In his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown casts Leonardo Da Vinci as a heretic with a passion for puzzles, which found expression not only in his famous notebooks of mirror-writing, but also in his paintings, particularly The Madonna of the Rocks and The Last Supper. Brown, whose work borrows heavily from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and several other recent works, which recast the Grail legend and Mary Magdalene's relationship with Jesus Christ, states explicitly:

1. The figure to Jesus' right is not the apostle John as was thought for centuries. It is Mary Magdalene.

   This view is a bit more supportable today, after the restoration of the painting, than it was previously,

   
   but is still a bit hard for many to swallow outside the realm of fiction, until one looks at a copy of The Last Supper made by one Leonardo's students and reproduced in part below:
   
   It begins to look like this is indeed a woman, not a male apostle at all!
2. Jesus and Mary/John, at the painting's center create a "V" with their combined bodies, which literally seem to be joined at the hip. In pagan symbology, the "V" represents the female principle, resembling, as it does, a woman's pubes before the "runway," heart, and other trims (pun intended) became popular.
3. Following from the inner "V" to the entire outline of the two figures, we see an "M," telling us, according to Brown, that this is indeed Mary Magdalene and, stretching the interpretation a bit further, that they are Married.
4. As Brown points out in The Da Vinci Code, taking a leaf from Sherlock Holmes in "The Hound of the Baskervilles," the painting is remarkable not only for what is present in the scene but for what is missing: the Chalice or cup, the vessel that holds the wine Christ says is his blood, which chalice also allegedly caught Jesus' blood during the crucifixion, and which became known popularly as the Holy Grail and the apparent object of many fruitless quests down through the ages.
   The absence of the cup which is central to the story is taken by Brown to mean that Da Vinci is saying the Grail is not a chalice but something else. That something being Mary Magdalene who is pregnant with Jesus' child. Thus "Sangraal," the "San Graal" or Holy Grail becomes "Sang Raal" or Royal Blood.

The Da Vinci Code posits that Leonardo was telling us the Roman Catholic Church is fraudulent, founded upon the lie of Peter's Apostolic Primacy. At its very core, it subverted the Sacred Feminine principles which Jesus Christ was reviving, and perpetrated a coup d'etat against the true bloodline or sang raal of Jesus, which existed then and still exists today. The Black Madonna fled to France in a boat with no oars and married into a local royal family called the Merovingians.

And thus the fun begins, the chase is on, and a great "high fiction" alternative history unfolds to the delight of all.

That is not the whole story, though. There is more:

5. Sitting next to Mary is an ominous and evil Peter. He seems consumed with jealousy and his hand crosses Mary's neck as if he would slice her throat, if his finger were a dagger.
6. To the left of them a disembodied arm and hand holds just such a dagger. As a portent of Jesus' coming crucifixion it is on the wrong side and not the best symbol. Coupled with Peter's gesture, however, it appears that its real target is Mary.

So, Peter hates Mary and even wants to kill her. She is a threat to him obviously, if The Da Vinci Code is to be believed. But looking at all this myself I saw something more. I became convinced that Peter hated not just Mary but all women, that he was gay and so closeted he didn't even know that himself or else felt such a need to hide it that he, like J. Edgar Hoover, another closet queen, went out of his way to persecute others in order to maintain his "manly" image.

According to Brown and others, Mary Magdalene and her group believed she had to flee Palestine and did so. The Romans did not execute Jesus because they believed he was a threat to them. Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the whole affair publicly. The Romans crucified Jesus at the behest of the Hebrew Sanhedrin. principally a priest named Caiphus. There is no indication anywhere they had larger plans, such as the elimination of Jesus' heir as well. Since they believed they could only eliminate Jesus through legal devices, they would have had to use the same devices against Mary and her child, but that would have been far more problematic than accusing a public figure and rabble rouser. Mary had nothing to fear from them, but clearly Mary and her supporters feared someone. I believe that someone was Peter.

Whatever the case, flee they did. Mary's child was born in Egypt.

Peter's seething hatred of Mary and the turmoil inside him that represented became an institutionalized misogyny within the organization founded upon his apostleship. The vows of purity and chastity required of the priesthood after the supposed chastity of Christ were impossibilities that led to the most terrible abuses right up to today in our own neighborhoods. Children are not safe. Nuns are not either. The church is a harbor for closet queens who attempt to prove they are "normal" by attacking the openly gay community.

This is why Leonardo Da Vinci hated the Church so much. Its hypocrisy and its failure to be a center for real spiritual unfoldment and enlightenment must have made him sick as it did Voltaire a few centuries later.

Dan Brown and others propose that Da Vinci was a Grand Master of a secret society which created the Knights Templar and continued down through the centuries after the Templar's demise.

In Da Vinci's time the Inquisition was still in its ascendancy, and heretics, rationalist, thinkers, artists, philosophers and scientist who didn't need nor want anyone thinking for them found their very lives were in danger if they expressed their conclusions in the wrong company. Thus the necessity for the secret society in which free thinkers could freely communicate. Because of this secrecy, codes, signs, symbols and identifying actions arose for mutual recognition and to transmit ideas in the guise of something entirely different.

Leonardo painted for those with "eyes to see." And, it must have given him great satisfaction that he was doing it right under the noses of the Inquisitors some of whom paid him to do it, a magnificent irony.

But I do not believe Leonardo was doing this just for his own satisfaction. I think he was communicating with the heretical community. He may have even been recruiting and gathering an elect around him. Certainly, he was telling those who could read the code that he was a man with hidden knowledge.

The source of that knowledge remains uncertain, though Brown, in The Da Vinci Code, has it a literal collection of trunks, carried from place to place by the Priory of Sion, which inherited the task from the Templars whom the Priory created to recover them.

We do know that the existent scriptures which compose the canonical New Testament are not the entirety of Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelations authored by Christians since the First Century, nor did the present Creed, which was agreed upon at Nicea in 325 AD at the order of the Emperor Constantine, define the only Christian beliefs at the time. Constantine wished to establish "One God, one Lord, one faith, one church, one empire, one emperor," but found that the "one faith" was in reality many, a fact that was unacceptable.

As a result of Nicea, what is now Christian orthodoxy was born and with it a persecution of heresy that doubtless threatened Leonardo and continues, in less extreme forms, even today. Beginning quite early, people were put to death, books were burned, and every attempt possible was made to obliterate anything that contradicted the orthodoxy which claimed Peter as its "rock" and foundation, who, along with Paul through his extensive writings, actually shaped the Church far more than its real founder, Jesus, did.

Perhaps Leonardo had access to manuscripts that survived these centuries long purges. Perhaps they were carried around in a collection of large trunks as Brown has it. Whatever the case, as I examined The Last Supper and saw in Peter this raging queen who did not have the courage to be himself and created unbearable suffering for countless people for millennia because of that, I could not help but think that perhaps Leonardo had access to a document like the "The Testimony of Bartholomew" which outs Peter in no uncertain terms and The Last Supper is his depiction of the contents of that obscure manuscript.

Coming next in this series: The Testimony of Bartholomew, read it for yourself!