Mary Magdalene is Sophia is the Goddess

Return to Plot Sequence Similarities

While The Da Vinci Code is, on its face, about Mary Magdalene, and Daughter of God is about Sophia, a number of books that are listed by Dan Brown's site (http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/faqs.html) as part of his bibliography establish clearly that Mary Magdalene is Sophia is the Goddess.

Two of those books, The Woman, With The Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail, and The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine by author Margaret Starbird, deal with this in detail.

For example, "[T]here can not be the least doubt that the Mary Called the Magdalene was the Goddess hidden from the very beginning of the Christian Gospels." (Goddess in the Gospels, p. 141).

Another book by Starbird, clearly establishes that Mary Magdalene the Goddess is also Sophia."In long-standing tradition, it was she [Mary the Magdalene], understood by early Gnostics as an incarnation of Sophia, ...." (Magdalene's Lost Legacy, p. 125)

And in yet a fourth book, Starbird writes, " Among the Gnostic Christians of the first three centuries of the Christian era, it was Mary Magdalene who was honored as the incarnation of the 'Sophia'."(The Feminine Face of Christianity, p. 116)

Starbird's assertions that Gnostics and others believe that Mary is Sophia is the Goddess are born out by both web and library searches. A few include:

http://www.sophiafoundation.org/

http://www.gnosis.org/

http://www.northernway.org/school/omm.html

http://graillighthouse.tripod.com/order_of_mary_magdalene.htm

http://www.jesusmysteries.demon.co.uk/j&g/j&ghome.html

Brown relied very, very heavily on Starbird's works, so closely that it would not be surprising to find plagiarism there as well.

Finally, Brown writes: "The Priory of Sion, to this day, still worships Mary Magdalene as the Goddess, the Holy Grail, the Rose, and the Divine Mother." (DVC:Ch60)

In Daughter of God, my choice of Sophia as a representative of the Goddess was taken from was take from studying The Nag Hammadi Library in English by James M. Robinson, a work also listed in Brown's bibliography. Given the extensive discussions throughout my book, there can be no other conclusion but that I am equating the Goddess and Sophia.

I also relied upon The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine pagels. Unlike Starbird and others, Pagels is widely acknowledged for the intellectual rigor of her scholarly writing and research.