The DaVinci Code Recoded: How to stop Hollywood from stealing your mind

by Judy Hodgkiss

Producer/director Ron Howard is now bringing to the screen, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. With 25 million copies in print, internationally, the book has been breaking all records for adult fiction, even though the only version available is a hardback, selling for $24.95 a copy. And there are no plans for Doubleday to bring out a paperback version
any time soon, since sales are only expected to climb, as the publicity for the movie kicks in.

Barnes and Noble Booksellers announced, on March 9, 2005—
the two-year anniversary of the release-date of the book—that the novel had broken all their sales records (the only comparable phenomena being the Harry Potter series for children), and that they had to create a special section on their shelves for books with connected themes.

Also, Doubleday and Brown appear to be preparing a follow-up novel, which will feature the Code’s hero, Professor Robert Langdon, in a new plot: this time, one based on the mysteries surrounding a famous classical composer, and his involvement in
an esoteric secret society, similar to Brown’s da Vinci/secret
society theme, in the current novel. Presumably, Ron Howard will
want to rub our noses in a big screen version of that one, too.
It was in 2003, that Howard won an Academy Award for his
production/direction of the movie based on Sylvia Nasar’s book,
A Beautiful Mind, a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the MIT
professor who had won a 1994 Nobel Prize for his "Game Theory"
system of economics. Nash’s theories were, explicitly, based on
a Delphic perversion of the work of the great German
mathematicians, Carl Gauss and Bernard Riemann, and, not
coincidentally, developed in collaboration with the two leading
opponents of Lyndon LaRouche during the 1950’s, Norbert Wiener
and John von Neumann.

Howard’s new movie, Da Vinci Code, now promises to treat
movie-goers, in the millions, to a spectacular Delphic
perversion of the art and science associated, historically, with
the Florentine Renaissance of Leonard da Vinci. And, as if all
of this is not enough, we are also now seeing the nation’s
bookstores flooded with a plethora of spin-off books, as a
by-product of the Code fad, with titles such as: The Da
Vinci Code Decoded, a sort of "Da Vinci Code for Dummies;"
The Secrets of the Code; The Templars in America: From the
Crusades to the New World; and The Knights Templar in
America, the latter two extending the Delphic perversions even
further by claiming an esoteric reach into the sciences of
astronomy and navigation, and then bringing it all to the shores
of America.

Public criticisms of The Da Vinci Code, so far, merely
lash out at the obvious insanity of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail
roots of the story, i.e., the hoary legend of the Knights
Templar/Freemasonic guardianship of the secret knowledge that
Jesus Christ married Mary Magdelene, and produced offspring
that included the rulers of the French Merovingian dynasty of
the Middle Ages. In fact, even hoarier, the heroes of Dan
Brown’s novel have a sacred mission to protect the modern day
carriers of that bloodline, that sacred DNA, in order to
ensure its perpetuation into the future.

And we do find the leading character of the novel, Robert
Langdon, promoting, by name, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (published
in 1983), to the heroine, Sophie Neveu, who is astonished when
Langdon tells her that the book had been an "acclaimed best
seller," since she, apparently, had never heard of it.
But Ron Howard and the rest of Hollywood would never have
considered turning that original book into a screenplay, unless
there was an intention to put an audience immediately to sleep.
The attraction of the Code is, explicitly, its splashy slander
of Leonard da Vinci, a figure who is given only a bare mention in
Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It is the shocking idea that the
Florentine Renaissance of da Vinci might have been an exercise in
esoteric, spooky-wooky mumbo-jumbo, that is catching the public
eye.

Similarly, Sylvia Nasar’s book, A Beautiful Mind, and its
movie spin-off, with its four Academy Awards, would have been a
matter of fluff, without the pretense that the hero, John Nash,
was a mathematician in the ranks of the great German thinkers,
Carl Gauss and Bernard Riemann. It is the trashing of great
minds, and the idea that creativity, itself, must be inherently
connected with kookiness, the occult, or, in the case of John
Nash, mental derangement, that titillates the interest of the
masses. A citizenry that has been deprived of the opportunity to
exercise their own creative powers, finds itself vulnerable to
such brainwashing, and now needs a quick innoculation against
this attack by Hollywood mind-benders.

