Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  Thomas Jefferson, while not a Freemason, was philosophically a deist. Freemasonry and deism are cousins of sorts. Deists typically believe in a supreme being, but one that created the world in an architectural sense and doesn’t continue to intervene in human affairs. For deists, there is not much need for organized religion. God is not a miracle worker on earth. TLS reminds us of the Jefferson Bible, which, unfortunately, gets all too little attention in what we know and learn about Thomas Jefferson in school. This great thinker and founder of American democracy, the man who wrote most of the inspiring words of the Declaration of Independence, also made his own “edit” of the Bible. He removed references to the virgin birth, the resurrection, and other miracles and supernatural phenomena he found irrelevant to the moral wisdom of biblical teachings, which he sought to emphasize.

  The beliefs of Freemasons and deists are not in necessary contradiction with Christian beliefs. Most of the Founding Fathers, including all of the figures mentioned above, undoubtedly considered themselves Christians. Yet these pioneers of the American experience believed deeply in the separation of church and state. These were not just words to them. This was a fundamental principle. They also believed in learning from all sources of valuable knowledge and were generally well versed not only in the Old and New Testaments, but in Greek and Roman classics, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophical works today considered obscure and borderline “pagan,” such as those of Francis Bacon, one of the more intriguing characters from history referenced by Dan Brown in TLS.

  True to the “inclusiveness” of Freemasonry that Brown promotes in TLS, the intellectual history of the Masons right up to the present day draws from deep wellsprings into the ancient beliefs, myths, rituals, systems of thought, signs, symbols, as well as the Judeo-Christian tradition and a wide variety of Eastern religions and civilizations. Like a cosmic intellectual grab bag, Freemasonry includes bodies of ideas from geometry to alchemy, Gnosticism to quantum physics. It includes schools of philosophical thought from the pre-Socratics to the Knights Templar, the Renaissance humanists, and the scientific, political, literary, and musical geniuses of the Enlightenment

  Christianity is not in contradiction with Freemasonry. The reverse is true as well. However, there is a clear difference in emphasis between the open, tolerant, exploratory Freemason/deist worldview of the late eighteenth century, and the more fixed, specific, rigorous religious vision of Christianity some would like to project (incorrectly) backward on to the America of the Founding Fathers. One of Dan Brown’s contributions to contemporary political discussion is to show why it just won’t work to picture the Founding Fathers as evangelical Christians in order to legitimize and justify attempts to superimpose such a worldview on American society today and in the future. It won’t work because it isn’t true. “In God we trust” was first used on coins in 1864; “under God” was not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954. Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin tended to speak sparingly of “Providence,” “Divine Providence,” the “Creator,” and other such euphemisms. They almost never invoked “God,” or “Jesus.”

  Dan Brown tells us he is not a Mason himself. But there is no mystery about his feelings on why Freemasonry epitomizes values he identifies with personally. As he wrote in a letter to a Freemason group after publication of TLS:

  In a world where men do battle over whose definition of God is most accurate, I cannot adequately express the deep respect and admiration I feel toward an organization in which men of differing faiths are able to “break bread together” in a bond of brotherhood, friendship, and camaraderie. Please accept my humble thanks for the noble example you set for humankind. It is my sincere hope that the Masonic community recognizes The Lost Symbol for what it truly is . . . an earnest attempt to reverentially explore the history and beauty of Masonic Philosophy.

  The Lost Symbol is a shout from the rooftops. Brown is saying that “the real America” is the America of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, of Freemasons and deists. It is the America of the open mind and the insatiable desire for knowledge of every type. The America open to all comers and all ideas and all traditions. The America where church and state are separate, shades of belief or nonbelief are personal choices, and no religious dogma prevents innovative minds from freely expressing themselves or advancing themselves through life.

  Freemasons: Theater Directors of Democracy

  Whether or not they have any actual linkage to ancient pyramid or temple builders, Freemasons have studied and assumed that heritage. Thus, it is no surprise that some of the most recognizable, appealing, and influential public buildings have been created by Masons or those influenced by Masonic styles. Robert Mills, the architect of the world’s most famous obelisk—the Washington Monument—was keenly aware of the importance of Egyptian civilization and its symbols to George Washington and the Masonic heritage the Monument was honoring. (Masons were among the chief fund-raisers for the Washington Monument!) Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower in Paris—a different kind of obelisk—was a Mason. Both the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower make symbolic statements about humankind’s aspirations to touch the heavens. Both suggest the soaring nature of their societies. Both have fabulous interplay with light, sunsets, moonrises, and the stars. Both were considered oddities when they were first built but have now become enduring classics, emblematic of and central to their cities. The ambition of both monuments is relentless. Both had to be built against the odds of financial battles, political infighting, and aesthetic criticism. When the Washington Monument was finished in 1885, it became the tallest building in the world at 555 feet. Its completion forever put an end to centuries of cityscapes dominated by cathedrals and religious buildings. Just four years later, the Eiffel Tower almost doubled the Washington Monument’s height, rising 1,063 feet at its completion in 1889.

