Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  How could we have been so sure of where Dan Brown would go in a book he hadn’t yet written? We had a certain advantage in this inquiry for two reasons. First, we had already spent two years reverse-engineering the ingredients that went into the intellectual stew of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. Where Dan Brown had found some books on the Gnostic gospels, for example, and pulled some interesting ideas out of them, we had gone to the world’s leading experts—people like Elaine Pagels, James Robinson, and Bart Ehrman—and interviewed them at length. We had come across the strange brew of legend and lore known as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and used an excerpt from it in Secrets of the Code, with permission from its authors. In my 2004 introductory note to that excerpt, I had written, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the book that ‘started it all.’ Reading the book, one can almost see the places where Dan Brown might have highlighted something or put a Post-it on it, and said, ‘Aha! I’ve got to use that!’ ”

  I referred to Holy Blood, Holy Grail as the “Ur-text for The Da Vinci Code,” but noted that it was a book of significantly questionable veracity, and saluted Brown for weaving some of its purported nonfiction elements into his work of fiction. As it turned out, in writing those words, I had forecast a) the plagiarism lawsuit that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail would bring against Brown two years later (unfair and without merit, in my opinion—with the London court that heard the case eventually upholding Brown’s innocence and the judge, amazingly, issuing part of his opinion in code); b) I had managed to foresee the evidence that the other side would try to argue in support of their claim of plagiarism (court depositions showed that Dan Brown and his wife, Blythe, had indeed marked up and highlighted passages of Holy Blood, Holy Grail as part of their research on The Da Vinci Code, just as I suggested); and c) I had outlined the case-winning defense: Brown was writing fiction, and using bits of what was alleged to be nonfiction from the other authors, only to create a more interesting fictional plot.

  In short, we were developing a good track record, validated by subsequent events, in understanding how the mind of Dan Brown works.

  As it turned out, we were right to encourage Shugarts to write Secrets of the Widow’s Son. His work cracking Dan Brown’s codes was so amazingly good and predictive that, five years before The Lost Symbol was even published, we had guessed that Dan Brown might utilize all the items mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. More than that: Dave went so far as to guess that Brown might use artworks by Albrecht Dürer. Amazing enough that he would be right about that. But not just any Dürer: Dave specifically suggested Brown would be interested in Dürer’s Melencolia I, with its magic square contained within the image. And sure enough, five years later, Dürer’s Melencolia I turns up as a critical ingredient in Robert Langdon’s solution of the riddle of the Masonic pyramid in The Lost Symbol. Dave didn’t just say “I think Brown will want to use the National Cathedral in his plot” (which of course Brown did in TLS), Dave specifically mentioned the detail of the Darth Vader grotesque on the facade of the National Cathedral as likely to attract Brown’s attention. Five years later, my wife and I are on our own impromptu tour of Washington, D.C., in the wake of the publication of TLS, and I find myself looking up at Darth Vader at the National Cathedral, and am genuinely amazed myself that Dave correctly predicted that this small detail would show up in The Lost Symbol.

  I had a similar experience in the Capitol Rotunda standing under its massive dome in the fall of 2009, right after reading The Lost Symbol. Great stories about the Capitol abound, so if you knew or at least believed Brown would write a thriller set in D.C., you could make a relatively easy and successful guess that the Capitol building itself might be involved. In fact, it turned out to be so important to TLS, that it is in the very center of the book’s cover image. And the central action of the book begins and ends in the Rotunda. But to envision specifically the use Brown would make of Brumidi’s Apotheosis of Washington fresco painted into the top of the domed ceiling in the Rotunda—which lawmakers and tourists alike generally walk by and ignore because you have to stop and crane your head and neck up to see it—this was again nothing short of amazing.

  Freemasonry is a body of thought and an approach to the world that relies very heavily on a wide variety of historical experiences and allusions, images and symbols, myths and rituals. Once you succeed at pulling back the veil and becoming an insider to this body of thought, the connections become electrifying and dazzling. Since the Freemasons themselves choose to connect their experience to so many other historical movements of learning, knowledge, spiritualism, and mysticism, and to express so much of their cosmology in potent symbolic form, ascending the winding staircase into this world is a lot like playing the grand master version of the Kevin Bacon game. Everything is connected to everything else by a thousand threads. Egyptian pyramid builders to Pythagoras to King Solomon to Jesus to Gnostics to Knights Templar to Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton to George Washington. All of this can be interpreted as a continuous, interconnected story. Indeed—that’s the point: the inter-connectedness of everything.

  For an author like Dan Brown, and a protagonist like Robert Langdon (and his Freemason/noetic coheroes in TLS, the Solomon siblings), this is a wondrous world to choose for a thriller. This is a novel of ideas. And that’s the joy (and sometimes the frustration) of doing a book like this about one of Dan Brown’s books. The appearance of the “Hand of the Mysteries” at the opening of The Lost Symbol indicates that Robert Langdon has been “invited” on a life-changing journey. We, too, as readers, have been given an invitation to think about some of the most profound ideas in the history of civilization and to engage in some of the most profound debates of both our recent and our ancient heritage.

