Here Brown is poking a bit of fun at himself, his own wardrobe, and his own books. But it is not just self-deprecation for the sake of warming the hearts of the readers. Looked at in terms of the initiation process, the banter with Pam is a studied scene in preordeal humiliation. Langdon is taking the first steps on the journey of this night, with the outside world mocking his appearance and reminding him that, Harvard professor or not, he is an ordinary mortal. Although Pam’s comments are trivial, she is playing the role of the critic stripping the warrior of his clothing. Only the rest of the evening will tell if he has what it takes to be the wise warrior he will need to be to save Peter and Katherine and learn the secrets of the Ancient Mysteries.
When Pam tells Langdon how much her book group enjoyed the last scandalous romp, Langdon replies, “Scandal wasn’t really my intention.” This is Dan Brown telling us that he has high hopes for TLS. It isn’t just another thriller. It actually means something important to him, and he hopes people will understand his true intentions. Intentionality itself will become an important theme much later in TLS when we learn of Katherine Solomon’s “noetic science” experiments.
Another Structural Tool of TLS Is Specific Coded and Hidden Messages
The book jacket of the American hardcover edition of TLS contains a variety of embedded codes, several of which have now been deciphered. (For more on codes and clues, see chapter 8, “The Summer of the Clues”). Here, I will comment on three codes that have been decrypted and one slightly hidden message:
POPES PANTHEON
This decrypted phrase is mainly a reference to John Russell Pope, the Freemason architect who designed many important buildings, including the 1915 Scottish Rite headquarters in Washington, better known as the House of the Temple. It is a pantheon of sorts in that it includes symbols and allusions to several different religious traditions. By using “Pope’s Pantheon,” Brown is probably also pointing to other buildings and ideas as well. For example, the Jefferson Memorial was also designed by John Russell Pope and was clearly inspired architecturally by the shape of the Pantheon in Rome, as well as the Panthéon in Paris.
The Roman Pantheon is interesting to Dan Brown (who used it in Angels & Demons) for two reasons: First, like all pantheons in the ancient world, it is a temple to multiple gods, emphasizing Brown’s point that all religions are essentially one. Second, the Roman Pantheon began as a pagan polytheistic shrine but was later repurposed as a Christian church.
In all his books, the novelist is reminding us that modern religions are built on a pastiche of ancient traditions. In The Da Vinci Code, for example, it is the pagan legend of the Persian sun god Mithras, which transmigrated into the Christian story of Jesus. (Mithras was born of a virgin birth, his birthday is around December 25, and he is said to have been resurrected three days after his death.) In TLS, it is the “god-eating rites of Holy Communion” in Christian worship, which Brown claims have their roots in primitive religious cults. The novelist seems to be saying: We may think Masonic rituals and symbols weird, but are Christian congregants not engaged in a parallel ancient rite when they symbolically drink the blood and eat the flesh of Jesus during Communion? The conclusion of this line of reasoning is cautionary humility. Those who believe they are following the word of the One True God are actually following nothing more than an edited collection of prior beliefs, myths, and practices. The corollary is to look for what has been edited out of the current tenets that were there at the beginning: the sacred feminine, for example, or potential for man to realize his own divinity.
The Panthéon in Paris also deserves mention here, because Jefferson knew and admired its history from his days as U.S. ambassador to France. This famous landmark in the fifth arrondissement of Paris was originally designed to be a Catholic church but was still under construction when the French Revolution occurred. The revolutionaries decided to repurpose it and turn it into perhaps the world’s first temple to man. The “saints” who are honored in the Parisian Panthéon are thinkers, writers, scientists, and artists, all of them explicitly not religious figures.
It is no coincidence that Jefferson modeled his Monticello after a pantheon, and that the style inspired his Monument as well. Brown sees a similar impulse in the design and layout of Washington as a whole. Just as religious monuments in great cities throughout the ages have served the purpose of connecting people to their past and extolled certain virtues and values, the designers of Washington and its monuments wanted to have the same visual and philosophical impact, connecting Americans to the heroic past accomplishments of the mortal men (and in more recent years, women) who built America.
