Rather than being
‘feminist’ in a modern sense, which one associates with the women’s movement
which began in the mid-1960s and has evolved in diverse ways since then, The Da
Vinci Code picks up an enduring thread in human history from the earliest
times: the archetypal sacred feminine that was perceived as essential to
balance the archetypal sacred masculine in order to create spiritual wholeness.
Dan Brown introduces
the theme of the sacred feminine within the first few pages of the novel.
Jacques Saunière is “considered the premiere goddess iconographer on earth” and
has a “personal passion for relics relating to fertility, goddess cults, Wicca
and the sacred feminine…”. Professor Robert Langdon has written a
three-hundred-page draft of a book “tentatively titled Symbols of the Lost
Sacred Feminine”.
The influence of
feminism did, however, contribute to the upsurge of interest in Mary Magdalene
and even more strongly to the proliferating goddess cults that have made their
appearance (or re-appearance in some cases) during the last forty years. In
many instances, it is difficult to separate feminism from modern goddess cults,
but the sacred feminine is spiritual in nature rather than feminist in the
modern sense.
Robert Langdon tells
Sophie Neveu: “The Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess”.
The power of the feminine, he tells her, was once revered as sacred, but the male-oriented
Christian Church had perceived it as a threat and deliberately sidelined it as
inferior and even unworthy. The chivalric quests, he said, had actually been
endeavours to discover the sacred feminine… and the ‘search for Holy Grail’ a
coded way of keeping the real meaning of the quests from Church authorities
with their obsession with uncovering ‘heresies’.
Although there are
many different ways of expressing the sacred feminine, it can be seen as the
eternally feminine aspect of the nature of the universe in which femaleness and
maleness are not separate in their essence but together make up a whole.
Symbols of the
sacred feminine permeate The Da Vinci Code. The author sees a modern symbol in
the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre designed by I M Pei at the
request of former French president, François Mitterrand… and in the inverted
pyramid hanging from the ceiling in the Louvre’s underground shopping mall with
the small stone pyramid on the floor beneath it. The tips of the two pyramids
point towards each. Brown sees the inverted pyramid as symbolising the chalice,
grail or sacred feminine poised in relation to the phallic shape of the pyramid
on the ground, together forming a symbol of completeness.
Remodelling of the
Louvre’s underground concourse is due to begin in 2007. Those who are
interested in what Robert Langdon calls ‘symbology’ will no doubt wait with
interest to see whether any further mysteries are revealed.
The early fertility
religions seem almost without exception to have venerated the feminine and to
have seen it in terms of the fertility of the earth and its cyclic
manifestations. Although male priests often presided along with priestesses,
the focus was on the feminine nature of the earth that gave human beings life
and sustenance.
Even though the
Bible gives versions of the teachings of Jesus that we now know to be selective
and incomplete, the role of the sacred feminine is clearly discernible - especially in his closeness,
whether spiritual or physical or both, to Mary Magdalene to whom he entrusted
the revelation of his resurrection and who came to be seen as a kind of
‘goddess’ figure to the earliest Christians.
There were women as
well as men among the entourage of supporters and witnesses who followed Jesus
as he travelled about the countryside. There is no indication that he made any
distinction between them in terms of their importance. In fact, one might make
a case for his particular liking and respect for women.
At the time we were
gathering questions from readers of The Da Vinci Code for the production of
this e-book, one of them sent an e-mail pointing out that, while Dan Brown
“wants to point out that the true followers of Jesus who lived in his time
might have passed on his actual words, exalting the feminine as producer of
life, equal with the masculine, and equal as deity”, he himself sees nothing in
modern Judaism suggesting equality of male and female. In fact, he continues,
he sees nothing in any other cultures, going back to the Stone and Bronze Ages,
to suggest a climate of male/female equivalence. Instead, he says, there seem
to have been only female-dominant or male-dominant cultures, and this seems to
have been true of the emerging new Christianity after the crucifixion of
Christ.
As one considers
culture after culture through the ages, one cannot help but agree that most
seem to have favoured either a god- or a goddess-directed spirituality rather
than one which gave equal weight to both the feminine and masculine principles.
The Greek and Roman pantheons consisted of both gods and goddesses whom people
felt obliged either to please or placate, but the supreme figures in each case
were male, being Zeus in the Greek pantheon and Jove in the Roman one.
By the time of the
ministry of Christ, most Romans were no longer taking the Roman pantheon of
squabbling gods and goddesses seriously. In fact, it would not be long before
the Roman emperors were declaring themselves divine, an absurdity that would
leave their people spiritually adrift and ripe for the new religion of
Christianity.
Apart from the
Pharoah Akenaton’s brief introduction of a single Sun-God deity in Egypt before
Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, the Hebrew Yahweh or Jehovah was the first
God figure to evolve into the Supreme Being of a monotheistic religion. This
was a slow evolution with many sects and cults continuing to worship other gods
before the final acceptance of the one and only God of the Israelites. There is
indeed no indication – at least to the lay observer – that this was
ever anything other than a patriarchal religion, or that it is anything other
than a largely patriarchal religion to this day.
Despite the
equivalence of men and women manifested by Jesus in his teachings and his way
of living, the “emerging Christianity” after his crucifixion was, at least to
begin with, essentially Jewish in its nature, so it is not surprising that
women were increasingly pushed into the background, although great devotion
continued to be shown to the memory of Mary Magdalene and her prominent role as
a major apostle of Jesus until after the Council of Nicaea (325 AD).
By the fifth century
AD Christianity saw itself as distinctly ‘un-Jewish’, and the mainline Church
was already involved in trying to eradicate ‘heresies’; in other words,
attempting to standardise the faith and wipe out opposition. It was by now
completely male-dominated, and women in general were seen as subservient and
too inferior to be allowed to play any formal role in the Church.
The sacred feminine
is a major theme in The Da Vinci Code and is shown to be worshipped and
protected by the Priory of Sion and attacked and suppressed by the Opus Dei.
Whether one agrees with the views endorsed in the novel or not, the resurgence
of the feminine during the last few decades is long overdue.
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