Let me get this rant out of the way before getting serious.
As stated in the preface, it is a work of fiction.

Is anyone out there listening? It’s fiction, made up, the opposite of real life, not fact.

NOT FACT!

Ron Brown writes Angels and Demons six years ago with the same main character discovering the battle between the Illuminati and the Catholic Church. There’s some bruhaha about it, but it dies off fairly quickly. Now the same hagiologist finds that the Catholic Church is using Opus Dei to protect the descendants of Jesus and maintain orthodoxy. I’m assuming his next book will involve the Freemasons somehow. It’s the only large secret organization left that Robert Langdon hasn’t dealt with.

My questions are:

• Why didn’t the Vatican send Opus Dei to go after the Illuminati if they’ve been fighting for centuries?
• Why doesn’t Robert Langdon work as a CIA agent – he’s escaped attacks from two super-secret, centuries-old, quasi-mystic organizations?

Then again, there are people that believe the Illuminati exist simply because of Angels and Demons. Recent polls have shown that the Da Vinci Code has caused some people to question their beliefs. Verisimilitude is the mark of a good writer, but really – when you put a fiction book down, suspension of disbelief is supposed to go away!

AND who are these nuts that are trying to get on the gravy train by writing books that disprove the Da Vinci Code? It’s a work of fiction! I’ve never seen anyone try to disprove the Hound of the Baskervilles. No one has tried to disprove Little Women. Maybe closer to the subject matter, no one believes that the NSA has a quantum computer that can decipher any encrpytion scheme because of Digital Fortress. I guess it gets to me that people, in the name of God, go out of their way to disprove a work of fiction for money. Ugh!

Boy, you make up stuff about the NSA and you get panned on Amazon. You make up stuff about the Catholic church and you get some attention. Mess with Jesus and the whole world starts throwing money in random directions as if the apocolypse is upon us.

If you’re going to disprove something, go after a work that claims to be non-fiction. You know, claims to be real, genuine, thoughtful, offers evidence of a logical albeit controversial conclusion, etc. (I’m talking about Holy Blood, Holy Grail.)

I feel better – more thoughtful stuff to follow

The best explanation I have seen for the Da Vinci Code was actually on A&E. Pretty quickly, the narrator talks about using the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci, the mystery of a secret group like Opus Dei, and the sometimes problematic issues of canonization to weave a fantastic story. The mind fills in the blank with all kinds of possibilities in the face of the unknown and the unknowable. In short, to make a great thriller that draws on historical people, groups, and events, you need three things:
An enigmatic central figure
A Religous Secret Society
Liberal Use of Christian Mythology

Despite all the religious material out there, I found this secular perspective the best stated explanation of the ‘code’.

Leonardo, the mystery dude
Da Vinci never really talks about himself. He investigates the range of human knowledge in his notebooks, but never examines himself. In this day and age of supreme self-consciousness, it is almost impossible to imagine a person that produced so much material without writing about himself. Because of this, the man himself is quite a mystery.

You get the sense that he didn’t share the same beliefs as the Catholic Church, but he never really says it. Despite this, though, he creates a masterpiece in the Last Supper that uses the Catholic symbols very well. He wrote in a backwards script in his journals and this makes the facsimiles of his journals look almost arcane. To this day, many fictional representations of spellbooks tend to look like something out of Da Vinci’s notebooks – a diagram or two and marginal notes written backwards. Why backward scripting? He was left-handed and allowed him to write freely across the page. It is easier to write backwards left-handed rather than backwards-slanting. (Try it!) He deeply investigated human anatomy and made detailed drawings and cross-sections. He designed weapons of war. He studied the flight of birds and thought about human flight. Studying all his notebooks is almost a complete education in itself! Working on all of the information, it would seem that he spent a lot of time to himself – he had to to produce this work. He called the Mona Lisa his master work and took it with him wherever he went, but he never explained why. For lack of an explanation, all kinds of theories have been put forward. Whatever his true reasons, Mona Lisa’s smile and androgyny has inspired many.

