Da Vinci Code

If you read Umberto Eco's the Foucault Pendulum, you would recall a vanity press publisher the narrator works for, setting up an edition for occult books "The Isis Revealed" arguing that there is a steady stream of conspiracy theories hacks that want to have their books published. Da Vinci Code could easily have been one of those books, but it also includes for a romantic relationship and thriller-like action. And this combination for some reason captured the popular imagination.

If there is one thing that is really unnecessary then it must be writing another review of DVC. How many books have their own page in Wikipedia? I will therefore skip recapitulating the plot and go straight to the point I want to make.

The book can be viewed on three levels: on the first one it is a thriller, on a second one it is an presentation of an unconventional theory about history of Christianity, and on the third one it is statement of certain religious worldview. These three points should not be confused.

As a thriller the book is quite unsatisfying, even though this is probably its strongest part. For one thing, the writing feels unnatural, as something learnt but never really understood. The text of DVC is almost exclusively combined from clichés and idioms. Brown never fails to use three words when one would suffice: "Gripping the top of the fence, he heaved himself up and over, dropping to the ground on the other side. Ignoring the slash of pain from his cilice, he retrieved his gun and began the long trek up the grassy slope." I think that this must be what the creative writing lessons do to you.

For the other, the plot itself stretches my facility of suspension of disbelief beyond limits. That a man should not recognize a voice of a person he was speaking with extensively in past twenty-four hours is hard to imagine, "fake French accent" or not. That a bishop of Catholic Church would enter "twenty-millions-euros-for-holy-grail-no-questions-asked" deal with a person he never heard about, is harder still, desperate or not. But that a thousand years old undercover organization encrypts its biggest secret with riddles an average boy scout with access to Internet would crack in six hours is just beyond me. That kind of encryption would be weak probably in time of Leonardo. And today it is just ridiculous.

But how difficult should these ciphers be? That is hard to tell, because it is really unclear what does that secret organization, Priory of Sion, want. If they never intend to divulge the information they protect, they could just as well destroy it. The revelation of the ultimate motives (or lack of those) of these mysterious behind-the-curtains movers is the greatest anti-climax of the book. It must be admitted that on the most fundamental level Brown is honest with us: all the questions are answered, no mystery is unsolved, even though some of the answers feel too stretched. When you close the book, you know who is who, where the Grail is, what it is, why it is there, who put it there and the heroine turns out to be a countess. But the answer to the most interesting question, namely what is going to happen with the Grail now, is the most disappointing one: Nothing.

And this leads us to the next level, that of the occult theory. Going back to Foucault's Pendulum, the editors of The Isis Revealed, after having been swamped by the submissions of esoterica, discover that new books can be generated by a computer randomly rearranging certain recurrent themes commonly known to all occult theories buffs. Using their terminology, the DVC can be best characterised in this way:

     Templars are related to everything.
     Whose marriage took place in Cane of Galilee?
     Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to France
     Merovingians say they rule by the will of God
     Minnie is engaged to Mickey Mouse
     Templars are related to everything.
(all quotations are from the Czech version of the book, the translation from Italian to English probably differs)

In fairness, Eco explicitly quotes the book that presents the gist of this theory (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) and Brown mentions it, so this is not entirely coincidental. I did not read this source book (save for the short passage quoted in the Pendulum) but it seems that it contains everything that is supposedly shocking in DVC. What sets the two books apart is that the former is a "serious" and "non-fiction" book while the latter is a thriller. People love well-researched thrillers with lots of trivia on esoteric subjects, and what could be more esoteric than esotericism?

How well-researched DVC really is I don't know, but after I read DVC, I happened to play a very old (as computer games go, it was released 1996) game Broken Sword: The Shadows of the Templars. It was really striking how similar the game is to the book and at the same time how much better it is. It’s got the Templars, their lost treasure (the Sword of Bafomet) and it got riddles, it even got a romantic story. It also refers explicitly to the THBatHG: the search for more clues takes your hero to Syria where he meets an American couple. When speaking with the woman, she says, “My husband… he’s little bit strange sometimes. He read that book, Holy this and Holy that and he believes every word of it. But I think it’s just a lot of hooey…” The only thing the game is missing is Walt Disney cast as an illuminati (I am not joking, Brown seriously suggests that Mr. Disney hid messages of the hidden truths in his early movies, or perhaps that the studio keeps hiding them to this day).

But the puzzles in Broken Sword are so much better, the locations more interesting and the characters more believable. It is also much more fun.

The disturbing question is whether Brown believes his theories and subscribes to the worldview stemming from them. This is the third layer of the book.

The worldview is composed of three interconnected axioms: a) our present Atlantic society suffers from the lack of appraisal of "sacred feminine", because b) the two thousand years reign of Christianity in general and Catholic Church in particular promoted masculine over feminine, in stark contrast to c) paganism preceding Christianity that held feminine in proper esteem and women were then free to fulfil their personality.

It is not difficult to see why such a worldview is so popular today. Feminism is a cornerstone of modern secular orthodoxy and paganism is growing more popular every day.

Let's start from c): there might have been some matriarchal societies in the past, but I have yet to see some solid proof of this. At the time of birth of Christianity, the role of women throughout the known world was inferior and that is a sad fact. To say, as Brown very nearly does, that the Temple prostitutes in ancient Egypt were celebrating their feminine identity in holy union with priests, shows a degree of naivety hardly seen in an adult man. An orgy celebrating the fertility and rebirth of Osiris is all good and well, but I cannot help feeling that men got the better of it.

The women in ancient Greece the women were not allowed to leave home without the consent of their husband, in no democratic society of the day were women allowed to vote. Sure, Rome had their Vestals, Greece had Delphi and Orphic cults, but their role in the actual affairs of the state was limited and women, who were not priestess, had very few rights, certainly less than a man that was not a priest.

Nor were the cults of the time such benign celebration of creative powers of the Nature as our present day druids claim. Human sacrifices and ritual cannibalism were very likely a part of these ancient mysteries as well.

The whole pagan revival is a deeply suspicious affair. It is amazing how clear and definite picture of a society that had left little if any documents or even archaeological evidence, some people have. They hear their music (of which there are no records whatsoever) in present day folklore songs, never considering it strange that there is no trace of the medieval church music (of which we have written records), even though the latter is some thousand years closer to us. They claim the Stonehenge for druids, never mind that it was built couple of thousand years before the first Celt set foot in British Isles.

For b), the conduct of the Church. It is fashionable now, as it was all the time during the last two hundred years, to make the Church a culprit of everything that's wrong with the society. This is certainly shallow if only because it is often contradictory. This is a complex topic you don't want to go into here. Maybe it is just worth repeating that the witch-hunts did not kill five million women over three hundred years. The actual number is between 40 and 80 thousand, a quarter of which were men. By contrast, the French Revolution killed 20 thousand men in single year.

And as for a), the lack of sacred feminine as root cause of wars, suffering and victory of G. W. Bush. I would make just on remark here: up until the beginning of the 20th century there was no cheap and reliable contraception. All sexual intercourse carried a large chance of pregnancy and it was certainly the woman that was left worse off when this happened (and this has nothing to do with the role of the woman in the society, this is a biological fact – pregnancy is more dangerous to woman than to a man). Therefore the taboos on sex before marriage and out of marriage actually protected the women.

Actually the most interesting thing about DVC is its phenomenal success. Honestly, I am at loss to understand it. But if it says anything about our society at all, it is nothing you would like to hear.