The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
I started reading this right after Angels & Demons. And on the whole I'd say I really enjoyed it!
As with the previous book, the facts in the book makes you want to look up the reality of everything the author talks about. I was also quite drawn in by the whole "goddess theme" of the book, which tended to center around how modern religions have removed strong female figures. This is something that I never put much thought into before.
Murder, mystery, a secret society with links to the Holy Grail. Very intriguing topics for just about everyone.
As for the story of the book, while it didn't read as quickly as the previous book, I very much enjoyed it. I'd definately recommend this to everyone %D
As with the previous book, the facts in the book makes you want to look up the reality of everything the author talks about. I was also quite drawn in by the whole "goddess theme" of the book, which tended to center around how modern religions have removed strong female figures. This is something that I never put much thought into before.
Murder, mystery, a secret society with links to the Holy Grail. Very intriguing topics for just about everyone.
As for the story of the book, while it didn't read as quickly as the previous book, I very much enjoyed it. I'd definately recommend this to everyone %D
1 Comments:
I was raised agnostic, possibly athiest, and became Hindu when I reached maturity (whatever that means). Years past and by the grace of something *way* cooler than myself I became fast friends with the most remarkable Christian woman - er, Catholic (they're the Hindus of Christianity, really) - I've ever met, and she's actually such a nut she's writing her own concordance of the Bible... with a goddess slant. It's been years in the making.
Before I read this book she'd already tuned me on to the fact that "they" (the men of the church) had been systematically and surgically removing Mother from Western scripture for hundreds, thousands of years.
Dang penis people, anyway.
The death of the female in our symbology has caused the death of female values, and this is the reason for the massive imbalance we see manifest on earth these days. No animal shits in it's own nest, but we've managed to poison ours to the extent that no one's supposed to eat more than a can of tuna a week for fear of heavy metal poisoning.
A female in the center of her strength is *strong* yet we think of the classic feminine qualites as being weak, effacing, the result of oppression and low self-esteem. Yet nurturing ain't no easy job. Neither is compassion, empathy, service: these things aren't *easy*, certainly not like selfishness and ruthlessness are easy. Feeling not only for yourself but for your family, community, culture, and society is no trivial feat. It requires a kind of self-referral depth and strength of character lacking almost entirely from modern culture.
Why, then, are the womenly values viewed as weak? Why do we live in a society so divorced from basic human grace that we're afraid of our neighbors and want to live in gated communities? Because the goddess and all her qualities has been erased from our history and with her went forbearance, strength, self-sacrifice (as a quality, not a mental aberration), nurturing, caring, love, compassion, and respect for the inner knowledge once not only attributed to women with awe but expected of us for its intimacy and immediacy. What could be more handy than a local healer woman to whom you could go for answers and who could, by nature of her innate connecton to the divine, give you the precise and personal healing and advice you required?
Part of the illness our world faces is the loss of the feminine's inherent connection to the substratum; that ability to *know* has become so lost to us that now we doubt our own intuition and most Western cultures not only make fun of it but denigrate it, and many women themselves use their 'intuition' as a method of controlling others.
Losing the goddess was a huge problem. I enjoyed this book for that idea as well as the fun, well-paced story.
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