The Da Vinci Code - Secrets of the Davinci Code

92 Pages·2005·9.56 MB·English

Discover the mysteries of the
world’s most timeless book
The Bible—Its origins are unknown, yet its
teachings have resonated for thousands of years.
Its stories are, as yet, unproven, yet millions believe
them to be fact. The Bible’s message inspires
many, while others reject it outright.
In every generation, believers and skeptics alike
have been enthralled by the mysteries of the Bible—
and now U.S.News & World Report explores
them in a new Special Collector’s Edition.
Here are just a few of the stories you’ll find:
• Secrets of the Scriptures. Who wrote the Bible?
Who were the Prophets?
• The Fight for History. In the Holy Land, archaeology
itself is a battleground. Whose homeland is it?
• Raisers of the Lost Ark.Two teams of explorers
seek evidence of Noah’s flood
ONLY
7
• The Dead Sea Scrolls.The scandal behind their $ 99
discovery
• Love and Leviticus. Debating the Bible’s stand PLUS S&H
on homosexuality
• And much more!
Mysteries of the Bible provides the insightful writing, exquisite photos,
and colorful illustrations that make it a must for your home library.
Don’t miss this 88-page limited-run special edition!
ORDER NOW AT
wwwwwwwww...uuusssnnneeewwwsss...cccooommm///ssspppeeeccciiiaaalll
Secrets
of the
Da Vinci Code
6 20 30
Secrets of the All About Mary History’s
Da Vinci Code Greatest
Coverup?
CONTENTS Decoding the Da Vinci Saint … or Sinner?|23 The Treasure of Nag
Phenomenon|7 There’s far more to Mary than Hammadi|32
Dan Brown’s novel is not only the official penitent—and The so-called Gnostic Gospels
a record bestseller; it has ig- prostitute—of church history. have cast new light on the
nited a firestorm of discus- early days of Christianity.
sion about religious history, The “Sacred
sex, and the Catholic Church. Feminine”|28 Christianity’s Untidy
Long overlooked, the links be- Start|39
The Man Behind the tween Christianity and an-
Mystery|16 cient goddesses and fertility The Church
Dan Brown himself is one big cults are now being explored. Triumphant|42
riddle. And he likes it like that. Did the early Church fathers
suppress the opposition?
Secrets of the Code
Much of this special Collector’s Edition of U.S. News & World Reportis excerpted from the bestselling book SECRETS
OF THE CODE: THE UNAUTHORIZED GUIDE TO THE MYSTERIES BEHIND THE DA VINCI CODE. Edited by Dan
Burstein, Secrets of The Code explores, through the eyes and opinions of the experts—archaeologists, theologians, art
historians, philosophers, and scientists—the major themes and questions raised in Dan Brown’s novel, from who was
Mary Magdalene to whether Leonardo encrypted secret messages in his art. Burstein also wrote several of the
articles that appear here, including introductions to various chapters. The editors would like to thank him and Arne de
Keijzer, the book’s managing editor, for their help and cooperation in producing this project.
From Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code,edited by Dan
Burstein and published by Client Distribution Services, Inc. Copyright © 2004 by Squibnocket Partners LLC.
COVER: LEONARDODAVINCI, THELASTSUPPER. ALINARI / ART RESOURCE. TITLE PPAGE: LEONARDODAVINCI, PORTRAIT OF A BEARDED MAN,
POSSIBLY A SELF-PORTRAIT, BIBLIOTECA REALE, TURIN, ITALY / BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY. GRAPHIC ((PAGES 44-5): LASZLO KUBINYI FOR USN&WR
48 60 75 82
Leonardo The Netherworld The Origin Resources
and His Secrets of Conspiracies of the Hoax
A Feast for All Eyes|51 Knights of Mystery|63 The Da Vinci Con|76 In the Footsteps of
Leonardo da Vinci hovers Lovers of conspiracies will de- The ever-rising tide of sales The Da Vinci Code|82
over The Da Vinci Codefrom light in the murky Priory of of the Codehas lifted some Our armchair guide to the hot
the first moment in the Lou- Sion and the equally mysteri- pretty odd boats, and none spots in the novel, from the
vre to the last. Did he inte- ous Knights Templar, a curi- odder than the dodgy yet blood-soaked Louvre and
grate a secret coded message ous body of medieval soldier- magisterial Holy Blood, Holy looming Saint-Suplice to
into The Last Supper? And monks of sinister reputation Grail,a 1980s bestseller that Scotland’s Rosslyn
why is Mona Lisa smiling? who—reputedly—were the underlies the novel. Chapel. Don’t leave home
guardians of a great secret. without it.
