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THE SION SCENARIO
Nestled within its dense plot-structure, The
Da Vinci Code presents a story that carries beliefs about
the central character of world history, Jesus Christ, quite
different from those carried in the conventional version. But
what difference would it make if the alternative story came
to be widely known and accepted? The very option to consider
a different story about the Saviour presents an example of
unmaking history.
Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code is
a thriller wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery hidden in
a cover-up disguised in a conspiracy and sealed with a paradox.
The book brings to mainstream readership a set of rumors that
have been circulating in the misty land of conspiracy theory
for some years now. In orientation reading for Metahistory Michael
Baigent and Richard Leigh are cited for The Dead Sea Scrolls
Deception, but they are better known for another controversial
book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In Brown’s novel Baigent
and Leigh are transformed, with considerable novelistic freedom,
into a mischievous character, Sir Leigh Teabing. (The name-play
typifies a plot-device exploited throughout the novel.)
An instant bestseller when it appeared in 1982, Holy
Blood, Holy Grail has remained in print ever since. It
heads a long and continually growing list of books that purport
to expose a secret society, the Priory of Sion, said to have
been founded by the crusader Godfroi de Bouillion in the 12th
Century. The scandalous secret known to members of the Priory
of Sion concerns a bloodline descended from Jesus Christ and
Mary Magdalene. The plot of The Da Vinci Code assumes
that the mission of the Priory of Sion is to safeguard the
evidence for this alternative scenario of history until the
moment comes to disclose it to the world at large. The operative
term here is evidence.
According to the Scion scenario, evidence for a bloodline descending
from Jesus was discovered in 1885 by a French priest, Abbe Sauniere,
whose parish was located at Rennes-le-Chateau in southeastern
France. It may consist of encrypted documents referring to, if
not dating from, the Merovingian dynasty of the 7th Century.
As for Mary Magdalene, there is ample legend in medievel Latin
and early French literature concerning her flight from Palestine
and her arrival on the shore of Provence, near Marseilles. The "Golden
Legend" attributed to Saint Voragaine records her life as
if she were a Christian saint. A grotto near Sainte Baume in
Provence, where she is said to have lived and died, was the site
for the consecration of French kings and is still a place of
pilgrimage, although lately appropriated by Catholicism. The
variants of medieval literature concerning Mary Magdalene do
not refer to a conjugal life with Jesus, but there is a longstanding oral tradition
that does. Every year on May 25th gypsies from all around Europe
gather at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer to celebrate the anniversary
of Magdalene’s arrival there. The crypt of the local chapel
houses a "Black Madonna" known as Sara, a small statue
representing a Hindu-type girl of olive complexion with gentle,
consoling brown eyes. Sara is traditionally the name of the daughter
of Jesus and Mary Magdelene.
The charming folk tales regarding Magdalene place the life of
Jesus within the scope of human sentiments. By association with
that notorious strawberry blonde Jesus becomes approachable as
a man who lived normally and loved a mortal woman, even a "fallen
woman." In twenty years the furor ignited by Holy Blood,
Holy Grail has produced a fullblown cult centered on Mary
Magdalene. Rennes-le-Chateau, an otherwise obscure hilltop village
on a back road accessed from the unremarkable town of Couiza,
receives a constant stream of visitors from around the world,
all fascinated by the Sion scenario and its endless, sinuous
permutations.
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown introduces
the Priory of Sion through one of its present-day members, Jacques
Sauniere (named after the Abbe Sauniere, of course), curator
of the Louvre, who is murdered in the opening scene. The secret
message he leaves behind involves a series of coded devices that
are gradually decyphered by the book’s protagonist, Robert
Langdon, a Harvard professor interested in esoteric symbolism.
Langdon pairs up with Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist for the French
police who also happens to be the granddaughter of the murdered
man. As the plot thickens, Langdon comes to suspect that members
of the Opus Dei, an ultra-conservative Catholic sect, may be
following the same trail of riddles in order to sieze and repress
the secret of Sion. He and Sophie turn to Sir Leigh Teabing,
an expert on Scion and the Holy Grail, so that they can decode
the clues left by Sauniere and retrieve the secret message guarded
by the Priory of Sion.
