Mother Mary Rants

In his remarks on May 16 about The Da Vinci Code, Howard Troxler unfairly dismisses the book as "patent nonsense," most of its allegations either sheer invention or "totally twisted" distortion. He writes good-humoredly about how all good Christians must "debunk" the upcoming movie, which his ESP tells him is going to be "half-baked."

My goodness me, how the gentleman doth protest! As a professional theologian, I found the novel far from nonsensical. I found many, many mistakes and distortions, but I found nothing "totally twisted," except perhaps the author's portrayal of his villains.

The Da Vinci Code is fiction, but one of its underlying premises is quite sound: Starting within the first decades of the Jesus Movement, the male leaders of Christianity have systematically stripped the religion of the proto-feminism of Jesus and Paul of Tarsus. For example, Mary Magdalene was falsely alleged to be a prostitute by Pope Gregory in 691 CE; non-Roman Catholic groups were consecrating female priests and even female bishops, the horror!

Human beings worshipped a female Creator for millennia; it was obvious that only a female could bring forth life and nurture it out of her own substance. Despite howls of protest from such Yahweh partisans as Jeremiah, the goddess Asherah was worshiped up until about 600 BCE, when she was transformed into Hokmah, Wisdom. Some theologians, including Marcus Borg, believe that Hokmah was transformed into Jesus of Nazareth.

But ever since the priests of Yahweh began insisting that God is exclusively male, the Sacred Feminine has been overshadowed by the sacralized masculinity of the Father and the Son. Women who want a deity with whom they can identify as men do are bleep out of luck, and feminity is relegated to second-class status, an afterthought created to serve and submit to the sacralized masculine.

The Da Vinci Code is fiction. It was published as a novel, an entertainment. Although the author claims that every fact is accurate, that claim is made in a work of fiction. He also claims that there are fewer than 70 words that can be found in the letters "PLANETS"; I found more than 300 before I stopped looking.

But even though it is full of mistakes and distortions, the book is not "patent nonsense," or it would not appeal to so many people who yearn for the Sacred Feminine — and the gentlemen who are quite happy with females as second-class citizens would not be protesting nearly so much.