The Last Supper|52 The French Confection|78
Could it really be Mary Mag- The Enigma Beginning in the 1950s, a If You Loved
dalene sitting next to Jesus? of Opus Dei|68 small group of men with neo- the Novel …|85
A close look at the disputed The most controversial group chivalric and nationalist lean- What do you read next?Our
painting. in the Catholic Church today, ings was able to perpetrate suggestions of books,
it is seen by some as a cult- what is almost certainly a movies, and websites for fur-
Inside the Mind like organization—and by oth- marvelously intricate hoax— ther exploration.
of a Genius|56 ers as doing God’s work. the Priory of Sion.
From age 30 on, Leonardo Dan Brown’s
produced more than 5,000 The Riddles Have It|70 Next Caper|87
remarkable manuscript pages The Da Vinci Codeis an artful For Robert Langdon, all clues
of notes, ideas, and drawings. web of mysterious codes and to his next adventure seem to
secret symbols that must be be pointing in one direction:
solved by Robert Langdon at Washington, D.C., home of
breakneck speed—or else. many Masonic mysteries.
FROM LEFT: AKG; DAGLI ORTI—GALLERIA SABAUDA TURIN / THE ART ARCHIVE; GIRAUDON / ART RESOURCE; USN&WR SPECIAL EDITION 3
ALINARI/ART RESOURCE (2); ANTONIO RIBEIRO—GAMMA; STEFANO DE LUIGI—CONTRASTO / REDUX
16
At 10:46 Friday night, following orders from a myste-
rious figure, Silas shoots curator Jacques Saunière in
the Louvre Museum in Paris. Before dying, Saunière
leaves a trail of coded messages in blood and black-
light ink throughout the Grand Gallery of the Louvre.
SATURDAY
l
1 12:32 AM Bezu Fache, head of Paris police, sum-
mons Robert Langdon from the Ritz Hotel to the
bizarre crime scene in the Louvre.
l
2 1:10 AM Sophie Neveu interrupts them.
l3 1:13 AMSilas searches St. Sulpice for Grail keystone. 11
l
4 1:47AMSecret message near the Mona Lisa, and
a hidden key, reveal Saunière belonged to the
Priory of Sion.
l
5 1:56 AM Neveu and Langdon sneak out of the
Louvre, foiling police.
l
6 3:35 AM Neveu and Langdon remove the precious
keystone from bank vault in Rue Haxo, Paris.
l
7 4:45 AM At his chateau in Villette (near 12
Versailles), Sir Leigh Teabing tells Neveu the Holy
13
Grail is Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s wife and successor.
l 14
8 5:00 AMSilas knocks out Langdon in Sir Leigh's
drawing room while attempting to steal the key- 15
stone for Opus Dei.
l
9 5:43 AM Neveu, Langdon, Sir Leigh, and his ser-
vant, Rémy, tie up Silas and escape to England,
unlocking keystone's cryptex en route.
l
10 6:30 AMBezu Fache, in pursuit, misses them as
they land in Kent, England.
l
11 7:40 AMSilas nearly steals the second cryptex
at London's Temple Church.
l
12 8:20 AMMysterious plotter who ordered Sauni-
ère's murder hides in London’s Westminster Abbey.
l
13 8:25 AM Silas’s shootout with police at Opus Dei in
London.
l
14 8:30 AM Langdon and Neveu hunt for clues in the
abbey to the code that will open the second cryptex.
l
15 8:45 AM In the abbey’s Chapter House, Teabing
admits to ordering Saunière’s
murder, Langdon deciphers the
keystone, and Bezu Fache
arrests Teabing.
l
16 7:00 PMNeveu finds her true
identity at Rosslyn Chapel—and
the trail leads back to Paris.
