By Their Groups notes

How many here have read a book called The Da Vinci Code? It came out last year. It’s by Dan Brown? If you haven’t read it, you’ve probably heard of it. If you haven’t read it, I recommend that you would.

I tend to be more of a non-fiction fan myself. But I found this novel a real page-turner—and not just because I had put down in the newsletter I was going to talk about it this morning.

It’s a thriller from a previously little known author (I least I’d never heard of him) named Dan Brown. It opens at the Louvre Museum in Paris. A curator spends his last, agonizing moments of life, dying of a gunshot would delivered by a mysterious intruder. After the murderer leaves him for dead, the dying man leaves a trial of clues, a type of code, that baffles the French national police. Robert Langdon, an American symbologist visiting Paris, is called to the scene. This is his initiation into a world where the symbols he has studied so long spring to life in the form of sphinx-like riddles, clues hidden in Renaissance paintings, and a literal quest for the Holy Grail.

Langdon and his companion, the dead curator’s granddaughter, race through France and Britain’s landmarks one step ahead of the authorities and shadowy figures from powerful, secretive organizations.

The Da Vinci Code includes a vast amount of material from the Western esoteric tradition. It includes stories most of us are somewhat familiar with, yet may not have ever looked upon them as anything but quaint folk tales or taken-for-granted Bible stories—like King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail or stories about Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Actually, the novel weaves together the two stories, from very different times and cultures. Both Magdalene and the Holy Grail, according to novelist Brown, are examples of the “sacred feminine.” He paints a view on history that is informed by the Gnostic Scriptures, which portray Jesus’ life and teaching in a different light from that of the books that were selected by a Church council to be included in the Christian New Testament. Some of these writings from the first centuries of Christianity existed in quotations in the anti-“heresy” writings of some of the early Christian fathers. (By the way, as Brown points out, the word “heresy” comes from a Greek root that means “choice.”). Other Gnostic writings were discovered over the centuries, such as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, found in the late nineteenth century. But the big find was in Nag Hammadi, Egypt back in 1945. Thirteen codices, or bound volumes, many not seen since they had been buried in the fourth century.

I’m far from the first to point out that Brown does make some factual errors, despite his high-profile claim at the beginning of the book: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” For instance, Teabing, the author’s fictional Grail historian, utter one very misinformed series of claims. To quote, Teabing states:

Fortunately for historians … some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In addition to telling the true Grail story, these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. (unquote)

Some corrections:

The Dead Sea Scrolls were not found in the 50’s, but in 1947. They were Jewish documents, including many books of the Hebrew Bible, not Christian Gospels. There are those over the years who have tried to see the figure of Jesus in the Scrolls’ character known as “The Teacher of Righteousness,” but this is speculative at best.

The Nag Hammadi documents were in the form of codices, that is, books, not scrolls. Most of them were written by Gnostics. I’ll get more into them in a moment. Contrary to the novel, many of them did not depict Jesus (quote) “in very human terms.” (unquote) On the contrary, he is shown as the son of God coming to those God sends him or as a revealer of divine truth. They don’t contain the much of the type of seemingly concrete everyday detail we find so much in the canonical Gospels. To my mind, the Gnostic writings do not so much portray Jesus as human as teach humans to follow him into divinity.

Some of the Nag Hammadi texts do mention Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Actually, only one of them, the Gospel of Phillip, calls her “Mary Magdalene.” Several others simply say “Mary.” From our reading, we know that there is more than one Mary in the Gospel of Phillip: Jesus mother, sister, and “companion.” Dan Brown’s characters are again in error when one of them calls to his defense scholars of Aramaic to justify his claim that in the passage “companion” means “wife.” Actually, the text is in Coptic, an Egyptian relative of Greek.

Nevertheless, seeing “companion” as “wife” makes sense. It’s often been pointed that it was very rare for Jewish men of Jesus’ time (or most any other) to be single. If Jesus were single, it would seem some Christian text would have felt obliged to explain why. Instead, we have mostly silence on the matter. The evidence in Phillip is strengthened by the report of Jesus often kissing the Magdalene.

Whether or not Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married in historical fact, or in terms of the story if we take them to be purely mythological, we can extrapolate from a number of biblical and non-biblical texts that Mary was one of Jesus most dedicated, gifted, and beloved disciples. But Dan Brown takes thing to a further level in his book, drawing on traditions not so much from the Bible or Nag Hammadi Library but from centuries of European legend. He claims that Mary bears Jesus’ child in France and the bloodline still survives, guarded by a mysterious secret society called the Priory of Sion. Though Brown lists the Priory’s existence as a “Fact” at the beginning of the novel, that’s as maybe. Robert Anton Wilson, who literally wrote the book on conspiracies, has this to say in his encyclopedic compendium, Everything Is Under Control: “The Priory of Sion is one of the most enigmatic of all secret societies, and can seriously be suspected of being a serious conspiracy and also of being nothing but an elaborate hoax by some witty French aristocrats.”

Perhaps the best-known claim to come out of The Da Vinci Code is that the disciple to Jesus’ right in Leonardo’s famous painting of the Last Supper is not John, as commonly believed, but Mary Magdalene. The face, restored now to the original layer of the fresco, does look remarkably feminine. Brown also notes how Jesus and the disciple are wearing clothes in opposite colors and how their bodies seem to form the letter “M.” Was this Leonardo’s clue to her identity?