  Chapter One

  Intellectual Alchemy

  Exploring the Complex Cosmos of The Lost Symbol

  by Dan Burstein

  Time is a river . . . and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.

  —The Lost Symbol, based on language taken from Masonic writings

  Is The Lost Symbol one of those books that will stand the test of time? Probably not. In the nearly three millennia history of written books, few works of popular culture, with a handful of exceptions such as Shakespeare’s, have achieved centuries of endurance and longevity. But Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol may, in retrospect, be a different kind of enduring achievement. It may provide future historians and anthropologists one of the best renderings, in one volume, of humankind’s early twenty-first-century thoughts, debates, and inarticulate pointings at currently inexpressible ideas about some of the biggest questions, mysteries, and challenges of human existence.

  Set in Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol ironically and quixotically ignores virtually all the pressing issues of contemporary Washington. The Lost Symbol is essentially unconcerned with wars, health care, economic stimulus, or other items on this version of Washington’s “big questions.” Instead, its agenda looks more like this:

  Is there a God?

  Is God an exterior force or is God interior to all of us?

  Is there a soul? If there is, what happens to it when we die?

  Why are we here?

  What if there is no God, no prime mover of any kind? How will we know? How should we live in such a world?

  What is our purpose in the universe?

  What happens after we die?

  Can all the world’s religions and spiritual systems be read essentially as one large vision of humanity’s quest for connections to the larger universe?

  Is there a physicality to the “mind,” the “soul,” and human thoughts that can be focused, shaped, and turned into energy, causation, and change in the external material world?

  Do the latest advanc
es in physics, cosmology, biology, and neuroscience mirror our ancient philosophical, mythic, and religious ideas about who we are and what the universe is?

  Did ancient philosophers, Renaissance alchemists and mystics, and even America’s Founding Fathers have insights into the process of humanity coming to harness its inherent power?

  When the ghoulish severed hand of Peter Solomon turns up in the Capitol Rotunda, Dan Brown is using one of the hundreds of symbolic/metaphorical tricks that he will use throughout the novel, drawn from his grab bag of the last several thousand years of mystery writings he has researched. The evil Mal’akh is using the symbol of the “Hand of the Mysteries” to invite Robert Langdon to become a pawn in Mal’akh’s own deadly game—his personal quest to discover the meaning of the “Ancient Mysteries” and the “Lost Word.”

  Langdon will go on a classic “hero’s journey” during the cold, twelve-hour January night on which the book is set. This is his own elaborate ritual quest and rite of initiation and passage. We, as readers, are invited onto a simultaneous, parallel journey. Ours is a journey that will touch, albeit only superficially, on some deep ideas and theories about the most compelling questions of human existence. Whether or not one agrees with the ideas as presented on this tour, even the most rudimentary exegesis of The Lost Symbol suggests a whole series of extraordinary and thought-provoking discussion topics.

  In the penultimate moments of TLS, Robert Langdon and Katherine Solomon are lying on their backs, gazing up at the magnificent mythic fresco, The Apotheosis of Washington, that fills the top of the Capitol Dome, “two kids, shoulder to shoulder,” contemplating the meaning of life, after their heroic night of revelatory adventure. Langdon remembers his teenage years, canoeing out into the lake at night, gazing at the stars, and thinking about “stuff like this.” Like the teenage Langdon, we all did this at some point in our lives. So, too, did people in all societies from prehistory to the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, biblical-era Jews and Christians, Romans, gnostics in the desert, medieval alchemists, Renaissance humanists, Galileo, Newton, and even Benjamin Franklin. (Franklin was known for his “lunatic society” walks on moonlit nights with fellow big thinkers discussing the big questions.)

  Almost all children do art and music when they are young, then stop doing these activities somewhere along the line. Similarly, most of us once spent some moments of our lives reflecting on the “big questions.” Typically, this was in our adolescence or young adulthood. But as we grow older, most of us cease to focus on weighty matters like these. Weighed down by the pressures of daily life, having come to believe whatever we have come to believe through our life experiences, and convinced (by our usually less than successful attempts to think for too long or too deeply on these matters). We generally conclude that there are no satisfactory answers to the bigger existential questions and simply continue on life’s journey. Just as we no longer sing or paint as regularly as we did when we were children, most of us stop asking ourselves questions like: What existed before the Big Bang?

  Except for a handful of us who are cosmologists, physicists, philosophers, or theologians by profession, or another handful of us who have decided to make the quest for these answers an integral part of our personal lives, most of us have religious beliefs or gut feelings about these questions, but we don’t spend much time actively contemplating them.

  And that’s what so interesting about The Lost Symbol. In the form of an extremely accessible pop fiction book—a fast-paced beach read, an airplane page-turner, whatever you want to call it—we have the opportunity to revisit these questions. Whether Brown’s presentation of them is right or wrong is almost immaterial. The process of wrestling with the questions can be extremely thought-provoking and can allow any of us to engage in our own way, at whatever level of depth we choose to pursue.

