What Is The DaVinci Code?

In Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to the Louvre, where the curator has just been found murdered. Unbeknownst to Langdon, he is a prime suspect in the man's death. The body of the curator has been left in the position of Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, and a coded message is left next to his body. In a quest to discover the murderer before he himself is arrested for the crime, Langdon races to decode a series of cryptic symbols relating to Leonardo's artwork. He uncovers the key to one of the greatest mysteries of all time – including the possible location of the Holy Grail.

Included in the discoveries Langdon makes are the curator's membership in the Priory of Sion, and the involvement of Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic organization made up of clergy and lay members trying to encourage Catholic teachings. Brown contends that the organizations, documents, rituals, artwork and architecture in the novel all exist. No one has proven the existence of the Priory of Sion as described in the book. The book provoked an uproar in the Christian community with some critics calling the work heretical and anti-Christian. Others applaud the controversy as having awakened a new interest in Christianity.

The book is filled with coded messages, anagrams and ambigrams, and number puzzles. Readers were invited to solve a puzzle found in four codes in the book; the winner would receive a trip to Paris. Thousands of readers broke the code, which had to do with longitude and latitude readings that pinpointed CIA headquarters in Virginia. It is also the location of a sculpture called Kryptos, which Dan Brown will write about in his next book.