Book Review of The Da Vinci Code

May 25, 2006 (Press Release) -- Book Review of The Da Vinci Code

“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When

Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily.

Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of

forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to

be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect

themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess,

burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred

feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239)

The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but difficult-to-

attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord Stanley’s Cup.

While the original Grail—the cup Jesus allegedly used at the Last Supper

—normally inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance, Dan Brown’s recent

mega–best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, rips it away to the realm of

esoteric history.

But his book is more than just the story of a quest for the Grail—he

wholly reinterprets the Grail legend. In doing so, Brown inverts the

insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a

container symbolically a woman’s body. And that container has a name

every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail was

actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the blood of Jesus

Christ in her womb while bearing his children.

Over the centuries, the Grail-keepers have been guarding the true (and

continuing) bloodline of Christ and the relics of the Magdalen, not a

material vessel. Therefore Brown claims that “the quest for the Holy

Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene,” a

conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the other

Grail knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the Last

Supper.

The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator

inside the museum. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy

professor of symbolism from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter,

burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Nevue. Together with crippled

millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one step

ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei “monk” named Silas who

will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the “Grail.”

But even Brown has his limits. To dodge charges of outright bigotry, he

includes a climactic twist in the story that absolves the Church of

assassination. And although he presents Christianity as a false root and

branch, he’s willing to tolerate it for its charitable works.


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Posted By Sandra Miesel