PART III
God or Goddess?

The Da Vinci Deception
(pp.124-125)

“Powerful men in the early Christian Church ‘conned’ the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine...Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever...Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos - the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole - has been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice, woman.”

Hero Robert Langdon’s sorrowful tale of the deliberate banishment of the goddess from Western religious consciousness establishes yet another key component in “The Da Vinci Code”’s conspiracy theory. The novel asserts that Constantine and his chauvinist co-conspirators systematically destroyed humanity’s original religion, the worship of the goddess, in order to foist upon mankind a patriarchal power system which they could manipulate and control. Brown argues that what Constantine began has been successfully carried on through centuries of brutal bloody persecution by the Church. In what may be the novel’s most amazing overstatement he contends that any “freethinking woman” was branded as a witch and detailed instructions were provided by the Church to its all-male clergy as to how “to locate, torture, and destroy them”

“Those deemed witches by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women suspiciously attuned to the natural world. Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth - a suffering the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.” (DVC, p. 125)

At the core of this view is the belief that the worship of the feminine image of the divine, the goddess, is the oldest and, in fact, the original human religion. Feminist scholars tell us that the worship of the goddess is constant throughout human history and has taken on an endless variety of forms throughout the ages. A recent study entitled “The Myth of the Goddess - Evolution of An Image,” traces the various stages in the development of goddess worship throughout the ages:

“The myth of the goddess has moved through several stages of diminishing influence from the Paleolithic Age to the present, and these have registered the way in which humanity looks upon itself and its world...In the beginning, the Great Mother Goddess alone gives birth to the world out of herself, so that all creatures, including the gods, are her children, part of her divine substance...Thereafter, the Mother Goddess unites with the god - once her son, now her consort - to give birth to the world. Here the distinction is made between the eternal womb and its temporal phases (whether of the moon or the seasonal life of vegetation) and the focus of the myth is on the relationship between the Mother Goddess and her god, her son-lover....In the next stage the Mother Goddess is killed by the god, her great- great- grandson, who then makes the world from her dead body, and the human race from the blood of her dismembered son-lover...Finally, the god creates the world alone without reference to the Mother Goddess, either through self-copulation (the Egyptian Atum) or through the Word...In the Hebrew creation myth, inherited by the Islamic and Christian traditions, there is no relation whatever to the Mother Goddess, who is no longer even an enemy and has disappeared from view.” (Baring, Cashford, pp. 660-661)

John Michael Greer, an active occultist and author of “The New Encyclopedia of the Occult,” (2003) convincingly argues that this view has more to do with the needs of modern romantics than the facts of history. Greer defines the goddess as “the principal deity of the modern Neo-pagan movement, associated with nature, fertility, the moon, the cycles of biological life, and the planetary eco-system of the earth, conceived as a single vast entity.” (p. 198) After a careful review of the historical evidence he concludes:

“Many of her modern votaries hold that the worship of the goddess has been handed down continuously in its present form since pre-historic times. The actual history of the goddess, however, is a good deal more complex...The Goddess herself, though, is essentially a modern figure and her emergence is the most recent and best documented example of the birth of new divinity.” (Greer, p. 198)

Dr. Phillip Davis, in a perceptive study entitled “The Goddess Unmasked,” is somewhat more pointed in his observations: “It has been clear from the outset, however, that goddess books are not simply about the history of religion and culture. They are, in and of themselves, the expression of a particular religious mindset which shapes both their presuppositions and conclusions...Goddess books, accordingly, should be seen as professions of faith and their authors as neo-pagan evangelists.” (Davis, pp.86-87)

Feminist scholars argue that the chauvinist prophets of the Old Testament banished the goddess and replaced her with the stern male figure of Jehovah as the reflection and the justification of their own patriarchal culture. Memories of the goddess remained in Hebrew myths and legends about “Lilith,” Adam’s first wife and the Queen of the Demons and Creatures of the Night. The only direct reference to Lilith in Scripture is in Isaiah 34:14 where the prophet describes the desolation which will be left in the aftermath of God’s judgment upon the heathen land of Edom - “Wild cats will meet hyenas there, the sartyrs will call to each other, there too will Lilith take cover seeking rest.” Lilith is often linked to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, the Goddess of the Moon and the Queen of the Night Sky, who played a similar role in the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia. The same one sided male dominated distortion, we are told, was perpetuated in orthodox Christianity and the writings of the canonical New Testament which it produced. “Literalist Christianity took as its scriptural backdrop the Jewish Old Testament with its patriarchal monotheism. It therefore vigorously suppressed the idea that there was a Christian goddess.” (Freke/Gandy, p. 44)