There are no hidden bombs, rampant viruses or hijacked submarines
in The Da Vinci Code. In Brown’s treatment of the
thriller formula, the action acquires a higher dimension of meaning
because the protagonists are tracking a spiritual message that
might change the world, not a sinister device that might destroy
it. According to conventional Christian beliefs, Jesus Christ
is the supreme model for humanity, the example of the best a
human being can be. But for Christ to fulfill this role, the
belief-system must assert that He is more than human. We are
asked to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is a
divine being who appeared in human guise on the stage of history
to save the world. The Sion scenario throws Jesus’s divinity,
and hence his entire mission, into question.
The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ derives from the
teachings of Saint Paul who was a contemporary of Jesus yet never
met the man (or God-man, if you prefer). Paul ignored the human
Jesus and elevated "the Christ" to a divine level,
but the status of divinity was later conferred on Jesus by
vote at a theological council in the 4th Century. First-hand
accounts of the time describe how the vote was forced for political
reasons: the Byzantine Emperor Constantine needed to confer the
divine afflatus claimed by Roman emperors upon the spiritual
figure of Jesus so that Christianity, once it was enforced as
state religion, would be underwritten by a superhuman authority.
In this view, which is irrefutable as far as the historical facts
are concerned, Christianity is not a true religion, it is a political
ideology disguised in religious terms.
In the novel the historian Robert Langdon is
something of a feminist whose sympathies for Goddess-oriented
pagan spirituality align him to the figure of Mary Magdalene.
Through his words the reader learns about the repression of the
Goddess cults of antiquity and the hidden traditions in art,
science and literature through which devotees of Her have kept
their faith alive. Scholars have been debating these matters
for decades, and there are dozens of esoteric groups obsessed
with the Goddess Revival, although the Prior of Sion is not usually
grouped among them. Both the stated and supposed aim of the Priory
is to reestablish sacred kingship in Europe, based on the bloodline
of Jesus. The monarchist orientation is patriarchal rather than
feminist. The author of The Da Vinci Code takes artistic
liberty in making the Priory of Sion a champion of the "sacred
feminine," but the twist works well because the Priory is
pitted against Opus Dei, an ultra-conservative Catholic sect
that does really exist and is known for its harsh views on womanhood.
In Rule by Secrecy (2000), Jim Marrs presented a detailed
summary of the controversy surrounding the Priory of Sion. His
book was marketed as an "underground bestseller." With The
Da Vinci Code, Magdalene, Goddess cults, secret codes and
anti-Christian conspiracies finally emerge from the undergound
into the mainstream. Dan Brown’s stroke of genius was to
turn an obscure historical conspiracy theory into a novelistic
plot.
One way to unmake history is to present a parallel story that
undermines the accepted (i.e., imposed) version of past events.
Whether or not the Priory of Sion actually exists, there is dramatic
power in the mere rumor of its existence. It tempts us to wonder,
Did an underground movement of Goddess-centered spirituality
exist for centuries, parallel with orthodox Christianity yet
denied and suppressed by the enforcers of party-line religion?
Dan Brown is well aware that the subversive power of this scenario
does not reside in the influence of secret societies, about which
we may only speculate, but in the figure of Mary Magdalene who
focusses the Goddess on the human plane. To develop the multiple
symbolic meanings of the Holy Grail throughout the book, Brown
cites the famous word-play that carries the entire secret of
the Sion scenario: Holy Grail in Old French is San Graal,
a pun on Sang Real, "true blood." In the literal
sense, the Grail is the true bloodline of Jesus and Magdalene,
but Brown plots his novel so that the reader is taken well beyond
fixation on this single geneological clue.
I noted above that the operative word in the Sion scenario is
evidence, but evidence is not the ultimate goal of the Grail
Quest as Brown represents it. Whether or not there is proof of
a "messianic bloodline," the story of Jesus and Magdalene
is a special romance that might inspire humanity toward a different
kind of spirituality, or then again it might not. Textual or
artifactual evidence for the Sion scenario is not essential,
because the real proof of unmaking history must be moral and
imaginative catharsis, a spiritual shift for humanity. The
Da Vinci Code works fine as a thriller but its superior success
may be in the way it turns the trail of secrets -- "the
sacred feminine… the chalice… the Rose… the banished
Mary Magdalene… the decline of the Goddess… the Holy
Grail" -- back toward the heart of the reader.
The mystery in all this is how we each effect the fate of the
Mystery.
[JLL, Lausanne, 19 June 2003]
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