July 10, 2006
Marrying off the Goddess?
Comments on The Da Vinci Code
by Geraldine Charles
Goddess is greater by far than any human bride of Christ. It is insulting and -- I can think of no better word than hubristic -- to reduce her to the status of brood mare.
I rather enjoyed The Da Vinci Code -- well, as much as, say, Jurassic Park and somewhat more than any of Dan Brown's oddly similar earlier books. I enjoyed The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, too, and certainly the latter encouraged me to make enquiries of my own and -- more importantly -- to think for myself. But I like to read trashy novels when I'm tired, and wouldn't normally have paid The Da Vinci Code much more attention than I would any of the other charity-shop fodder that clutters my room.
What worries me about Dan Brown's book isn't that it is nothing special -- written to a well-worn formula with lots of cliff-hangers and infuriating twists and turns in the plot, it did leave me feeling somewhat more cynically manipulated than usual. But that's all. I won't bother to summarise or describe the narrative as almost everyone has read it by now and hey -- if by some miracle you managed to miss the book -- the movie is out now!
The similarities to HBHG are immediately obvious, but I was surprised to hear that Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of its authors, were bothering to sue DVC's publishers in a green-eyed but obviously unwinnable lawsuit. Surprised, that is, until I heard that Dan Brown and the authors of HBHG share a publisher. Sure enough, the motorway services soon had newly minted copies of the latter on its shelves, and some bookshops went so far as to explain the connection with DVC for the sake of anyone who has been living off-planet for the last few months. Well, as Dan Brown has shown, we all love a good conspiracy, and I'll bet many publishers would burn their M25-hugging SUVs for the kind of publicity this gave them. As Sarah Crown wrote in a Guardian blog:
"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail has shot up the Amazon bestseller charts from number 173 yesterday lunchtime to number 10 at the time of writing. I suspect marketing management on the grandest scale."*
No, what does bother me is the reaction of people -- Goddess people - to the book and the ideas expressed therein. I have no idea whether Dan Brown truly subscribes to these ideas or is simply making his bank manager a very happy bunny, but I frequently find myself reminding others that this is a novel -- fiction -- and therefore required to uphold no academic standards whatever. Judging from some of the excited conversations I've overheard in Goddess circles, people are taking it as Gospel -- Gnostic Gospel. And there, of course, lies the problem -- that of the co-optation of Goddess into a set of ideas that will serve only to uphold the status quo of patriarchal religion. Using Her in a tawdry money-making conspiracy is insulting, but treating our Goddess simply as a vessel for passing on the "holy blood" is quite another matter.
I'm interested in the story or myth of Mary Magdalene and happy to have her fascinating character reclaimed from the simplistic "prostitute" ideas grafted onto it by the church and surrounding culture -- but worry at the same time that Goddess people appear to have such a lot invested in whisking her, like another sassy Pretty Woman, from the status of whore to wife. What's so terrible about prostitutes, anyway, particularly the sacred ones who may well have been around in Palestine in the year dot?
A quick scan of the internet for critiques of DVC immediately produces a rash of outraged Christians, who again seem to have forgotten the simple point that the book is fiction, and who make a variety of claims regarding "factual" errors in the novel, usually by quoting the obviously "factual" bible in their own support. Now, this is all great fun for someone like me, who simply doesn't believe there is any real evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus -- the wonder-worker who has been variously described over the last thirty years or so as astronaut, parthenogenetic female and, most entertainingly, magic mushroom. Why not, then, a simple family man? Well, Gnosticism itself is why not. The biggest contradiction in the ideas put forward by Brown et al is that any first century Gnostics who happened to be browsing the internet would be baffled by today's wranglings, for to them Jesus and Mary were mythological figures deliberately used in teaching Gnostic beginners the basics. It is in such Gnostic teachings that the real danger lies -- for at its heart Gnosticism values spirit above all and believes the material world -- the creation of our Mother -- to be fundamentally corrupt.
