Re: "Da Vinci" Debunking

"The Da Vinci Code" nearly caused me to burst a blood vessel. It is a
DREADFUL book.  The burden of its song is, more or less, as DL said:

> . I gather
> it also presents a very skewed picture of Greco-Roman paganism,
> offering it as a kind of Never-Never-Land of woman-friendly,
> tree-hugging values overthrown by the evil Constantine and his
> goons.

Over and over again, Brown suggests that pagan antiquity considered women
sacred and thought that no man was whole or complete unless he got in touch
with The Sacred Feminine through sexual intercourse;  that before the
Council of Nicaea, the Sacred Feminine controlled the excesses of male ego
in "ancient cultures" until Constantine and those nasty Catholics ruined it
all; that men in Egypt, Greece, and other parts of  "antiquity" all reached
Gnosis through the Hieros Gamos with a woman, etc. etc.  The conflation of a
multitude of different cultures into "the Ancients" drove me batty, as did
statements like this (to take one example out of so many, so many):

"Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from
matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of
propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from
modern religion forever.? (p. 124)

And to top it all off, it's not even a good novel. It's shoddy, filled with
characters who can hardly even be called cardboard, and extremely badly
written--the man has no STYLE at all. And the supposedly brilliant main
characters are annoyingly stupid. I kept shouting the solution of various
clues at them for PAGES before they "got it"--I mean,  two supposedly
top-notch world-class cryptographers can't figure out simple anagrams right
away? Come on ...

The only good thing I have to say about the book is that it (and today's
NYTimes article which DL has kindly brought to my attention) provided me
with several "teachable moments" for the students who (shudder) liked the
book.

> I'd try to elicit a posting from the list-member to whom I have
> alluded above, but as she explained in a long and elegant posting
> today she is *much* too busy to post anything to the Classics List
> right now!

Yeah, well ...

EV

Elizabeth Vandiver
Distinguished Visiting Lecturer
Department of Greek and Roman Studies
Rhodes College
Memphis, Tennessee 38112

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