The “The Da Vinci Code,” repeatedly and forcefully advocates modern feminism’s standard line about the suppression of the goddess and the sacred feminine. We are told that these beliefs were at the core of the original authentic Christian faith and were brutally suppressed by a male dominated Church. Robert Langdon patiently spells out the real story for his confused companion Sophie in this way:

“The Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church. The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean.” (DVC, p. 238)

The Bible’s accounts of Creation and the Fall in Genesis are dismissed as male inventions maliciously designed to “embezzle the female’s creative power.”

“‘ It was man, not God, who created the concept of original sin whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy.’ ‘I should add,’ Teabing chimed, ‘that this concept of woman as life-bringer was the foundation of ancient religion. Childbirth was mystical and powerful. Sadly, Christian philosophy decided to embezzle the female’s creative power by ignoring biological truth and making man the Creator. Genesis tells us that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Woman became an offshoot of man. And a sinful one at that. Genesis was the beginning of the end for the goddess.’” (DVC, p. 238)

This emphasis would help to explain why gnostic variations of Christianity figure so prominently and are presented so favorably in “The Da Vinci Code.” In many instances the gnostics attempted to combine traditional pagan worship of the goddess with different components of the Christian Gospel. Valentinius, a gnostic leader in 2nd Century Egypt, taught that the goddess was the “first universal creator” who brought into being all things and who enlightens human beings and makes them wise. In one of the gnostic writings of the Nag Hammadi collection the goddess declares: “I am the Triple Formed Primal Thought that dwells in light...She who exists before the All...I move in every creature...I am the Invisible One within the All.” (Pagels, p. 55) Many of the gnostics believed that the jealous God of the Old Testament was either subject to or simply ignorant of the all powerful Goddess from whom He too had come. Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels sums up this astonishing view as follows:

“This creator was a derivative, merely instrumental power whom the Mother had created to administer the universe, but his own self-conception was far more grandiose. They say that he believed that he had made everything by himself, but that, in reality, he created the world because Wisdom, his Mother, ‘infused him with energy’ and implanted into him Her own ideas. But he was foolish and acted unconsciously, unaware that the ideas he used came from Her; ‘he was even ignorant of his own Mother...It was because he was foolish and ignorant of his Mother that he said, ‘I am God, there is none beside Me.’” (Pagels, p. 57)

“The Da Vinci Code” would have us believe the rediscovery of the goddess will do nothing more than restore the original harmony of Christianity, creating a kinder, gentler version of the faith than that which men have fashioned in their own violent image. It should already be completely evident that there is much more at stake here than minor redecorating. These folks want to tear down the house, destroy the foundation, and start over again from scratch. Carl Olsen is quite correct when he warns:

“The point of the goddess movement and books is not a revitalization or a renewal of Christianity, as proponents sometimes assert, but a complete transformation involving the removal and destruction of core beliefs about the nature of God and the person of Jesus.” (Olsen, p. 91)

The God(dess) of modern feminists and ancient gnostics is not a supreme being who reveals objective truth through his Word, but personal divinity within every individual. The delightful thing about this view was, and is, that’s it’s all up to me and it’s all about me. The goal of such religion is not the forgiveness of sin and salvation but, in the words of classical historian Bruce Thornton, “validating individualist self-actualization.” (Thornton, p. 185) In all this, Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the world becomes completely irrelevant. As feminist theologian Delores Williams recently remarked: “I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.” (Olsen, p. 92)

 







The Da Vinci Deception
(pp. 308-309)

“It’s called Hieros Gamos,” he said softly. “It dates back more than two thousand years. Egyptian priests and priestesses performed it regularly to celebrate the reproductive power of the female”... “Hieros Gamos is Greek,” he continued. “It means sacred marriage”...He explained that although what she saw probably looked like a sex ritual, Hieros Gamos had nothing to do with eroticism. It was a spiritual act. Historically intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis - knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites have been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven. “By communing with woman,” Langdon said, “man could achieve a climactic instant when his mind went totally blank and he could see God.” Sophie looked skeptical. “Orgasm as prayer?” Langdon gave a non-committal shrug, although Sophie was essentially correct. Physiologically speaking, the male climax was accompanied by a split second entirely devoid of thought. A brief mental vacuum. A moment of clarity during which God could be glimpsed.