ALL GREAT TRUTHS BEGIN AS BLASPHEMIES
Dan Brown is a defender of heretics. He believes that, just as Jesus was at first anathema to the Roman Empire, so later, when Christianity was adopted as Rome’s state religion, the Christian state became just as zealous in crushing heretical voices as the pagan emperors had been.
Brown reminds us that many of the basic ideas of science were initially censored by religious authorities as heresy, including principles like heliocentrism that we know today to be scientific facts. He further tells us that the Dark Ages arose when Christendom decided to wall itself off from the wisdom of ancient knowledge-based cultures of pagan Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and declare much of this past wisdom to be heresy. Europe found its way to the light again only when this ancient wisdom was rediscovered. Rearmed with the ancient wisdom, the Renaissance could emerge and flourish, and lead, within the short space of three centuries, to the Enlightenment, democracy, and the Industrial Revolution.
The reason Freemasons gathered in secret was not fundamentally to practice weird rites or to conspire in a morally negative sense. Instead, they were conspiring in a morally positive sense. They were creating the body of ideas and beliefs that would lead to revolutionary notions of liberty and eventually to overthrowing a world dominated by monarchy and clergy and replacing it with the novus ordo seclorum referred to on the great seal of the United States—a new secular and democratic order.
In Brownian cosmology, the breaking away of America from England and the commitment to truths Americans would come to hold as self-evident (that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, not by a specific God, but by their much more abstract “creator,” with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) are also indicators that the blasphemers and the declaimers of the traditional order need to be tolerated, heard, encouraged, and ultimately welcomed.
Of course not every unpopular, unconventional, or heretical idea will prove to be correct. Just because the majority of the scientific community today criticizes the research methodology of the noetic scientists, it does not follow that the scientific community is wrong. Brown goes overboard in claiming noetics as a science and in reading far too much into the limited data that has today been gathered by people doing this kind of research. Noetics is absolutely fascinating as a metaphor, and is willing to contemplate some daringly innovative ideas. But only time will tell whether it is truly promising as a scientific direction for understanding the universe and the place of the human mind and human thought within it.
YOUR MIND IS THE KEY
The Lost Symbol argues for a worldview in which the human mind is the most powerful force on earth and the most concentrated expression of divinity we can know. Throughout its pages, we are told that all the great philosophers, teachers, and “adepts” emphasized that anything is possible through the human mind. Access to the great thoughts that can be thought, the great artworks that can be created, the great words that can be written, the great inventions that can be generated, the great dreams that can be dreamed, all come from the human mind.
Speaking through the thoughts of Peter Solomon, TLS asserts that “Freemasonry, like Noetic Science and the Ancient Mysteries, revered the untapped potential of the human mind, and many of Masonry’s symbols related
to human physiology . . . The mind sits like a golden capstone atop the physical body.” The mind is the real “Philosopher’s Stone” that has been sought by the alchemists throughout the ages. “Through the staircase of the spine” (the spine has thirty-three vertebrae at birth—there’s that unique number so important to Masons again), “energy ascends and descends, circulating, connecting the heavenly mind to the physical body . . . The body is indeed a temple. The human science that Masons revered was the ancient understanding of how to use that temple for its most potent and noble purpose.” Langdon calls the Ancient Mysteries “a kind of instruction manual for harnessing the latent power of the human mind . . . a recipe for personal apotheosis.” He also says, “The human mind was the only technology the ancients had at their disposal. The early philosophers studied it relentlessly.” To which Katherine replies, “Yes! The ancient texts are obsessed with the power of the human mind. The [Indian] Vedas describe the flow of mind energy. The [Gnostic] Pistis Sophia describes universal consciousness. The Zohar [Jewish/Hebraic mystical texts] explores the nature of mind spirit. The Shamanic texts predict Einstein’s ‘remote influence’ in terms of healing at a distance. . . .”