NASH VS THE LAROUCHE-RIEMANN MODEL

Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash describes him, as a
student at Princeton:

"He seized opportunities to boast about his accomplishments.
He would mention, out of the blue, that he’d discovered, as an
undergraduate, an original proof of Gauss’s proof of the
fundamental theory of Algebra, one of the great achievements of
18th Century mathematics, nowadays taught in advanced courses on
the theory of complex variables."

And, in the very next paragraph, Nasar describes Nash’s
fascistic beliefs:

"He implied that his lineage was superior to that of fellow
students, especially Jewish students. Martin Davis, a fellow
student who grew up in a poor family in the Bronx, recalled
catching up with Nash when he was ruminating about blood lines
and natural aristocracies one day as they were walking from the
Graduate College to Fine Hall. He definitely had a set of beliefs about the aristocracy,' said Davis.He was opposed to
racial mixing. He said that miscengenation would result in the
deterioration of the racial line. Nash implied that his own
blood lines were pretty good.’ He once asked Davis whether Davis
had grown up in a slum."

And this is a Beautiful Mind?

This pervert was to spend 25 years of his adult life in and
out of various mental hospitals, but soon after his remission in
the 1990’s, he received a Nobel Prize in Economics for the work
he had done in the 1950’s.

The actual heroes of Nasar’s book are the old nemeses of
Lyndon LaRouche, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, with whom
Nash had a sometimes competitive, sometimes collaborative
relationship during the 1950’s. Nash knew von Neumann during
Nash’s early years at Princeton; Wiener, when Nash became a
professor of mathematics at MIT. Nash learned from von Neumann’s
"Game Theories" and from Wiener’s "Cybernetics," that man was
merely a clever animal, or, at best, a walking super-fast
computer.

Nash’s "discovery" was how to apply Game Theory to
economics, by "embedding a Riemannian manifold in an Euclidian
space," thereby achieving "an equilibrium result for n-person
games, a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic
varieties," as he described it.

In other words, soon after Lyndon LaRouche had developed his
"LaRouche-Riemann" hypothesis in physical economics, in the early
1950’s, Nash was presenting a perverted version of those theories
of Riemann, on behalf of the economic policies of the financier
oligarchy, who had sponsored the likes of von Neumann and Wiener
at MIT and Princeton, in the first place. And, by 1994, Nash
would be awarded a Nobel Prize in economics for his services to
those financiers.

NEXT TARGET: LEONARD DA VINCI

After trashing Bernard Riemann and Carl Gauss, the Ron
Howard/Avika Goldsman team are apparently ready to take on a more
well-known target: Leonard da Vinci.

Leaving aside for the moment, the laughable idea that da
Vinci had any bizarre beliefs about Mary Magdelene’s sex life,
the more difficult assertions in the Code to refute, concern
the possibility that da Vinci was embedding codes into his
artwork in order to bypass the Church’s Inquisition against
science. What, of course, is left out of the story, is the fact
that the Florentine Renaissance, itself, was, in the generation
before da Vinci, initiated by the towering figure of Cardinal
Nicolaus Cusa, the second-most influential figure of the Church,
next to the Pope, himself. And da Vinci, himself, was a very
active public figure in the politics of his day, in association
with the likes of Caesar Borgia, Niccolo Michiavelli, and others.

Towards the end of his long life, yes, he came under suspicion as
the Inquisition came into power in Italy, and he went into exile
into France for the last three years of his life; but, even
there, he was the honored guest at the court of King Francis I,
and lobbied incessantly for his proposed canal projects,
armament improvements, and other inventions and projects
conceived in his fertile mind—exactly as he had in his previous
career in Milan and Florence.

In fact, if there is any "secret" embedded in Leonardo’s
famous Mona Lisa, it is that the wild natural landscape behind
her is not so "wild:" it is, in fact, in process of being
man-formed, and represents the layout of one of Leonardo’s
favorite water projects: the dam and canal constructions aimed at
the diversion of the River Po, that was to have given Milan an
access to the sea. The project had been started, and stopped in
fits, over more than two decades. Yes, Leonardo did love the
painting, kept it with him at all times, and even refused to sell
it at the demand of his last patron, France I, who loved it, too.

The only enigma here though, is: Is the Mona Lisa just
beginning to smile at you about Leonardo’s jokes and scientific
passion; or, has she just finished sharing a smile with you over
them?