The narcissistic hedonism at the essence of the modern goddess movement is clearly revealed in The Da Vinci Code ’s obsession with the sexual ceremony called “hieros gamos.” Dan Brown describes this act of ritual intercourse as “a deeply sacrosanct ceremony” (DVC, p. 309) through which, at the instant of orgasm, the male is able to achieve “spiritual wholeness and communion with God.” (DVC, p. 309) It is sadly ironic that this nonsense brings the author as close to reverence as he will ever come in this novel.

Here, as elsewhere throughout The Da Vinci Code, Brown is simply echoing the fantasies of new age mystics and radical feminists, presenting them in his novel as incontestable facts. But these are nothing more than the ravings of fringe writers whose trendy books reflect not reality but the needs of their own way-out theories. That is why, until now, they have never been taken seriously by anyone and their ideas have remained far out on the margins of popular culture. Margaret Starbird, another of Brown’s favorite authors, is an excellent example of the problem. In The Woman with the Alabaster Jar - Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, this imaginative writer argues - without benefit of any historical evidence or textual support - that the Gospel episode in which Christ’s feet were anointed by an anonymous woman in Bethany is a actually the sacred marriage ceremony of Jesus and Mary Magdalen (cf. Mark 14:1-9). Lest you suspect that I am making this up, allow Ms. Starbird to speak for herself:

“In Greek this rite was called the hieros gamos or Sacred Marriage. The anointing of the head had erotic significance... The chosen bridegroom was anointed by the royal priestess, the surrogate of the goddess... Through his union with the priestess, the king/consort received royal status. He became known as ‘the anointed one,’ in Hebrew, the Messiah...The story of the anointing of Jesus by the woman in Bethany is one of the most important events recorded in the New Testament Gospels...The story of the anointing is easily the most intimate expression of Eros/relatedness in the recorded events of the life of Jesus.” (Starbird 1, pp. 36,40)

In her subsequent study The Goddess and the Gospels - Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine, Ms. Starbird concludes that the suppression of hieros gamos was the work of a misogynist Church: “The hieros gamos was one of the original teachings of Christianity attributed directly to Jesus but obscured in later Church tradition.” (Starbird, p. 157) She bases this startling conclusion on her own unique brand of “gematria,” the secret number codes hidden in the words of the parable of the mustard seed, the movements of the earth and the moon, the principles of ying and yang, and the 666.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, also featured as authorities in The Da Vinci Code, espouse the same bizarre theory. They not only insist that Mary Magdalen was the anonymous woman at Bethany but that she was a pagan priestess, a temple prostitute who enabled men to experience the divine by having sex with them: “The anointing of Jesus was a pagan ritual: the woman who performed it, Mary of Bethany, was a priestess. Given this new scenario, it is more than likely that her role in Jesus’ inner circle was as sexual initiatrix.” (Picknett/ Prince, p. 258) We in the West, they condescendingly inform us, cannot hope to understand the view of sacred sexuality reflected in hieros gamos because of the negative view of women and human sexuality with which we have been indoctrinated for centuries. From such authorities Dan Brown has derived the “facts” which he presents in his novel.














The Da Vinci Deception (pp. 309-310)

“Admittedly, the concept of sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first. Langdon’s Jewish students always looked flabbergasted when he first told them that the early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex. In the Temple, no less. Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not only God but His powerful female equal Shekinah. Men seeking spiritual wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses - hierodules - with whom they made love and experienced the divine through physical union. The Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH - the sacred name for God - in fact derived from Jehovah, and androgenous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.”

