Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Everybody loves a conspiracy. And Dan Brown8217;s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, is creatively brilliant, a banquet of a book, except the end is a bit tame, don8217;t you think: Let the patriarchal status quo continue, keep Magdalene and the sacred feminine alive merely in song and story without official restitution, despite five million women being killed in the names of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? The plot is drawn from the politics of religion and the re-writing of history books, except that the 8216;history book8217; in question is the world8217;s number one best-seller: the Bible. Nowhere does Brown mock Christ or speak of him with anything but love and respect, but 8212; and this is what we envy the West for 8212; he critiques, without fear of fatwas, riots and vandals, the expulsion of the sacred feminine from official Christianity and the political makeover enforced on Jesus four centuries after his death when Constantine the Roman emperor hijacked his legacy for his own political benefit.
I won8217;t spoil the story for you in case you haven8217;t read it yet. However, Express readers are no strangers to the issue of the sacred feminine that keeps appearing in Faithline, whether it is a Devi story or Leah, the Californian rabbi whom you met in Cochin last September, who8217;s a votary of Shekinah the Jewish goddess. Or Faithline8217;s theory that Europeans slid into the Dark Ages when they threw out the Old Gods for sexless church dogma, seeing light only in the Renaissance when they let the Old Gods out to romp unofficially but openly in their lives through art, literature and architecture. Yet, your columnist is accused by the patriarchal Hindu right of being 8220;an honorary lady Jesuit8221; on the payroll of Opus Dei! So it was with that extra edge of interest that I finally got around to reading the wholly unputdownable Da Vinci Code.
