be destroyed by released acid.
Historical research has not been able to prove that such a device as the cryptex ever existed. Great for a novel, unlikely in the real world.
- The real message of the Da Vinci code
The above examples of “interesting information” from Brown’s work are merely background for the real message of the work. And message it is – the work has not just an entertaining tone but a crusading spirit. There is a “truth” the world needs to know. How committed Brown himself is to this truth is neither here nor there. His work becomes a vehicle for a message that finds resonance throughout much of the post-Christian world. Simply stated, this message is:
a)Divinity is feminine – his so-called “divine feminine”
b)The Christian church has tried to keep this truth under wraps in favour of its own patriarchal dogma.
The reason why this message finds resonance in contemporary popular (and even academic) culture is because it is completely in line with the basic thrust of much New Age sentiment, as well as with the foundational values of “political correctness” as evidenced in academic and political discourse.
2.1The divine feminine
It is a central theme among New Age proponents that as the planet moves from the House of Pisces to the House of Aquarius, the age of the male gods comes to an end. Whether these male gods are the gods of Olympus (Zeus and company) or the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of Christianity, or Allah of the Muslims, or the major male gods of the Hindu pantheon (Vishnu, Krishna, etc), the change of the age determines that their influence is over.
Underlying much of this sentiment of the notion that the male gods as dominant deities were interlopers anyway. They were introduced into the bronze-age Mediterranean basin, and into Mesopotamia, and into the Indian sub-continent, by Aryan invaders with iron-age technology. Bearded men of war, men with chariots of iron and horses fleet of foot, men who revered bearded gods of war and of conquest.
Before their advent the civilisation of these major regions were predominantly agricultural, with nomadic pastoral groups on their fringes (such as the Hebrews.) And these earliest civilisations revered the most basic and all-pervasive form of divinity: the feminine. Some of the oldest religious artefacts ever unearthed in Eurasia are clay and stone figurines of the Earth Mother Goddess
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Earth Mother Goddess Figurine
The notion of the divine feminine was closely linked to the cycles of wet and dry seasons, of seed-time and harvest. The myths associated with this cycle normally referred to a dominant feminine entity linked to a dying and later resurrected male entity. This coupling is evident in the Baal epic, where Anath (Astarte) is the dominant feminine entity and Baal is the dying god resurrected by the power and intervention of Anath. Similar myths link Cybele and Attis (grandmother and grandson) in Asia Minor, Isis, Osiris and Horus (a more complicated triangle of sister-brother-son) in Egypt, and Aphrodite and Adonis in Greek legend. In all of these myths the relationship between the couples are explicitly sexual and incestuous. The more common Greek cycle involves two women, the mother-daughter pairing of Demeter and Persephone (Core). There is no intimation of a sexual relationship here.
Cybele and Attis
Early figurine of Cybele – Earth Mother
The symbol most representative of the dominance of the feminine divinity is the mother-and-child portrait, common in pagan art and found even in some forms of Christianity in the Madonna-with-Jesus motif.
“Madonnas”
This divine feminine principle is linked to a number of natural phenomena. The earth is the goddess Gaia (and later derivatives), the moon the goddess Ishtar (and derivatives), the male figures are necessary for impregnation, but the fruitfulness flows from the bountiful reproduction of the feminine.
The popularity of the principle of the divine feminine in New Age thinking (and in political correctness as well) is often based on the notion that the feminine principle is less aggressive, assertive, confrontational and warlike than the masculine. Male bearded gods are gods of war, bloodshed, cruelty and violence. Female goddesses are more loving, gentle, nurturing. Not destructive but reproductive. (Amazingly, despite such truisms, the rituals and legends related to these feminine deities often involved ritual mutilation and human sacrifice!) The age of Aquarius will be an age of peace, not warfare.
2.2The propaganda of a patriarchal church
It has become standard, virtually unquestioned, practice to label the Christian church as a patriarchal institution. It reveres a male God, based on a text compiled exclusively by males, and generally reserves leadership and didactic positions within its ranks for males.
The “church institutional” is of course highly vulnerable to such labelling, since any historical overview of its gender makeup simply confirms the label. And across the spectrum of denominationalised Christianity, from the halls of the Vatican to the fundamentalist seminaries of the US Bible Belt, there is still strong resistance to any role by females in church leadership.
That such an institution has something to hide is just too juicy a possibility to ignore. And with public spiritual sentiment (swayed by New Age spirituality) leaning toward the notion of feminine essence in divinity, while the feminist influence in political correctness forces the male ego onto the defensive, what better conspiracy theory than to claim the church as institution is actually hiding a massive secret? The truth that, even in Christian tradition, God has always been actually female, not male! Obviously, entrenched male interests cannot allow such a truth to emerge.
The real message of the Da Vinci Code is that church as currently institutionalised is a massive fraud aimed at perpetuating the greatest lie of two millennia: God is male.
This is a message popular culture is not as loath to receive as theologians might imagine. It resonates with the spirit of the times. The church, whether viewed as the massive Roman Catholic denomination, or as the mass hysteria of the “charismaniac” gurus, is no longer a respected organisation in the world. It deserves to be unmasked as a group of charlatans who have perverted the truth of feminine divinity – the oldest truth in the world!
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