Ah...the books you pick up at the airport bookstore. Actually, I shouldn't say that. Everybody always reads bestseller trash with this big sob-story excuse like they were somehow obliged to read it. Then they talk about it afterwards in this pretentious tone like they are somehow intellectually superior to everybody who read a book that sold millions of copies.
Let's get a couple facts straight before I go any further. I picked up The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown because I was curious about it. I read the whole thing from cover to cover because it was sufficiently engaging to hold my attention.
I guess I'm pointing out all these facts because I decided to do an internet search on The Da Vinci Code this morning just to see what some other people thought about it. The first criticism I came across was this super-obnoxious rant from some dipshit who thought the rules of writing can be expressed in generalized phrases like "never place a modifier at the beginning of a rudimentary clause...blah blah blah...snore." The only reason people write crap like that is to show off the fact that they can identify all the ridiculous parts of a sentence. For some reason, people think that practicing that skill makes them "writers." It doesn't.
But as much fun as it is to skewer overly-intellectual types who never get laid, the reality is that I was a little embarrassed carrying The Da Vinci Code around. It's especially annoying because...well, when you walk around with a book you really like, you always kind of hope that some attractive girl will see you reading it and walk up and be like:
Girl: "Hey, you're reading Catch-22, that's one of my favorites!"
You: "Yeah, I like the joke about Major major major major."
Girl: "Ha, ha, that was a good one." (she plays with her hair slyly and brushes her hand across her perfectly formed, 22-year old bosom.) "You seem to be a man of the world, I need somebody like you to teach me."
You: "I'm all yours."
Girl: "Great, the first thing I want to learn is how to satisfy a man orally. The sooner we get started the better, and I'm going to keep on practicing until I get it right!"
You: "That's the spirit!"
But of course, nobody ever says a damn thing to you when you're sitting in an airport reading Catch-22. The only time they ever say anything to you is when you're sitting there trying to hide the fact that you're reading the Da Vinci Code.
"Ohhh, is it your first time reading that?"
"You mean people read this more than once?"
Conversation ends.
Ok. Let me just state for the record that The Da Vinci Code is not literature. It is not well-written. I could tell you why but I don't think anybody's really interested in that crap, I'm going to focus on the positives instead. The fact is that in spite of the writing, there is some spectacularly good information to be gotten from the Da Vinci Code which I think anybody who finds anything of any value at all on my page would be fascinated by.
If you were to take the Da Vinci Code and cut it down to a fifteen page research paper about Symbolism and the Holy Grail, you'd have something wonderful. There are several places in the book where Dan Brown abandons his clunky narrative and just gives the reader well-researched information for a couple of pages. These sections are absolutely great! The only downside is that to get to them you have to go through fifty to a hundred page sections where people are sticking electronic people tracers into bars of soap to escape from the police.
For example, there's an extended lecture on the number PHI (1.618) which is the value of the divine ratio (1.618 to 1). Apparently this ratio appears everywhere (they even talk about it in the movie "pi," so it must be true. That's a damn good movie by the way). Brown lists several examples of where the divine ratio appears in nature:
1. In any beehive in the world the number of female bees to the number of male bees is 1.618 to 1.
2. In any spiral seashell, the ratio of each spiral's diameter to the next is 1.618 to 1.
3. The distance from your head to the floor compared with the distance from your bellybutton to the floor is also 1.618 to 1.
Brown lists a whole lot more but you get the idea. This ratio appears all over the place and no matter what you believe, it is kind of an interesting phenomenon isn't it? The number PHI can also be derived from the Fibonacci sequence. Now the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two. It goes like this:
1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,...
Apparently the "quotients of adjacent terms [possess] the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618--PHI" (Brown 100). Now, a quotient is something that I used to remember but I have subsequently forgotten. In any case, you don't need a degree in math to see that PHI is somehow linked to that weird progressive sequence.
The Da Vinci Code is filled with bits of information and history about mathematical mind-fucks like this. These are the types tidbits that you could casually toss out at a dinner conversation and have everybody think you were a real intellectual (except that everybody's read the Da Vinci Code, so they'll know where you got it from). Oh, before I forget, that one picture that Leonardo Da Vinci did...the famous one with the naked guy surrounded by a square and a circle...it's called the Vitruvian Man (for some reason, I just think that might be useful to remember).
Ok, well, why is any of this important in anything other than just for curiosity's sake? Well, it turns out the lines of a pentagram "automatically divide themselves into segments according to the Divine Proportion" (Brown 103).
And why is that important? Well because it lends credibility to the claim that the pentagram was once considered a symbol of divine perfection rather than the Satanic symbol that it is normally used as today. Also, Brown mentions that the planet Venus traces out a perfect pentagram in the sky through the course of a year. If this is true (and I'm guessing it is, I don't think you could get away with making something like that up and putting it in a book as widely publicized as "Code" has been and get away with it) it provides a pretty rock solid case for Brown's argument that the pentagram was once used as a symbol to represent the Divine Feminine. Venus was the Roman god of beauty remember, oh, and yeah, they knew about the planets a loooonnng time ago. The reason they knew about them is that over time, the planets are the only celestial objects other than the sun and moon that sometimes move in the sky with respect to the other stars during the course of the year. They move both backwards and forwards for reasons too complicated for me to go into right now, and you don't need a telescope to see it.
