The Da Vinci Code
The
Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery
thriller novel
by Dan
Brown. It is Brown's second novel to
include the character Robert
Langdon: the first was his 2000 novel Angels
& Demons. The Da Vinci Code follows
"symbologist" Robert
Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre
Museum in Paris causes them to become
involved in a battle between the Priory
of Sion and Opus
Dei over the possibility of Jesus
Christ having been a companion to Mary
Magdalene.
The
novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is
that the Merovingian
kings of France
were descended from the
bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary
Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers
to The Holy Blood and
the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated
that it was not used as research material.
The
Da Vinci Code provoked a popular interest in
speculation concerning the Holy
Grail legend and Mary Magdalene's role in
the history of Christianity. The book has, however, been extensively denounced by many Christian
denominations as an attack on the Catholic
Church, and consistently criticized for its historical and
scientific inaccuracies. The
novel nonetheless became a worldwide bestseller[1] that sold 80 million copies as of 2009[2] and has been translated into 44 languages. In November
2004, Random House
published a Special Illustrated Edition with 160 illustrations. In 2006, a film adaptation was released by Columbia
Pictures.
Plot
Louvre curator and Priory
of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is
fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas,
who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to
discover the location of the "keystone," an item crucial in the
search for the Holy Grail.
After
Saunière's body is discovered in the pose of the Vitruvian
Man, the police summon Harvard
professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache
tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message
Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence
out of order.
Langdon
explains to Fache that Saunière was a leading authority on the subject of
goddess artwork and that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own
blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache
believes.
Sophie
Neveu, a police cryptographer,
secretly explains to Langdon that she is Saunière's estranged granddaughter,
and that Fache thinks Langdon is the murderer because the last line in her
grandfather's message, which was meant for Neveu, said "P.S. Find Robert
Langdon," which Fache had erased prior to Langdon's arrival. However,
"P.S." actually refers to Sophie, as the nickname given to her by her
grandfather is "Princess Sophie". It does not refer to
"postscript". Neveu is troubled by memories of her grandfather's
involvement in a secret pagan group. However, she understands that her
grandfather intended Langdon to decipher the code, which leads them to a safe
deposit box at the Paris branch of the
Depository Bank of Zurich.
Neveu
and Langdon escape from the police and visit the bank. In the safe deposit box
they find a box containing the keystone: a cryptex, a cylindrical, hand-held vault with five concentric,
rotating dials labeled with letters. When these are lined up correctly, they
unlock the device. If the cryptex is forced open, an enclosed vial of vinegar
breaks and dissolves the message inside the cryptex, which was written on papyrus. The box containing the cryptex contains clues to its
password.
Langdon
and Neveu take the keystone to the home of Langdon's friend, Sir Leigh Teabing,
an expert on the Holy Grail, the legend of which is heavily connected to the
Priory. There, Teabing explains that the Grail is not a cup, but a tomb
containing the bones of Mary
Magdalene.
The
trio then flees the country on Teabing's private plane, on which they conclude
that the proper combination of letters spell out Neveu's given name, Sofia.
Opening the cryptex, they discover a smaller cryptex inside it, along with
another riddle that ultimately leads the group to the tomb of Isaac
Newton in Westminster
Abbey.
During
the flight to Britain, Neveu reveals the source of her estrangement from her
grandfather ten years earlier. Arriving home unexpectedly from university,
Neveu secretly witnesses a spring fertility rite conducted in the secret
basement of her grandfather's country estate. From her hiding place, she is
shocked to see her grandfather with a woman at the center of a ritual attended
by men and women who are wearing masks and chanting praise to the goddess. She
flees the house and breaks off all contact with Saunière. Langdon explains that
what she witnessed was an ancient ceremony known as hieros
gamos or "sacred marriage."
