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Dan Brown´s The Da Vinci Code is perhaps the most controversial novel of the 21st century. Aiming to "unravel" the "greatest conspiracy of the past 2000 years", Brown claims that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (Jesus´s sweetheart and his nominee for Church leadership) and a male-dominated Church tried in vain to eliminate the Holy Grail (Mary Magdalene and her children by Jesus) but a secret society headed by alchemists like Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, etc. has had protected the Grail and the Sacred Feminine (i.e., Lady Magdalene) secretly from the bloodthirsty male-dominated Church, which through the Bible had slandered her as a prostitute. Brown demands that Christianity must reintegrate the Sacred Feminine into itself for the cultural and psychological well-being of 200 million people. Though hundreds of books have been written to examine the historical (in)validity of this novel, interestingly enough critics have tended to forget that this fiction should also be studied as a piece of literature. This book attempts to fill the void in literary criticism over Dan Brown´s The Da Vinci Code by undertaking an alchemical reading of this fiction.

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Dr. Rajendra Dash is an MA, M Phil and PhD in English from Ravenshaw University. A Business English Certificate holder from Cambridge University and an awardee of State Sadbhavana Award, he has written Communicative English for the 21st Century, Interrogating Postmodernism, A Handbook of Professional Communication Style, and has translated CHILIKA.

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