![]() ![]() Despite attempts to vilify and eradicate the Sacred Feminine, Her story has been kept alive in myth and ritual for over thirty-thousand years. Long before the Euro-centric, Judeo-Christian image of God as an elderly Father was envisioned, our ancestors imaged God as the Great Creatrix. Unless, that is, we are actually willing to believe not only that they shared wedlock and a child, but that their descendents may offer some kind of political challenge to an oppressively patriarchal religious regime on our behalf. For Brown’s premise, tying as it does the idea of the Grail to the specific historic moment of Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus Christ, ultimately empties the quest of any real hope at all. Sadly for readers whose interest may have been piqued by the plot of Brown’s telling of the age-old romance, this quest stumbles over itself in an attempt to over-subscribe to its facet as material fact, and is thereby dissolved of any real power in its other aspect, that of inspiration. On the other, this very ‘sacred space’ cannot actually be realised in material terms, as the very nature of the mythic realm impels the goal to be continuously shifted beyond the grasp of we ordinary mortals. On the one hand, the goal must inspire us to reach beyond the everyday world toward a greater reality, where mystical qualities and moral certitude rest alongside abundance and healing. The latest version of the quest, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, reveals the two sides of the coin that make a mythic symbol mysterious, unattainable, and yet so tantalisingly real. Myth can often be seen to supply a response to the yearning of the world, and the legend of the Holy Grail is no exception. Ultimately both novel and film fail to develop a truly transformative rhetoric but instead reinforce traditional beliefs about gender in the culture ![]() It concludes that The Da Vinci Code does not present a feminist mythic narrative, but instead presents another version of the heroic quest myth that functions to reaffirm masculine power, under the guise of a faux feminism. Using insights derived from feminist theology and myth, this study examines this claim through a close analysis of both novel and film, focusing both on the mythic narrative and individual characters. Most criticism focused on the historical and religious problems in both the novel and subsequent film, leading some to claim that the storyline represented a type of radical feminism in its presumed secret marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene that led to “the greatest cover-up in history,” and ultimately the suppression of "the divine feminine" in the Catholic Church. One of the more controversial films of 2006 was the highly anticipated The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. ![]()
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