By
the time they arrive at Westminster
Abbey, Teabing is revealed to be the
Teacher for whom Silas is working. Teabing wishes to use the Holy Grail, which
he believes is a series of documents establishing that Jesus
Christ married Mary Magdalene and bore
children, in order to ruin the Vatican. He compels Langdon at gunpoint to solve the second
cryptex's password, which Langdon realizes is "apple." Langdon
secretly opens the cryptex and removes its contents before tossing the empty
cryptex in the air.
Teabing
is arrested by Fache, who by now realizes that Langdon is innocent. Bishop
Aringarosa, head of religious sect Opus
Dei and Silas' mentor, realizing that
Silas has been used to murder innocent people, rushes to help the police find
him. When the police find Silas hiding in an Opus Dei Center, he assumes that
they are there to kill him and he rushes out, accidentally shooting Bishop
Aringarosa. Bishop Aringarosa survives but is informed that Silas was found
dead later from a gunshot wound.
The
final message inside the second keystone leads Neveu and Langdon to Rosslyn
Chapel, whose docent turns out to be
Neveu's long-lost brother, whom Neveu had been told died as a child in the car
accident that killed her parents. The guardian of Rosslyn Chapel, Marie Chauvel
Saint Clair, is Neveu's long-lost grandmother. It is revealed that Neveu and
her brother are descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. The Priory of
Sion hid her identity to protect her from possible threats to her life.
The
real meaning of the last message is that the Grail is buried beneath the small pyramid directly below the La Pyramide Inversée, the inverted glass pyramid of the Louvre. It also lies beneath the "Rose Line," an
allusion to "Rosslyn." Langdon figures out this final piece to the
puzzle; he follows the Rose Line to La Pyramide Inversée, where he
kneels to pray before the hidden sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, as the Templar
knights did before him.
Characters
Main article: List of The Da Vinci
Code characters
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Reaction
Sales
The
Da Vinci Code was a major success in 2003 and was
outsold only by J. K. Rowling's
Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix.[3]
Historical inaccuracies
The
book generated criticism when it was first published for inaccurate description
of core aspects of Christianity and descriptions of European art,
history, and architecture. The book has received mostly negative reviews from
Catholic and other Christian communities.
Many
critics took issue with the level of research Brown did when writing the story.
The New York Times writer Laura Miller characterized the novel as "based
on a notorious hoax", "rank nonsense", and "bogus",
saying the book is heavily based on the fabrications of Pierre
Plantard, who is asserted to have created
the Priory of Sion in 1956.
Critics
accuse Brown of distorting and fabricating history. For example, Marcia Ford
wrote:
Regardless
of whether you agree with Brown's conclusions, it's clear that his history is
largely fanciful, which means he and his publisher have violated a long-held if
unspoken agreement with the reader: Fiction that purports to present historical
facts should be researched as carefully as a nonfiction book would be.[4]
Richard
Abanes wrote:
The
most flagrant aspect... is not that Dan Brown disagrees with Christianity but
that he utterly warps it in order to disagree with it... to the point of
completely rewriting a vast number of historical events. And making the matter
worse has been Brown's willingness to pass off his distortions as ‘facts' with
which innumerable scholars and historians agree.[4]
The
book opens with the claim by Dan Brown that "The Priory of Sion—a French secret
society founded in 1099—is a real
organization". This assertion is broadly disputed; the Priory
of Sion is generally regarded as a hoax
created in 1956 by Pierre
Plantard. The author also claims that
"all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents… and secret rituals
in this novel are accurate", but this claim is disputed by numerous
academic scholars expert in numerous areas.[5]
Dan
Brown himself addresses the idea of some of the more controversial aspects
being fact on his web site, stating that the "FACT" page at the
beginning of the novel mentions only "documents, rituals, organization, artwork
and architecture", but not any of the ancient theories discussed by
fictional characters, stating that "Interpreting those ideas is left to
the reader". Brown also says, "It is my belief that some of the
theories discussed by these characters may have merit" and "the
secret behind The Da Vinci Code was too well documented and significant
for me to dismiss."[6]
In
2003, while promoting the novel, Brown was asked in interviews what parts of
the history in his novel actually happened. He replied "Absolutely all of
it." In a 2003 interview with CNN's Martin
Savidge he was again asked how much of the
historical background was true. He replied, "99% is true… the background
is all true".
