All my life
a ludicrous and portentous solemnisation of sex has been going on.
(C.S. Lewis, The
Four Loves, “Eros”, p. 97)
A while ago I
heard a song on the radio of which I could only catch the words ‘Take me to
church’ and ‘Amen, amen, amen’. I strongly suspected I was missing something,
so I looked up the complete lyrics. The song was Take me to church by
Hozier; it has been on the Top 100 list for 25 weeks now, peaking at #2 and
currently still going strong at #3. Hozier’s church, contrasted with the sombre
and misanthropic institutional church, turns out to be one that ‘worships in
the bedroom’. Almost Augustinian is the line ‘I should’ve worshipped her
sooner’. Sero te amavi!
The simile is
so extended as to become almost Homeric. The lover is called a ‘mouthpiece of
heaven’, a ‘Goddess’ that demands sacrifice, one that gives ‘deathless death’
(a stock metaphor)
and to whom one’s life can be given. Imagery of Christmas and Corpus Christi is
combined (with innuendo) in the lines ‘What you got in the stable? / We’ve a
lot of starving faithful’. Sex becomes worship, a liturgical rite – but one
without hierarchy:
No Masters
or Kings
When the
Ritual begins
There is no
sweeter innocence
Than our
gentle sin
Dammit, it
sounded like such a good song.
In fact it
reminded me of nothing so much as the Da Vinci Code (spoilers alert). In
Dan Brown’s book, the murdered Louvre curator who opens the plot has had a
falling-out with his favourite granddaughter ten years before. The
granddaughter happens to become Langdon’s intelligent and docile sidekick. She
is struggling with the event that led her to break off contact with her grandfather. This event is
referred to in gradually increasing detail until you have an idea what it could
be, and when it is ultimately revealed to be a sex rite, you’re not surprised.
Hieros
Gamos, Langdon
calls it, the Sacred Marriage. Practised in temple prostitution in many ancient
cults, including the Jewish Temple before the patriarchal system took over.
(Perhaps he is thinking of Eli’s
sons, but they were priests at the Shiloh sanctuary before the Temple was
even dreamed of.) Still practised secretly in cultural centres like Manhattan
and Paris. It is a festive celebration of fertility, a happy natural religion
in contrast with the gloomy, restrictive, sin-obsessed Judeo-Catholic power
structures.
Sophie voices
the obvious objection: ‘What I saw was neither holy nor a marriage.’
Now Dan Brown
lets this hang in the air, but ultimately answers it with an almost
Chestertonian twist: the woman who was with the curator was actually his wife.
They had separated to avert danger from their two grandchildren, but still they
came together annually because some rites just had to be performed.
It is very
interesting to note the devilish cleverness by which our author has painted sex
rites with a veneer of bourgeois conventionality. All of the reviews I read
back in the day took pot-shots at the historical wrongness of Dan Brown’s opus,
but none addressed the core idea. What precisely is wrong with having
ritual sex with your wife?
Well, aside
from wrongness, there are two inner contradictions in this picture. The most
obvious one is this: if the rite is an annual celebration of fertility, why on
earth did the curator have only one child? Apparently most of the fertility
rites failed to deliver. The Christian way of celebrating fertility
(liturgically at Christmas and more informally after the birth of any child)
would seem to make more sense.
The other
element has to do with the anti-patriarchal pretence that Langdon/Dan Brown
puts up. This gets a little more complicated. His contention is that the
Catholic Church established their power status by elevating Jesus to divinity
at the Council of Nicea (325), making the Church the only bringer of salvation
on earth. (Try telling the Donatists that. Or the Assyrians, or the Copts.) The
Church obscured the ‘fact’ that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus in order
to create the hierarchical Petrine church we all know and love.
In reality,
Dan Brown claims, Mary Magdalene was the hero of the story of Christianity. She
was the ‘Holy Grail’ because she was the chosen vessel of Jesus to perpetuate
his bloodline: the line of King David, later of the Frankish kings. The Da
Vinci Code ends with Langdon’s realization of the pilgrimage we are called
to make: to ‘pray at the feet of the outcast one’, at the relics of Mary
Magdalene in Paris. She was ousted from her powerful position in the early
Church because they feared the power of the ‘sacred feminine’.
But what was
her merit? Apparently nothing more than being married to Jesus, as his
favourite disciple, and being the mother of his children. And Jesus was only a
human prophet. How this makes Mary Magdalene an embodiment of the ‘sacred
feminine’, I have no idea.
So this is the
second inner contradiction: in Dan Brown’s world, women receive their
importance and insight from men. As Mary Magdalene was taught and wedded by
Jesus, Sophie with her ‘virginal’ (i.e. uninitiated, receptive) mind is taught
by Langdon and Teabing, who draw an explicit analogy between teaching and
sexual intercourse (planting the seed, that sort of thing). In the Priory of
Sion, it is the Grand Master who holds the strings, also of its ritual aspects.
No Masters or Kings / When the Ritual begins?
Say what you
like about the Judeo-Catholic tradition, I am not convinced that the cult of
the sacred feminine offers a better alternative. Somehow it always seems to end
in temple prostitution, half-orphaned children, empty celebrations and failed
promises, enshrined lies – and no forgiveness:
I’ll tell
you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
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