In preparation for the articles I will have to write when the movie version of The Da Vinci Code comes out, I have spent the last few days reading Angels & Demons, the previous novel by Dan Brown; like Da Vinci, it features various coded intrigues, as well as Robert Langdon, the character Tom Hanks plays in the upcoming movie.
And while I am ignorant enough of Renaissance art and history to be mesmerized by all the alleged Illuminati connections — most or all of which are hooey, I’m sure — I have to say that I burst out laughing when I came across this howler, from Chapter 61:
Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of … repackaged sun worship!“
“Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’ — that is, Holy Communion — was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.”
The fact that there is some mythic and ritual overlap between Christianity and other religions is neither new nor problematic, of course; J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis dealt with that ages ago.
But, um, uh, “Holy Communion was borrowed from the Aztecs“!? A Christian ritual, the origins of which were documented in the gospels and the letters of St. Paul way, way back in the 1st century, was “borrowed” from a North American civilization that was not even encountered until the 16th century? Bwahahahaha!
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