  Of course it’s easy to dismiss The Lost Symbol as not particularly meaningful. It is a novel, like Dan Brown’s previous works, in which clunky clichés, impossible plot points, purple prose, awkward sentences, over-italicization, and vast oversimplifications of complex ideas are the rules, not the exceptions. I am an unabashed Dan Brown fan—but I am also the first to howl at his frequently awful lines of dialogue, glaring factual errors, and the one-dimensionality of his characters. We need to bear in mind at all times that TLS is a work of fiction (this time, as opposed to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown put the words “a novel” right on the cover to remind us of this obvious fact). It may or may not be your idea of great fiction. But I will argue that it is interesting, intriguing, and, at the end of the day, important fiction.

  We live in a society that is less and less inclined to engage in long-form debate or to read substantial book-length nonfiction. True literary fiction is also disappearing and, frankly, there is a poverty of ideas in much of what passes for literary fiction today. The Lost Symbol may be a beach read, but underneath the sand, it is a novel of ideas. That’s why we have created Secrets of The Lost Symbol: a book to explore those ideas. The exploration that starts here is not only based on my own thoughts and those of my colleague, Arne de Keijzer and our Secrets team, but even more so on the wisdom of the many world-class thinkers and experts whose views are reflected throughout this volume. And if our mission here is successful, you will have the raw materials to extend your own ideas and interests in a multiplicity of directions.

  Of Freemasons and Deists: America Was Founded as an Inclusive Nation

  The agenda of The Lost Symbol is nearly as vast as attempting to explore the universe and the whole of human history of ideas. So let’s begin with just a handful of the novel’s bigger ideas and themes.

  “America wasn’t founded a Christian country. It became a Christian country.” This crisp statement made by Dan Brown in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer sums up the purpose of dozens of references, historical anecdotes, and arguments that are one of the major leitmotifs of TLS. In the last thirty years of American history, our society has come under the sway of a powerful modern myth that would have us believe America’s Founding Fathers were animated by a Christian fundamentalist worldview similar to that of today’s religious right. In fact, just the opposite is the historical case, according to TLS.

  The reason Brown dwells on the importance of Freemasonry to the early American experience is because Freemasonry is a cohesive body of philosophical thought that recognizes a generalized God concept but rejects a specific definition of God and faith. In Brown’s rendition (which is undoubtedly overidealized), Freemasonry emphasizes tolerance, respect for many religious traditions, and diversity of belief. It focuses on morality, progress, personal development, intellectual enlightenment, and communitarian values, but not on specific religious belief. The Freemasons draw inspiration from the wisdom of the ages and from thinkers and writings from many cultures, both sacred and secular. TLS reminds us that in the Scottish Rite Freemasonry’s Washington, D.C., headquarters—the so-called House of the Temple, where both the opening and climactic scenes of TLS take place—the Old Testament, New Testament, and Koran sit together on the altar table.

  George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and numerous other leading architects of American democracy were Freemasons. The secret passwords exchanged among Freemasons to establish bonds with one another played a major role in at least one decisive moment of our nation’s history. On the very day of Paul Revere’s famous ride, he was taken into custody by a British police captain. When it was established that both men were brother Masons, the policeman released Revere, who went on to make his famous ride for freedom and against British tyranny.

  At least nine signers of the Declaration of Independence were Freemasons. Many of the early presidents were Freemasons (including Washington, Monroe, and Jackson). Numerous leading lights of the European Enlightenment were Freemasons, from Voltaire to Diderot. Concepts, phrases, and symbols flowed freely from the philosophical world of Masonic thought of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into the documents, decisions, debates, laws, art, and architecture of the new American nation. George Washington was sworn in for his first term on the Bible from the nearby Masonic lodge; he famously led a Masonic procession in his Masonic apron and regalia while presiding over a Masonic ritual to lay the cornerstone of the Capitol.

  Benjamin Franklin and the French philosopher Voltaire, two of the greatest minds of the transatlantic Enlightenment, met together in the Parisian Loge des Neuf Soeurs (the Lodge of the Nine Sisters). Indeed, Franklin helped initiate Voltaire into this storied French Masonic lodge. As early as elementary school we learn about the great support the American Revolution received from the French general Lafayette. But what we aren’t told in school is what may have helped Washington and Lafayette, despite language barriers and a huge difference in age, bond immediately and work in such close alignment for the success of the American cause. They were motivated, of course, by the common goal of opposing the British. But they were also brother Masons, able to understand and trust each other because they saw the world from similar viewpoints. Even today, a heroic statue of Lafayette stands directly in front of the White House, testament to Washington and Lafayette’s shared belief in liberty, equality, and, perhaps especially notably, fraternity. Many of the foreigners who joined the American cause were also Freemasons, including Baron von Steuben, the Prussian military expert who is credited with helping Washington shape up his ragtag army, as well as with writing the first training manual for the American troops.