Periodically, works of fiction can become bestsellers by cloaking truth in fiction, sometimes challenging our long-held beliefs with thought-provoking ideas. A novel is currently enjoying such acclaim, and its author, Dan Brown, intrigues us from the first pages with statements of veracity of secret societies and their continued existence since ancient times. Even more fascinating in The Da Vinci Code is the author’s knowledge and commentary of the substance of the story, the history of the Divine Feminine. It is a story most of us know little about.

When I moved to North Carolina, I joined the Writer’s Network in Asheville and attended workshops. I met Sue Monk Kidd at the Flat Iron Building where she was testing the waters of fiction writing, having held a long-established reputation as a Christian writer and editor for Guidepost magazine. The daughter of a Baptist preacher, she was also married to a Baptist minister. We saw one another over the years at various workshops and writer’s conferences across the state, and I listened in awe as her spiritual journey took her in search of the Goddess throughout Europe and history. She quit her position (with great trepidation in leaving a well-paid job) and escorted women on tours of Greece (the oracle of Delphi), and Eastern Europe (in search of the Black Madonna). She authored The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a non-fiction account of her search for spiritual validation. When her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, became a bestseller last year I was delighted, but not surprised. What rings forth strongly is her voice for and of women everywhere, evident in each of her characters. The Black Madonna figures in the story as well, in case anyone might miss the symbolism of the sacred qualities of her women.

At Unity, I watched a movie of the Burning Times about the Inquisition’s slaughter in a three year time span of over five million women—deemed witches, yet mostly midwives, property owners, and uppity women whom the clergy wished to destroy. This "set the stage" for a patriarchal society that continues to this day. Those who were aligned with Mother Earth became agents of the devil, and even the symbols of the Goddess were equated to devil worship by the church. Pentacles are still considered representative of "devil worship." However, Dan Brown relates that this symbol was the icon of the Goddess. The Goddess Venus and the planet were considered one and the same, and Venus "traced a perfect pentacle across the ecliptic sky every four years. So astonished were the ancients to observe this phenomenon, that Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection, beauty, and the cyclic qualities of sexual love. As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads." (p.36) There are additional details of the perfection of PHI to 1, represented in nature as well as in the pentacle. The discussion of symbols is another awesome aspect of this novel. (Brown’s wife is an art historian, as is the protagonist of the story.)

A few weeks before I read the book, Time (August 11, 2003) reported over two pages on the quest of religious historians to understand more about Mary Magdalene’s role in Jesus Christ’s life. I was taught as a young Catholic girl in Saturday catechism class that Magdalene was a prostitute—equated with the "let no man cast the first stone" fame. Nope. Seems the church combined all the Marys into one, save the mother, equivalent to saying all Johns were the same guy! Dan Brown surmises that Magdalene was from the house of Benjamin, and therefore of royal blood. He has quite a bit more to say about her, but I won’t give away the story! Nevertheless, the symbols of the feminine relate to the chalice, and the masculine to the blade. The chalice is represented by the Grail, and "symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the lost Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine." (p.238) My friend, Cameron Ellison, told me of a book, The Chalice and The Blade. After reading The Da Vinci Code, I have decided her recommendation is high on my list of must-reads!

One of the aspects of fundamentalists that has always bothered me is their insistence that the King James Version of the Bible is "the word of God" (yet these same people say Catholics are not Christians). History tells us the first church, or Catholic Church, re-wrote passages of the Bible multiple times, deleting what the hierarchy decided the common man could not understand (and establishing firmer control over him). Brown’s novel discusses Constantine’s collection of "particular" gospels four centuries after Jesus’ death and suppression—outlawing and burning—of other written records, some of which have been found in modern times and contradict the "spin" emphasized by the church. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coptic Scrolls are the best known of these, but others are currently being analyzed. He also relates how Constantine, a pagan until his deathbed conversion to Christianity, combined pagan symbols, stories, and practices with Christian beliefs to make that religion palatable to both groups. The switch from Saturday to Sunday as the day of worship is one of the primary practices he established (the pagan day of worshiping the sun).

By far the most beautiful aspect of the story is the belief that through union we experience the divine. "…it is important to remember that the ancients’ view of sex was entirely opposite from ours today. Sex begot new life—the ultimate miracle—and miracles could be performed only by a god. The ability of the woman to produce life from her womb made her sacred. A god. Intercourse was the revered union of the two halves of the human spirit—male and female—through which the male could find spiritual wholeness and communion with God…" (p.309) I know that when I am in my husband’s embrace, I feel that connection and contentment. And the birth of our daughter was the most miraculous moment in my life. I watch her growth with the same awe and gratitude I feel at the beauty of the seasons and the unfolding of nature outside my door. In my family’s love, I feel the constant divinity of life. Praise the Goddess. 

~ Gabrielle M. Thompson, 2003
© 2003 Gabrielle M. Thompson

Gabrielle Thompson lives with her husband Ed and daughter Lyric in the mountains of western North Carolina at Eco-Cove, a 117-acre wildlife sanctuary and trout farm. She has a degree in Anthropology and is Coordinator of Library Services at McDowell Technical Community College. Previously she helped Ed build, sail, and charter the 75’ schooner, SATORI for 14 years in the Virgin Islands. She is a freelance writer and has written two unpublished novels. In December 2002, she had an article published in Moments of Grace Magazine, with an introduction by Neale Donald Walsch.