There has been a great deal of interest in the idea of "Sophia" as the missing Christian Goddess, and the sentiment underlying this has placed Mary Magdalene into the same mould -- interestingly, because Sophia herself, in Gnostic myth, is described as a whore in more of their parables. Sophia is to Gnostics -- besides being the only female present - the lowest emanation of deity (as, interestingly, is Christ, because he took on a material body, this being the main reason why many Christians so hate Gnosticism, of course -- despite the fact that Christianity is actually thoroughly infected with Gnostic dualistic ideas.) The whore, redeemed or otherwise, is a powerful image; when we replace her with a dutiful wife, we diminish ourselves and our culture. Risk is the new sin, after all, and so a little more wonderful wildness is gone; the safety of institutionalized religion shored up for a little longer. Gnostics may argue that I've oversimplified, but ultimately Sophia is subject to their God, who is seen as male.
Goddess is greater by far than any human bride of Christ. It is insulting and -- I can think of no better word than hubristic -- to reduce her to the status of brood mare. I'm also annoyed that I can't think of words for robbing a female -- deity or person -- of power without coming up with "castrating" or "rendering impotent" -- which underlines my point, so little power have women had under patriarchy that there hasn't even been a need for a satisfactory word for the act of taking it away from them.
Come to that, do we want a sacred bloodline back in the saddle? My own blood freezes at the thought of a re-established theocracy in Western Europe, where so many lives were lost to inquisition, witch hunt and pogrom, not to mention squabbling aristocrats, revolutions and the horror of two world wars. Who needs an authority that we cannot challenge because to do so would constitute blasphemy or heresy? Where would our sovereignty lie then? If you think a restored Merovingian dynasty couldn't be much worse than the cynical sound-byte politicians of today, take a look at Afghanistan under the Taliban. Goddess Temple? Don't make me laugh, you'd be lucky to be allowed out to feed the chickens.
Right now, various religions are arguing which of them is the fastest-growing in the world today, with Islam and fundamentalist Christianity in pole position. But paganism can also justifiably make this claim, particularly in North America and the West; although due to almost complete decentralization would probably never get it together to offer any proof. This growth hasn't gone unnoticed, though, and is (probably rightly) considered a real threat by all the patriarchal religions. No real conspiracy, just a zeitgeist is all that's needed to marry Goddess off to God (after all, the patriarchal Greeks did this very successfully with the ancient deities of the lands they invaded). How useful it would be to rob our Goddess of her growing power, to marry her safely off to Jesus, an 'er indoors to point out to backsliding churchgoers -- there, now you have your Goddess, so everything's OK, all is as before. Thank you, kind sir. Precisely my point.
Taking these ideas to their logical conclusions may seem a little excitable, but nothing compared to the hysteria engendered by the publicity surrounding the book and film. If I were Dan Brown, I'd be on the high road to megalomania, few pulp authors have affected popular culture to this extent, however much publicity is thrown their way.
The holy grail of Goddess, She who is mystery and mother, creator and immanent presence, must not become a symbol as degraded as was the swastika -- an ancient sign of good fortune, of the sun's path and of humanity's status as children of our Mother. If we're in any doubt as to the hold that such symbols can have on our collective unconscious, remember how the Nazis misused myth in their drive for power, talking of bloodlines, of the grail. Sound familiar? Himmler, it is reported, wished the SS to be a new Round Table of knights dedicated to racial -- bloodline -- purity. With Kinder, Kirche, Küche**, of course, for the womenfolk. KKK, anyone?
** Children, church, kitchen.
Geraldine Charles
References
*(Sarah Crown, GU blogs, 28 February 2006) http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/02/28/originality_sins.html
Dan Brown, 2002, The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday Books
Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln. 1982, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Jonathan Cape Ltd
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, 2001, Jesus and the Goddess, Thorsons
The Gnosis Archive: http://www.webcom.com/gnosis/