Then, when it comes to the central role played in Brown’s
novel, by what he calls Leonardo’s "sacred geometry," which,
supposedly Leonardo must furtively embed into his notebook
studies through mirror writing and codes, and hide in his works
of art—guess what? In 1509, Leonardo published a book on the
topic, together with his collaborator, Luca Pacioli, called The
Divine Proportion. It’s all there: everything that appears in
Brown’s fervid mind as "revelations" about the "secrets" of
Leonardo’s geometric construction of the Virtruvian Man—the
figure inscribed, spread-eagle, in a circle; the not-so-"magical"
Fibonacci Number Series; and the design of the Golden Mean
Proportions, so integrally related to the construction of the
Pentagram—the figure coveted by lovers of esoteric "secrets."

And, finally we will deal here with the question of the
"sacred architecture" that was supposed to be the basis of the
very name of Freemasonry. Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, which
still existed at the time of the Crusades, served as the original
headquarters for the Knights Templar. The supposition is that
the Temple was built according to a very ancient pagan or
Judaical body of knowledge, of an astrophysical nature, similar,
but on a less grand scale, to the Egyptian feats incorporated
into the construction of the pyramids; and it is supposed to be
the Knights Templar/Freemasons who have conveyed the secret
knowledge of that construction into modern times.

Henry Lincoln, the chief of three authors of Holy Blood,
Holy Grail, originally published in 1983, has since repudiated
the leading source of those authors’ material, Pierre Plantard
de Saint-Clair, and his "Dossier Secret." Lincoln now steers
away from the blood-line issues, and has, instead, written a
recent series of books (the most recent of which, The Templar’s
Secret Island, co-authored with Erling Haagensen, compiles the
essence of the previous ones), which now proclaim the "Grail" to
be the Egyptian/Greek lost knowledge of astrophysics, as
demonstrated in the construction and geographical layout of
churches and groups of churches, built by the Templars throughout
Europe. All of which churches, were, of course, modelled on the
original construction of King Solomon’s Temple.

If anyone were wondering why the more esoteric,
Freemasonic-minded "Temple Mount" fanatics that are involved in
stirring up religious war between Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem,
would be so eager to collaborate with Fundamentalist Christians,
in the project of "rebuilding King Solomon’s Temple," here is the
answer: It is "pyramid power," that they are after, not any
particular rapture of a more commonly understood variety.
Dan Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, has studied the "sacred
architecture" of the Templar-related sites, and some of the
critical scenes in the novel take place within them. The novel,
itself, is ambiguous as to the exact nature of the "Grail:" Is
it Mary Magdelene, the incarnation of the "sacred feminine," as we
see her image, and her role revealed through coded messages
embedded in great Renaissance art and architecture; Or, is the
"Grail," the idea of a pagan science that had to be hidden, and
conveyed through such codes?

The contradiction in the latter thesis, which neither Brown
nor Lincoln dare to address, is that the towering intellectual
figure behind the Knights Templar, the leader of the Cistercian
Order, Bernard of Clairveaux (1090-1153), was, himself, the
leader of the Inquisition. In fact, it was Bernard, who lead
the condemnation, and banishment to monastic orders of silence,
of the leading Platonic thinker of the day, Peter Abelard. Among
the surviving documents of Abelard, those which escaped the fire,
we find nothing explicit on geometry or astrophysics; but there
is something haunting in the name that he gave to his son:
Astrolabe.

However that may be, we do know that it was Bernard’s
document, "Against a Few of Abelard’s Central Errors," that was
used at Abelard’s trial by the Inquisition. We find there the
following argument:

"[Abelard] sweats hard to show that Plato was a Christian,
thereby proving that he himself is no better than a pagan...Our
faith is rooted in the might and goodness of God, not in the
devisings of our powers of reason."

Quite a statement from the man whom Lincoln calls the
"eminence grise" behind the Templars; and this is supposed to be
the ideology which gave rise to the European Renaissance of
Leonardo da Vinci? Bernard and his Knights Templar were, in
fact, just what you might suppose from their barbaric behavior
during the Crusades: they were the equivalent of the Cult of
Apollo, which had arranged for the judicial murder of Plato’s
beloved teacher, Socrates, and the subsequent dispersion of the
Platonic/Pythagorean Academy of ancient Greece.

Note, therefore, the hypocrisy in Lincoln’s praise for the
science of the Pythagorean School in The Templar’s Secret
Island:

"The mathematicians of antiquity struggled with three famous
and knotty problems. The first is at least known to, if not
properly understood by, most people: the Squaring of the Circle.