Asked
by Elizabeth Vargas
in an ABC
News special if the book would have been
different if he had written it as non-fiction he replied, "I don't think
it would have."[7]
In
2005, UK TV personality Tony
Robinson edited and narrated a detailed
rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Michael
Baigent, Richard Leigh
and Henry Lincoln,
who authored the book Holy Blood, Holy
Grail, in the program The Real Da
Vinci Code, shown on British TV
Channel
4. The program featured lengthy
interviews with many of the main protagonists cited by Brown as "absolute
fact" in The Da Vinci Code.
Arnaud
de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède,
stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of
the Prieuré de Sion,
the cornerstone of the Jesus
bloodline theory: "frankly, it was
piffle", noting that the concept of a descendant of Jesus was also an
element of the 1999 Kevin Smith
film Dogma.
The
earliest appearance of this theory is due to the 13th-century Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay who reported that Cathars believed that the 'evil' and 'earthly' Jesus
Christ had a relationship with Mary
Magdalene, described as his concubine (and that the 'good Christ' was incorporeal and existed
spiritually in the body of Paul).[8] The program The Real Da Vinci Code also cast doubt
on the Rosslyn Chapel
association with the Grail and on other related stories, such as the alleged
landing of Mary Magdalene in France.
According
to The Da Vinci Code, the Roman Emperor Constantine
I suppressed Gnosticism because it portrayed Jesus as purely human. The novel's
argument is as follows:[9]
Constantine wanted Christianity to act as a unifying religion for the Roman
Empire. He thought Christianity would
appeal to pagans
only if it featured a demigod
similar to pagan heroes. According to the Gnostic
Gospels, Jesus was merely a human prophet,
not a demigod. Therefore, to change Jesus' image, Constantine destroyed the Gnostic
Gospels and promoted the gospels of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which portray Jesus as divine or semi-divine.
But
Gnosticism did not portray Jesus as merely human.[10] All Gnostic writings depict Christ as purely divine, his human
body being a mere illusion (see Docetism).[11] Gnostic sects saw Christ this way because they regarded
matter as evil, and therefore believed that a divine spirit would never have
taken on a material body.[10]
Literary criticism
The
book received both positive and negative reviews from critics, and it has been
the subject of negative appraisals concerning its portrayal of history. Its
writing and historical accuracy were reviewed negatively by The
New Yorker,[12] Salon.com,[13] and Maclean's.[14]
Janet
Maslin of The New York Times said
that one word "concisely conveys the kind of extreme enthusiasm with which
this riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller can be
recommended. That word is wow. The author is Dan Brown (a name you will want to
remember). In this gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format
he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to
blockbuster perfection."[15]
David
Lazarus of The San Francisco
Chronicle said, "This story has so many
twists—all satisfying, most unexpected—that it would be a sin to reveal too
much of the plot in advance. Let's just say that if this novel doesn't get your
pulse racing, you need to check your meds."[16]
While
interviewing Umberto Eco
in a 2008 issue of The
Paris Review, Lila Azam Zanganeh characterized The
Da Vinci Code as "a bizarre little offshoot" of Eco's novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. In response, Eco remarked, "Dan Brown is a character
from Foucault's Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters'
fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The
role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything
is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist."[17]
The
book appeared on a 2010 list of 101 best books ever written, which was derived
from a survey of more than 15,000 Australian readers.[18]
Salman
Rushdie said during a lecture, "Do not
start me on The Da Vinci Code. A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a
bad name."[19]
Stephen
Fry has referred to Brown's writings as
"complete loose stool-water" and "arse gravy of the worst
kind".[20] In a live chat on June 14, 2006, he clarified, "I just
loathe all those book[s] about the Holy
Grail and Masons and Catholic conspiracies and all that botty-dribble. I
mean, there's so much more that's interesting and exciting in art and in