Robert Langdon Sophie Neveu Jacques Saunière Sir Leigh Teabing Silas
A professor of “religious A young, pretty The curator of the Not only is Sir Leigh a An albino monk and a
symbology”—a field of cryptographer, Neveu Louvre, Saunière is also former “British Royal member of the Catholic
study that exists only in becomes Langdon’s ally Grand Master of the
Historian”—a title that group Opus Dei, Silas is
Dan Brown's mind—Lang- in the search for the Priory of Sion. As the
does not exist; he is the an orphan who is given
don arrives in Paris to truth about the murder novel begins he is found
give a lecture on pagan of Saunière, her dead—naked, and spread- world's most renowned orders from an individ-
symbolism. estranged grandfather. eagled on the floor of living expert on the ual known as “The
Langdon, who was first Sofia,in Greek, the Grand Gallery—with a Holy Grail. His hench- Teacher” to murder
introduced in Brown's means wisdom. Her last pentacle scrawled in man is a manservant Saunière. He is known
earlier novel, Angels & name, Neveu, is a blood on his torso. named Rémy. for his deft practice
Demons,is his tribute to homonym of the French His name is derived
In creating the enig- of corporal mortifica-
John Langdon, author of word nouveau,or new. from that of a French
matic Teabing, Dan tion, which involves at-
Wordplay: Ambigrams Combined, the full name priest, Abbé Bérenger
and Reflections on the adds up to “New Saunière, who, according Brown was paying trib- taching a spiked chain
Art of Ambigrams,one of Wisdom.” At the center to legend, discovered ute to the conspiracy called a cilice to his
Brown's favorite books. of the name Neveu is mysterious parchments theorists whose work thigh.
the word “Eve,” pointing hidden in a pillar at the preceded his own— Besides being a hom-
to Sophie’s possibly church of St. Mary specifically, the authors onym for the word cilice,
unique position in the Magdalene in Rennes-le-
of Holy Blood, Holy the name Silas appears
world as the chalice Château in 1885. The
Grail,a controversial to have been taken from
carrying Christ’s blood. papers traced a bloodline
descended from Jesus book published in 1982. a Biblical character who
Christ and Mary One of the authors is escaped from jail during
Magdalene—and turned Michael Baigent (Tea- a God-willed natural dis-
Saunière into a rich man. bing is an anagram of aster—described by lat-
Baigent) and another is ter-day scholars as ei-
Richard Leigh. ther an earthquake or a
hurricane.
9
10 8
7
6
1
2
4
5
3
BY WRITER NAME
6 USN&WR SPECIAL EDITION PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT GOES HERE
BEHIND THE CODE
Decoding the Da Vinci
Phenomenon
... OR HOW A 24-HOUR THRILL RIDE THROUGH PSEUDO-HISTORY BECAME A SENSATION
BY AMYD. BERNSTEIN
t the beginning of The Da Vinci finale: Dan Brown has led his readers on a clas-
Code,Robert Langdon, “Harrison sic wild goose chase.
Ford in Harris tweed” and distin- Widespread readership of an intriguing thriller
guished professor of symbology at is nothing unusual, but The Da Vinci Code is
Harvard, is summoned to the something else again. In the almost two years
Louvre to examine the corpse of the curator, since its publication, the novel has become a
Jacques Saunière, victim of an apparent ritual record bestseller, with 7.35 million copies in print.
murder. The scene is film noir-esque: But it has also managed to ignite a firestorm of
discussion about religion and sex, core doctrines
“The bloody star, centered on Saunière’s navel, of the Catholic Church, Renaissance art, symbols,
gave his corpse a distinctly ghoulish aura.... codes, and even the history of the Western World SWEET SMILE
He did this to himself. … as we know it. Despite its patently fictional con- OFSUCCESS.
