A Likely Story: The Da Vinci Code as Work on Myth

<p>Theory of myth is used as an explanatory framework within which to explore the enormous and controversial popular appeal of the novel The Da Vinci Code, first published in 2003. The Da Vinci Code is a site of contestation between truth and falsity. Modernity has used the category of myth to contain and control false stories that claim to be true. Myth is characterised here as story-with-significance but also as story believed by people other than scholars and the guardians of legitimate culture. The novel reinserts story into religious history, finding 'natural' significances to replace those progressively exposed and expunged by scholarship and liberal theology. Code's major themes, the sacred feminine and the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, endorse popular knowledge about religion, inheritance, identity, community and gender, knowledge that is threatened by detraditionalisation, feminism, and modernity's emphasis on the autonomous individual. The bloodline myth's move into the category of fiction further blurs the boundaries between the legitimately true and the mythically false.</p>

A Likely Story: The Da Vinci Code as Work on Myth

<p>Theory of myth is used as an explanatory framework within which to explore the enormous and controversial popular appeal of the novel The Da Vinci Code, first published in 2003. The Da Vinci Code is a site of contestation between truth and falsity. Modernity has used the category of myth to contain and control false stories that claim to be true. Myth is characterised here as story-with-significance but also as story believed by people other than scholars and the guardians of legitimate culture. The novel reinserts story into religious history, finding 'natural' significances to replace those progressively exposed and expunged by scholarship and liberal theology. Code's major themes, the sacred feminine and the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, endorse popular knowledge about religion, inheritance, identity, community and gender, knowledge that is threatened by detraditionalisation, feminism, and modernity's emphasis on the autonomous individual. The bloodline myth's move into the category of fiction further blurs the boundaries between the legitimately true and the mythically false.</p>

Sufism and the Sacred Feminine in Lombok, Indonesia: Situating Spirit Queen Dewi Anjani and Female Saints in Nahdlatul Wathan

This article is a feminist ethnographic exploration of how ‘indigenous’ notions of a ‘sacred feminine’ shape Sufi praxis on the island of Lombok in the eastern part of Indonesia in Southeast Asia. I demonstrate through long-term immersive anthropological fieldwork how in her indigenous form as Dewi Anjani ‘Spirit Queen of Jinn’ and as ‘Holy Saint of Allah’ who rules Lombok from Mount Rinjani, together with a living female saint and Murshida with whom she shares sacred kinship, these feminine beings shape the kind of Sufi praxis that has formed in the largest local Islamic organization in Lombok, Nahdlatul Wathan, and its Sufi order, Hizib Nahdlatul Wathan. Arguments are situated in a Sufi feminist standpoint, revealing how an active integration of indigeneity into understandings of mystical experience gives meaning to the sacred feminine in aspects of Sufi praxis in both complementary and hierarchical ways without challenging Islamic gender constructs that reproduce patriarchal expressions of Sufism and Islam.

Crossings with Jatra: Bengali Folk-theatre Elements in a Transcultural Representation of Lady Macbeth

This paper examines a transcultural dance-theatre focusing on Lady Macbeth, through the lens of eastern Indian Bengali folk-theatre tradition, jatra. The wide range of experimentation with Shakespeare notwithstanding, the idea of an all-female representation is often considered a travesty. Only a few such explorations have earned recognition in contemporary times. One such is the Indian theatre-dance production Crossings: Exploring the facets of Lady Macbeth by Vikram Iyenger, first performed in 2004. Four women representing four facets of Lady Macbeth explore the layered nuances that constitute her through the medium of Indian classical dance and music juxtaposed with Shakespearean dialogues from Macbeth. This paper will argue the possibilities posited by this transgressive re-reading of a major Shakespearean tragedy by concentrating on a possible understanding through a Hindu religious sect —Vaishnavism, as embodied through the medium of jatra. To form a radically new stage narrative in order to bring into focus the dilemma and claustrophobia of Lady Macbeth is perhaps the beginning of a new generation of Shakespeare explorations. Iyenger’s production not only dramatizes the tragedy of Lady Macbeth through folk dramatic tradition, dance and music, but also Indianises it with associations drawn from Indian mythological women like Putana (demoness) and Shakti (sacred feminine).

Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

Intertextuality, Isiac Features, and the Shaping of the Sacred Feminine in Trimorphic Protennoia (NHC XIII, 1)

The aim of this paper is to bring to light through intertextual analysis some dimensions of continuity between the Hellenistic and Imperial theology of Isis and the figure of the Sacred Feminine as it appears in the Trimorphic Protennoia (NHC XIII 1). Instead of attempting to establish a diachronic (=historical) relationship of dependence between sources (e.g., borrowing, allusion, influence), this study establishes correspondences that can be traced on the literary level. Through a reception-oriented analysis, it will be possible to show the continuity between the Isiac religion and the late ancient mysticism of the Trimorphic Protennoia. A late ancient reader would have experienced the Nag Hammadi text in dialogue with Isiac traditions, and this literary dialogue with the Isiac religion would have nurtured and shaped their understanding of the sacred feminine described in the Trimorphic Protennoia.

Once Upon a Toxic Sanctuary: Partnering to Restore and Reclaim a Dakota Sacred Site

In this article, we examine the role of partnerships as they relate to the destruction and reconstruction of Wakaŋ Tipi and Indian Mounds Park as a Dakota sacred feminine, origin, birth site through a theoretical lens of critical Indigenous pedagogy of place (Trinidad, 2016) and partnership studies (Eisler, 2005). We discuss the deep historical, social, psychological, and cultural relationship the Dakota have to this sacred site and the challenge of partnering with non-Dakota entities to restore Wakaŋ Tipi/Indian Mounds Park from a toxic waste dump to a spiritual sanctuary.