Secrets of the Priory

 

Oh no, not again! A Swedish TV network is showing "The Da Vinci Code" as we speak. This is my old review from Amazon, probably posted circa 2008, and here on the blog in 2018. Reposted for the hell of it! 

Recently, no-longer-so-Red China prohibited the movie "The Da Vinci Code", after only two weeks of airing. Thank God. At least there is some Western trash the Chinese audience don't have to endure. Apparently, the movie have also been banned at the Faroe Islands (of all places). Once again: Thank you.

Although the movie slightly downplays the most controversial claims in Dan Brown's novel, the basic message is still the same. All these ideas have been refuted by serious scholars (including secular ones) long ago. Jesus was not married to Mary Magdalene and didn't sire children with her. Constantine didn't invent the Christian Bible. In fact, all or most of the New Testament (NT) was written 200 years earlier. Nor was Constantine the first to declare Jesus a God. His purported divinity is spelled out already in the NT, most clearly in the Gospel of John, written around AD 100. The Gnostic gospels, in which Mary Magdalene is portrayed as the chief disciple of Jesus, were written long after the NT Gospels. Besides, the Gnostics also regarded Jesus as divine! Et cetera.

Thus, the movie doesn't expose any cover-up. Rather, it and Dan Brown's novel are themselves part of a cover-up. Brown wants to replace one religious myth (the Christian) with another (his own). I'm not a Christian, but the Church is at least a public institution, with a public message. Dan Brown's alternative is presumably a secret sex cult, carrying out bizarre rituals reminescent of Satanic ritual abuse, and led by a Grand Master with a penchant for pentagrams and other Satanist paraphernalia. In the movie, the members of this secret society, "The Priory of Zion", are depicted as the good guys. By contrast, "The Teacher", who wants to expose both the Church and the Priory, thereby ending ALL conspiracies for good, is one of the bad guys!

In fact, I found Teabing or the Teacher to be the only sympathetic person in the entire movie, a sort of expose-em-all David Icke character (and I must admit that I don't usually like Icke).

Incidentally, who engineered the car accident that killed Sophie's father and mother anyway? The movie never says, but we are left with the impression that it might have been the Priory after all. Thus, the "good" guys.

So the muckracker is the bad guy, and the secret manipulative Satanic cult are not really Satanists at all, but jolly nice people. Oh yeah? So why do they operate in secret, then? Obviously, because they have something to hide, not only from "the council of shadows", but from the rest of us as well. It might be well to remember that many of the ideas in Dan Brown's novel originally comes from Pierre Plantard, a French right-wing extremist. Besides, the conspiracy theory of history is usually associated with the far right of the political spectrum. These essentially elitist and fascist ideas have then been neatly edited into a vaguely "New Age" version and voila, we have "The Da Vinci Code".

Make no mistake about it. "The Da Vinci Code" might be a bad movie, but the ideas behind it are even worse. Not just for the odd traditional Christian, but for all of us. Sincerely, do you want a world ruled by the Priory of Zion? If forced to chose, I rather go with the most boring, philistine Anglican vicar!