ENDPAPER
The Code revisited
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
DON'T get me wrong — I loved The Da Vinci Code as much as any conspiracy buff out there, but to take it seriously as established history would be actually doing the book a disservice. Dan Brown's unputdownable theological thriller should be read as the grandest kind of entertainment out there: a conspiracy that is part history, part fiction. If you literally believe the conspiracy, it isn't thrilling anymore. For a conspiracy to be truly tantalising, the connections, the threads, should never add up but hint at bigger conspiracies. Only then will the paranoia be real. The Da Vinci Code is proof that even more powerful than our craving for a good conspiracy is our desire to believe in one. Are conspiracies also a comfortable way of making sense of the world? Things don't just fall apart — somebody makes them fall apart.
Global phenomenon
DVC has become a global publishing phenomenon, prompting a special illustrated edition. Its fans stay well into the night to finish it, or find themselves at two a.m. desperately looking for any art book featuring a detailed reproduction of The Last Supper or The Mona Lisa. What most people want to know when they've finished it is: what is fact and what is fiction? Intrigued, I decided to probe a little more. The first thing I discovered is that the book has not yielded all its secrets yet! Dan Brown has left clues all over the hardcover book jacket (look carefully at the left hand margin of the back cover, the spine, and the blurb on the inside jacket) that points to a mysterious code. If you go up his website (www.danbrown.com) you'll find a contest that links several clues leading to the subject of his next book.
Brown didn't invent the Da Vinci conspiracy — it has been kicking around for several years in New Age pseudo-history/alternate history books. His genius was to take these fringe conspiracy theories/alternate histories and fashion a fascinating theological thriller that is also an intellectually challenging novel of ideas. In particular, he was inspired by three controversial non-fiction bestsellers from the 1980s: Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelations and The Woman With The Alabaster Jar. In the wake of DVC, several of these source books have come back into print. What is more interesting is the number of books published in the last six months offering a key to the mysteries in DVC.
Wading through several of them, I found most of them to be biased one way or the other: some have been responses by conservative theologians explaining why DVC is a hoax, while the others are by New Age historians or secret society buffs attempting to add credibility to the conspiracy. A few even chide Dan Brown for not having gone all the way and revealed everything, and then proceed to inform us of bigger conspiracies.
I don't think the book threatens people's faiths as much as provoking them to take a fresh look at its origins and traditions. What the book has accomplished is to bring all these parallel or alternate histories that have been floating around in fringe circles to the mainstream; in particular celebrating the sacred feminine in Christianity by reclaiming the centrality of Mary Magdalene to the Christian faith. If you remember, Teabing tells Sophie: "Jesus was the original feminist. He wanted Mary Magdalene to lead the church."
Perhaps the one balanced (if you can have balance in conspiracies at all), comprehensive, definitive, intelligent and informed guide to DVC is Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code, edited by Dan Burstein. It brings together essays, interviews, opinions and reviews that pertain directly to DVC or subjects relating to it by theologians and religious scholars (conservative, liberal, radical, New Age), art historians, archaeologists, academic and alternate historians, scientists, literary critics, and philosophers. The book is really open ended — you can take what you want from it. But its editor, the remarkable Dan Burstein, a huge fan of DVC, offers his conclusion (informed by non-partisan experts like Elaine Pagels, Simon Singh, Laura Miller, and having read all the essays closely myself I concur): that one half of what Brown reveals is based on growing documented, authentic evidence, and another half, alas, is conjecture based on myths and legends that he presents as established truth. (That mythologies spell their own truth is another thing.)
Between truth and tall tales
The parts (spoilers ahead) rooted in historical evidence: the importance of Mary Magdalene to the founding of the early church, the possibility of a romantic relationship between her and Jesus, the history of the Knights Templar and the quest for The Holy Grail. The parts that are speculations recycled from legends and lore: Magdalene as the Holy Grail, a marriage between Magdalene and Jesus, a royal lineage from their bloodline, and the Priori of Sion as an ancient secret society guarding a 2,000 year old secret. Further, respected art historians strongly refute the thesis that it is the Magdalene in "The Last Supper". Umberto Eco, whose Foucault's Pendulum dealt with The Knights Templar, told the press recently that the idea of a marriage between Mary and Jesus and a secret royal bloodline in DVC was based on 19th Century fairly tales as common as "Pinocchio" and "Red Riding Hood"!
Well, I can't say I wasn't disappointed the first time I discovered this but that's when I realised it wouldn't be as much fun or as fascinating if it was all true. It wouldn't be a conspiracy anymore, it would be history. Though I still like to think that it is Mary Magdalene in "The Last Supper". She is, after all, worthy of being The Holy Grail.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
