The Da Vinci Code and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

The Di Vinci Code the 2003 Dan Brown Novel is now a www.sonypictures.com film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks as Harvard University symbologist Robert Langdon and Audrey Tatou as the premiere french cryptologist Sophie Neveu in the search for the answer to the question the The Da Vinci Code raises: Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene marry and have a daughter whose descendants are living among us now? Have the past and present-day churches kept this information from us for eighteen-hundred years?

A guardian of these secrets, Jacques Sauniere, a curator at the prestigious Louvre Museum in Paris is murdered and the brush stokes of Leonardo Da Vinci detail the answer with cryptic clues. All this takes place within only 48 hours a sequence of the highest art, Renaissance painting rendezvoused with the history of the world’s major religion nascent origins in a thrilling narrative. Biblical specialist Sir Leigh Teabing prophetically played by Ian McKellan.

As we say in west coast wording, what is the backstory? We assume that since males dominate the higher echelons of the world’s religions today that this state was always thus. In The Alphabet Versus the Goddess By Dr. Leonard Shlain The Conflict Between Word and Image (ISBN 040196013 Penguin) is non-fictionally related to us and brings us to the biblical time of Joshua Ben-Joseph and Mary Magdalene.

Where have all the Goddesses gone? Who removed them from their pedestals? Dr. Leonard Shlain, the father of the modern Goddess Movement, literaturally answers that in 35 chapters starting with: 1 IMAGE/Word through 35 PAGE/SCREEN, dichotomies.

Preliterate societies were devoted to Goddess centered religions, then along came Alphabets and the elimination of female images from the temples. Goddesses were replaced by the great revelation of only one God, and the laws declared by Him governed mankind’s affairs thereafter. The First Commandment: “Thou shalt revere no other gods or goddesses.” and the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above.”

The Conflict Between Word and Image is wrought-out in the human brain between the left-brain (male attributes) of abstraction, numeracy, reading-writing, speech and a linear view of reality and the right-brain (female attributes) of consciousness of being, feeling, intuition, images of form and a 360 degree (holistic) view of reality. The history of humans journey through the invention of the alphabet to the printing press is related as images being displaced by the written word.
Images are perceived and processed by the right-brain all at once but words have to be organized in a sequence, and can be interpreted variously by the left-brain, so more time is involved in the processing of the information.When reading and writing we are “left-braining”; as we adsorb television programs the “right-brain” is more fully utilized.

The Conflict Between Word and Image is wrought-out in the human brain between the left-brain (male attributes) of abstraction, numeracy, reading-writing, speech and a linear view of reality and the right-brain (female attributes) of consciousness of being, feeling, intuition, images of form and a 360 degree (holistic) view of reality. The history of humans journey through the invention of the alphabet to the printing press is related as images being displaced by the written word.Images are perceived and processed by the right-brain all at once but words have to be organized in a sequence, and can be interpreted variously by the left-brain, so more time is involved in the processing of the information.When reading and writing we are “left-braining”; as we adsorb television programs the “right-brain” is more fully utilized.

The Conflict Between Word and Image is wrought-out in the human brain between the left-brain (male attributes) of abstraction, numeracy, reading-writing, speech and a linear view of reality and the right-brain (female attributes) of consciousness of being, feeling, intuition, images of form and a 360 degree (holistic) view of reality. The history of humans journey through the invention of the alphabet to the printing press is related as images being displaced by the written word.Images are perceived and processed by the right-brain all at once but words have to be organized in a sequence, and can be interpreted variously by the left-brain, so more time is involved in the processing of the information.When reading and writing we are “left-braining”; as we adsorb television programs the “right-brain” is more fully utilized.

On a visit to the Mediterranean the author saw: “At every Greek archaeological site we visited the tour guide explained that the shrines had been devoted to a Female Deity. Later for unknown reasons, unknown persons reconsecrated them to a male one.” Chapter 32: SORCERY/SCIENCE relates the worst aspects of “human nature” with the explanation of the sequence of events that led to the various “witch hunts” over the centuries, as women were persecuted for being out of order with their societys’ view of their role in the community. The term has meaning for us as used in our present day culture in relation to events in the various political arenas.

The author’s definition of “Common Sense” as the “wisdom of more than one person. It is the result of give-and-take of face-to-face conversation with another which allows on to “hear oneself think.” In this second meaning, common sense wisdom is generated in common.” This says, to me that there is hope in our democratic political system that we as Americans will come to the correct decisions and take the right actions.

Today in the United States a Goddess movement is reforming as more women become concerned that the political process has failed to take into account females issues and act on them to improve their lives. While they are not abandoning their traditional religions, they are demanding that those institutuions also be more responsive to their needs.

Alphabet Versus the Goddess is 460 pages of insights, a book to keep after you have read it in it’s entirety and start reading any page at random and be stimulated in your thinking about the events that have brought us to the present day. You may not agree with all the conclusions presented, but that is one of the goals of scholarship; to encourage debate.

Computer use, movies and television are bringing images to be processed by our consciousness more than ever before in our intellectual lives; utilizing the “right-brains” innate talents may increase our non-alphabetic abilities is Dr. Shlains intuition of mankinds’ future. Thank the Goddess.