Code to a fortune... mix sex and religion and call it the Holy Grail

GIVE a Frenchman the chance to mock America and he will take it. It has ever been so - but especially in these days when American restaurants have been pouring French wine down their sinks and renaming ‘French fries’ as freedom fries.

Now Dan Brown, author of international bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, has given the French an opportunity to laugh at the Americans and make money out of it. Tour guides in Paris are taking American tourists on a ‘Da Vinci Code’ tour. Jean-Manuel Traimond, the man behind the idea, originally wanted to call it “The Da Vinci Con Tour” because of all the inaccuracies in the book. However, local hotel porters advised him that this would be too provocative for their American clients, and bad for business.

Traimond’s wheeze is to take the excited tourists to various French landmarks mentioned in the novel, and then to disappoint them by pointing out all the contradictions. For example, Brown’s novel has it that Francois Mitterrand instructed that his famous glass pyramid in the Louvre museum would be constructed precisely of an occultish 666 pieces. Tourists are invited to count 674. Then they are taken to the Church of Saint Sulpice only to discover that there is only one floor in the place, with no sign of that mysterious second floor on which part of the book’s plot depends. Other anti-climactic moments follow.

Over 19 million copies of Brown’s book have been sold worldwide, and Tom Hanks is pegged to play the leading role in the film version next year.

But The Da Vinci Code is different from other novels-turned-publicity phenomena. Many people who have read the book think it has something of serious historical interest to say. This makes for considerable hilarity among the cynical French, and a certain amount of concern among religious people who worry that their contemporaries will end up even more confused about the Christian faith than they already are.

The Da Vinci Code opens with the mysterious murder of a curator in the French Louvre. The victim thoughtfully spends the last 15 minutes of his life arranging himself naked in a spreadeagled position reminiscent of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, uses his own blood to paint a five-pointed star on his abdomen and adds several mysterious codes in writing that can only be detected using ultra-violet light.

All of this is intended to set his code-breaking grand-daughter and a renowned Harvard symbologist (in real life, Harvard doesn’t do much symbology) on a mystery trail which could rock the Catholic church to its foundations.

Let me cut to the chase: looking at Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the novel proposes that the person on Jesus’s right, traditionally taken to be John (‘the beloved disciple’) is in fact Mary of Magdala who married Jesus, bore him a child, and was Jesus’s real choice to succeed him as leader. What’s more, the true ‘Holy Grail’ is not the chalice from the Last Supper, which the knights of old thought it was, but Mary of Magdala herself, the ‘feminine goddess.’ It’s all about sex. The wholesome ritual performed by adherents to this ‘true’ religion in the novel involves a man and a woman having sex in the presence of their followers.

The novel has it that the official church has suppressed this precious truth from the very beginning, burning to death more than five million women in the process. If it were not for the heroic Priory of Sion, a fellowship of true believers which, we are told, included Da Vinci, Galileo and Walt Disney, and secret codes including Leonardo’s The Last Supper, the truth would be lost forever.

You have to hand it to Dan Brown. He’s written an intriguing novel. But he has also taken in lots of people. Millions are taking the storyline as truth and groups have sprung up with the aim of cracking, and preserving, the code.

What the author knows about religious history can probably be summed up in a small pamphlet. For example the claim that five million people were burned by the church is just one untruth among many. But Brown is expert when it comes to identifying which ideas and concepts will open people’s wallets today.

THE first ingredient in his formula is gnosticism, the idea that there are hidden secrets which you need to know. In Brown’s book, the Priory of Sion is an ancient society which exists to preserve the secret about Mary Magdalene - but not, bizarrely, to share it with the world.

The second element is anti-Catholicism. Rome is founded on a lie about Jesus Christ and has murdered people without hesitation down through the centuries in order to protect that lie. Then there is fascination with ‘the sacred feminine’ - the idea that patriarchy has distorted our history and consciousness. Appropriately enough for the times we live in, sex is the liberating force revealed by the sacred feminine (if only the church would get off our backs). The final element in Brown’s bankable formula is the idea of fiction as history. Take historically factual persons and events, invent and insert new claims of your own, and present the whole package as ‘history.’ Truth is less important than perception.

This last element is crucial to The Da Vinci Code’s success. Brown pulls a neat trick by stating certain things in the book to be fictional - leading you to believe his other claim that “all descriptions of monuments, works of art, documents and secret rituals” are factual.

This statement does not survive scrutiny. For example, Brown claims that the church has always belittled Mary Magdala as a prostitute in order to belie her true relationship with Jesus. True, the supposition that Mary Magdala was the woman caught in adultery and saved by Jesus only goes back to Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 AD). But the real point is that countless church writers, including popes, have venerated Mary of Magdala.

She does, after all, have the letters ‘St’ before her name. She has been titled “the apostle of apostles” and “the new Eve announcing not death but life” by various church writers. Come to think of it, it says a lot for the ancient church that it should revere Mary Magdala in this way, given her youthful indiscretions.

One could go on and on about Brown’s inaccuracies, but for the full debunk you can give your loved one The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code for Christmas. It might save a lot of embarrassment later if you are thinking of giving the fertility rites a shot.

In the end, we can hardly blame Brown for hoodwinking us. Is it his fault that millions of people are so willing to see fiction as ‘history’? It is a paradox of our times that many of the people who find mainstream religion impossible to swallow because of its mysterious claims and doctrines are so willing to fantasise about The Da Vinci Code.

If nothing else, the novel proves that our sceptical generation is as vulnerable to superstition as people ever were.