Da Vinci Code - Part II

In continuation to previous post, this one describes the other important keywords used in “Da Vinci Code”. Some of the additional information I have picked up from Wikipedia, although it was
not as descriptive as I had imagined. Some of the concepts which Dan Brown has described in the book, were mind boggling for me, like Pentacle, PHI, Atbash Cipher and many more.

Part – II
Corporal mortification
Sénéchaux
Clef de voûte
Paganism
Pentacle
The Vitruvian Man
Tarot
PHI - The Divine Proportion - 1.618
The Anagrams
The Rose Line
fleur-de-lis
Phallus and the Chalice
End of Days
Atbash Cipher

Corporal mortification: Father Josemaría Escrivá a Catholic priest from Spain, was the founder of Opus Dei.-the Teacher of all Teachers. Although Escrivá had died in 1975, his wisdom
lived on; his words still whispered by thousands of faithful servants around the globe as they knelt on the floor and performed the sacred practice known as "Corporal Mortification."

Sénéchaux: The location of the Holy Grail is one of the best kept secrets in history. Priory members wait decades proving themselves trustworthy before being elevated to the highest echelons of the fraternity and learning where the Grail is. That secret is protected by an intricate system of compartmentalized knowledge, and although the Priory brotherhood is very large, only members at any given time know where the Grail is hidden—the Grand Master and his three sénéchaux.

Clef de voûte: Key for the Vault. Clef de voûte is a common architectural term. Voûte refers not to a bank vault, but to a vault in an archway. Like a vaulted ceiling. Every stone archway requires a central, wedge-shaped stone at the top which locks the pieces together and carries all the weight. This stone is, in an architectural sense, the key to the vault. In English we call it a keystone.Keystones as a masonry technique for building stone archways had been one of the best-kept secrets of the early Masonic brotherhood. The Royal Arch Degree. Architecture. Keystones. It was all interconnected. The secret knowledge of how to use a wedged keystone to build a vaulted archway was part of the wisdom that had made the Masons such wealthy craftsmen, and it was a secret they guarded carefully. Keystones had always had a tradition of secrecy.

It is a common used by Grail researchers for referring to the Keystone. According to Priory lore, the keystone is an encoded map... a map that reveals the hiding place of the Holy Grail.

Paganism: Nowadays, the term pagan had become almost synonymous with devil worship—a gross misconception. The word's roots actually reached back to the Latin paganus, meaning country-dwellers. "Pagans" were literally unindoctrinated country-folk who clung to the old, rural religions of Nature worship. In fact, so strong was the Church's fear of those who lived in the rural villes that the once innocuous word for "villager"—villain—came to mean a wicked soul.

Pentacle: The Pentacle is a pre-Christian symbol that relates to Nature worship. The ancients
envisioned their world in two halves—masculine and feminine. Their gods and goddesses worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and yang. When male and female were balanced, there was harmony in the world. When they were unbalanced, there was chaos. This pentacle is representative of the female half of all things—a concept religious historians call the 'sacred
feminine' or the 'divine goddess.' In its most specific interpretation, the pentacle symbolizes Venus—the goddess of female sexual love and beauty. Early religion was based on the divine order of Nature. The goddess Venus and the planet Venus were one and the same. The goddess had a place in the nighttime sky and was known by many names—Venus, the Eastern Star, Ishtar, Astarte—all of them powerful female concepts with ties to Nature and Mother Earth.

Pentacle's most astonishing property—the graphic origin of its ties to Venus. The planet Venus traces a perfect entacle across the ecliptic sky every four years. So astonished were the ancients to observe this phenomenon, that Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection, beauty, and the cyclic qualities of sexual love.

As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads. Nowadays, few people realized that the four-year schedule of modern Olympic Games still followed the cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the five-pointed star had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified at the last moment—its five points exchanged for five intersecting rings to better reflect the games' spirit of inclusion and harmony.

But not many people know these things about the Pentacle and they relate Pentacle to “Devil Worship”. The five-pointed star is now a virtual cliché in Satanic serial killer movies, usually scrawled on the wall of some Satanist's apartment along with other alleged demonic symbology. But the irony is that the Pentacle's true origins are actually quite godly. Symbols are very resilient, but the pentacle was altered by the early Roman Catholic Church. As part of the Vatican's campaign to eradicate pagan religions and convert the masses to Christianity, the Church launched a smear campaign against the pagan gods and goddesses, recasting their divine symbols as evil.

This is very common in times of turmoil. A newly emerging power will take over the existing symbols and degrade them over time in an attempt to erase their meaning. In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols, the pagans lost; Poseidon's trident became the devil's pitchfork, the wise crone's pointed hat became the symbol of a witch, and Venus's pentacle became a sign of the devil. Unfortunately, the United States military has also perverted the pentacle; it's now our foremost symbol of war. We paint it on all our fighter jets and hang it on the shoulders of all our generals. So much for the goddess of love and beauty.

