Arguments And Things I Found Interesting In The Very Famous Dan Brown Book, The Da Vinci Code
Embarrassingly, it’s only my first time reading the book ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and this is for two major reasons;
- I’ve had no access to it until recently
- The reviews I’ve had has not been recommendations until recently
By the way, those are not the order it follows.
You may or may not have read the book, however, keep in mind, if you’re reading this piece, that I am neither writing to criticize nor recommend the book, although when asked by a friend who recommended it about a month ago, and if I should ever be asked by anyone…
The Da Vinci Code is a 10/10 book, thank you very much, Dan Brown!
Ok let’s get to it.
Some things you need to note first before we get into it, especially if you’ve never read the book or seen the movie adaptation of it:
- Most of the scenes took place in France
- It was a three-days-scene-book (hope that makes sense)
- Has 105 chapters and every chapter is fast paced (which I think is what makes it amazing)
- There are many historical references (which is the highlight of the book, because he successfully fused history with fiction. Interesting, right?)
- There is a secret cult known as Priory of Sion, tasked with the responsibility of protecting The Holy Grail
- Dan Brown is such a Leonardo de Vinci lover that he has a horse named after him, so his referencing of de Vinci in the book is not just a thing of fiction
- I’m catholic
Next, for clarity’s sake, I’ll introduce some of the main characters in the book and the role they played, as I may need to mention them in the course of writing.
- Jacques Sauniére: Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion, Louvre curator and Grandfather
- Sophie Neveu: a police cryptographer and granddaughter to Jacques
- Robert Langdon: American symbologist
- Sir Leigh Teabing: a historian
Ok. Let’s start.
I believe, the purpose of this book, given its several historical references, is to make aware of the part of history that didn’t win when the coin was tossed.
So the whole context of this book is to reveal a long-lost secret. The Secret of the Holy Grail. I don’t know about you, but I never saw those two words to mean anything of significance. Not as Christ’s chalice at the Last Supper or any other thing the book says most people know it for.
Apparently, the Holy Grail is a woman, whose significance in history has been lost, her value abused by men who have no regard for the sacred feminine.
As the book puts it, the sacred feminine is the reverence or acknowledgment of the divine authority of females in bringing about a balance in the world, and Da Vinci was a huge believer in the sacred feminine, so much so that most of his famous paintings are secret trademarks to this belief.
We see this in the famous Mona Lisa painting, as the book pointed out in the part where Robert Langdon and Sophie looked for clues to understand the random messages Jacques Sauniére inscribed on the museum floor with his blood before he died.
The book explains that the background behind the face of the Mona Lisa is uneven, with the left horizon being slightly lower than the right horizon, so she looks larger from the left side than she does on the left.
To anybody, that was probably a painting error, but the book lets us know that Leonardo de Vinci was not one to often make mistakes. That, however, was his way of reverencing the sacred feminine.
You see, in history, the left side of anything is seen to be the feminine side, just as today, the left side is said to be the weaker side, and females are seen to be “weaker vessels” (I’m sure Leonardo would argue about that last bit).
So the left is to the females and the right to the males, and by making the left horizon bigger, he makes her look majestic.
Apart from left and right to depict male and female, throughout history many symbols have been used to represent gender, another which is the blade (ᴧ) and the chalice (ᴠ), where the blade is male and the chalice is female.
Brings us back to where we started. The Holy Grail is a woman. Precisely, Mary Magdalene of the bible.
Not only does the bible say she was a prostitute (devaluation) but she only appeared a few times (forgotten), meanwhile, the book paints her, well according to some lost scrolls of the bible or the ones Emperor Constantine The Great burnt when “collating” the bible, she was neither a prostitute nor just a random follower of Christ. She was Christ’s companion, Christ’s lover, the mother of his child, Sarah (I laughed at this part, I’m sorry Dan Brown), the Holy Grail.
Yeah, if you’ve never read or heard about the book, you’re probably like “Whaaaaaaaat?😳”
Just so you know, it’s not just you. The Church said the same thing after reading Da Vinci Code then came for Dan Brown’s head.
But that wasn’t even my problem when I read that part.
As Catholics, the only high female order we recognize is the blessed Virgin Mary and I’m a fan of the woman. So reading all that about Mary Magdalene, all I saw was someone, some body, trying to give the place of the blessed mother to Mary Magdalene.
Say my view is biased or whatever, but no, history, no, Dan Brown. Holy Grail or not, the only sacred feminine in the story of Jesus is the blessed mother.
