The Da Vinci Code: or, Christ on a Crutch


 


I took the book out on tape to listen to on the Thanksgiving Journey and I'm two-thirds done. It's not a terribly good thriller--but a lot better than late ghostwritten Ludlum, for example. Also, nearly none of the cool conspiratorial stuff is new to me: reading Robert Anton Wilson gives you most of it; and the late lamented Gnosis magazine pretty well debunked the book about seven years before it came out.

Specifically (although this isn't the purpose of the post) the whole Priory of Sion/Holy Blood Holy Grail thing was stitched together by a bunch of French ultra-rightists who wanted to restore the House of Bourbon, and what better reason than that the blood of Jesus Christ himself ran in their veins? Probability isn't really the name of the game in either heresies or thrillers--but this one has an extra added rancidity.

But what really started the wheels rolling was the sort of esoteric bait and switch Mr. Brown started to pull, adducing powerful and seductive concepts (Gnosticism and particularly Goddess worship) and giving the reader stuff that was, in many aspects precisely the opposite of what was advertised.

yes, it's just a novel--and yes, it's pretty much a made up Christology that doesn't represent a real tradition--and yes, I don't think I can legitimately ascribe it to anything but Dan Brown's clumsiness. (And yes, I'm still a Socratic ignorant man, with no dog in this fight, since I have no way of knowing that we are arguing about anything but a bunch of Dawkins-debunked delusions.)

Still, wrong is wrong--and the Da Vinci code has introduced millions to the delights of heresy, of that wonderful metanoia that happens when you twist a central narrative. So it's sad that that twist comes in a direction that promises some serious occult fun, gives something flatter and uglier.

The teaser is happy indeed: Jesus had sex! Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene! They had a kid! And all that stuff about the Holy Grail was really about that secret bloodline! And what does that promise? It promises a Christ and Christianity that's less sexually mad, more empowering to woman, less tied in to the ponderous Church and more to cool people like Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Claude Debussy. Sounds like a good time.

But , in keeping with its right-wing origins, what it delivers is something else again. Mary Magdalene is rescued from being a whore, but instead is turned into an inanimate vessel. A repository for Jesus Christ's blood--or, to call a spade a spade, Jesus Christ's jism. And in turn what does Jesus become? What does Jesus give to the world? No longer his teachings--no, those were long gone, replaced by Jesus the King of the Year, the mystic sacrifice by which sins are removed and heaven obtained: a touchstone by which the Good Tribe is known and the Bad Tribes are excluded. But this is even less than that: instead of stealing from Eleusis and Osiris, this secret tradition takes from the old exoteric paganism, of Leda and Heracles, of heroes and kings born of sex with the gods. Mary Magdalene, in this Priory of Sion vision, contributes nothing by her works, her words, or anything but that one thing Woman is reduced to by the dead-souled Man: a birth. Brown talks about Goddess worship, but the Magdalene is given no power by this, rather less. All that's important about her is her child, Sarah. And alll that's important about Sarah is that she blends the sacred blood with the Kings of France, so they can be the House of Atreus.
The interesting thing is that the plain old pompous repressed church has far more Goddess Worship in it than this faux Priory of Sion (Scion?). The Virgin Mary was far more than a cup: she was the Mother of God--kept from being superior to him by the expert topology that is Catholic dogma--but still with intercessory powers, her own divine authority, and the reputation for being a soft touch. Mariolatry was practically a religion within a religion--and pretty much became the official religion of Spain. In the original New Testament Trinity, the Greek word for the Holy Spirit (pneuma) was feminine, which by a back door allowed the shadow of Father, Mother, and Child to be represented in Christian spirituality. That subtle grammatical equality was erased when the move was made to Latin, but, y'know, that Eternal Weibliche will zieht uns hinan. Thus Mary inevitably found Her way into the Church which, when all was said and done (and before the Counter-Reformation), pretty much allowed you to worship anything as long as you put a Jesus sticker on it and it didn't threaten the power structure.
That's the irony: the Da Vinci Code's vision actually moves the feminine farther away from power than the Real ol' warty Church does. And likewise the supposed move away from Church hierarchy: Again, ignoring any of the things Christ said or did as a teacher/philosopher/political activist, the Church at least made the Cup of Jesus's Blood something that every humble person could drink from. For all that it was in the control of the guys with gold clothes and big funny hats, the Blood of Christ entered everybody's body.(and incidentally tied it all in with the ceremony of the deliverance of Israel that is the Seder.) But this new version takes the Blood of Christ out of the whole body of Christendom and puts it in the pale veins of Merovingian and Bourbon kings where it belongs. And thus they can be the unassailable elite by virtue of Grandma having had sex with a swan. (And Brown points out, maybe inadvertently, that this elite bloodline is the same ol' same ol' by talking about the tiny number of Merovingian Bloodline names: if this had had anything to do with Mary M, there would be absolutely no continuity of name, going as it did from mother down to daughter.)

This is not really a trashing of the book: I think Dan Brown has done the world a service of letting the wide world in for some spiritual gymnastics. And it does no good to say they should read Robert Anton Wilson or Talmudic commentaries instead: you go to spiritual war with the best sellers you have, not the ones you wish you had.

Still, it's a shame that the Secret Doctrine Brown hands us isn't more in keeping with our current spiritual hungers, but less. It's not a revivifed Christ, but a Christ more extensively crippled. Sure, the book's a music box, and decorously carved, and when you open it--hey! it plays a song!
It's just that, after a while a music box that plays 'Smoke On The Water" loses its appeal pretty quickly..

Posted: Friday - December 01, 2006 at 10:30 AM        

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