Resumo de The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code has all the right ingredients to create a massive market share of the fiction sold during the next year. The characters are believable, the fictional premise intriguing, and it has two major components to insure sales -- the Knights Templar and the search for the Holy Grail.

Dan Brown has produced here an ingenious thriller It is an indoctrination into Gnosticism wrapped in the murder mystery. The reader is meant to imbibe many lies about Christian history that appear as factual declarations in the mouths of two well-educated characters who reinforce each other. Outrageous lies are given as indubitable facts ? for example, that the medieval Church killed five million women in 300 years, that Christians were constantly making war on Pagans before 325 A.D and that the Crusades were launched to destroy information about Mary Magdalene's having been the wife of Jesus. We are told in dogmatic tones that Original Sin was an idea devised to counter the sacred feminine and that Christians regarded Jesus Christ as a mere mortal until his divinity was imposed by Constantine on the Nicene Council

There is a secret society whose members share a fascination with goddess iconology, paganism, feminine deities, and contempt for the Church. Only gradually is it made clear that this society practices the abomination of ritual sex. The three monotheistic religions are dismissed as women-hating because they dared to recast as a shameful act the ritual sex The book is full of references to pentacles, roses, pyramids, blades and chalices, all of which are obsessively connected with sex and goddess worship.

Brown's Mary Magdalene is not the Catholic saint we know. She stands here for the goddess of sex once called Isis, Astarte or Venus. It sees the Lord as the equivalent of the horned gods of Paganism, such as Baal. It is the equivalent of Belshazzar's feast, where the sacred cup belonging to the Holy of Holies was monstrously profaned. Brown takes the Holy Grail, the cup in which Christ is thought to have consecrated the Blessed Sacrament at the Last Supper, and tramples it by reducing it to something carnal. He tries to persuade the reader that the Holy Grail had nothing to do with the Eucharist, but was only about Mary Magdalene's procreative organs.

On the last page, author finds Magdalene's grave but decides against publicizing what's in it, the documentary proof that the Church is a fraud. Why? Because it wouldn't do for the hoi polloi to know the Truth. Here Brown preaches Gnostic doctrine: that the stupid many, unlike the superior few, cannot live without lies. He shows the Bible as a web of lies, too, for he quotes Da Vinci saying, "Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude," and adds that this is in reference to the Bible

The Da Vinci Code is full of anagrams, puzzles, riddles and codes. This highlights what is most seductive about Gnosticism, its appeal to superficial cleverness. For the Gnostic, truth is an esoteric code that only the very clever can decipher. Brown treats his readers as if they belonged to this exclusive club of code-breakers. Trouble is, when all the puzzles are solved ? and he solves them by his mouthpiece the Harvard professor so the reader doesn't have to take any trouble ? what is left is banal and sordid. In contrast to the infinite depth and holiness of the Christian mysteries, the Gnostic mysteries turn out to be dull and dirty, like an expanse of foul-smelling mud. Or like coming to the last of several nesting boxes and finding that instead of a rare gift, you have only a pornographic image.

It's no accident that the professor who speaks for Brown ends up sounding like an atheist. He tells the naive girl that every faith in the world is based on fabrication, and every religion uses metaphors, but foolish ordinary people believe these stories literally. In other words, clever people are atheists because they regard evgion as made up.

In chapter 74, Brown finally gives a lengthy description of ritual sex. By this point he imagines that the reader has fallen under his Gnostic spell, so it is safe for the professor tell the ingenue about a ceremony that only looks like a sex ritual, but is actually a spiritual act meant to "achieve gnosis

In the last lines of the Da Vinci Code, after Mary Magdalene's grave has been found, the professor kneels in reverence and seems to hear a voice speaking to him from the abyss below: "For a moment, he thought he heard a woman's voice ... the wisdom of the ages ... whispering up from the chasms of the earth." One cannot help here but be reminded of Dante, the greatest Catholic poet, in whose Inferno the deep chasms of the earth are teeming with wicked demons and damned souls. By Brown's own admission here, the pretended wisdom that has inspired his book is lodged in the underworld. This is the voice, then, not of Mary Magdalene, but of a demon. Indeed this whole book, while superficially clever, comes straight out of hell. It is especially wicked to use the name of Mary Magdalene to cover the gross abominations of Gnosticism, which include goddess worship and ritual sex.

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