  If Pierre l’Enfant, the designer of Washington’s street plan (who came to America with Lafayette), was not a Mason, he was certainly very closely involved with Freemasonry and had a great appreciation for the Masonic geometry of ovals, ellipses, squares, and circles. He worked closely with George Washington, who was himself a land surveyor and urban planner by training, on the layout of this new city, this “Athens on the Potomac.” Renwick, the architect of the Smithsonian “castle” building, may have been inspired by Templar and Freemason castle redoubts in Europe, including Rosslyn Chapel of Da Vinci Code fame.

  Several composers of some of our most uplifting music were Freemasons—people like Mozart, Haydn, and Elgar, the composer of Pomp and Circumstance, today’s nearly universal American music for graduations and other rites of passage. As lifelong students of ritual, rite, and symbolic presentation, the Freemasons are like theater directors to our world, and it should be no surprise that they play a disproportionately large role at certain key moments in our history.

  Mystical Tradition Is Our “Third Culture”

  From its opening pages to its last, The Lost Symbol is an argument for the nonlinear, not-necessarily-rationalist, magical-mystical-spiritual tendency in human thought to be recognized as a major force in shaping the development of civilization. We learn in school that the Renaissance was triggered by Europe’s rediscovery, during the Crusades, of classical knowledge of mathematics, philosophy, and the arts held in the great repositories of knowledge in Byzantium and the Mideast. But no high school teacher ever adds that Crusaders, Templars, and travelers also brought back the mystical teachings and “secret knowledge” of the neo-Platonists, whose writings had dominated the Library of Alexandria. If you want to know about the impact of Hermes Trismegistus on the Renaissance, you’d better get an occult/esoteric book, because you won’t find these exotic mystical ideas in our mainstream texts.

  We learn about the great rationalist minds of Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, without ever being told of Jefferson’s interest in Bacon and the Rosicrucians, or Franklin�
��s interest in astrology and Freemasonry. As for Newton, we all learn the tale about the apple falling. But most of us never learn that he spent the majority of his capacious waking hours not on the laws of motion, but on alchemical experiments, searching for the lost wisdom of ancient civilizations, attempting to reimagine the Temple of Solomon, and otherwise decoding the meaning of Scripture.

  Some of us may wish to think of America as born in the spirit of Christian fundamentalism, and some of us may wish to think of America as born in a pure, rationalist, Federalist Papers–type celebration of democratic theory. But the reality is messier and more complicated that either pole of the debate would suggest. As novelist and Time magazine reviewer Lev Grossman said of TLS, “What he did for Christianity in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, Brown is now trying to do for America: reclaim its richness, its darkness, its weirdness. It’s probably a quixotic effort, but it is nevertheless touchingly valiant . . . Our history is as sick and weird as anybody’s! There’s signal in the noise, order in the chaos! It just takes a degree from a nonexistent Harvard department to see it.”

  One of the great experts on the evolution of the “mystery traditions” over the last two thousand years is Joscelyn Godwin. Godwin, a professor of music at Colgate, is about as close as we will ever see to a real-life Robert Langdon. Think about this quick tour of the ancient mysteries he provides in his 2007 book, The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery Traditions:

  After the Roman Empire, Hermeticism . . . expanded to include alchemy and the occult sciences (divination, astrology, magic, etc.). All three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) found a place for it, although sometimes a grudging one . . . In the Renaissance era, the Hermetic philosophy served as neutral ground for Protestants and Catholics alike. Alchemy and the other occult sciences to which it provided the intellectual underpinning flourished as never before.

  Because it is essentially a cosmological and practical teaching, rather than a theology, Hermeticism can coexist with any religion . . . Its historical record is innocent of intolerance and bloodshed, its way of life one of science, contemplation, and self-refinement . . .

  Freemasonry, which arose in its present form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the most lasting creation of the Hermetic tradition in the West . . .

  After demonstrating the connective tissue that runs intellectually from Plato and Pythagoras through to the alchemists, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and the American Founding Fathers, Godwin considers the “Philosopher’s Dilemma”: should the enlightened person, who has access to the cosmological secrets, work for the betterment of the world? Or is the world such a lost cause that such a person should work only for his own ability to obtain immortality? As theologian Deirdre Good suggests in chapter 5, the religion of Dan Brown may sound universal, inclusive, ecumenical. But if it separates people into their own self-development pods, focused only on their own self-improvement, it cannot harness the collective energy necessary to change the world for the better.

  Godwin quotes Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the nineteenth-century Theosophy movement as saying, “The permanent preservation of a personal identity beyond death is a very rare achievement, accomplished only by those who wrest her secrets from Nature, and control their own super-material development . . . [It is] accomplished only by adepts and sorcerers—the one class having acquired the supreme secret knowledge by holy methods, and with benevolent motives, the other having acquired it by unholy methods, and for base motives.” This is the origins of Dan Brown’s Mal’akh. To obtain genuine immortality, the adept must have forged, during life, a “radiant body.” (This, of course, is what Mal’akh has been trying to do with his fitness regimen, his tattoos, self-castration, etc.) But he also needs access to the “supreme secret knowledge,” and for that he must use the “unholy methods” of taking Peter hostage and entrapping Robert Langdon and conniving to obtain their help in his quest.

