da vinci code and dan brown and phyllis trible and church of the covenant and goddess worship

Now that the Da Vinci Code phenomenon is about three years old and the movie's release impends, I thought it good actually to read the book and see what the rest of the world has been drooling over the past three years. I read the book not necessarily to be entertained or to expose its historical shortcomings. Online reviews galore do this. Suffice it to say that the book is riddled with indefensible historial statements about the continuity, from the earliest days of Christianity, of an oral tradition teaching that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that they spawned what eventually became the Merovingian Kings of early France.

Rather, I was interested in the question of why this book has become such a big seller at this time. Why has it captured the imagination of religious and anti-religious people, mystery readers and writers, and the public in general? I think a combination of three factors explain why it has crested at this historical moment: (1) the interest in the "goddess" as the basis of human religion; (2) lingering anti-Catholic sentiment which the Church, by its bumbling handling of priest sexual abuse issues, has only fueled; and (3) the relatively recent discovery and publication of "secret" or "gnostic" Gospels which had previously only been partially known by earlier generations of scholars. Let me begin with a story.

1. The Goddess Emerges

If I wasn't in on the "ground floor" of the American feminist movement, I was at least on the second floor. My religious community in the mid-late 1970s in Boston was a liberal church known as Church of the Covenant ("COC"). At that time, COC drew scholars and feminists from the academic "think" tanks of the Boston area (Andover-Newton; Harvard; Episcopal Divinity School; Boston University). We as a community engaged in debates over "language of God" as well as the withering effects of patriarchy on Western culture. It wasn't easy to be a white male in that congregation at that time. In addition, while still living in Boston in 1978-79, I was a graduate TA at Brown (Providence, RI) for Professor Phyllis Trible, who was a visiting professor from Andover-Newton. Phyllis had recently become a household word in the Christian feminist movement by the publication of God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. She taught the Introduction to the Old Testament (as it was still called at the time) and I was her TA.

She spent a lot of time on expositions of Gen. 1-2 and introduced her novel theory that God first created a sexually undifferentiated "earth creature" in Gen. 1, and that human sexuality actually resulted only after Eve was taken from the heart of the earth creature in Gen. 2. It was Eve, rather than Adam, who became the decisive one, the one who acted in freedom, the one who acted to realize herself. Eve, then, was the original mother of the seekers, the ones who pursued God as well as knowledge, the one who initiated and led in the world.

The effect on the class (about 75% of whom were women) was electric. It was as if someone had told the female students, for the first time, that God made them with great dignity, a dignity independent of the male, and that God honored their search for truth, even though it might have some negative consequences. I think that my being a witness to the energy released by Phyllis' teaching more than 25 years ago helps me understand one of the strands of current thought in our culture. That strand says that women were, from the beginning of time, the leaders, the thinkers, the actors. It was only because men suppressed the originality and powerful sexuality of women that it went "underground." Thus, the quest of some feminist religious scholars in the early 1980s, when I was a fledgling professor of religion at Reed College (Portland, OR), was to try to drive back this interest in women's priority and superiority to earlier and earlier times. In fact, this must have had its origin, the argument went, in an original worship of a goddess that was long suppressed by male-oriented religious hierarchies.

All of this was "in the air" in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the academic study of religion, but it remained cloistered there, so to speak, until its popularization in the 1990s by the explosion of goddess worship and now through the Da Vinci Code. But is there evidence for this "Ur-goddess" cult? Is there evidence of its universality or localization? Its worship or expression? Not really. As so often is the case in religious studies, the most interesting questions lie tantalizingly beyond the scope of our evidence. Yet, there is a societal need today, a longing, to locate women's spirituality and religious uniqueness deep in an original feminine someplace and sometime. Hence, Dan Brown has skillfully exploited that theme.

I need one more essay to explore my other two points.

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