We all know it as one of those impossibilities,' which we can use in a metaphorical sense without fully grasping its mathematical import, which is to construct a square equal in area to a given circle. The second problem is the Duplication of the Cube--how to construct a cube with twice the volume of another cube. Yet another puzzle which cannot be solved by use of ruler and compass. The third great problem is the Trisection of the Angle. While this may seem astonishing to the non-mathematician, the division of an arbitrary angle into three, using only straightedge and compass, is impossible to achieve." Lincoln asks us to consider the symbolism of the six-pointed Star of David, or Seal of Solomon, inscibed within a circle, as the archetype of any polygon inscribed within a circle, the square being the simplest: "Consider again the symbol...the square within the circle. This symbol represents, in the simplest possible way, the three different families of numbers which create and measure everything in the universe [these are: the familiar numbers, which measure the length of the sides of the square; the irrational numbers, measuring its diagonals; and the transcendental, measuring the circumference of the circle]. These three families cannot unite. In the language of the mathematicians, they areincommensurate’
with each other."

We find spread throughout Lincoln’s later works, everywhere,
an explicit bowdlerization of that Platonic tradition, always
accompanied by nauseating praise for Bernard and his Knights.
Lincoln has produced six BBC-TV documentaries on his various
theories of the "Holy Grail," and he and Dan Brown may be cooking
up an even more advanced approach for Hollywood brainwashing of
the masses, as evidenced by an interview given by Brown, on March
2003, to BookBrowse.com. Brown promises us that his character,
Robert Langdon, will, in future books, be looking at "numerology
cults," among which he includes the Pythagoreans:

"Aha, the Kabbalists! Yes, they are fascinating—as are the
Pythagoreans. Without a doubt, Langdon will be exploring these
more closely in the future...[The Da Vinci Code] also drops a
hint as to the identity of another ultrasecret numerology sect
that fascinates me, but I can’t reveal their name here without
ruining much of the surprise of the next book."

WHO CONTROLS WHOM?

It has been announced that documentary film-maker, Ken
Mandel, is working with the Opus Dei right-wing Catholic sect
to produce a rebuttal to The Da Vinci Code, the which they
expect to be aired on a major TV network next spring, at the
point the movie is released. It will be interesting to see if
Mandel will object to how Brown portrays the novel’s fictional
leader of Opus Dei, who turns out to be a foolish dupe of a
British oligarch, Sir Leigh Teabing. In the novel, Teabing has
the capability to monitor the innermost conclaves of the Vatican,
and to manipulate the differences between the Holy See and the
Opus Dei leader, all on behalf of Teabing’s secret pagan agenda.
This revelation, that there is an overlay of hidden
controllers behind the key characters in the novel, including
the assassin, parallels the plot of Brown’s earlier novel,
Angels and Demons. In this earlier case, our hero, Robert
Langdon, discovers that there is a hierarchy of control behind
the terrorist that he is chasing, a Muslim fundamentalist who is
plotting to blow up the Vatican. The Muslim, who wants revenge
against the Catholic Church because of the Crusades of the Middle
Ages, believes that he has entered into a contract with members of
a powerful, super-secret organization, the "Illuminati," who hate
the Catholic Church for their own reasons. We are led to believe
that the Illuminati want to avenge the past wrongs committed
against the Renaissance scientists and artists who were victims of
the Church’s Inquisition; Langdon discovers that the Illuminati is
actually a synthetic creation of someone who is motivated by much
more immediate ambitions.

A truly creative novelist, today, in the tradition of Edgar
Allan Poe, or James Fenimore Cooper, could create a concluding
installment of the Robert Langdon series, in which our hero
might discover, that he, too, has been operating, since his
first waking moment, within a carefully choreographed scenario.

Langdon would realize, that it is not only members of
fundamentalist religious sects that are susceptible of manipulation
into insane behavior by evil men lurking in the shadows; but that,
actually, the entire culture of a nation is susceptible to such
manipulation. The turning point in the novel would be Langdon’s
dawning recognition that he, himself, has been the tool of a
powerful group of cult-masters and mind-benders, powerful enough
to dominate Hollywood and the New York Times Bestsellers List;
and, yes, even powerful enough to have within their clutches, a
professor-novelist from the state of New Hampshire, and a
child-prodigy film-maker from the town of Mayberry.