So it was rather late in the game that I finally got around to reading Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Da Vinci Code, the book that everyone has been talking about for the past year. A quick search on Google will highlight the controversy stirred up by this interesting twist to a murder mystery. For those of you who have avoided the bestseller, Brown’s research on the Christian Church’s origins raised inevitable historical questions on which he capitalized by injecting enough modern fiction and suspense to create one heck of a good story. The problem, of course, is the religious aspect of the novel. Essentially, Brown’s story expounds upon theories surrounding the life of Jesus and a secret society called the Priory of Sion. The Priory supposedly holds the secret to finding the Holy Grail, the subject of hundreds of fantastic tales and stories from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is in the senior English curriculum at my school, to hysterical spoofs like the Monty Python skits. The clues to the secret are found in many of the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, an early Priory leader.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the result is information that proves the Holy Grail is not the cup from Jesus’s last supper but the identity of the "rose," a code for Mary Magdalene. Slandered as a whore throughout the history of the Christian Church, Magdalene, according to The Da Vinci Code plot, was actually Jesus’s wife and the mother of his child, Sara. Confused? The premise behind the story is actually fairly simple. Like many critics of Christianity, the members of the secret society described in The Da Vinci Code, the Priory of Sion, do not believe that Jesus was the divinely made son of God. Instead, they believe that Jesus was a charismatic prophet of royal blood, a great leader, who married Magdalene, also of royal blood. In an effort to stamp out the prevailing pagan beliefs during the time of Constantine, however, history was rewritten to create the modern version of events now taught by the Christian Church.

Much of the talk online, in churches, book groups, and newspapers focuses on the accuracy and authenticity of the information presented in the book. To be truthful, I don’t really care about that. There appears to be several little known but academically accepted truths exposed in the novel in addition to the speculation over Jesus’s divine nature. Obviously, Christians cannot allow themselves to entertain the idea that the last 1,000 years or so of teachings may have been parables and fictionalized accounts of what "really" happened, any more than people who follow other spiritual paths can accept the fantastic leaps of faith required by literal translations of the Bible. We all enter into literature with our various beliefs and faiths sorted out and intact. Literature has the power to create questions and spawn new quests for truth, but only to the degree that the reader allows. The authenticity of documents such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and others Brown names will always be contested. What is more important is to change the type of questions being raised. Instead of focusing on the research, which is always subject to criticism despite tenacious and methodical documentation, readers would be better served to honestly explore the more subtle details offered in Brown’s text.

Instead of debating whether or not Jesus is the divine son of God (an unanswerable question, you either believe it or you don’t), readers should examine the theories behind why history would have been altered. It is an accepted fact that paganism, worship of the cycles of nature, was the established religion for much of history. The underlying belief in this beautiful tradition is that life requires balance. Paganism labels the differences female and male, much like the Asian description of Yin and Yong (yang). Goddess worship was common, as were ties to the seasons. According to The Da Vinci Code, the destructive path of our society today is not the result of those deemed "sinners" by The 700 Club (sinners being the National Organization for Women, gay and lesbians, the ACLU...Hell, ask Rod Paige and we could throw the National Education Association in there, too) but rather an imbalance caused by the rejection of the "feminine" part of the equation. It would seem that this is a far more beneficial question to ponder. Have we as a society lost touch with our ties to nature? How would our lives improve with a deeper understanding of the cycles that penetrate our daily lives, even when we choose to ignore them? People can hold religious beliefs that contradict the information presented by Brown’s novel, the story is considered fiction. However, it may be possible to improve how we interpret our beliefs, whatever they may be, as we reflect on our relationship with our planet.

After considering some of these questions myself, I was sidetracked by the book’s passing mention of Leonardo Da Vinci’s homosexuality. If we literally interpret the idea of a necessary male/female balance, are we back to the same anti-gay argument purported by fundamentalist Christians? I think that paganism, with its acceptance of that which is found in nature, would have to be more accepting of same-sex partnerships (again, a quick Google search finds that modern pagans seem to be). Physical gender is not the same as the spiritual balance the book discusses. I come across this notion in discussions of modern feminism and gender roles. Straight feminist friends have asked me how lesbian partnerships divide common daily tasks, even child care (with no children of my own, my answers to the latter are admittedly all secondhand). Such a division of roles is not the labored egalitarian discussion radical 1970s texts would have readers believe. The complementary halves to a partnership evolve slowly and somewhat naturally, so why can’t the male/female spiritual balance be just as metaphorical? Perhaps that balance is meant to be found within all of us, regardless of biological sex.

Critics of The Da Vinci Code are missing out on an important discussion if they become bogged down by mainstream arguments. The novel, in addition to being an excellent story, also has the potential to raise interesting questions for self-reflection. The author has a great website for further exploration, www.danbrown.com, which steps away from the religious argument a bit and focuses more on the many riddles and curious facts his research uncovered.