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This weekend.
Aug. 25th, 2024 05:36 pm- I went to an outdoor flea market, and woah it is still way too hot here to be doing that. But I got a Cool Knife. Not a mall ninja knife (I still don't trust myself to be able to use a butterfly knife or balisong without injuring myself) but a functional folding knife. I needed to retire my old "every day carry" knife, anyway.
- I watched The film adaption of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and forgot how much it really did to get a lot of the ideas held by "Dragon Court"-type peoples out in front of the General Public - and no one seemed to do it better than he did. He took ideas from the book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (one of the characters names from the book, Leigh Teabing, is a combination of all their names) and made it into something the average reader could grok and glom onto. He did it better than Messers. Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln did, and better than anyone else who tried to springboard off of the concepts they were proposing (Margaret Starbird, Laurence Gardner, Nicholas de Vere, Tracy Twyman, etc.)
People from the old Dragoncourt Dot Org forum that I am still in contact with have claimed that Dan Brown was a proverbial "fly on the wall" on one of the other forums that a lot of Nicholas de Vere loyalists wound up on in between the time when de Vere was kicked off of Laurence Gardner's Mediaquest site in 2000, and when Webmaster Bill got the Dragoncourt Dot Org site up and running in 2001. They claim that he came and he joined, and he lurked. And then he wrote a bestselling work of fiction based on the concepts he saw there.
And the movie that is based on the book is a lot of fun! Seeing Sir Ian McKellan hamming it up is a hoot! Tom Hanks's hairsyle isn't nearly as distracting as people kept claiming it was!
And people within the "Dragon Court Community" were super mad that Dan Brown took those concepts and ran with them so successfully. They were mad because the fact that a fiction author was the one who did it meant that people could point at those concepts and call them a hoax and a work of fiction and a bunch of pseudohistorical nonsense.
But people had already been doing that, anyway. Dan Brown only made those ideas popular for a while. It was a fad. It had its day, and then became passé, as fads do. And I think that they were mad about that, too - because they didn't want those concepts to be a fad, even if it was a very successful fad for a while (136 weeks at the top of the best-seller list!) They didn't want the concepts described in the book to be disseminated in the kind of "book-club book-of-the-week"-type novel that captured the attention of wine-mom book-clubbers everywhere in the early 2000s. They wanted those concepts to become accepted as historical fact, and for them to be normalized. They wanted those ideas to be taken seriously, dammit.
They wanted whoever it was they were championing as The Descendant Of The Merovingian Kings, And Therefore Jesus And Mary Magdalene (depending on the faction, Nicholas de Vere, Michel Lafosse AKA Prince Michael Stewart of Albany, etc) to be fully accepted as such, and to be elevated to a position of power because of it. They didn't want a Hokey Whodunit Movie with Tom Hanks and his Hokey Hair.
Come to think of it - I'm wondering if the seething, irrational hatred that a lot of people in the qanon/conspiracy theory community seem to have for Tom Hanks really started with this movie, in 2006.
Which brings me to this: that it's easy to see how the Da Vinci Code hype could have led to the formation of the phenomenon that would become Qanon. The obsession with symbols and Gematria, or the meaning of secret number correspondences and combinations, and the idea that "The Cabal" would have their foolproof plan for World Domination in the bag, if not for their pesky compulsion to keep dropping clues and hints that clever internet sleuths will always be able to spot!
I've seen Right Wing Wacksters panic-tweet about the so-called "The Bloodlines Of Satan/The Illuminati" and their supposed tyrannical control over the world - while claiming that Trump and Putin are descended from the Merovingian Kings, and are therefore the rightful rulers of civilization - seemingly completely unaware that when taking the theories proposed in the Dragon Court Narrative and The Da Vinci Code to their logical conclusion, they're referring to the exact same group of people. It's just another permutation of "my preferred Alleged Merovingian Descendant should be the one in power, and all of the rest are a bunch of illegitimate pretenders and fakes."
Because there is something about all of this, a "Return Of The Rightful Heir/King" romantic archetypal storyline that "gets" people, if that makes sense. That's how it "got" a lot of people on the old Dragon Court forums, Dot Org and otherwise.
But I think the real truth behind all of this has gotten lost. And it was best expressed by my Mom back when I first told her about the Dragon Court, a year or so before she read The Da Vinci Code novel.
