Sacred Feminine - The Da Vinci Code (Assignment)

Sacred Feminine – The Da Vinci Code (The New Literature)	March 8 2020
Assignment of The New Literature – Sem : 4 ( Krishna Patel)

Name  : Krishna K. Patel

Course: M.A. English
Semester: 4
Batch: 2018 – 2020
Roll no:-14
Enrolment no.: 2069108420190035
Email Id: krishnadobariya08@gmail.com
Paper no.: 13 The New Literature
Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi Dept. of English MKBU

Introduction

 Dan Brown:-

Dan Brown is an American author best known for his thriller novels, including the Robert Langdon novels Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbols, Inferno and Origin. His novels are treasures hunts that usually take place over a period of 24 hours.

The Da Vinci Code

Silas asked to Jacques Sauniere about the Holy Grail. Silas is the member of Opues Dei where as Jacques Sauniere is the head of The Priory of Sion. Silas killed Jacques Sauniere.  Realizing that he has only a few minutes to live and that he must pass on his important secret, Sauniere paints a pentacle on his stomach with his own blood, draws a circle with his blood, and drags himself into the center of the circle,  re – creating the position of Da Vinci’s Virtual Man. He also leaves a code, a line of numbers, and two lines of text on the ground in invisible ink.

Robert Langdon who is the protagonist of the novel and also a symbologyist, does not realize that he himself is suspected of the murder.

What is Divine Feminine?

The Divine Feminine is sacred, sensual and often beyond the realm of day living. It’s something that can’t be seen but rather experienced and felt. It’s a healing force beyond the physical world. The divine Feminine is also the positive expression of the feminine side of us that exists in both men and women. The divine feminine principle is within us all.

“When you think of your body as a sacred temple of the divine, no matter what age, shape or size, the Divine Feminine within you will be revealed.”

For example, when you hold all your relationships as sacred including the one you have with yourself, Divine Feminine energy will be awakened within you. You will know how to be feminine and experience it in a truly healing way.

The Sacred Feminine is spoken of much in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The concept of a sacred feminine is that there was a matriarchal culture in early religious and supposedly the Christian church under Constantine attempted to crush it.

Sacred Feminine – Christianity elevated women The Advent of Christianity radically transformed the fate of women. Even ancient Roman pagan scholars agree that it was a turning point for the freedom and dignity of women.

Wherever Christianity has been introduced, it has lifted up women, not just in antiquity but even in modern times. Sex selection infanticide was common in1880 in pagan China before the influence of Christian missionaries. Girl babies were disposed of as a liability. In the last two centuries, because of Christian influences, the treatment of women worldwide has improved immensely. It was the influence of Christian that helped abolish China’s practice of binding women’s feet in order to create the diminutive effect that men found attractive. This dangerous practice had led to gangrene infection, needles amputation, and sometimes death.

The irony of The Da Vinci Code is it claims that the Gnostics were the guardians of the heritage of the sacred feminine.  For many of his women readers this may be one of the most appealing aspects of Brown’s book. Yet again this is an amazing picture of Gnosticism. In fact, though Gnosticism did describe feminine elements in the divine realm, it was overwhelmingly hostile to women. For example, where the Apostle Paul singles out the first man, Adam, for blame when he speaks of the fall of the world into sin, many of the Gnostics blame the feminine spiritual being Sophia. She was the one who could not control her desire and who disrupted the cosmos, as a result producing what the Gnostic think of as our evil material world. But the portrayal of the feminine in Gnosticism gets worse than this.

“When we consider that as a rounded container a chalice is a feminine symbol, the idea of a vessel  filled with blood becomes an image metaphor for a woman’s womb, and the Grail then takes on the possibility of another meaning – that of a numinous or mysterious feminine symbol, something transformative and healing, with a sacred or divine dimension of the feminine.

-         Jean Shinoda Bolen

The patriarchal culture described in Brown’s book, although its patriarchal are Judeo-Christian, has been the controlling ideology of all human cultures for the last five thousand years. The realization that this patriarchal culture was not necessarily dominant before that time is based on a recent explosion of studies of Neolithic period in history in which goddess – dominated cultures existed for millennia before the patriarchy, with its male oriented societal and psychic principles.

An exception is Dan Burstein’s secret of the code, which brings together over forty commentators on every aspects of The Da Vinci Code. Several chapters written by women discuss the person of Mary Magdalene. One writer, Margaret Starbird, discuss the meaning of a feminine spirituality that transcends Magdalene when she writes, “The sacred feminine is that other face of God that has not been honored over the two millennia of Christianity – at least not as a fully equal partner.”