With these remarkable assertions Dan Brown moves from the fantastic to the ridiculous. It is ludicrous to suggest that the Jews practiced sex rituals and kept sacred prostitutes in the Temple of Solomon as an ordinary and acceptable part of Hebrew religious life. When the Israelites did indulge in these heathen practices it was in defiance of God’s Law and was always viewed as an aberration and an abomination which would result in God’s fearsome judgment upon the nation. If this distortion were not part and parcel of Dan Brown’s total misrepresentation of the Biblical view of human sexuality it could be dismissed as laughable. But nothing seems too extreme for this author or too shocking for his millions of readers.

The practice of cultic prostitution was common among the Canaanite peoples of Palestine. The practice remained pervasive long after the Israelite conquest of the land. In the 8th Century B.C., the prophet Hosea denounced Israel’s widespread involvement in this abomination:

“They sacrifice on the mountain tops and burn offerings on the hills, under oak, poplar, and terebinth, where the shade is pleasant. Therefore your daughters turn to prostitution and your daughters-in-law to adultery. I will not punish your daughters when then turn to prostitution, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery, because the men themselves consort with harlots and sacrifice with temple prostitutes - a people without understanding will come to ruin...A whirlwind will sweep them away and their sacrifices will bring them shame.” (Hosea 4:13-14,19)

The divine command against temple prostitution was absolute. The most devastating depiction of a temple prostitute in Scripture is provided by the prophet Ezekiel (Chapter 23) as he compares the kingdoms of Judah and Israel to pair of such prostitutes. The prophet pictures their debasement and shame in almost pornographic detail. They are overcome with lust and have been completely defiled by the men to whom they have given themselves -

“They even sent messengers for men who came from far away, and when they arrived you bathed yourself for them, painted your eyes and put on your jewelry. You sat on an elegant couch with a table spread before it on which you had placed the incense and oil that belonged to Me.” (Ezekiel 23:40-41)

Through Moses, God declared that such detestable things were to remain totally separate from the worship of God and His holy Temple: “No Israelite man or woman is to become a temple prostitute. You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or a male prostitute into the House of the Lord your God to pay any vow because the Lord your God detests them both.” (Deuteronomy 23:17-18) A priest who served in the house of the Lord was not allowed to marry a prostitute or a former prostitute and if the daughter of a priest became a prostitute the punishment was death by fire (Leviticus 21:7,9) The text explains that these drastic measures were necessary because of the role of the priests as servants in the sacred house of the Lord: “Regard them as holy because they offer up the food of your God. Consider them holy, because I the Lord who makes you holy, am holy.” (Leviticus 21:8) But despite these stern commands the allure of cultic prostitution often proved irresistible. The radical reform of King Josiah in the latter days of the Kingdom of Judah reveals that by that time this corruption had penetrated within the very walls of the temple itself.

“The king ordered Hilkiah the High Priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the Temple all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside of Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel...He took the Asherah pole from the Temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley and burned it there...He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes, which were in the Temple of the Lord and where women did weaving for Asherah...He removed for the entrance to the Temple of the Lord the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan Melech. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun.” (1 Kings 23:4-11)

But the text also reports that “the fierce anger of God” burned against Judah and brought God’s judgment upon that apostate nation and its corrupted Temple: “I will remove Judah also from My presence as I removed Israel and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this Temple, about which I said, ‘There shall My Name be.’” 2 Kings 23:27) It was this sexual sin that led to the final downfall and destruction of the nation. Somehow The Da Vinci Code conveniently overlooks this dimension of the Biblical message about temple prostitution.

The identification of the “shekinah” as the goddess, “the powerful female equal” (DVC, p. 310) of God is completely fanciful. “Shekinah” is a Hebrew word which means “the one who dwells.” The term is not used in the Bible. It occurs commonly in the rabbinic translations and commentaries of the Old Testament as a circumlocution for God to describe the glory of His presence. It was applied to the pillar of cloud and fire which signified God’s presence leading Israel through the years of wandering in the wilderness (cf. Exodus 13:21-22; 14:24) and the fiery cloud which demonstrated the presence of God upon Mount Sinai (cf. Exodus 19:16-18). Upon the completion of the Tabernacle that Glory Cloud rested upon the Tabernacle and filled the Holy of Holies (Exodus 40:34-38) as it also did later in the Temple of Solomon:

“The priests then bought the ark of the Lord’s covenant to its place in the inner sanctuary of the Lord’s temple, the Most Holy Place, and put it beneath the wings of the cherubim. The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and overshadowed the ark and its long carrying poles...There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses placed in it at Horeb, where the Lord made a covenant with the Israelites after they came out of Egypt. When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the Temple of the Lord. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled His temple.” (1 Kings 8:6-11)

 

 

 There is not the slightest suggestion anywhere in Scripture that God could have had a “powerful female equal.” Margaret Starbird cites only unnamed “Jewish mystics” to support her contention that the Shekinah was God’s female counterpart:

“As a model for the sacred ‘human vessel’ - each human individual - the Temple in Jerusalem with its outer and inner courts leading to the ‘Holy of Holies’ was designed, according to Jewish mystics, to contain the presence of Jahweh and his holy consort, the Shekinah, dwelling together in intimate union in their ‘bridal chamber’ the human psyche/heart.” (Starbird 2, p. 150)

 The assertion of the Shekinah as God’s female equal appears to be based upon a woeful misunderstanding (or a deliberate distortion) of the teachings of the “Kabbalah” (Hebrew - “tradition”) - a strange blending of mysticism and the occult which arose on the edges of Judaism in the 11th and 12th Centuries A.D. The practitioners of the “Kabbalah” taught that a distinction had to be made between the essence of God Himself who was utterly infinite and transcendent, and the ten forms in which God chose to reveal His power to man. The Kabbalists distinguished between male and female manifestations of divine power. In this obscure system, the “Shekinah” was a female manifestation of divine power, although these Jews who dabbled in magic and the occult were careful to stress that this should never be understood as a reference to a goddess or as a suggestion that there could be more than one God. This, of course, is a far cry from saying that God had”an equal female partner” living with Him in the Temple. There is also a major chronological discrepancy here. Dan Brown declares that this female deity was the belief of “early Jews” and links that belief to “Solomon”s temple.” The Temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. The discussion of the “Shekinah” as a female manifestation of God’s power did not take place for another 1,800 years! Nor was this bizarre view ever accepted by any branch of orthodox Judaism. All such nonsense direct contradicts the strict monotheism which was the essence of the Old Testament. The famous “Shema,” the most fundamental confession of Israel’s faith, acknowledges this basic truth: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)

The Da Vinci Code’s analysis of the Tetragrammaton is equally imaginative: “The Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH - the sacred name of God - in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.” (DVC, p. 309) This assessment is, as one critic notes, “wildly off the mark.” (Olsen/Miesel, p. 291) In Hebrew tradition since the days of the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th Century B.C. the pious demonstrated their reverence for God by their refusal to utter His sacred Name - “Yahweh.” They believed that human lips were unworthy even to speak the Name of God when reading the Biblical text. Instead, they commonly substituted the Hebrew word “Adonai” which means “lord.” Prior to the 6th Century A.D. the Hebrew text of Scripture was printed without vowels. The reader would supply the vowels as he read, based upon his familiarity with the language. Vowel points were finally added beneath the printed consonants between A.D. 600-700 by a school of Hebrew scribes called the Masorites. In the case of “YHWH” the vowels of “Adonai” were placed beneath to consonants to indicate the substitution of “Adonai” for God sacred name. Around A.D. 1520 a scholar named Petrus Galatinus conceived the idea of combining the consonants of “Yahweh” with the vowels of “Adonai” to form an entirely new word - “Jehovah.” The term gained widespread acceptance, primarily within the Gentile world, and found its way into traditional English Bible translations. Once again, Dan Brown has it backwards. “Yahweh” is not derived from “Jehovah.” “Jehovah” is derived from “Jahweh.” “Jehovah” is not a Hebrew word at all but a hybrid combination of two Hebrew words used primarily by Gentiles. The word “Jehovah” is not - in any way, shape or form - a verbal image for the physical union of man and woman. The Hebrew name for Eve - “havah” means “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Name of God. This type of wildly inaccurate speculation without any foundation in history or linguistics is characteristic of the occult theorists upon whose writings Dan Brown depends.

click here to continue to Part IV