The Da Vinci Code
ORIGINS OF THE DA
VINCI CODE
THE STORY OF THE
BIGGEST HOAX OF THE 21ST CENTURY
In 2003 anchor books published the
Da Vinci code Dan brown. Over time the Da Vinci code went on to net a record
40-plus million copies!
The Da Vinci code talks about the
attempts by Robert Langdon, a Harvard Professor-Symbologist and Sophie Neveu, a
cryptographer with the Paris DCPJ to unravel the curious death of Jacques Sauniere,
the curator of the Louvre.; that eventually led them to the startling discovery
which exploded the divinity of Jesus Christ by unjocularly asserting that
Christ’s bloodline, sired with Mary Magdalene still exists. But aside from the
conservative clergy of the Christian world who felt the religious sensibilities
of Christians were being impudently affronted, everyone seemed to be cool with
it-the scientists okayed the scientific approach that had been employed in
arriving at the inference; the secular readership swooned over the
conspiratorial essence present in the novel’s plot.
In the early 1900s Abbe Sauniere a
priest in the remote French village
of Rennes le Chateaux struck gold mysteriously.
With this new, seemingly unexplained wealth (at least to outsiders; since he
made the money from burial-mass racketeering)-see Bill Putnam’s the treasure
of Rennes le châteaux;
a mystery solved- he gave himself and the village an uplift.
Soon after World War II and long after Sauniere’s death a businessman, Monsieur
Corbu bought over Sauniere’s castle and transformed it into a hotel but
business was slack so he developed a mystery around Sauniere’s wealth and as a
corollary-the Sauniere castle. That did the trick and soon everyone started
coming around, including in the 1950s, an egomaniacal French man, Pierre Plantard.
He saw in the castle-mystery an opportunity for him to satisfy the proclivities
of his megalomaniacal idiosyncrasies through reputation aggrandizement. He
convinced two of his friends, Philippe de Cherisey-a radio presenter and Gerard
de Sede to help him. The results were the seemingly top-secret Priory of Sion (the
purported non-militant and secret arm of the medieval knights templar who were
supposedly responsible for the safekeeping of the secret documents as well as
the bloodline of Jesus as descended from the Merovingian kings-Plantard named it
after a hill in his village) Grand Masters’ chronology which they placed in the
Bibliotheque Nationale, and a novel, la tressor le maudit.
This, Gerard de Sede encoded with a ridiculously simple code. He foresaw a
curious whiz kid eventually reading the book and gratifying their wishes.
The whiz kid duly appeared in the
form of a BBC reporter, Henry Lincoln holidaying
in the French countryside. He read the book, broke the code and latched on to
the expected denotations. These in turn were enough to allow the BBC okay his
extensive documentaries on what had now become known as the mystery of Rennés le
Châteaux. Together with the rather timely discovery of the purported Priory of Sion
documents, a seemingly sound basis was provided for the assertion in his 1980
co-authored bestseller, the holy blood and holy
grail as well as the sequel, the messianic legacy that
Sauniere’s wealth had been the result of
hush money paid him by the Vatican to keep him from revealing Gnostic gospels
that proved that the Merovingian dynasty was in fact a bloodline of
Jesus Christ from Mary Magdalene’s purported
pregnancy during her mythic post-Jesus-crucifixion sojourn in France. They backed this up with
the myth of the Merovingians’ descent from a fish and given that Jesus
was formerly symbolized as a fish, they arrived at the seemingly obvious
inference. They also gratified Plantard’s wishes by bringing him fame as the supposed
current Grand Master of the Priory of Sion (preceded by such eminent
personalities like Leonardo Da Vinci, Sandro Boticelli, Victor Hugo and even
Sir Isaac Newton) as claimed in the documents. Their book later inspired other
like-minded works like Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett’s templar revelation,
David Barrett’s secret societies and the famous-or infamous Da
Vinci code.
It was after the latter’s worldwide
success that the dust mainly cleared. Lincoln himself admitted having
interviewed Gerard de Sede himself and having discovered that the documents and
the code were a big hoax. Yet he still went ahead
to publish his book! Eventually misleading the
gullible soul-searcher Dan Brown into equally misleading a great number of his
readership, especially in the west where religious fervour is at an all-time
nadir.
The Aftermath
The Da Vinci code revealed the
religious disillusionment in the west.
Second it called into a strong
focus the epistemological relevance of knowledge in today’s world. In terms of the Da Vinci
code, Brown based his facts upon the purported Priory of Sion documents.
Now Brown can hardly be blamed for he was merely the victim of evidential ironies:
Ancient myths, art paintings, geography, political and religious history and
even mathematics! which All served to provide proofs of the
theories-from the sublime to the ridiculous- forwarded by the different Da
Vincians.
And lastly it indicates the extent
to which unscrupulous writers like Lincoln and Picknett will go to actually
best-sell their books by exploiting the psycho-religious vacuum of their
readership.
On the whole however, the Da Vinci
hullabaloo had one indubitable positive effect-it not only revived massive
reading culture worldwide but it also returned a pungent spotlight to the
literary media.
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