FROM THE AUTHOR -- Javier Sierra -- HIMSELF....!
It is wonderful to know that my novel The Secret Supper is still captivating readers, http://t.co/R2yA0KYAOG">http://t.co/R2yA0KYAOG
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| The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci |
In quick succession, I've finished reading two novels with several common threads running through them. After Dan Brown's fast-paced, though incredibly exhaustive (sometimes exhausting) The Lost Symbol, I found myself with a dusty version of Javier Sierra's The Secret Supper.
Both books have similar themes: an impending golden age of knowledge, the immortality of the soul and 'true Christianity'. Javier Sierra takes us back several centuries, into the 1400s and tells the story of a priest who goes on an 'inquisition' to the north of Italy but ends up taking the secrets of those he went to probe (the Cathars) with him to his grave.
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| Croix Occitane |
In the interim, he witnesses the completion of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, interacts with the great artist and is captured by the Cathars but released unharmed later.
The book is too detailed and lacks in pace in the first 50-odd pages. However, as it gathers momentum, it captures your imagination and leaves you pleasantly surprised in many ways. Rightly, as one of the blurbs on the book's cover puts it, "After finishing this book, you'll never see The Last Supper in the same way again."
It also helps see in new light a number of other aspects of the story. The most important of these is revealing the flip side of Christianity -- the Cathars -- efforts to crush whom have been on, unsuccessfully for nearly 800 years now.
Albert Einstein said this of religion: "I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws." Einstein believed that "there is some kind of intelligence working its way through nature. But it is certainly not a conventional Christian or Judaic religious view."
The Secret Supper, translated from Spanish by Alberto Manguel, succeeds at burning at the stake many conventional beliefs. It does so just as other novels like The Gospel of Mary of Magdala (by Karen King), The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) are now openly asserting long-held contradictory views on one of the world's newer religions.
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| Mary Magdalene by Leonardo da Vinci |
The recent discovery of a papyrus fragment by a Harvard professor (Karen King) that mentions Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife may just be another 'sign' that we are ready for a renewed approach towards spirituality.
Mentioned below is an account of how the Cathars saw themselves, recorded in 1143 or 1144 by Eberwin, Prior of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Steinfeld writing to Bernard of Clairvaux (St Bernard):
"We are the poor of Christ, who have no fixed abode and flee from city to city like sheep amidst wolves, are persecuted as were the apostles and the martyrs, despite the fact that we lead a most strict and holy life, persevering day and night in fasts and abstinence, in prayers, and in labour from which we seek only the necessities of life. We undergo this because we are not of this world. But you, lovers of the world, have peace with it because you are of the world. False apostles, who pollute the word of Christ, who seek after their own interest, have led you and your fathers astray from the true path. We and our fathers, of apostolic descent, have continued in the grace of God and shall so remain to the end of time. To distinguish between us and you Christ said "By their fruits you shall know them". Our fruits consist in following the footsteps of Christ.
(Sancti Bernardi epistolae, (letter 472, Everwini Steinfeldensis praepositi ad S. Bernardum) cited by Walter L Wakefield & Austin P Evans Heresies of the High Middle Ages, (Columbia, 1991) p. 129.)
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| Jesus and Mary Magdalene |
The Cathars shared some significant ideas with other religions, the most notable being Hinduism.
Zoe Oldenbourg, in a book on the Cathars named "Massacre at Montsegur" (Montsegur is the name of the castle in the Pyrenees where the Cathars held their last stand) writes:
In this respect, too, the various Cathar sects show certain discrepancies between one another. Some of them claimed that the total number of these 'lost souls' was limited, and that they merely migrated from one body to another, in a continual sequence of births and deaths - a view very much akin to the Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis and karma. (Massacre at Montsegur by Zoe Oldenbourg p 35)Oldenbourg adds:
Be that as it may, the Cathars, generally speaking, acknowledged the doctrine of metempsychosis as held by the Hindus, with the same precise calculations governing posthumous retribution for the individual. A man who had led a just life would be reincarnated in a body better suited for his further spiritual development; whereas the criminal was liable, after his death, to be reborn in a body full of flaws and hereditary vices - or even, in extreme cases, in that of an animal. (Massacre at Montsegur by Zoe Oldenbourg p 35)
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| A view of the Montsegur ruins |
For related information, go to:
http://www.blavatsky.net/newsletters/albigenses.htm
http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/09/new-gospel
http://www.midi-france.info/02_intro.htm