Why am I taking so much time to explain each and every tedious little point like this? Because I want you to know that my interpretation of The Da Vinci Code is not based on some whimsical "getting caught up in the emotion of the story" type deal. There is a lot of hard science involved in this novel, and it all fits in alignment with what I've been taught. And I spent a good deal of time studying physics, so although I'm not a master at it, I'm not a complete novice either. You should always check your sources before you believe anything, and even though there is an assurance at the beginning of the book that states:
"All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."
You should never take anybody's word on anything.
Anyway, getting back to the matter at hand, the question now comes up, why is the pentagram now seen as a Satanic symbol when it used to be a symbol of Divine Feminine Goodness? The answer, according to Brown, is that the pentagram is the victim of a massive smear campaign on the part of the Catholic church that was done in order to discredit pagan religions. Heck, even the word "pagan" now is considered an evil word, but the reality is that a pagan religion is just a religion of the forest that worships things like trees and the sun rather than a sick and twisted image of a dead, tortured, crucified man (sidenote: religions born in the desert like Christianity, Islam, etc., are always more bloody than religions of the forest. Unfortunately, people who follow religions of the desert always come and slaughter the people who worship religions of the forest. Thus, we're stuck being taught to be fearful of Christ and hell all the time rather than learning about the wisdom of the All-Father or Great Spirit).
Apparently, it was a conscious decision on the part of the Catholic church to establish women as secondary citizens. They provoked the witch hunts and slaughtered millions of women who knew herbal remedies for things. They vilified all the symbols that the pagan religions were built upon in order to rip out the very foundations of the religion. Does an act like this seem plausible? Well, shit, the evidence seems to be there as well as the motivation. To me, this is the more interesting part of the Da Vinci Code, and it is one that could be easily proven. All you have to do is get somebody to take another look at history.
Look, the real problem in our world is that too often people have the tendency to look at events and not take into account what they know to be true about human nature. It's mind boggling really. For some reason, people want to believe this silly, romantic fantasy about what motivates people rather than the hard, cold, truth. Do you really think that somebody would go through all the effort of putting together an organization of supreme influence like the Catholic Church just because they thought they were doing the right thing? NO! They did it for power! POWER POWER POWER! It's obvious. I mean, you can see this impulse as even a necessity for the primitive governing of people.
"I am your new King, you must listen to me!"
"Why?"
"Er...good question." And the new King gets killed and chaos reigns. A much better answer would be.
"Because I have been appointed by God to lead you!"
Once you've established yourself in the public eye as the one who controls some kind of divine right of rule, then you're in like Flint. It's practical, especially if you're only in charge of a bunch of dumb, uneducated peasants who freak out at the sight of fire. At the end of every line of Kings, there is one clever guy who simply pulled the wool over the eyes of the masses and got them to believe that he was somehow special. It happens all the time, it continues to happen today, except now we're supposed to worship corporate logos like Coke, Pepsi, or Brittany Speers.
So, if you can come along and smear somebody else's god, then you clear the way for your own power.
You see, what amazes me is that ideas like this, in our Catholic controlled world, would ever make it to a widely-promoted book. The answer for how they got there is that Brown doesn't go into the ramifications of all this much, he just sits there and tells his idiotic fantasy. But the criticism of the Church is THERE, and though there are a couple throwaway lines where Brown really loses his balls and says things like "the Catholic Church does a lot of good in the world today," it can't be hidden that this book is an indictment of the current system.
The Da Vinci Code goes on about how there is a secret code in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci that tell the tale of the marriage of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdeline. Furthermore, there is a secret society that is in charge of protecting Mary Magdeline's remains, and some original manuscripts written by Christ himself. Apparently this is all part of a widely held theory among conspiracy nuts that Mary Magdeline is, in fact, the Holy Grail (the vessel that caught Christ's blood...AKA a womb). It goes on to say that all stories that somehow deal with the grail from King Arthur to Indiana Jones (OK, Brown doesn't mention Indiana Jones, but I thought it was funny) are actually allegories for Mary Magdeline's story which couldn't be told outright for fear of repercussions from the church.
Is all that likely? Well, I have a hard time believing that there is an actual sarcophagus out there with Mary Magdeline's remains. Is it possible that Christ's child was born and herself had offspring the descendants of which still exist in the world today? Well, maybe. Who knows? Maybe we should focus on the things that we can get hardcore answers to.
Do you believe that major corporations like the Catholic Church or the Coka-Cola company would lie to you and destroy the image of other icons for their own gain?
Absolutely.
And because of that, there is a real justification for taking the conspiracy ideas of the Da Vinci Code and using them to reinterpret literature, etc. Dan Brown chicken-shits out before he does this, but the book can still point you in some interesting directions if you let it.
So I guess, after taking a quick look at the volume of words that I have written in response to this topic, I have to say that the Da Vinci Code is a pretty good book. The writing is absolute shit, but some of the ideas that it contains, ideas that are there perhaps in spite of the intentions of the author, are quite stimulating. So go out and read it, but don't buy a copy, you should be able to find one at a library by now, or even a used book store which you should be able to obtain by trading in your Spin Doctor's CD. Despite what pretentious assholes have to say about Dan Brown, he has produced a captivating work.
Oh, and the Catholic Church has come out and explicitly stated that you shouldn't read the book. I can think of no more glowing endorsement to pick up a book than that. Come to think of it, if anybody has a list of the books the Catholic Church wants banned, could you please send it to me?
The End
References
Dan Brown. "The Da Vinci Code." Doubleday. 2003.