morgan_dhu | Da Vinci Code, My Ass

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Da Vinci Code, My Ass

So what do these two things have in common? I think you can figure that one out. Be creative.

For once and for all, it's just a piece of fiction. It's not based on history. There is no Da Vinci Code, there was no Prieury de Sion before Pierre Plantard - a right-wing ultramonarchist with claims to a Merovingian bloodline - and some friends invented it. The idea was so cribbed from the idiots who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which built Plantard et al's delusions of grandeur into a pile of wing-nut tinfoil hat conspiracy crap, and the saddest thing is that the focus on this idiotic vision of Mary Magdalen as the earthly vessel of the Lord's sacred seed draws attention away from what the Roman Catholic church really did conceal about her.

If you want to know something really revolutionary and dangerous about Mary Magdalen, read the Gnostic gospels - the ones that were excluded from the biblical canon and ordered destroyed, but have survived in bits and pieces here and their, most notably in the Nag-Hammadi find. The Gospel of Philip is instructive. So is the Gnostic text Mary herself is reputed to have written, called the Gospel of Mary (this one was found in Cairo in the late 1800's, not at Nag-Hammadi).

These excluded Gnostic texts identify Mary as not just one of Jesus' companions, but as someone very special to him - not because she was his lover, although she may also have been that, but because she understood his teachings better than anyone else. One passage of the Gospel of Philip says:

They [the disciples] said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."

Mary was the one who set the course of the Christian church after the death of Jesus. It is on her vision that the initial message of the Ressurection rests. Some passages in the Gnostic gospels suggest that Mary was one of the leaders among the early disciples, and considered by at least some to be the person Jesus chose to lead the early church. Mary preached. Mary was, as much as any of the disciples were, a priest, and following her example, other women in the first two centuries of Chritianity were also priests and preachers.

The Gospel of Philip also tells us that there was a power struggle in the years after Jesus' death between Mary and Peter - Peter refused to accept that Jesus would give higher instruction to a woman, but other disciples - Matthew among them - accepted Mary as, at the least, the recipient of deeper instruction from Jesus and thus a legitimate teacher to the other disciples.

Now, let me ask you - what is a more revolutionary secret? That Jesus might have had sex, or that Jesus intended to place the leadership of his movement in the hands of a woman who he believed understood his teachings better than any of the men around him? That Jesus had a child, or that he intended women to have the same authority as men within his church?

Please note: I am not a Christian. I am looking at the history of the accounts of the person we know as Jesus and his companions, at the history of the early Christian movement, and the history of the Catholic Church. Whether Jesus was divine is irrelevant to this discussion; he and his followers have impacted history based on the assumption that he was, and there are many accounts of how that happened. From a historical perspective, there's no difference in legitimacy between the texts that were preserved as part of the Bible, and the texts that were excluded, mostly on grounds of theology and politics.

But if I were a Christian, I'd much rather have the legacy of a woman who was called to lead the early church than a convoluted story about a bunch of men hiding a holy flower-pot.

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for lack of a better word. . . . .AMEN!

;-)

Over the next couple of days, I plan to write a review of a book I just finished reading. It's a work of real literary scholarship about the sources and development of the legend of the Grail, and I plan on using that to make further vicious comments about the Da Vinci Code madness. It will be posted in my book journal (

bibliogramma) if you care to check there at some point.

One of the reasons this Mary=Grail stuff bothers me so much is that my specialty back in grad school was Arthurian literature. I have almost certainly forgotten more about the real literary history of the concept of the Holy Grail than Dan Brown has ever known.

I love that stuff.

What was the book called?

Mary Magdeline is a favorite subject of mine.

The book is called The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend, by Richard Barber. Being a study of the real Grail literature, it says nothing about Mary Magdalen, but has lots of references to the tradition that Joseph of Arimathea pppreserved the actual blood of Jesus (gathered while he prepared the body for entombment) as a relic, preserved it in an object that may have been either the cup from the last Passover or the cup Jesus was offered on the cross.

It quotes extensively from the early Grail writers - Chretien de Troyes, and Wolfram von Eschenbach in particular, and follows the development of the Grail legend in literature right up to modern works such as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and films such as Excalibur and The Fisher King.

The first printing was before Brown published his book, but the paperback edition, which I have, does include an afterword of a couple of pages saying how silly the whole Da vinci thing is.

Hm... I still haven't read The Da Vinci Code but your entry is quite interesting. If Mary really was Jesus's chosen successor it doesn't suprise me that the record would have been expunged. I'll definitely check our your book journal.

While I am neither a Christian, nor have I read The DaVinci Code, I have maintained a level of fascination with the history of Christianity, in the way that the Bible was selectively edited and how what all of those sects take for "literal" truth is in fact crafted "selective truth." I didn't know about the history of Mary Magdalen you brought up, which makes me even more interested in some of the early history of the Church. Of course, the fact that it made the church that much more patriarchal doesn't surprise me, given that it seems to be one more step on the path of erasing the power of women from the pagan/polythesitic traditions, which they were already actively vilifying. Do you think, though, that perhaps Brown's book may get more people to question the history of Christianity and find more of the actual truths on their own? Or will they be sheep, accept Brown's word as truth, and not move on?

