Re: "Da Vinci" Debunking

On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, David Lupher wrote

: 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.

to which Bradley Skeen responded

: How is this substanitally differnt from the view of antiquity
: presented by Robert Graves, Maria Gimbutas, Carl Jung,
: or Joseph Campbell?
:
: What it seems to that all of this stems from is a misundertanding
: of the Romatic fantasy of a bucolic golden age (in Keats, Goethe,
: etc. which served as an ideological basis for the criticism of the
: enlightenment) confused with fact.

and James Spinti added

: Don't forget Mary Renault!

I'm relying on imperfect memory here, but I'm assuming JS is referring to
the narrative of religious and cultural change in Renault's Theseus novels
(esp. *The King Must Die*).  While there is no doubt that Renault writes of
a "matriarchal" system in (gradually losing) conflict with a "patriarchal",
I'd hardly describe her version of the former as one of "tree-hugging
values";  indeed, quite the opposite.


Terrence Lockyer
Johannesburg, South Africa