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To: alt.magick From: Gnomedplume@aol.com (Gnome d Plume) Subject: ****Book Review---The Da Vinci Code**** Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 06:06:52 GMT ****The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Doubleday, N.Y. 2003 Okay Indiana Jones fans, strap-in for the e-ticket ride. This best seller has more plot twists, hooks and double crosses than three Dean Koontz books shuffled together (Brown has obviously studied Koontz's bible on how to plot, pace and pivot in this genre). We start off with a grizzly murder inside the Paris Louvre museum--the curator no less---who arranges his dying body in the first of nearly fifty secret symbols and codes our American professor hero and a French lady police agent have to unravel. Not the least of the complications is the lady agent herself who turns out to be the late curator's granddaughter. The villains in this epic are a shadowy gang of loyal Roman Catholics apparently working for Opus Dei. The secret "good guys" are our old friends from *Holy Blood, Holy Grail* "The Priory of Sion* who are desperately trying to save the old documents proving Jesus and Mary Magdalene's Merovingian progeny. After 200 pages of hairbreadth escapes in a scavenger hunt from one cryptic clue to the next (like the *Celestine Prophecy* but more fun) we finally come to the unveiling of the ultimate secret: The Holy Grail! Which turns out to be very similar to the ultimate revelation in *Foucault's Pendulum*---although a bit more modern it is absolutely, super-nationally French! Now all this is great fun and very skillfully hung together. But Dan Brown hasn't made any friends in the Catholic Church with his very negative take on Opus Dei. He even puts his story in a 'post John Paul Holy See' where Opus Dei is about to lose its charter. He doesn't disconnect Opus Dei from the psycho albino assassin Brother Silas until the last few chapters of the book. On the other side of the fraternal fence, he provides another *Holy Blood, Holy Grail* promotional accolade for the French right-wing political cult that calls itself "The Priory of Sion,* giving the strong impression that all of their claims of ancient linage and a succession of Grand Masters (including da Vinci) from the Crusades to today are true. If Dan Brown researched his book as well as he claims, why didn't he read the Spring 1999 issue of *Gnosis* article by Robert Richardson titled *The Priory of Sion Hoax*? He would have realized that the Priory (1938) is actually more recently founded than Opus Dei (in 1928). Ah, well, it makes for a good story---and, in spite of the Priory of Sion's political agenda, the probability of Jesus being properly married is not at all far-fetched, and a line of secret Grail Kings is also a possibility. These ideas and the mixture of fact and fiction Brown blends in his thriller make *The DaVinci Code* more just an entertainment. It is hoped that readers with more a casual interest in these themes will do their own homework after reading the novel. **** Good Magick! Gnome d Plume
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