Global Malaysians Forum : Business and Professional Networking
Topic: In Search of the Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown’s 2002 top-selling fiction thriller, The Da Vinci Code (DVC), will hit Malaysian cinemas on May 18. Whether the novel is fact or fallacy or a combination of both, plagiarised or not, is immaterial but the debate it has generated has been tremendous. It revolves around a conspiracy by the Roman Catholic Church in attempting to hide Jesus Christ’s marriage to Mary Magdalene, whose symbol is believed by some to be etched in the heavens, as planet Venus, and a bloodline that survives from the marriage to the present day.

Of interest are a series of baffling anagrams and numerical code seemingly left behind by the Louvre’s curator, Sauniere, before his death: “O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint! So dark the con of man.” These clues lead Professor Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, to Leonardo da Vinci and his world-famous paintings, the Mona Lisa/La Gioconda and Madonna of the Rocks. The numerical code apparently is part of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers: 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21… a feature that is important to Fibonacci studies in Elliot Wave Theory. However, one of the more interesting aspects in DVC is the symbolic “pentacle”, a five-pointed star insignia painted in blood on the body of the murdered soul.

Implicated was the now infamous Priory of Sion — a secret society registered in early 1950s — and the Knights Templar. As the story goes, they might have garnered untold wealth in treasures from their presence on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Legends include their discovery, among others, of Solomon’s treasures and the Holy Grail while on the Temple Mount and their full commitment to protect the Holy Grail in Petra — as portrayed in the final episode of the Indiana Jones trilogy.

I believe it was the “hidden” knowledge, presumably learnt from the Islamic scholars (the Saracens, Salehuddin Al-Ayubbi and others) at the time and passed on to the Renaissance period from the battlefields, that is touted as being the real wealth or treasure. The Holy Grail story was perhaps just one of these.

Why were all these hidden in the first place then? Cinema buffs would remember movies like Kingdom of Heaven, Ivanhoe (the original one which starred Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor) and Casanova; and famous people like Columbus and Nostradamus. The kingpin of European medieval history was the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition was at its height in those days — in fact, the last of the Knights Templar was burnt at the stake for heresy. Modern knowledge was branded as witchcraft and practitioners as heretics. If the Roman Catholic Church was as powerful today as it was then, novelists like Dan Brown and Henry Lincoln would easily qualify as modern heretics. Interestingly, these modern Christians (New Age thinkers?) are the ones who are now challenging the very basis of Christian theology and the authenticity of some of the biblical gospels — mainly arising from new Judeo-Christianity archeological findings.

What can we learn from the ‘Pentacle’?

Now, back to the pentacle of the real world. If the pentacle was part of a grand design by the guardians of the pentacle to hide their knowledge from the world, then it could possibly be worthwhile to explore how it can be applied, say, to forecast economic and stock market trends.

Henry Lincoln, co-author of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, made three documentaries for an intriguing BBC series called Chronicle in the 1970s. His hypothesis of a blood descent from Jesus sparked a huge controversy. This was, however, not fiction but based on serious research which had humble beginnings after a chance purchase by Lincoln of a small red paperback entitled Le Trésor Maudit (The Accursed Treasure by Gerard de Sede) while vacationing in Rennes-le-Château at the foothills of the Pyrenees in 1969. A priest, Berenger Sauniere, was rumoured to have discovered the lost treasure of the Knights Templar from his interpretation of two parchments found in the small village church in 1891 that led to the supposed treasure.


The paperback that started it all.        

The pentacle was deciphered out of the two parchment designs (one is pictured here) published in the book. The end result was the new knowledge of geometry previously unknown to Medieval Europe. The detailed studies were made into a documentary entitled Origins of the Da Vinci Code and hosted by Lincoln himself.

Lincoln was the first to break a secret code from the passage of the gospel in French. It reads (translated): “This treasure belongs to Dagobert II King and to Sion and he is there dead.” By 1982, it became clearer that the lost treasure mystery was just a distraction, a small part of a real secret of much greater wonders of the ancient world — a sacred knowledge that was linked to the Knights Templar.


One of the parchment designs (as discovered by Lincoln).