Notes
193 Notes . THE TR AVELS AND TR AVAILS OF MATRIARCHAL MYTH 1. At the beginning of the novel, Langdon has just completed a lecture on “pagan symbolism hidden in the stones of Chartres Cathedral” (Brown, Da Vinci Code, 9). 2. Ibid., 36, 120. 3. Ibid., 23, 46. 4. Ibid., 113. Brown claims that the Priory of Sion was a real organization whose members included Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci. But most of his “information” about the Priory of Sion seems to draw on the thought and writings of a right-wing Frenchman, Pierre Plantard, who believed himself to be the true heir to the Merovingian throne of France. It was Plantard who, probably quite fancifully, populated a supposedly historical Priory of Sion with figures like Newton and da Vinci. For more information on this and other debates about information contained in The Da Vinci Code, see Price, Da Vinci Fraud. 5. Brown, Da Vinci Code, 124. Constantine is also credited, ironically, with rescuing ancient paganism by fusing it with early Christianity: “nothing in Christianity is original ,” one of the novel’s pedagogues asserts (232). 6. Ibid., 124, 125. 7. According to the novel, the scandal of Mary Magdalene’s secret history is, in the eyes of the church, that she “had physical proof that the Church’s newly proclaimed deity had spawned a mortal bloodline” (ibid., 254). 8. Interestingly, the novel never speculates on why Protestants have remained bound to the sexism and goddess-murder instituted by patriarchal Catholicism, or what role Eastern Orthodoxy played in the suppression of goddess religion. The novel shucks off Christianity’s Middle Eastern origins and claims the main action for western Europe as 194 notes to pages 4–10 soon as Mary Magdalene presumably departs Jerusalem, shortly after Jesus’s crucifixion , and arrives in France to tend to her secret dynastic line of Christ’s heirs (ibid., 255). 9. Ibid., 446. 10. Of course, some people hated The Da Vinci Code with the same intensity as those who loved it, mostly those who had a stake in Christian orthodoxy. 11. Brown, Da Vinci Code, 444. 12. Actually, Dan Brown regards his novel as historical fiction, resting on many facts. He begins his book with a page titled “fact,” claiming that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (Da Vinci Code, n.p.). These supposed facts have been thoroughly critiqued. See, for example, Price, Da Vinci Fraud. 13. A great many feminists have reiterated this story, from Merlin Stone’s 1976 study When God Was a Woman to the final summation of the work of Marija Gimbutas in her 1997 book The Living Goddesses. Perhaps the most popular summation was Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. For more on recent feminist appropriations of matriarchal myth, see Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, 150–184; Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 30–55. 14. Diop, Cultural Unity of Black Africa, 23. 15. Mason, Unnatural Order, 11. 16. Shannon, Great to Be a Girl, 17–18. 17. Gore, Earth in the Balance, 260. Gore explicitly leaves “much room for skepticism about our ability to know exactly what this belief system—or collection of related beliefs—taught.” 18. Peake, “Season of the Goddess,” 31. 19. As Andre Gingrich writes, “Bachofen can still be seen as a founding spirit of the grand evolutionist debates that intrinsically connected the study of humanity’s history with that of the development of gender relations” (“The German-Speaking Countries,” in Barth et al., eds., One Discipline, Four Ways, 79). 20. The myth of matriarchal prehistory never achieved the sort of prominence in fascist circles that it held in communist circles, but a number of German philosophers and public intellectuals with fascist leanings revived Bachofen in the early twentieth century (including Ludwig Klages, Alfred Schuler, Carl Bernoulli, and Alfred Bäumler). This interest persisted into the era of National Socialism, with some thinkers, such as Ernst Bergmann, insisting that the Aryan race was originally matriarchal and that under matriarchal conditions, proper “racial hygiene” was practiced (Erkenntnisgeist und Muttergeist ; “Deutung des nationalsozialistischen Gedankens,” 36). 21. When Dan Brown was sued for copyright infringement, it was by two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh), whose book Brown did indeed follow very closely. But Brown’s broader attention to goddess and matriarchalist themes is far more indebted to feminist matriarchal writings than to the work of...
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