Basically, here is your enigmatic central character. He is a genius, but little is known about him personally. He obviously has a great deal of knowledge. The author merely has to suggest that he has some kind of secret knowledge and the rest can follow. The suggestion looks like this: A guy this smart had to know something that we don’t know, right? Throw in some of his quirks and something as ambiguous as art and Da Vinci’s your guy.

Secret Societies of the Pious and the Powerful
No one had really heard of Opus Dei before the book. I have a friend with a relative that’s a member. Third-hand info is that this family member enjoys his membership and the organization. First hand experience being a member of a secretive religious organization, I can say that it is fun for awhile. In any case, you take the fact that this small group within the Catholic Church commands quite a bit of resources without looking into their history, and all the mind fills-in-the-blanks with all kinds of things. All a good thriller needs is to point out its secret rituals (which can be genuine), play up the secrecy and point out some unexplainable events in the organization’s past. Thus the recipe for a conspiracy – thus this secret group is involved in some conspiracy.

Ever notice that most conspiracies are explained with questions? Examples include: Why was there no footage of a plane hitting the Pentagon? Why would the government deny that a missile hit it instead of a plane? Why would Kennedy fall backwards if shot from behind? How could a bullet take this weird journey and come out pristine? Why would two people make deathbed confessions about the death of Jimmy Hoffa? Why does the Catholic Church allow the radical Opus Dei folks to exist? How did my son remove his hearing aid without using his hands?

Dazzle with Brillance, Baffle with Baloney
To many Christians, the Bible must have come down as Jesus rose into the sky. To suggest that early Christianity struggled with orthodoxy can even shake the faith of some. What did they do without a Bible for four hundred years? Well, that question assumes a lot, but that’s a topic for another post. Point is that there was ambiguity about certain things we take for granted twenty centuries later. Play of the ambiguity and there is fodder for all kinds of things.

The easiest thing to do is remark about why certain gospels were chosen and certain others were not. The Egerton Gospel isn’t that controversial, why was that left out? What about the Gospel of Thomas? Go to earlychristianwritings.org to read a copy and the mind is on its way to filling in blanks once again. Like any other book, reading it outside of its history and context can lead to all kinds of strange readings. (But it is fun for a creative exercise). Most people read the Apocryphon of John and reject it outright because it is “weird”, despite the fact that at least one group of Gnostic Christians considered it inspired. Introduce the Gospel of Thomas, which is ‘weird’ in two places and contains stories found in the other gospels, and it isn’t so clear.

Back to the point – in Da Vinci’s code case, there is the contention that Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ wife and they had children. This comes from modern speculation but hey, it is scholarship. Mix in the Gospel of Mary with Mary’s conflict with Peter implying that Mary was held above Peter and there’s all kinds of fun you can have.

DIY Master Thriller
Umberto Eco wrote Focault’s Pendulum for just this scenario. A group of people try to invent a conspiracy with the Knights Templar and the conspiracy sucks them in. The characters in the book know ahead of time that they are making things up, yet they still eventually believe in their own myth. It’s dense, but worth the read.

Okay let’s make our own. First, we need one engimatic genius:

Hieronymus Bosch – check

Then we need a secret organization:

HB was a member of the Bortherhood of Our Lady, one of many groups supposedly devoted to the worship of Mary. – check

Now we need some Christian Mythology:

This one is tricky. The big myths are covered already. Let’s use the Gospel of Judas.

Synopsis of the Next Great Thriller
Okay, here’s the story. HB joins the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a wealthy group in his hometown. They owned most of his work. Not all of it was made public. HB, as a member, finds that the group is a sect of Gnsotics that reveres Judas. A cryptic message – ADJACENT SIN WON US – is found in the corner of HB’s painting “Tempation of St. Anthony”. The outer panels, featuring the arrest of Jesus shows Peter and Jesus, but not Judas. Another painting, one of many about the Last Judgement has all 12 apostles in Heaven, including a figure in black – is this Judas? Our hero struggles to come to grips with the machinations of this secret Brotherhood of Our Lady with groups worldwide on every continent. Puzzling through the strange remark on HB’s painting and images of the apostles, he comes to the stunning realization:

JUDAS WAS INNOCENT. (anagram)

Not bad for ten minutes work, if I do say so myself.