DaVinci Code Lecture

Lascaux Cave Painting

We spent today at sea. The most fascinating part of the day was a lecture titled “Decoding the DaVinci Code”, given by the violinist we had heard a few nights ago. The title was meant to capture your interest, even though the lecture itself only briefly touched on DaVinci. He started by pointing out some recent findings from the painting of animals and hunters discovered in Lascaux Cave in southern France. This cave was created by a hunter/gatherer clan over 19000 years ago. The recent discovery is that the dots and stars around the animals had meaning! They appear to mark the solar and lunar times that animals migrated to the area, mated, and give birth – in other words, it told hunters when to hunt! On our trip, we had seen pictures of the Cave of the Hands in Southern Argentina with similar dots and star patterns, could this be similar? Another recent discovery is Turkey’s Gobekli Temple, which predates Stonehenge by 6000 years. It seems to be a solar observatory, marking the solstice and equinoxes and key stars. This implies that the hunter gatherer societies were much more sophisticated that we previous believed.

The Code

The second part of the puzzle are the Gnostic gospels found in 1945. These gospels seem to have many passages that just don’t make sense. But recently, someone suggested that these gospels make sense if you look at various terms that are opposites God-Man, Heaven-Earth, Immoral-Mortal, Light-Dark. If you equate the ‘good’ side of these terms (the first ones in my example) with Hunter-Gatherer and the ‘bad” side with “agricultural society”, the gospels make sense. Several universities have now concluded that statistically this appears to be a code. This code also appears in several even older documents like the Instruction of Shirrupak, the first know document. In general, as you read these documents after translating the code – they talk about the hunter-gatherers having knowledge that the agriculturalist don’t have (the behavior of animals based on the seasons) and that the hunter-gatherers should keep this knowledge from them. Why? Just like the American cattle ranchers versus the farmers, farming threatens the way of life of the hunter/rancher.

The Hymns of Enheduanna

What has this to do with the DaVinci code? Well, here is the stretch in my mind. Water in the code means knowledge. If you look at the Mona Lisa, could her smile be a smirk? Did Leonardo understand this code? If you look at the background of many of his paintings, water is in the mountains and higher ground (knowledge is possessed by the hunter-gatherer), but the valleys are dry (the farmers don’t have the knowledge).