 Women,
you lost big time!
Book: The Da Vinci Code
By Anoosh Ariapour
December 17, 2003
The Iranian
Men too. Actually, Dan Brown's premise in his novel, The
Da Vinici Code, is not
new at all and if it can hold any water, the whole humankind lost it to the
Founding Fathers of the Christian Church. But, can it be that
simple?
First, should this novel also be read as some kind
of fictional essay, leaning toward a feminist-New Age narrative?
Read it as it is, an "intelligent thriller"
as one the blurbs on the back cover states. If you like thrillers and if
particularly, you are into light occult, The Knights Templars,
Rosicrucians, Freemasons,
etc. babble, dabble, scrabble. As a page-turner for the holidays,
it is an enjoyable
read for many, but "many notch above the intelligent thriller"?
This is where
some of the book's intelligence come from:
"Many scholars claim that the early church literally stole Jesus
from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding
it in an impenetrable
cloak
of divinity, and using it to expand their own power." (P 233).
Nothing new
so far, every religion, every non-religious institution jumps to
grab more power, it is called the human nature. To unfold such
a 'scholarship'
into a good thriller, Brown has to have a plot twist every other page,
bringing up one riddle after another and bombard us with one conspiracy on
top of the
last one. Not unlike layers of paint on the famous paintings' visual clichés-
he interprets for us. In fact, an army of "researchers" across the Atlantic
have their names acknowledged on the first page.
In The
Da Vinici Code, people are on a trail to find
the Holy Grail, the holiest concept for some and a physical object
for the others. But in this book,
the search is
not for the chalice in which Jesus had his last drink with his disciples
and onto which, his blood from the crucifixion was collected. "The quest
for the
Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene.
A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine."
(P 257)
In the biggest conspiracy in the human history, the
early church fathers, went against Jesus's wish, who wanted his
beloved,
legal wife, Mary Magdalene
(Maryam
Majd-ol-elieh) of a royal blood, to continue his ministry. Not only
they spread lies about Mary Magdalene to be a whore, but they tried
to kill
her, who was
carrying Jesus's baby at the time of the crucifixion.
To hide the truth,
according to people who believe in the story, and it seems their list
includes the
greatest human minds throughout history, men of the church, with a
little help from the Roman
empire, almost destroyed eighty other evangelical texts, including
that of the Mary Magdalene herself and the diary of Christ.
In 1989, Umberto Eco, the best seller author of
The
Name of the Rose, published his Foucault's
Pendulum. A book
at least ten times more intellectual
and
fifty times more informative than The
Da Vinici Code, along the same
points of interest.
Not being a career fiction writer, professor Eco did not have to
pretend to be a scholar. He was one. A great one. Salman Rushdi,
to quote a
guy who understands
the difference between literature and genre writing, wrote this about
Foucault's Pendulum: "Reader, I hated it."
I for one, hated
myself for spending a few days reading 640 pages of Foucault's
Pendulum and enjoying it.
It is thankworthy that Mr. Brown's book is only
454 pages and less interesting.
If the subject matter can be treated in a two-hour
movie, which Eco's could not, don't waste my time by hundreds of
pages that
can be summarized
in
a ten page
essay.
Brown's English, unlike many genre writers,
is crisp and deserves credit for making his work a best seller.
But common wisdom
dictates that
it is not the prose and style that create a publishing success
story. Readers flock
to book stores when: 1- A new book repackages the information
they like to
hear and they were unaware that existed before. That goes
for the fiction too. 2-
The information is consistent with their geist and zeitgeist.
It is not echolalia per se, like a medical symptom, but it
operates on a
large
scale.
I am even
suspicious of our Middle Eastern, daily dosage of low level,
survival
oriented paranoia
to be a psychosis. I think it is downright cultural, sometimes
necessary, with its equivalence or counterpart in the West.
I know what you're
thinking. The
Oxford Medical Dictionary, defines "Neologism",
coning of new words, as a medical condition. With this
definition, some
of
our best
Iranian thinkers,
translators
and intellectuals should be institutionalized. But maybe...No,
just kidding.
Now, back to The Da Vinici Code: 1- Iconography
is a very complex subject, dangerous in the hands of the
novice. It is not the
same as, nor can
it be reduced to popular
symbology. 2- It seems that the matriarchal society
had lost the "Battle of Sexes" everywhere, long before organized
religion, Semitic or otherwise,
even started
to form. My undocumented guess is, that religion
just put
the seal
of approval on this lose to the womankind.
3- On the face of it, to someone like myself, growing
up in a non-Christian society, Catholicism, with
its adoration
for
the
Virgin Mary, Mother
of God, almost elevated
to a cult, seemed to be gentler on women. Even
God has to have a mother who wipes his little, cute butt
and
takes care of
him. Or,
is this
one of those
absurd,
linguistic riddles that I will never understand
to the day
I go to my grave?
Maybe it is my own mom who had
studied in a Catholic
school
for
a year
or two back home and sang 'Silent Night?
to us at this time of the year.
Having
enjoyed centuries of great Western art in the
form of the Madonna and Child (the other Madonna) paintings,
I assumed
women are
in
a better
position
in the Christendom.
But apparently, I was wrong. The sky is the same
color every
where. Author
Anoosh Ariapour is an Iranian born journalist based in Washington
DC.
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Women,
you lost big time!