The Vitruvian Man:

Considered the most anatomically correct drawing of its day, Da Vinci's The Vitruvian Man had become a modern-day icon ofculture, appearing on posters, mouse pads, and T-shirts around the world. The celebrated sketch consisted of a perfect circle in which was inscribed a nude male... his arms and legs outstretched in a naked spread eagle.This image exemplifies the blend of art and science during the Renaissance and provides the perfect example of da Vinci's keen interest in proportion. In addition, this picture represents a cornerstone of Da Vinci's attempts to relate man to nature. Encyclopaedia Britannica online states,"Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through his anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo(cosmography of the microcosm). He believed the workings of the human body tobe an analogy for the workings of the universe." It is also believed by some that Leonardo symbolized the material existence by the square and spiritual existence by the circle. Thus he attempted to depict the correlation between these two aspects of human existence.

Tarot: The medieval Italian card game was so replete with hidden heretical symbolism that Langdon had dedicated an entire chapter in his new manuscript to the Tarot. The game's twenty-two cards bore names like The Female Pope, The Empress, and The Star. Originally,
Tarot had been devised as a secret means to pass along ideologies banned by the Church. Now, Tarot's mystical qualities were passed on by modern fortune-tellers. The Tarot indicator suit for feminine divinity is pentacles.

PHI - The Divine Proportion -1.618

That's the number PHI, "As the mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!"

PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the universe. Number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence—a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618—PHI!

Despite PHI's seemingly mystical mathematical origins, the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block in nature.Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI
to 1. PHI's ubiquity in nature, clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the Creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded one-point-six-one-eight as the Divine Proportion.

"Hold on," said a young woman in the front row. "I'm a bio major and I've never seen this Divine Proportion in nature."
"No?" Langdon grinned. "Ever study the relationship between females and males in a honeybee community?"
"Sure. The female bees always outnumber the male bees."
"Correct. And did you know that if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same number?"
"You do?"
"Yup. PHI."
The girl gaped. "NO WAY!"
"Way!" Langdon fired back, smiling as he projected a slide of a spiral seashell.
"Recognize this?"
"It's a nautilus," the bio major said. "A cephalopod mollusk that pumps gas into its chambered shell to adjust its buoyancy."
"Correct. And can you guess what the ratio is of each spiral's diameter to the next?"

The girl looked uncertain as she eyed the concentric arcs of the nautilus spiral.

Langdon nodded. "PHI. The Divine Proportion. One-point-six-one-eight to one."
The girl looked amazed. Langdon advanced to the next slide—a close-up of a sunflower's seed head.
"Sunflower seeds grow in opposing spirals. Can you guess the ratio of each rotation's diameter to the next?"
"PHI?" everyone said.
"Bingo." Langdon began racing through slides now—spiraled pinecone petals, leaf arrangement on plant stalks, insect segmentation—all displaying astonishing obedience to
the Divine Proportion.
"This is amazing!" someone cried out.
"Yeah," someone else said, "but what does it have to do with art?"

"Aha!" Langdon said. "Glad you asked." He pulled up another slide—a pale yellow parchment displaying Leonardo da Vinci's famous male nude—The Vitruvian Man—named for Marcus Vitruvius, the brilliant Roman architect who praised the Divine Proportion in his text De Architectura.

"Nobody understood better than Da Vinci the divine structure of the human body. Da Vinci actually exhumed corpses to measure the exact proportions of human bone structure. He was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal PHI."

Everyone in class gave him a dubious look.

"Don't believe me?" Langdon challenged. "Next time you're in the shower, take a tape measure."
A couple of football players snickered.
"Not just you insecure jocks," Langdon prompted. "All of you. Guys and girls. Try it. Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get."
"Not PHI!" one of the jocks blurted out in disbelief.
"Yes, PHI," Langdon replied. "One-point-six-one-eight. Want another example?

Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. PHI again. Another? Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. PHI again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI. My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion."

Even in the darkness, Langdon could see they were all astounded. He felt a familiar warmth inside. This is why he taught. "My friends, as you can see, the chaos of the world has an underlying order. When the ancients discovered PHI, they were certain they had stumbled
across God's building block for the world, and they worshipped Nature because of that. And one can understand why. God's hand is evident in Nature, and even to this day there exist pagan, Mother Earth-revering religions. Many of us celebrate nature the way the pagans did, and don't even know it. May Day is a perfect example, the celebration of spring... the earth coming back to life to produce her bounty. The mysterious magic inherent in the Divine Proportion was written at the beginning of time. Man is simply playing by Nature's rules, and
because art is man's attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator's hand, you can imagine we might be seeing a lot of instances of the Divine Proportion in art this semester."

