The Da Vinci Code
Mar. 13th, 2004 05:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlI picked this book up a couple of weeks ago, just to see what it was about when I'd heard so many people talk about it. I have to say I wasn't impressed. This review has been written for a bit, but I'm unlocking and redating it now.
By the time I'd finished the book, I felt like I'd read the history of the world, as rescripted by Sigmund Freud. Like King Charles' head, the female reproductive organs just won't stay out of the book. I felt like going, 'Not everything is about sex; get laid and get over it!' at about the halfway point. My disbelief was unsuspended with a crash when Mary Magdalene codedly starred in Disney films.
Then I got the feeling it was dodgily researched, or at least that the facts weren't allowed to get in the way of a good story. I can't see any unaccounted-for hands in The Last Supper, and they all look like girls to me anyway :D
'Jehovah' isn't extant before the 12th century AD, and is a conflation of the consonants of the Name with the vowel sounds of 'Adonai (Lord), the word Jewish readers used to replace the Name with. And that's connected to the verb 'hwh', a earlier form of the verb 'to be'(L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner,Lexicon in Veritas Testamenti Libros, 1958).
Oh, and Teabing (was I the only person to read this consistently as 'Teabag'?) was fake-English-as-written-by-Americans. Way to be over the top. As Teabag was merrily debunking Christianity, no one seems to realise that Goddess-worship (and all other religions) can be debunked just as easily, leaving us all back where we started, more or less. You can't play that game. Oh, and if you're going to make wild guesses on the basis of the historically iffy Gnostic gospels, why not include the horrible passage where 'Jesus' says Mary cannot enter heaven, being merely a woman, but it's all okay, as he will turn her into a man! (Where's the mpreg in this freaky scenario? It's all it needs to shove it into the realm of badfic)
I wasn't much up on the 'great scientists and philosophers through history guarding and keeping the secret of the Grail' thing either. The thing about all the scientists I've ever meet, is that they are incapable of leaving well alone. It's that 'poke it and let's see what it does', that's their defining factor. I really can't see it lying dormant in the charge of all those nosey people (who all seemed to be men; what gives?) I was waiting for the secret to turn out to be that there was no secret, as well. I love that sort of twist.
Also, I thought that the Opus Dei and the Grail-people's attitude to women equally creepy. Must the feminine be either demonised or deified? Why? I have a vagina, but I also have a mind and a soul. I'm not a temptress or a priestess. I'm a person.
Oh, and the Head Honcho can achieve Nirvana or whatever during orgasm when having ritual sex with a woman *pukes* And that leaves women where, exactly? Going 'is that all?' Lean back and think of Jerusalem?
Could I also point out that the Christian religion does not consist solely of the Roman Catholic church. kthnxbye. And in casting it as suppresors of teh evol sacred feminine1!!, the BVM seems to have been factored out of the equation. Seeing as it seems only a matter of time before she's elevated to Coredemptrix by Papal decree, I'd say the RCs are pretty well up there with the sacred female. I can see why they had to be the villians of the piece for historical reasons, but still.
And the book ended with our Gary Stu hero (professor of ohsocoolinvented subject1!!) praying at the relics of a saint. Fit right in with the Roman Catholics, that would.
It's late, I'm snarxy, this post comes across as a mixture of mockity and serious criticism. Bite me.
By the time I'd finished the book, I felt like I'd read the history of the world, as rescripted by Sigmund Freud. Like King Charles' head, the female reproductive organs just won't stay out of the book. I felt like going, 'Not everything is about sex; get laid and get over it!' at about the halfway point. My disbelief was unsuspended with a crash when Mary Magdalene codedly starred in Disney films.
Then I got the feeling it was dodgily researched, or at least that the facts weren't allowed to get in the way of a good story. I can't see any unaccounted-for hands in The Last Supper, and they all look like girls to me anyway :D
'Jehovah' isn't extant before the 12th century AD, and is a conflation of the consonants of the Name with the vowel sounds of 'Adonai (Lord), the word Jewish readers used to replace the Name with. And that's connected to the verb 'hwh', a earlier form of the verb 'to be'(L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner,Lexicon in Veritas Testamenti Libros, 1958).
Oh, and Teabing (was I the only person to read this consistently as 'Teabag'?) was fake-English-as-written-by-Americans. Way to be over the top. As Teabag was merrily debunking Christianity, no one seems to realise that Goddess-worship (and all other religions) can be debunked just as easily, leaving us all back where we started, more or less. You can't play that game. Oh, and if you're going to make wild guesses on the basis of the historically iffy Gnostic gospels, why not include the horrible passage where 'Jesus' says Mary cannot enter heaven, being merely a woman, but it's all okay, as he will turn her into a man! (Where's the mpreg in this freaky scenario? It's all it needs to shove it into the realm of badfic)
I wasn't much up on the 'great scientists and philosophers through history guarding and keeping the secret of the Grail' thing either. The thing about all the scientists I've ever meet, is that they are incapable of leaving well alone. It's that 'poke it and let's see what it does', that's their defining factor. I really can't see it lying dormant in the charge of all those nosey people (who all seemed to be men; what gives?) I was waiting for the secret to turn out to be that there was no secret, as well. I love that sort of twist.
Also, I thought that the Opus Dei and the Grail-people's attitude to women equally creepy. Must the feminine be either demonised or deified? Why? I have a vagina, but I also have a mind and a soul. I'm not a temptress or a priestess. I'm a person.
Oh, and the Head Honcho can achieve Nirvana or whatever during orgasm when having ritual sex with a woman *pukes* And that leaves women where, exactly? Going 'is that all?' Lean back and think of Jerusalem?
Could I also point out that the Christian religion does not consist solely of the Roman Catholic church. kthnxbye. And in casting it as suppresors of teh evol sacred feminine1!!, the BVM seems to have been factored out of the equation. Seeing as it seems only a matter of time before she's elevated to Coredemptrix by Papal decree, I'd say the RCs are pretty well up there with the sacred female. I can see why they had to be the villians of the piece for historical reasons, but still.
And the book ended with our Gary Stu hero (professor of ohsocoolinvented subject1!!) praying at the relics of a saint. Fit right in with the Roman Catholics, that would.
It's late, I'm snarxy, this post comes across as a mixture of mockity and serious criticism. Bite me.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-13 11:06 am (UTC)What the hand actually means, of course, is still open to interpretation. I wish they had actually put plates of the art in the book; I kept having to get out my old art history textbook.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 06:54 pm (UTC)Yes, I think I was looking at a restored version. And I agree about the plates of the paintings mentioned. We don't all have easy access to art galleries, we may be working off a crappy reproduction in a kid's art book.