‘It’s a pentacle’, Langdon offered, his voice feel- tent and glaring factual inaccuracies, The Da Vinci Leonardo’s
ing hollow in the huge space. ‘One of the oldest sym- Code has been the subject of endless cocktail party Mona Lisa has
bols on earth. Used over four thousand years before chatter and water-cooler discussions. It has even captivated an
Christ.’ been deemed worthy of an online Ivy League international
‘And what does it mean?’ course: “The Da Vinci Code Demystified: A Schol- audience. So
Langdon always hesitated when he got this ques- arly Perspective,” co-authored by Harold Attridge, has the book.
tion. Telling someone what a symbol ‘meant’was dean of the Divinity School at Yale Uni-
like telling them how a song should make them versity, and two Yale colleagues—not some-
feel—it was different for all people.” thing that normally happens after the pub-
lication of, say, a John Grisham novel. Dean
Eerie and mysterious, the pentacle is one of the Attridge says he proposed the online sem-
central symbols in The Da Vinci Code,the phe- inar after his talks on The Da Vinci Code
nomenally bestselling thriller that—remarkably— had drawn record turnout at events all over
has an academic for its hero, makes knowing ref- the country. “Though you gag at the his-
erence to Renaissance art and is filled with torical claims in it,” he says, he spoke on
historical allusions to everything from the early every occasion to packed houses of Yale
Christian Church to the Crusades. Within min- alumni “who sat with rapt attention.”
utes of seeing the corpse, Robert Langdon and Why the rapt attention from Ivy League
Agent Sophie Neveu, a beautiful and gifted young graduates, no less? The secret lies in the
cryptanalyst, set off on a fast-paced, 24-hour trea- novel’s potent convergence of elements
sure hunt through France and England, aided by that entertain, enlighten, and empower the
a series of clues and puzzles that eventually lead reader. A succession of seemingly complicated
them to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. Several codes, pregnant symbols, and clues promises to
corpses later in this twenty-first-century retelling lead to a hidden “truth”— which in turn promis-
of the Holy Grail legend, the murders are solved. es a seismic shift in nothing less than the bedrock
But the final resting place of the Grail comes only beliefs of Christianity itself. Mixing reality and
in the Epilogue, in an oh-yes-I-forgot-to-tell-you- fantasy, Brown has challenged the idea that re-
AKG USN&WR SPECIAL EDITION 7
CRIME SCENE. Leigh, Lincoln produced three very successful doc-
I.M. Pei’s bold umentaries about the story in the 1970s that led
glass pyramid at in turn to the book. At the center of the docu-
the Louvre leads mentaries and book was a small, hilltop town in
to the galleries rural southwestern France, Rennes-le-Château.
where the deed It was home to an obscure village priest, Bérenger
was done. Saunière, who is said to have made an earth-
shaking discovery at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury involving a trove of parchments hidden in the
local Church of Saint Mary Magdalene. On the ad-
vice of his Bishop, the story goes, Saunière took
the documents to the church of Saint-Sulpice in
ceived notions of the Bible and the Church are Paris, and, upon his return home, became sud-
a relevant mirror for our twenty-first-century cul- denly and unaccountably rich. This story was later
ture. At a time when the Catholic Church is in revived in the 1950s by Pierre Plantard, a right-
crisis, he is offering new meaning through the wing, neo-chivalric intriguer, who used it to per-
cryptic symbols and coded messages of ancient petrate an elaborate hoax involving the rediscov-
philosophies and pagan religions. As Catholic ery of Saunière’s parchments in the Bibliothèque
writer Sandra Miesel notes of Dan Brown’s book Nationale in Paris. The “dossiers secrets” pur-
in her review in Crisis Magazine, “The Da Vinci portedly proved that the medieval French Mer-
Codetakes esoterica mainstream.” ovingian royal dynasty still existed, and the fam-
The main source for The Da Vinci Codeis the ilies St. Clair and Plantard, living descendants of
“nonfiction” bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the Merovingians, were Christ's direct bloodline.
which was first published in 1982 and is conspir- A secret society called the Priory of Sion had al-
acy-theory writing at its most deft. The project was legedly been guarding the truth for centuries.
originally the brainchild of Henry Lincoln, who In Holy Blood, Holy Grail,Lincoln, Leigh, and
had become intrigued with the story of Mary Mag- Baigent further elaborated the story of Rennes-le-
dalene’s enigmatic fate after picking up an obscure Château and used the secret of its church of Saint
book, Le Trésor Maudit (1968), by Gérard de Sède, Mary Magdalene to bolster the conspiracy theory
one summer on the way to a rental house in that Christ may not only have been married to
France. Along with Michael Baigent and Richard Mary Magdalene and fathered a child with her,
8 USN&WR SPECIAL EDITION FROM TOP: BRUNO BARBEY—MAGNUM; GILLES BASSIGNAC—GAMMA