Over the next half hour, Langdon showed them slides of artwork by Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Da Vinci, and many others, demonstrating each artist's intentional and rigorous adherence to the Divine Proportion in the layout of his compositions. Langdon unveiled PHI in the architectural dimensions of the Greek Parthenon, the pyramids of Egypt, and even the United Nations Building in New York.

PHI appeared in the organizational structures of Mozart's sonatas, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as well as the works of Bartók, Debussy, and Schubert. The number PHI, Langdon told them, was even used by Stradivarius to calculate the exact placement of the f-holes in the construction of his famous violins. "In closing," Langdon said, walking to the chalkboard, "we
return to symbols" He drew five intersecting lines that formed a five-pointed star. "This symbol is one of the most powerful images you will see this term. Formally known as a pentagram—or pentacle, as the ancients called it—this symbol is considered both divine
and magical by many cultures. Can anyone tell me why that might be?"


Stettner, the math major, raised his hand. "Because if you draw a pentagram, the lines automatically divide themselves into segments according to the Divine Proportion."

Langdon gave the kid a proud nod. "Nice job. Yes, the ratios of line segments in a pentacle all equal PHI, making this symbol the ultimate expression of the Divine Proportion. For this reason, the five-pointed star has always been the symbol for beauty and perfection associated with the goddess and the sacred feminine."

The girls in class beamed.

"One note, folks. We've only touched on Da Vinci today, but we'll be seeing a lot more of him this semester. Leonardo was a well-documented devotee of the ancient ways of the goddess. Tomorrow, I'll show you his fresco The Last Supper, which is one of the most astonishing tributes to the sacred feminine you will ever see."

"You're kidding, right?" somebody said. "I thought The Last Supper was about Jesus!"

Langdon winked. "There are symbols hidden in places you would never imagine."

The Anagrams: Few people realized that anagrams, despite being a trite modern amusement, had a rich history of sacred symbolism. The mystical teachings of the Kabbala drew heavily on anagrams—rearranging the letters of Hebrew words to derive new meanings. French kings throughout the Renaissance were so convinced that anagrams held magic power that they appointed royal anagrammatists to help them make better decisions by analyzing words in important documents. The Romans actually referred to the study of anagrams as ars magna—"the great art."

O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint! - Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!

SO DARK THE CON OF MAN -Madonna of the Rocks

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - vile meaningless doodles (Picasso's masterpiece)

The Rose Line - A strip of brass that segmented the sanctuary on a perfect north-south
axis. It was an ancient sundial of sorts, a vestige of the pagan temple that had once stood on this very spot. The sun's rays, shining through the oculus on the south wall, moved farther down the line every day, indicating the passage of time, from solstice to solstice. The north-south stripe had been known as the Rose Line. For centuries, the symbol of the Rose had been associated with maps and guiding souls in the proper direction. The Compass Rose—drawn on almost every map—indicated North, East, South, and West. Originally known as the Wind Rose, it denoted the directions of the thirty-two winds, blowing from the directions of eight major winds, eight half-winds, and sixteen quarterwinds. When diagrammed inside a circle, these thirty-two points of the compass perfectly resembled a traditional thirty-two petal rose bloom.

To this day, the fundamental navigational tool was still known as a Compass Rose, its northernmost direction still marked by an arrowhead... or, more commonly, the symbol of the fleur-de-lis. On a globe, a Rose Line—also called a meridian or longitude—was any imaginary
line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole. There were, of course, an infinite number of Rose Lines because every point on the globe could have a longitude drawn through it connecting north and south poles. The question for early navigators was which of these lines would be called the Rose Line—the zero longitude—the line from which all other longitudes on earth would be
measured.

Today that line was in Greenwich, England. But it had not always been. Long before the establishment of Greenwich as the prime meridian, the zero longitude of the entire world had passed directly through Paris, and through the Church of Saint-Sulpice. The brass marker in Saint-Sulpice was a memorial to the world's first prime meridian, and although Greenwich had stripped Paris of the honor in 1888, the original Rose Line was still visible today. "And so the legend is true," the Teacher had told Silas. "The Priory keystone has been said to lie 'beneath the Sign of the Rose.' "

Sub rosa, The Romans hung a rose over meetings to indicate the meeting was confidential. Attendees understood that whatever was said under the rose—or sub rosa—had to remain a secret. Rosa rugosa, one of the oldest species of rose, had five petals and pentagonal symmetry, just like the guiding star of Venus, giving the Rose strong iconographic ties to womanhood. In addition, the Rose had close ties to the concept of "true direction" and navigating one's way. The Compass Rose helped
travelers navigate, as did Rose Lines, the longitudinal lines on maps. For this reason, the Rose was a symbol that spoke of the Grail on many levels—secrecy, womanhood, and guidance—the feminine chalice and guiding star that led to secret truth.