"So if Jesus was just a man, and the Merovingian Kings were descended from him, and we're descended from the Merovingian Kings - but Jesus was a human being and not a Divine Superbeing - then what does that mean, exactly? Why is it cool to be descended from Jesus if he wasn't the Actual Son Of God? What does that do for me, right now, in the course of my life?"
And then she read The Da Vinci Code, and she got it. It snapped into clarity. Because the really important thing, the thing that everyone keeps losing track of, is the idea of The Divine Feminine being re-introduced back into Christianity. The idea that on some level, The Goddess is alive, and Magic is afoot. And that Her Mysteries don't conflict with the teachings of Christ - they complement them.
This was the concept that had grabbed the imagination of my Mom and and a lot of other people, Goddess worshipers and otherwise, via Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Mists Of Avalon two decades or so before The Da Vinci Code was written. Mom didn't care about Maybe Being Descended From Jesus. She was excited about the idea of a secret conspiracy to keep the concept of The Divine Feminine alive through centuries of Church suppression. And of course the Holy Grail was wrapped up in it somehow, as a symbol of the Divine Feminine.
And, historical fact or fiction aside, this is also what I believe to be the true purpose of The Da Vinci Code and the Dragon Court Narrative or Mythos as a whole. This is why it is important, why it's a part of the Collective Unconscious that manifested and expressed Itself when it did.
Then we had a bunch of Evangelical Right Wing Fuckery, and now it's lost in the maelstrom of Qanon batshittery and the Conspiracy Theory Industrial Complex. Which did what authoritarian control structures do best: it assimilated the symbols and the message of The Resistance, and incorporated them back into its system of control.
BUT! Maybe it's not about the "Return Of The King" at all. Maybe it's about the Return Of The Queen. The Goddess.
There is also the aspect of the "Dragon Court" or Da Vinci Code narrative being an attempt to recontextualize Christianity itself. And the idea that the Romans (specifically Constantine, as stated in The Da Vinci Code) took the story of a Jewish dissident leader who was murdered by an apparatus of the Roman Imperial State for trying to resist the Roman Imperial occupiers and colonizers, and twisted it into something that benefited those same occupiers and colonizers and their Imperial State Cult.
Much like the Normans: who, a few hundred centuries later, would appropriate and subvert the story of a British Celtic warchief named Arthur, and the Grail. But that's a subject for another post.
Current Mood:
- I watched The film adaption of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and forgot how much it really did to get a lot of the ideas held by "Dragon Court"-type peoples out in front of the General Public - and no one seemed to do it better than he did. He took ideas from the book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (one of the characters names from the book, Leigh Teabing, is a combination of all their names) and made it into something the average reader could grok and glom onto. He did it better than Messers. Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln did, and better than anyone else who tried to springboard off of the concepts they were proposing (Margaret Starbird, Laurence Gardner, Nicholas de Vere, Tracy Twyman, etc.)
People from the old Dragoncourt Dot Org forum that I am still in contact with have claimed that Dan Brown was a proverbial "fly on the wall" on one of the other forums that a lot of Nicholas de Vere loyalists wound up on in between the time when de Vere was kicked off of Laurence Gardner's Mediaquest site in 2000, and when Webmaster Bill got the Dragoncourt Dot Org site up and running in 2001. They claim that he came and he joined, and he lurked. And then he wrote a bestselling work of fiction based on the concepts he saw there.
And the movie that is based on the book is a lot of fun! Seeing Sir Ian McKellan hamming it up is a hoot! Tom Hanks's hairsyle isn't nearly as distracting as people kept claiming it was!
And people within the "Dragon Court Community" were super mad that Dan Brown took those concepts and ran with them so successfully. They were mad because the fact that a fiction author was the one who did it meant that people could point at those concepts and call them a hoax and a work of fiction and a bunch of pseudohistorical nonsense.
But people had already been doing that, anyway. Dan Brown only made those ideas popular for a while. It was a fad. It had its day, and then became passé, as fads do. And I think that they were mad about that, too - because they didn't want those concepts to be a fad, even if it was a very successful fad for a while (136 weeks at the top of the best-seller list!) They didn't want the concepts described in the book to be disseminated in the kind of "book-club book-of-the-week"-type novel that captured the attention of wine-mom book-clubbers everywhere in the early 2000s. They wanted those concepts to become accepted as historical fact, and for them to be normalized. They wanted those ideas to be taken seriously, dammit.