Now about Jesus having a child, another part Emperor Constantine apparently omitted after putting Jesus’s divinity up to a vote in a council (yeah, I know 😅 just go read the book), if I’m to follow Sir Leigh Teabing’s argument when he was introducing MM to Sophie as the Holy Grail;
“Moreover, Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor…the social decorum during that time virtually forbids a Jewish man to be unmarried”
My question will be, since even the book agrees that Jesus was a powerful man as the bible we know says, a man so powerful that he was actually boldly stubborn.
We see his stubbornness right from the time when Mary and Joseph found him in the temple, when Mary asked him to help the groom at the wedding, when Jews fasted and he didn’t, when he performed miracles on the Sabbath day…
My point is, the man was so bold he was breaking protocols. So what makes you think he couldn’t forfeit that social decorum, Sir Leigh Teabing? For a man like that… it makes sense that he was unmarried.
I’ve exhausted more than a thousand words on arguments, now let’s talk about some things I found interesting in The Da Vinci Code.
Jacques Sauniére was portrayed as an intelligent and complex man in the book. He made anagrams to stuff for a hobby and most times these stuff were Da Vinci’s works. The first of his anagrams was decoded by Langdon when he and Sophie were still in the Louvre
O Draconian devil
Oh, lame saint
Translation
Leonardo da Vinci!
The Mona Lisa
That wasn’t the only anagram for Mona Lisa the book recorded.
There was a flashback scene to where Robert was teaching some prison fellas about symbology and stuff, then he made mention of the Egyptian god of fertility, AMON and his counterpart, ISIS.
Before we can make sense of the anagram here, let’s make something clear. ISIS was originally called L’ISA, therefore, the fusion of AMON and L’ISA gives:
MONA LISA
Another anagram, this one Sophie decoded herself when she went into her father’s office, was:
So dark the con of man
Translation
Madonna of the Rocks
Madonna of the Rocks is another of Da Vinci’s paintings. It didn’t particularly interest me, so I won’t be saying more.
Oh, another interesting point, tied to the Egyptian god of fertility is that he is a man with the head of a ram. And as some people will believe, as it is said in the book, the common sexual slang among Gen-Zs, ‘horny’, originates from the nature of this Egyptian god. I don’t know about you, but that makes absolute sense.
Back to the Mona Lisa again. I’ve always wondered what makes it such a treasure and resigned myself to think that I probably do not see it because I don’t have an artistic eye.
That might still be true, but here’s what I found out.
The Mona Lisa, is no She. It is also not a He. But both.
Going by the AMON and L’ISA anagram, a god and goddess, the gender of the painting is already revealed, which also goes on to explain the reason behind the snide smile the painting has.
This was also Da Vinci’s coy to show his believe in the sacred feminine, the belief in the balance that can be created from recognizing both masculine and feminine authority in all things.
The next interesting thing I learned from The Da Vinci Code is the Fibonacci Sequence and given how low this is ranking on my list, it can be said to be unfair because it was actually one of the first things I learned from the book.
The moment Sophie was introduced as a cryptographer, walking into the murder scene of her grandfather and meeting Robert for the first time.
Among her grandfather’s final written random messages, he had also written some set of numbers
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
Sophie had rewritten it as:
1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21
“This is the Fibonacci sequence… A progression in which each term is equal to the sum of the two preceding terms” Sophie had said.
But it didn’t end there. Another number was revealed in a flashback where Robert was lecturing some students (I think in Harvard) and he asked if anyone knew about ‘PHI’.
PHI = 1.618
Apparently, PHI is the most beautiful number in the world and it is derived from the Fibonacci sequence. “The quotients of adjacent terms in the sequence possess the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618” the book says.
I wish I understood the last bit of all that, but I don’t. here’s what I understand though:
When you take a measuring tape to measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor and divide what you get by the distance from your belly button to the floor, you’ll get 1.618.
Or if you measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertip and divide that with the distance from your elbow to your fingertips, you’ll also get PHI.
In fact, The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci is said to be the most accurate depiction of the human anatomy because it was the first to show that the human body is made of building blocks whose proportional ratios = PHI.
Lastly, Leonardo da Vinci exhumed corpses to obtain the accuracy and proportional ratios of the human body as shown in his Vitruvian Man drawing.
I learned a lot from this book and I was so excited reading every bit and I guess that’s why this has to be the most fun thing I’ve written in a while. I hope you enjoyed reading but…
Before you go, quickly let me know in the comment if you have or not read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. If you haven’t, is this piece a conviction to read it? And if you have, kindly drop an argument or an interesting fact you learned from it.
Also, don’t forget to clap and share if you find it worthy.