The feminine self is a sacred secret, hidden deeply in both men and women. In contrast to our patriarchal self, it is inclusive rather than exclusive. It values cooperation rather than competition. During the period from roughly 7000 to 3000 BCE, anthropologists have discovered in their study of the goddess tradition very few articles of war. Early feminist anthropologists note that this maternally oriented tradition featured a partnership model between men and women in private and public life.

Feminine gnosis, therefore, is more central than it would seem. Its importance is not restricted to issues of religion and individual spirituality. The ideas of gnosis and the feminine are not just rooted in the human soul. If human kind is a part of nature, if we humans are the evolved consciousness of the universe itself, then gnosis, this hidden knowing, exists also in the universe. Brown’s alter – ego Langdon touches on this idea when he speaks of PHI  or what is called also the Divine Proportion. It has a personal as well as collective existence in all of nature. Gnosis includes an innate awareness of our human interconnectedness and, with this, an inborn sense of justice and compassion. Gnosis, therefore, enters the political realm with its compassionate demands for equality and opportunity for all peoples. It is central to a democratic philosophy and theology, as both Needleman and Michael Learner point out. Finally, in the experience of anyone who has suffered serious psychological, chemical and physical breakdowns, we learn to what extent we must trust the wisdom of the psyche and the body in its healing potentials.

These concepts of the sacred secret are articulated in many confusing ways in The Da Vinci Code. However, they are clearly discussed in the works of analytical psychology developed by C.G.Jung.  In our extraverted material – oriented culture, Jung’s psychology is often dismissed by academia and treated with suspicion by pharmacologically – oriented psychologists and psychiatrists and treated with suspicious of its use of the word soul and nature. Yet the works of Jung have reverberated in many ways thought our culture.

The concept of the sacred feminine and its significance in history, in myths and other stories, and its crucial importance for the spiritual welfare of individuals must be distinguished from the modern feminist movement, though there are subtle connections. The feminist movement, especially with its aggressive extraverted thrust in the angry tone of its early advocates, represents the tip of the iceberg, which is the missing feminine in our culture. More importantly, feminism stimulate, particularly in women scholars, research into the Neolithic goddess tradition, and with that, the rediscovery of the sacred feminine in human history.

The Da Vinci Code is many faceted, beginning with the murder of the world – renowned curator and teacher of the goddess tradition, Jacques Sauniere of the Louvre in Paris. But this murder is hardly a mystery since we know quickly who did it. As to the motive, a series of false leads points to the conservative Opus Dei organization, very much alive today in Catholic Church politics. An example of its conservative makeup is dramatically illustrated as its newly built international headquarters in New York, where women and men minimally relate to one another in their organizational work.

The discussion about the reawakening of the feminine principle, in the ladies of the lake figures and the grail in the Arthurian Legends and in Sophie Neveu as the “new” feminine “wisdom” in The Da Vinci Code , is not complete without mentioning the power and influence of the child archetype. The feminine and the child are inseparable in life and in literature.

In the novel, Dan Brown challenges the Christian ideas of feminine, by favoring the pagan ideas. Before the Christianity, people believed in paganism. Pagan religion believed in both gender, it emphasized equality of both gender and sometimes revered feminine leadership and divinity too. Followers of pagan religion believed in worshiping of Goddesses.

“…and the companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said him, ‘why do you love her more that all of us?”

Conclusion:-

So until now women have been seen as pure, divine and sacred but as Christianity came into existence, it challenged the sacredness of feminine. Women have been praised as she is able to give birth to new life bit with the Christianity, idea of sacredness questioned and they started believing it’s not woman but man who is divine and able to create new life. Now women is treated as second or lower to man, her ability to create new life is not considered as something divine but as something impure and unclean.

Even she has been given a symbolic name Sophie, which means Wisdom. In the Christian religion Sophie  is honored as goddess of wisdom by the Gnostic. So, in the novel Sophie Neveu stands for the wisdom. She has been presented as highly intellectual personality. The way she saves Robert Langdon from the police and the way she drives the car, the way she explained the Cryptex to Robert Langdon, and this all things proves that Dan Brown has in real sense shown the Female leadership through Sophie Neveu. When Sophie finds that Robert has Travel Phobia, she just touched Robert’s feels better and relaxed. This link with Jesus as he has also the power of touch.

Works Cited

Buchanan, Matthew. The Sacred Feminine. 8 March 2020 <http://thetruthaboutdavinci.com/the-sacred-feminine-article.html>.

Giannini, John. The Sacred Secret: The Real Mystery in The Da Vinci Code. spring 2008. 8 March 2020 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.2008.2.2.63>.

Thea, Anna. What is the divine Feminine? 7 March 2020 <https://annathea.org/the-divine-feminine>.