The questions and speculations of this “Jesus and Mary Chain,” as we might style it, go on forever. (Yes, I stole the title of this morning’s sermon from a pretty good rock band of the same name). To make yet another rock reference, all this might remind one of the famous “Paul Is Dead” hoax by the Beatles, which had fans analyzing album cover art and playing their records backwards. But it would seem Brown’s novel is much more than a publicity stunt.

My suspicion is that The Da Vinci Code’s amazing controversy/popularity is indicative of where we stand in religious history. Just like the centuries that brought us the fall of classical Paganism, the ascent of Christianity as we know it, and the rise and demise of Gnosticism, we are in a time of great social change, of cultures meeting and comparing notes, and of the hegemony of a single, increasingly remote and brutal world power. Gnostic elements have also been commented on in such recently celebrated works of art/entertainment as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and even Harry Potter.

The Da Vinci Code was not written as a scholarly account and should not be taken as such. Intelligent readers would do well to consider each individual claim carefully. From a cultural perspective, though, a novel can shape the general culture far more than scholarly tomes usually do. This novel provides a highly interesting introduction to the Western esoteric traditions, which have lived in the shadow of (and often in peril from) the established Christian churches.

Just like in the novel, not everyone is happy about the reemergence of the sacred feminine. Consider this statement I found on a fundamentalist Christian website. In it, the editor of the site, Steve Van Nattan, makes reference to an article about Methodists’ changing conceptions about God’s gender, including adopting Jewish and Hindu ideas about a feminine side of deity. I quote,

If it were only the Methodists, in their mongrel unbelief, who pandered to Shakina and Shakti, well, we would not be awfully surprised. But, many Fundamental Baptists and Bible believers jabber about "the Shikhina Glory" of God. What exquisite blasphemy. Read on, and weep for us all for letting our minds be invaded by the most pagan forms latent from ancient Babylon and Sumer.[1] (unquote)

I said earlier that I would say a few words about Gnosticism. “Gnosticism” is a modern, scholarly term used to refer to an amazingly diverse group of religionists of the first Christian centuries, inhabiting various places on the Venn diagram between Judaism, Christianity, and Paganisms from Greece, Egypt and southwest Europe. They emphasized not faith, but knowledge. This was not knowledge gained from reason, but from revelation. They did not want to believe in God; they wanted to know God, that is, to be acquainted with the infinite within the self.

Since spontaneous mystical experiences are few and far between, many have speculated about how different Gnostic schools may have helped God help themselves, so to speak, by altering their consciousness to be aware of realities normally beyond human perception. Some theories put forward in the last few decades are that various Gnostic groups used ritual, chanting, mind-altering plants, meditation, and, most relevant to The Da Vinci Code, sexual practices—either ascetic or libertine.

Trying to discern what their secrets may have been proves to be a challenge, not unlike the fictional Da Vinci Code. Gnostic Scriptures are written in symbolic language that does not readily lend its meaning’s to the casual reader. Or, as one of the translators of the Nag Hammadi once said, “It’s a Gnostic gospel, it’s not supposed to make sense.” But the fact that various forms of Gnosticism reached from the Roman Empire to China meant that they meant a great deal to those who possessed the keys to read them. They were convinced that the secret teachings enabled them to see through the illusions of the physical world into the transcendent world and that the truly spiritual lived forever.

Gnosticism is back. Actually it never really left, many of its ideas weathering the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in such forms as Alchemy, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, the Cathar heresy, and Chivalry. The Neo-Gnostics of our time, just like those of old, are an exceeding diverse lot, holding among them many competing practices and worldviews. Just like Neo-Pagans, many stress the need to experience the divine in both masculine and feminine forms. Just like the older Gnostics, the schools founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, guide their students to practical achievements in spirituality. To again quote Robert Anton Wilson, “Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Many contemporary men and women are hungry for first hand experience in religion. Whether they seek this by modifying traditional faiths or by seeking obscure, ancient knowledge, these people are wary of outside authorities that have proved to betray them so often. Like the characters in The Da Vinci Code, they are on a quest, not knowing what they’ll find but with eyes wide open along the way.

I will conclude with the words of James Ishmael Ford, a Unitarian Universalist minister and Buddhist, who sees common ground between Buddhism, Gnosticism, and UUism. He writes,

Our UU gnosis is fed by the enlightenment and the rise of the scientific method. But, we are also essentially a religious expression--we are not just seeking to accumulate facts, scholarly knowledge. Rather our work is to find that salve, healing, release from suffering, discontent, angst; which lives like a worm within the human heart. And, critically, we UUs find our way to the healing of heart through the human mind.

This, I feel, is the important point. It is … why so many of us may find value in other expressions of "gnostic" salvation, particularly within the insights of Buddhism. Here I am suggesting those among us who find Zen and Vipassana so important, are not chasing after alien gods (as some of my friends have suggested), but rather growing and flowering very much within our native soil. The quest for wisdom is an ancient western religious expression. And, as such, we Unitarian Universalists, as modern gnostics, are grand examples of this perspective.

By acknowledging this I believe we not only see what we are, but can also be forewarned of some of the many dangers on our particular spiritual path. The dangers of narcissism and of extreme dualism are always with us. To seek wisdom is to keep on our toes, don't you think? And, looking at the ancient gnostics as our genuine ancestors may well prove to be very helpful in this regard.

My very best to each and every one of you on your own quest, your own “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”!