They wanted whoever it was they were championing as The Descendant Of The Merovingian Kings, And Therefore Jesus And Mary Magdalene (depending on the faction, Nicholas de Vere, Michel Lafosse AKA Prince Michael Stewart of Albany, etc) to be fully accepted as such, and to be elevated to a position of power because of it. They didn't want a Hokey Whodunit Movie with Tom Hanks and his Hokey Hair.
Come to think of it - I'm wondering if the seething, irrational hatred that a lot of people in the qanon/conspiracy theory community seem to have for Tom Hanks really started with this movie, in 2006.
Which brings me to this: that it's easy to see how the Da Vinci Code hype could have led to the formation of the phenomenon that would become Qanon. The obsession with symbols and Gematria, or the meaning of secret number correspondences and combinations, and the idea that "The Cabal" would have their foolproof plan for World Domination in the bag, if not for their pesky compulsion to keep dropping clues and hints that clever internet sleuths will always be able to spot!
I've seen Right Wing Wacksters panic-tweet about the so-called "The Bloodlines Of Satan/The Illuminati" and their supposed tyrannical control over the world - while claiming that Trump and Putin are descended from the Merovingian Kings, and are therefore the rightful rulers of civilization - seemingly completely unaware that when taking the theories proposed in the Dragon Court Narrative and The Da Vinci Code to their logical conclusion, they're referring to the exact same group of people. It's just another permutation of "my preferred Alleged Merovingian Descendant should be the one in power, and all of the rest are a bunch of illegitimate pretenders and fakes."
Because there is something about all of this, a "Return Of The Rightful Heir/King" romantic archetypal storyline that "gets" people, if that makes sense. That's how it "got" a lot of people on the old Dragon Court forums, Dot Org and otherwise.
But I think the real truth behind all of this has gotten lost. And it was best expressed by my Mom back when I first told her about the Dragon Court, a year or so before she read The Da Vinci Code novel.
"So if Jesus was just a man, and the Merovingian Kings were descended from him, and we're descended from the Merovingian Kings - but Jesus was a human being and not a Divine Superbeing - then what does that mean, exactly? Why is it cool to be descended from Jesus if he wasn't the Actual Son Of God? What does that do for me, right now, in the course of my life?"
And then she read The Da Vinci Code, and she got it. It snapped into clarity. Because the really important thing, the thing that everyone keeps losing track of, is the idea of The Divine Feminine being re-introduced back into Christianity. The idea that on some level, The Goddess is alive, and Magic is afoot. And that Her Mysteries don't conflict with the teachings of Christ - they complement them.
This was the concept that had grabbed the imagination of my Mom and and a lot of other people, Goddess worshipers and otherwise, via Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Mists Of Avalon two decades or so before The Da Vinci Code was written. Mom didn't care about Maybe Being Descended From Jesus. She was excited about the idea of a secret conspiracy to keep the concept of The Divine Feminine alive through centuries of Church suppression. And of course the Holy Grail was wrapped up in it somehow, as a symbol of the Divine Feminine.
And, historical fact or fiction aside, this is also what I believe to be the true purpose of The Da Vinci Code and the Dragon Court Narrative or Mythos as a whole. This is why it is important, why it's a part of the Collective Unconscious that manifested and expressed Itself when it did.
Then we had a bunch of Evangelical Right Wing Fuckery, and now it's lost in the maelstrom of Qanon batshittery and the Conspiracy Theory Industrial Complex. Which did what authoritarian control structures do best: it assimilated the symbols and the message of The Resistance, and incorporated them back into its system of control.
BUT! Maybe it's not about the "Return Of The King" at all. Maybe it's about the Return Of The Queen. The Goddess.
There is also the aspect of the "Dragon Court" or Da Vinci Code narrative being an attempt to recontextualize Christianity itself. And the idea that the Romans (specifically Constantine, as stated in The Da Vinci Code) took the story of a Jewish dissident leader who was murdered by an apparatus of the Roman Imperial State for trying to resist the Roman Imperial occupiers and colonizers, and twisted it into something that benefited those same occupiers and colonizers and their Imperial State Cult.
Much like the Normans: who, a few hundred centuries later, would appropriate and subvert the story of a British Celtic warchief named Arthur, and the Grail. But that's a subject for another post.
Current Mood:
