Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
On the Trail of
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown's novel,
The Da Vinci Code
(Brown 2003), was first published in 2003.
By the end of 2006 its sales were reported to have reached 60 million worldwide,
and it had been made into a successful film. Its fast-moving action springs from the
murder of an art curator in the Louvre Museum in Paris as the assassin seeks out
the location of a powerful religious treasure kept by a secretive organisation. The
organisation, the Priory of Sion, is based in Opus Dei, the closed Roman Catholic
society, although the secret purposes of Opus Dei in the novel have been much
exaggerated and fictionalised. The treasure is called the Holy Grail, but it is not, as
in the Arthurian legend, the chalice used by Jesus to offer wine at the Last Supper.
It may be the tomb of Mary Magdalene, or it may also be the secret that she is, in
the novel, Jesus' wife, a “fact” said to have been hidden by the Priory of Sion for
2000 years. The fifteenth century artist Leonardo Da Vinci, supposedly one of the
society's adherents, is reported in the novel to have depicted this secret in a coded
way in his painting of the
Last Supper
.
The novel mixes a small spice of fact into a large dollop of fiction to create an
entertaining novel of intrigue, adventure, romance, danger and conspiracy, which
have been imaginatively worked together to cook up the successful bestseller.
Most interest in the novel's origins has centred on the sensational religious
aspects. There are about twenty book-length commentaries on the
The Da Vinci
Code
's religious history. Its account has drawn fire from large calibre guns. In March
2005 the Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, at a seminar called
Storia Senza Storia
(“Story Without History”) rebutted the claims that Jesus had a
child with Mary Magdalene. He said he wanted “to unmask the lies” so readers
could see how “shameful and unfounded” the novel was.
The Cardinal's condemnation may give the words of the novel more significance
than they deserve. Dan Brown has written: “All of the art, architecture, secret rituals,
secret societies, all of that, is historical fact.” This gives an air of authenticity to the
novel. Brown has, however, made up the religious doctrines, or based them on
questionable accounts by others, or on fiction disguised as fact.
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The technique is not unparallelled. The Coen brothers' film,
Fargo
(1996), famously opens with
the statement “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.”
This is a completely fabricated statement to give authenticity to a completely fictional story.
