Key Takeaways:
In Antiquity, ceremonial EGO DEATH experiences, such as those observed at Eleusis, involved drinking from a mystical chalice.
In Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, THE HOLY GRAIL became an underground symbol of goddess worship after the Church opposed such practices.
Medieval folklore associated the Knights Templar with the Holy Grail, until they were driven underground by the Church to become a SECRET SOCIETY.
Ego Death
Before Christianity, the Eleusinian Mysteries were the central pivot around which Greco-Roman spiritual life revolved. “Among the many admirable and divine things your Athenians have established to the advantage of human society,” observed the Roman orator Cicero, “there is nothing better than the mysteries by which we are polished and softened into politeness”.
The heavy influence of Greek culture on the Romans is impossible to overstate. Cicero's remarkable claim is that the mysterious rites performed at the small town of Eleusis, just outside Athens, were even more influential to the Romans than Greek art or philosophy.
For over a thousand years, pilgrims who visited Eleusis worshipped the motherly grain goddess Demeter and her virginal daughter Persephone. The dramatic climax of the Eleusinian ritual involved drinking from a mystical chalice called the Kykeon.
Its recipe was a closely-guarded secret, kept by the generations of priestesses who ran Eleusis. Revealing that secret was punishable by death. Or by exile, as in the case of the Athenian statesman Alcibiades. These stiff punishments ensured that the contents of the Kykeon remained an enduring mystery for millenia.
But recent archeobotanical evidence (Juan-Stresserras, 2002) strongly suggests that ergot was the active ingredient in the Kykeon. That fungus contains similar psychedelic alkaloids to LSD. In high enough doses, these alkaloids cause an experience known today as “ego death”, where mental conceptions of self are chemically switched off, just as alcohol might turn off feelings of social anxiety.
The resulting selfless perspective is typically experienced as a profound relief. While mental conceptions of self help determine which mouth to feed at dinner, an overly calcified ego exaggerates our own sense of importance relative to others, driving selfish behavior. But after a few hours' relief from the ego, initiates at Eleusis might be “polished and softened into politeness”, as Cicero observed.
Our egos are mental reflections of our dying physical bodies. As such, they also amplify anxieties over individual mortality. For this reason, pilgrims sometimes came away from their experiences at Eleusis claiming to have discovered the secret of immortality. Or, more often, to have “been saved”. In Greco-Roman society, immortality and salvation came from sipping a magical chalice.
The Holy Grail
In his 2003 thriller, The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown wove his plot around the notion that the Holy Grail is a symbol representing veneration of the feminine. But he missed his chance to connect the Holy Grail to the magical chalice offered by the priestesses of Eleusis.
According to Brown’s tale, early Church fathers saw the pregnant wife of Jesus as a threat to their political power. They feared that Christians might see her—and not them—as Jesus’ natural successor in the newly established Church hierarchy. In the story, they altered scripture and recast Jesus’ wife as a prostitute, effectively erasing her from history and securing their own influence over the growing spiritual movement.
In Brown’s book, the Holy Grail represents worship of the feminine in general, and the physical person of Jesus’ pregnant wife in particular. After the Crucifixion, her supporters snuck her out of Palestine and into France, where their descendants kept Jesus' secret bloodline safely hidden from Christian authorities throughout the ensuing centuries.
The Da Vinci Code takes its title from the idea that one such guardian was none other than Leonardo Da Vinci. Brown has him creating his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, as a tribute to that legacy in the early 1500s.
Da Vinci’s split horizon in the Mona Lisa presents us with a literal imbalance between left and right. According to Brown, this bizarre feature evokes a symbolic imbalance between the masculine and the feminine. Furthermore, the female subject’s sly smile suggests a feminine secret. These details can be observed in the real-life painting, which serves as the Title Card of this essay.
The real reason the early Church opposed goddess worship was its spiritual monopoly. The Roman Senate had already cracked down on the mystery cult of the wine god Dionysus in 186 BC. Centuries later, the Christian emperor Theodosius ushered in the end of an era by outlawing all non-Christian rituals, including the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The wheat of the grain goddess Demeter and the wine of Dionysus were thereafter illegal, while the Roman state exclusively endorsed the bread and wine of the new Christian Eucharist. This spiritual monopoly became a hallmark of the Roman Catholic Church during the Medieval Period.
Secret Societies
In The Da Vinci Code, Brown has the Knights Templar keeping the secret of the Holy Grail during the Middle Ages. It’s revealed to be the sarcophagus of Jesus’ wife, which the heroes of the story eventually discover beneath Rosslyn Chapel. Located just south of Edinburgh, this chapel is associated, by legend, with the Knights Templar.
In real life, the Knights were rumored to have discovered a secret of immense power beneath the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where they set up their headquarters during the Crusades. Medieval folklore suggested that this secret was the Holy Grail, inspiring Dan Brown. But it wasn’t the Grail that granted the Knights Templar extraordinary political power. It was their banking practices.
After the Fall of Rome, moneylending got such a bad reputation that the Church banned it. That was still their position at the time of the Crusades. But the Knights Templar began issuing letters of credit to pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. Travelers to the Holy Land were much safer carrying letters than actual coins. And the Knights turned handsome profits for themselves through favorable exchange rates on these transactions. They were effectively loaning money at interest. Eventually, these activities made them wealthy enough that their power and influence threatened even the Pope.
On Friday, October 13th, 1307, the crowned heads of Europe unsealed simultaneous orders from the Pope to arrest the Knights Templar. Confessions of blasphemy were extracted through torture, giving the authorities the excuse they needed to seize the Knight’s assets.
But King Edward II of England hesitated to prosecute the Knights, who were his political allies. He dithered for a few crucial months before finally following through on the Pope’s orders. This delay gave the English Knights time to disappear and hide themselves underground.
But in 1314, seven years after they were supposedly eradicated, the Knights Templar were rumored to have fought alongside Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn during the First War of Scottish Independence. Both Winston Churchill, in his capacity as a historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman wrote about a secret society operating in the English countryside that fomented the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
Conclusion
The Da Vinci Code makes for a great read, but it's ultimately a work of fiction. In real life, the Medieval Church opposed both goddess worship and moneylending as challenges to its political authority. Nonetheless, whispers and rumors of these practices persisted in Scotland, which was geographically distant from the Pope in Rome. The rise of secret societies in the British Isles illustrates how, during the late Middle Ages, cracks were beginning to form in the previously unassailable edifice of Church authority.
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Further Materials
Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today’s troubled world, and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to “reeducate” the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific.
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum—or The Witches’ Hammer—indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women” and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.” Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth—a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.
The propaganda and bloodshed had worked. Today’s world was living proof.
Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice … woman.
Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church’s defamation. In France and Italy, the words for “left”—gauche and sinistra—came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity,and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister.
The days of the goddess were over. The pendulum had swung. Mother Earth had become a man’s world, and the gods of destruction and war were taking their toll. The male ego had spent two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart. The Priory of Sion believed that it was this obliteration of the sacred feminine in modern life that had caused what the Hopi Native Americans called koyanisquatsi—“life out of balance”—an unstable situation marked by testosterone-fueled wars, a plethora of misogynistic societies, and a growing disrespect for Mother Earth.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003, Page 105