OT: Shekinah; some spoilers: was: THE DAVINCI CODE

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>


> Czhang:
> > In a message dated 2003:06:03 05:41:17 PM, a.rosta@LYCOS.CO.UK writes:
> >
> > >Sally:
> > >> The DaVinci Code
> > >> Read it and tell me what you think..
> > >
> > >There's no way I'm going to read it now, after the slagging off you've
> > >given it
> >
> > In a message dated 2003:06:03 05:56:28 PM, markjreed@MAIL.COM writes:
> >
> > >Your comments aren't really filling me with a burning desire to
> > >read this book, Sally. :)
> >
> > ROTFLMAOSHIHLH ouch   that's rich... *gigglespasm!* "Caution: the
conlang
> > email list may be dangerous to your reading, TV and movie watching
> > habits..."
>
> I wish and wish the exchange of positive and negative word-of-mouth
> played a greater role in our culture. Going by the recommendations from
> like-minded people seems to be the only solution to the problem of how
> to find stuff that's worth reading/seeing and how not to waste time and
> spiritual energy on stuff that isn't.
I've been hard on DaVinci Code, but I see, from reading Amazon.com, that I'm
not alone.  I wanted to find fellow readers, though, so that I could discuss
some of the issues he brings up in it.  Amazon.com's publisher's remarks
TOTALLY give away the secret of the book.  Even though I suspected it was
leaning towards the Holy Blood Holy Grail premise, I would have been
infuriated if I'd read that blurb before I'd finished the novel.  What's
wrong with these editors and writers?  They can't bank on anyone being
patient enough to let the drumroll of suspense do its work.  Dan Brown can't
"bank" on anybody knowing anything about Western culture and history and
languge, but idiot-like, and in the most condescending way, he has to
translate every f**king French phrase for us.  Or: "you mean it's like an
anagram?"  And if that's not clear enough, "like the Jumble in the
newspapers?"  I've come to distrust his scholarship so much that I'd be very
eager to discuss with someone who has read the book how the hell he derives
the notion that the Shekinah, which I always thought meant "God's Presence"
or "Dwelling Place," is, and I quote, "the powerful female equal to YHWH" (I
presume that it's referred to in the feminine somewhere in the Hebrew
Bible?) or how he finds in the words Yah Weh "an androgynous physical union
between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah."  Okay,
the cat's outta the bag... the book is about a search, among other things I
won't disclose, for the "Sacred Feminine," the major research area of the
dashing Harvard don Robert Langdon.  He seems to misrepresent Judaism
completely in trying to oppose its essential "matriarchic" thrust to
Christianity's evil "patriarchy."  Both strike me as being forcefully
patriarchic. Am I wrong?  And he completely misuses the word "pagan."  There
were many pagans.  Which pagan?  Sofia in some of the Nag Hammadi material
is represented as the divine Mother to the "jealous god" who defies her,  a
detail he completely ignores (he has read ABOUT the Nag Hammadi materials,
clearly, without, it seems, reading them), but that's Gnostic.  Is there
anything in the Pseudepigrapha or the Midrash materials that supports his
claims about the Shekinah as the powerful female equal to YHWH?  He doesn't
give a bibliography, obviously.  Some of this stuff I can really grok, but
most of it seems filtered through a dim conception of scholarly rigor.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

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