Before the story comes full circle back to the Louvre, readers face a barrage of codes, puzzles, mysteries, and conspiracies. Together with crippled millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one step ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei “monk” named Silas who will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the “Grail.” But despite the frenetic pacing, at no point is action allowed to interfere with a good lecture. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy professor of symbolism from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter, burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Nevue. The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator inside the museum. Therefore Brown claims that “the quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene,” a conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the other Grail knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the Last Supper. Over the centuries, the Grail-keepers have been guarding the true (and continuing) bloodline of Christ and the relics of the Magdalen, not a material vessel. She was the vessel that held the blood of Jesus Christ in her womb while bearing his children. And that container has a name every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene. In doing so, Brown inverts the insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a container symbolically a woman’s body.
But his book is more than just the story of a quest for the Grail - he wholly reinterprets the Grail legend. While the original Grail - the cup Jesus allegedly used at the Last Supper - normally inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance, Dan Brown’s recent mega–best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, rips it away to the realm of esoteric history. The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but difficult-to-attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord Stanley’s Cup. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” ( The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239) Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. “The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess.
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