The Rose has always been the premiere symbol of female sexuality. In primitive goddess cults, the five petals represented the five stations of female life—birth, menstruation, motherhood,
menopause, and death. And in modern times, the flowering rose's ties to womanhood are considered more visual. The blossoming flower resembles the female genitalia, the sublime blossom from which all mankind enters the world.

Phallus and the Chalice: Many people incorrectly assume the male symbol is derived from a
shield and spear, while the female symbol represents a mirror reflecting beauty. In fact, the symbols originated as ancient astronomical symbols for the planet-god Mars and planet-goddess Venus. The original symbols are far simpler.

This symbol is the original icon for male, A rudimentary phallus. This icon is formally known as the blade, and it represents aggression and manhood. In fact, this exact phallus symbol is still used today on modern military uniforms to denote rank.

The female symbol, as you might imagine, is the exact opposite. This is called the chalice.

The chalice resembles a cup or vessel, and more important, it resembles the shape of a woman's womb. This symbol communicates femininity, womanhood, and fertility. Legend tells us the Holy
Grail is a chalice—a cup. But the Grail's description as a chalice is actually an allegory to protect the true nature of the Holy Grail. That is to say, the legend uses the chalice as a metaphor for something far more important.

The blade and chalice…….Fused as one.
The Star of David... the perfect union of male and female... Solomon's Seal...marking the Holy of
Holies, where the male and female deities—Yahweh and Shekinah—were thought to dwell.

End of Days: In terms of prophecy, we are currently in an epoch of enormous change. The millennium has recently passed, and with it has ended the two-thousand year- long astrological Age of Pisces—the fish, which is also the sign of Jesus. As any astrological symbologist will tell you, the Piscean ideal believes that man must be told what to do by higher powers because man is incapable of thinking for himself. Hence it has been a time of fervent religion. Now, however, we are entering the Age of Aquarius—the water bearer—whose ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think for himself. The ideological shift is enormous, and it is occurring right now.

The Church calls this transitional period the End of Days.

That's a common misconception. Many religions speak of the End of Days. It refers not to the end of the world, but rather the end of our current age—Pisces, which began at the time of Christ's birth, spanned two thousand years, and waned with the passing of the millennium. Now
that we've passed into the Age of Aquarius, the End of Days has arrived.


The Church and the Priory have had a tacit understanding for years. That is, the Church does not attack the Priory, and the Priory keeps the Sangreal documents hidden. However, part of the Priory history has always included a plan to unveil the secret. With the arrival of a
specific date in history, the brotherhood plans to break the silence and carry out its ultimate triumph by unveiling the Sangreal documents to the world and shouting the true story of Jesus Christ from the mountaintops.

Why would members of the Catholic clergy murder Priory members in an effort to find and destroy documents they believe are false testimony anyway?

The clergy in Rome are blessed with potent faith, and because of this, their beliefs can weather any storm, including documents that contradict everything they hold dear. But what about the rest of the world? What about those who are not blessed with absolute certainty? What about those who look at the cruelty in the world and say, where is God today? Those who look at Church scandals and ask, who are these men who claim to speak the truth about Christ and yet lie to cover up the sexual abuse of children by their own priests? What happens to those people, if persuasive scientific evidence comes out that the Church's version of the Christ story is inaccurate, and that the greatest story ever told is, in fact, the greatest story ever sold.


Atbash Cipher: Atbash is one of the oldest codes known to man. The famous Hebrew encoding system. The cipher dated back to 500 B.C. and was now used as a classroom example of a basic rotational substitution scheme. A common form of Jewish cryptogram, the Atbash Cipher was a simple substitution code based on the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet. In Atbash, the first letter was substituted by the last letter, the second letter by the next to last letter, and so on.

Atbash is sublimely appropriate, Text encrypted with Atbash is found throughout the Kabbala, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and even the Old Testament. Jewish scholars and mystics are still finding hidden meanings using Atbash. The Priory certainly would include the Atbash Cipher as
part of their teachings.

For years, religious scholars had been baffled by biblical references to a city called Sheshach. The city did not appear on any map nor in any other documents, and yet it was mentioned repeatedly in the Book of Jeremiah—the king of Sheshach, the city of Sheshach, the people of Sheshach. Finally, a scholar applied the Atbash Cipher to the word, and his results were mind-numbing. The cipher revealed that Sheshach was in fact a code word for another very well-known city.


The decryption process was simple. Sheshach, in Hebrew, was spelled: Sh-Sh-K.
Sh-Sh-K, when placed in the substitution matrix, became B-B-L.
B-B-L, in Hebrew, spelled Babel.

The mysterious city of Sheshach was revealed as the city of Babel, and a frenzy of biblical examination ensued.