history. It plays to the worst and laziest in humanity, the desire to think the
worst of the past and the desire to feel superior to it in some fatuous
way."[21]
Stephen
King likened Dan Brown's work to
"Jokes for the John", calling such literature the "intellectual
equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese".[22] The New York Times, while reviewing the movie based on the book, called the
book "Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English
sentence".[23] The
New Yorker reviewer Anthony
Lane refers to it as "unmitigated
junk" and decries "the crumbling coarseness of the style".[12] Linguist Geoffrey
Pullum and others posted several entries
critical of Dan Brown's writing, at Language
Log, calling Brown one of the
"worst prose stylists in the history of literature" and saying
Brown's "writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily,
thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad".[24] Roger Ebert
described it as a "potboiler written with little grace and style",
although he said it did "supply an intriguing plot".[25] In his review of the film National Treasure, whose plot also involves ancient conspiracies and treasure
hunts, he wrote: "I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code
every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read
books like The Da Vinci Code."[25]
Lawsuits
Author
Lewis
Perdue alleged that Brown plagiarized from
two of his novels, The Da Vinci Legacy, originally published in 1983,
and Daughter of God, originally published in 2000. He sought to block
distribution of the book and film. However, Judge
George Daniels of the US
District Court in New York ruled
against Perdue in 2005, saying that "A reasonable average lay observer
would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter
of God" and that "Any slightly similar elements are on the level
of generalized or otherwise unprotectable ideas."[26] Perdue appealed, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld
the original decision, saying Mr. Perdue's arguments were "without
merit".[27]
In
early 2006, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh filed suit against Brown's
publishers, Random House. They alleged that significant portions of The Da
Vinci Code were plagiarized from The Holy Blood and
the Holy Grail, violating their copyright.[28] Brown confirmed during the court case that he named the
principal Grail expert of his story Leigh Teabing, an anagram of "Baigent
Leigh", after the two plaintiffs. In reply to the suggestion that Henry
Lincoln was also referred to in the book, since he has medical problems
resulting in a severe limp, like the character of Leigh Teabing, Brown stated
he was unaware of Lincoln's illness and the correspondence was a coincidence.[29] Since Baigent and Leigh had presented their conclusions as
historical research, not as fiction, Mr Justice Peter Smith, who presided over
the trial, deemed that a novelist must be free to use these ideas in a
fictional context, and ruled against Baigent and Leigh. Smith also hid his
own secret code in his written judgement, in the
form of seemingly random italicized letters in the 71-page document, which
apparently spell out a message. Smith indicated he would confirm the code if
someone broke it.[30] After losing before the High Court
on July 12, 2006, they then appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Court of Appeal.[29][31]
In
April 2006 Mikhail Anikin, a Russian scientist and art historian working as a
senior researcher at the Hermitage
Museum in St Petersburg, stated the
intention to bring a lawsuit against Dan Brown, maintaining that he was the one
who coined the phrase used as the book's title and one of the ideas regarding
the Mona Lisa used in its plot. Anikin interprets the Mona Lisa
to be a Christian allegory consisting of two images, one of Jesus Christ that
comprises the image's right half, one of the Virgin Mary that forms its left
half. According to Anikin, he expressed this idea to a group of experts from
the Museum of Houston during a 1988 René
Magritte exhibit at the Hermitage, and when
one of the Americans requested permission to pass it along to a friend Anikin
granted the request on condition that he be credited in any book using his
interpretation. Anikin eventually compiled his research into Leonardo da
Vinci or Theology on Canvas, a book published in 2000, but The Da Vinci
Code, published three years later, makes no mention of Anikin and instead
asserts that the idea in question is a "well-known opinion of a number of
scientists."[32][33]
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