  Harry Potter, Robert Langdon, and the Philosopher’s Stone

  The fiction bestseller lists in the first decade of the twenty-first century have been dominated by two book series—J. K. Rowling’s and Dan Brown’s—each involving a very likable everyman sort of character (Harry Potter, Robert Langdon) who has to enter a world of mystery, magic, myth, alchemy, and ancient crafts, and use intelligence (mostly) and physical skills (only occasionally) to do battle with the darkest of evil forces. Although Harry Potter is widely perceived as being for teens, and Robert Langdon for adults, there is an interesting crossover in the audiences. The Da Vinci Code proved to be one of the first adult novels many high school students read a few years ago, and a huge following exists among adults for Harry Potter. Both book series have captured the attention of global audiences and both have generated very successful mass-market films.

  The books even involve a few of the same characters. Dr. Abaddon in TLS and Apollyon in Harry Potter, are Hebrew and Greek versions of the same word for destruction and serve as names for malevolent characters. Nicolas Flamel, a French alchemist, is said to have been a friend of Dumbledore’s in Harry Potter. Meanwhile, in DVC, Flamel is said to have been a fourteenth-century Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Although Flamel is a real historic personage, the references to him in both books are fictional.

  The first Harry Potter book had to have its American title changed from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because the U.S. publisher thought American teenagers wouldn’t know what the philosopher’s stone was. Now both Harry Potter and Robert Langdon, as well as their fans and readers, know plenty about the search for the power of alchemical transformation that lies at the heart of the concept of the “philosopher’s stone.” Interestingly, the philosopher’s stone is most often associated with alchemists’ frenzied efforts to turn base metals into gold. But many alchemists, and Flamel in particular, also believed that the philosopher’s stone could be used to render a person immortal. Spiritual riches—rather than gold and material riches—and the search for the immortal soul in particular, lie at the heart of The Lost Symbol.

  Our Journey Is Complex and Layered with Symbols and Metaphors

  Following in the footsteps of Kabbalists, neo-Platonists, and all kinds of mystery writers, everything in The Lost Symbol is “overdetermined.” Almost every plot point, character name, symbol, historic reference, number, and artwork has multiple meanings and interpretations. Consider these elements and aspects of TLS:

  The Entire Book Is Structured to Take Robert Langdon and the Reader Through a Rite of Initiation, a “Hero’s Journey”

  Key events and scenes draw from the degrees and rituals of Masonry. In this way, TLS is similar to Mozart’s Magic Flute, among other Masonic works that have the structure of initiation rites built into them. TLS is also structured like an archetypal “hero’s journey,” as described by thinkers like Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell. (In terms of the Zeitgeist it is notable that Jung’s long unpublished personal diary of his own dreams, nightmares, and primal thoughts, known as The Red Book, which touches on many of the same issues as TLS, is being published for the first time in the same season that has brought Dan Brown’s new novel.)

  The greatest of all hero’s journeys in Western civilization is Homer’s Odyssey (replicated structurally by James Joyce in his masterpiece of modernism, Ulysses). Throughout TLS, Brown weaves symbolic references to specific Masonic initiation rites, as well as more general hero’s journeys. It’s not always clear which is which. TLS opens with a specific Masonic initiation ceremony, where Mal’akh, in bad faith, is initiated by his own father (unbeknownst to Peter Solomon) into the 33° ritual of Scottish Rite Freemasons. The story moves chapter by chapter through various classical elements of mythic initiation rites: the quest to find lost objects (the Lost Word, the Lost Symbol), the intellectual puzzling over the meaning of symbols, the painful moral choices between loyalty to one’s
word and to one’s friends (whether Robert should betray Peter’s secret in order to help save him), the heroic battle with adversaries (Mal’akh), the need to defeat skeptics (Sato), the near-death experience (Total Liquid Ventilation Tank), the appearance of resurrection/rebirth/coming back to life (especially important, since mock death and resurrection are part of Masonic ritual), the return of the lost objects (the pyramid, Peter’s ring), the epiphany of discovery (Robert and Peter at the top of the Washington Monument), the journey home (back to the Capitol Dome, where Robert and Katherine are reunited like Odysseus and Penelope at the end of The Odyssey), and the arrival in the light (sunrise over the Washington Monument), a suitable ending, since “enlightenment” is the ultimate destination of Freemason ritual.

  Some steps along the rite of passage seem odd, until you put them in the context of the initiation structure: When Robert Langdon (and Dan Brown, by proxy) is greeted in chapter 1 of TLS by Pam, the passenger services representative in the Dulles Airport private air terminal, he finds her dismissing his last book (i.e., The Da Vinci Code) as if the Harvard symbologist had written nothing more than an intentionally salacious bestseller. Referring to Langdon’s book about “the sacred feminine and the church,” Pam says, “What a delicious scandal that one caused! You do enjoy putting the fox in the henhouse!” She then tweaks him for wearing his “uniform” of Harris Tweed jacket and khakis, deriding his customary turtleneck as hopelessly “outdated.”