[Chants]

I just finished reading Brown's book, "The DaVinci Code."

The theory upon which it operates is this. Jesus was married to Magdaline. The Catholic Church, however, wanted a male dominated church and felt threatened by having Magdaline paired up with Christ. In their attempt to cover any reference to Magdaline, they initiated a conspiracy campaign against everything feminine. Evidence of this campaign is illustrated through great works of art, language, and tarot cards. Only by denigrating the feminine could the church hold power.

Brown aserts that women were essentially equal to men prior to the church's conspiratorial campaign. And that women only slipped behind men in rights and status after the church started slandering them and covering up the truth.

That assertion is simply false. Women have unfortunately been second class citizens from time immemorial, across nearly every culture, and the church had absolutely nothing to do with it. The chuch did not control China, had no influence over Hindus, yet women were porrly treated in those cultures as well. The church was a product of the prejudices which existed at the time of it's creation, and altough it may have been a vehicle to perpetuate those prejudices, it can't be said that it created those prejudices.

Some of the examples of this conspiracy were less than compelling for me. For example, the author claims that women were associtated with the left (sinister) and men were associated with the right (dexterity) because the church wanted women to be percieved negatively. No proof was provided about just how the church orchestrated such a linguistic manipulation, in several languages mind you, to achieve the desired result. Brown just left the reader to assume the chuch did it (because he said so) and then assume that the association helped support his overall theory: Magdaline was married to Christ.

Brown essentially uses the old UFO technique to prove his case. The absence of actual facts serves to prove the cover-up, and the cover-up serves to prove the absent facts.

Nevertheless, Brown does write an exciting murder-mystery, if one can get over the rather silly premise. He weaves in his theory deftly in a page-burning plot which makes it hard for the reader to put the book down. And while the premise is silly, it is also very interesting.

Other than a good read, the book struck me as an awfully elaborate explanation for something which, even given the prejudices of the time, seemed inconsequential in comparison.

[Some hope remaining.]

A friend of mine, who is Catholic, told me about a theory on the celibacy thing. Some people claim that because early popes, bishops, etc. tended to accumulate a lot of wealth the church didn't want them to have families to pass their wealth on to. If they were celibate it would go back to the church when they died. He wasn't saying he believed that theory, just that it was one he had heard.