From Jennifer Emick,
Your Guide to Alternative Religions.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

A review of Tim Wallace-Murphy's Cracking the Symbol Code.

Out of a large crop of mostly rotten books purporting to reveal the 'truth' behind the popular Da Vinci Code novel, only one has offered up any substance.

Rosslyn author Tim Wallace-Murphy's "Cracking the Symbol Code" picks up the ball where Dan Brown dropped it, following the winding thread of heretical and mystical symbolism through the centuries to discover a secret narrative of the life and teachings of Christ, and an alternative, mystical Christianity.

Author Tim Wallace-Murphy provides an excellent introduction to the esoteric spiritual streams that pervade Renaissance art and architecture, revealing a compelling alternative version of Christian history. This book is a fantastic treasure hunt, with many gems scattered throughout.

Unlike many of the related books that flooded the market in the wake of the success if the Da Vinci Code,'s book reveals a deep passion for the subject. He begins by exploring the contributions of the Egyptians and Hebrew to the development of early Christian symbolism, and continues to follow the thread of Christian gnosis under the watchful and increasingly paranoid rule of the Church, which, over time, became ever more concerned with its grasp of temporal power than with inner truth.

The analysis continues through the early accounts of the founding of the Church, especially the life and teachings of Paul, who is arguablky the first heretic, and continues through the Church's role in the consolidation of power in Christian Europe, the proliferation of the "green language" of the Gothic period, the veneration of the Black Madonna, and the mysteries of the Templars, the Grail legends, the development of the Tarot, and the symbolism of Rosslyn chapel, and finally,. the convergence of these streams in the symbolism employed by renaissance art.

The author also picks up on many allusions missed by authors eager to follow delusions of secret bloodlines and hidden treasure, and rightly guesses that the effeminate figure portrayed in Leonardo's "Last Supper" represents the hermetic androgyne, and not an allusion to Mary Magdalen.

On the down side, the author skips over many interesting facets of the mystery, largely ignoring the contributions of Greek mystery religions, and leaves many obvious kabbalistic stones unturned. Further, he appears to rely a bit too heavily on claims about Mary magdalen by authors like Mary Starbird, who place too much emphasis on bloodlines and physical relationships. I would rather have seen attention paid to the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalen and more to the allegory of the esoteric Church that Mary represented in heretical art.

On the whole, book's open, breezy writing style makes even obscure material accessible, and the material is better researched and better presented than most of the currently available material on the topic.