Some people will probably use the book as a starting point for their own questioning of how Christianity became what it is today, and what has been excluded - and in that quest, they will look for what might have actually happened, rather than what they would like to have happened. But the way that I see this material being presented and discussed around me suggests that many, perhaps most, will just take the garbled pap that Brown and all the other members of the new Da Vinci code industry that's grown up around the book and now the movie and not think about questions of fiction, history, truth and imagination.

In the sense that it raises questions, there's nothing wrong with the book itself *as a work of fiction*. What disturbs me deeply, however, is the author's presentation of the book as based on "real history."

Forgive me for ranting about the state of and attitudes toward knowledge today in North America, and perhaps the entire supposedly developed world, but this is a very large pet peeve of mine.

There is such a thing as history. There are real documents, artifacts, etc. Some of these are of course open to a great deal of interpretation, and one source alone does not tell you anything, but there are real sources of information that can be looked at together, given appropriate weight and consideration, and used to develop an understanding of history.

Not all documents deserve the same weight. You cannot, for example, place the same weight on oral traditions or literary works as you can on troop manifest or grain inventories - and compiling all of those boring troop manifests will, eventually, tell you if the war that's celebrated in oral tradition actually took place.

These days, there is much blurring of history, literary tradition, oral tradition, and imagination - which is then turned around and sold as "a true story." And that's what's happened with The Da Vinci Code. It's fiction. Some of it is loosely based on history that has been rewritten to serve the plot, some of it is based on some oral and literary traditions - mostly the variants considered least reliable, by the way - and some of it is based very loosely on some true general principles. Early Chritianity did, in fact, absorb a great deal of pagan influences, from arbitrarily picking the birthday of Jesus to co-incide with the already celebrated birthday of an earlier god with similar characteristics (Mithras) to encouraging the doctrine of the intercession of the saints in a way that resembled the polytheistic worship many rural people were used to (one big skygod, some supernatural companions and a lot of smaller lares and penates). Mariolatry was a definite resurgence of the need to position a divine feminine role somewhere in the pantheon. And so on.

But while parts of what Brown wrote are based, to some degree, on things that did happen, or are similar to things that did happen, the book is being presented as if the "secret" and all of the "evidence" of its existence is fact, and the fiction part is just the narrative of how a couple modern people discover all of this.

I've been watching all of the psuedo-documentaries that have been flooding the airwaves in advance of the opening of the film, and most of them as such bad history that I sit there weeping in rage at the total distortion of what has been hard-wrung from the obscurity of the past by dedicated people who sought to find the truest possible account of how things were and how they came to be.

It is true that sometimes a work of fiction can give us a deeper truth - at a symbolic and psychological level - than any record of fact. But in the name of anything that might be holy, let us please be able to know the difference.

Although I am no historian -- very far from it -- I agree with your rant. I have my own rants on how modern feminism and feminist paganism have set up their own myths on how things were in the Golden Age of goddess worship. Perfectly fine in a whole lot of ways as a myth, and very evocative, but I object to it being presented as The Truth.

What would be very interesting to read is a good, accurate (insofar as that is even possible) fictionalization of the life of Mary Magdalen.

Oh, don't get me started on feminist paganism and the whole "once everyone worshipped a mother-goddess and women were revered and everything was cool" thing.

Even in those societies where goddesses were worshipped on an equal level with gods (in most places where there is a mother/earth goddess to worship, there is also either a sky-father or a hunter/horned god who is just as powerful), there's no evidence for full matriarchy. Some places women had a significant role in leadership (a number of First Nations, for example), but there weren't all that many of them, and while a good many societies were matrilineal or matrilocal at some point, in almost all, power and property were held and exercised by men, and simply passed through the female line.

There are hundreds of great goddesses to worship, but please, let's be realistic about the cultures in which they were worshipped in the past.

And while you are reading about Mary, make sure you read about Pelagius, and how the church took a wrong turn in the 5th century A.D.

Hi. I wonder if you'd mind identifying yourself, I like to know who I'm talking to.

I've read a great deal about Pelagius - how could I not, when some sources suggest his birth name was Morgan - and I do agree with you. Pelagianism has always been my favourite heresy, and largely becasue I am very much a beliver in free will.

I've never understood the appeal of the Augustinian doctrine that you can't choose to do/be good unless God has given you the pre-existing grace to be able to want to do/be good. Pelagius simply makes more sense, both from a human perspective, and if there are gods, from a divine perspective. How much fun can it be watching your creations figure out how you intended them to live if you've stacked the cards so they can't figure it out unless you specifically give them the ability to do so first? Now that's one seriously screwed-up deity, and not one I'd be interested in following.

Sorry. I didn't realize the system would log me as annonymous.

Cool. Thanks for sharing your username. And for reading my rant.

The project "Dan Brown" - is the unswer by "The Last Gambit (http://mera.com.ru/2005/05/14/20050514-the_last_gambit/)".
And all sensation statements from Vatican and others Christian church easy open (http://mera.com.ru/2006/06/02/about_the_da_vinchi_code_eng/)

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Da Vinci Code, My Ass

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