One message of TLS is that the human mind is the ultimate creative and divine force, and that we need to free the human mind from its remaining shackles to move to the next era of enlightenment. But that message is tempered by another one. The human mind is also capable of thinking evil and destructive thoughts. Mal’akh is the character in the story most devoted to learning the ancient secrets and practicing the ancient arts. Yet he has crossed the line and is willing to kill or destroy as needed to achieve his own personal apotheosis. The example of Mal’akh applies to science and technology as well. The alchemists who were trying to transform matter in the hopes of turning base metals into gold have been superseded by the scientists who succeeded in transforming matter by creating nuclear fission. With their success, the world now has the dangerous power of atomic weapons. Dan Brown is correctly concerned and even a bit cautionary about his new heroes among the noeticists. If they are successful in proving that matter outside the body can be transformed through human thought, or that it is possible to intervene in other minds and bodies at a distance, such success would have its own obvious perils. But Brown is an optimist. He believes we are heading into a new enlightenment not a new dark age. And the golden treasure to fund that enlightenment, the source of energy and the power of the wisdom are not really “buried out there.” As it turns out, it’s buried in here; hidden in plain sight. It is the unseen human mind within the body.
AS ABOVE SO BELOW
This well-known mystical aphorism is not in a coded message like the prior three references. It’s just a bit hard to see. On the back of the U.S. hardcover edition, “As above” is in the demi-arc band at the top of the back cover; “so below” is upside down in the demi-arc at the bottom. This remarkably powerful and long-lived four-word phrase is most often attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who in turn derived it from the mythical “emerald tablet.” The phtase is thought in the annals of Medieval and Renaissance mystics to be definitional as to the relationship of man to god, earth to universe, material world to spiritual world. It also appears prominently in astrological studies of the same time period. TLS quotes “As above, so below” explicitly seven different times. What’s more, if you look at the scenes staged in the book by Dan Brown, you find multiple conceptual reenactments of the relationship between “above” and “below.” Thus, at the beginning of the book, Peter’s severed hand in the Capitol Rotunda is pointing up to the image of Washington’s apotheosis above, reflecting Mal’akh’s own misguided desire for personal apotheosis. At the end of the book, Robert and Katherine are sharing their big thoughts about the mind and the universe while staring up at the Apotheosis of Washington fresco. The episode in which Peter Solomon leads Robert Langdon on the trip up and down the Washington Monument is its own mini spiritual journey to demonstrate the alleged truth that the “Lost Word” is buried at the bottom of a long descending staircase. But along the way, we learn that the obelisk architectural form connects the sun to the earth and that the staircase is a metaphor for Jacob’s ladder to the heavens and for the spine connecting brain to body.
“As above, so below” can be read, along with the other decoded proverbs from the cover, as another way of stating the same humanistic principle that runs throughout TLS: What really matters is the world we live in. And the world we live in, as well as our minds and our selves, are no different—for good or ill—than the divine world religions imagine reside in the heavens. We are not fundamentally sinners, we are fundamentally divine. All the powers we ascribe to gods exist on earth among humankind. Everything we are usually told to believe is holy, sacred, and ideal can also be interpreted as profane, secular, and real.
A Brief History of Philo of Alexandria
A character of considerable importance, in my view, to understanding The Lost Symbol is not among the dozens of philosophers, mystics, and adepts mentioned in Brown’s voluminous inventory. He is Philo of Alexandria, and his lifespan is generally cited as between 20 b.c.e. and 50 c.e. He is associated with some of the earliest efforts to read traditional Scripture nonliterally, and to look for the hidden meanings, numerology systems, and codes within the sacred texts. Philo believed there was a Bible within the Bible, a body of knowledge and wisdom designed for those seekers who wanted more than normal meanings. TLS references this view numerous times. Peter reminds Robert that Corinthians tells us the biblical parables have two levels of meaning, “milk for babes and meat for men,” where the “milk is a watered-down reading for infantile minds, and the meat is the true message, accessible only to mature minds.” Peter quotes the Gospel of John as saying “I will speak to you in parable . . . and use dark sayings” and quotes Psalm 78 as avowing, “I will open my mouth in parable and utter dark sayings of old.” All this talk of dark sayings causes Langdon to remember that “dark” in this context means hidden and shadowed, not evil. Age of Wonder poet William Blake wrote: “Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read’st black where I read white.”
Philo made a protoscience of finding the hidden, shadowy, dark meanings in the Bible. Just a small tasting of Philo’s premises for finding clues in biblical texts that tell the careful reader that a nonliteral meaning is about to be disclosed:
• Look for the repetition of a phrase.
• Look for an apparently superfluous expression.
• Look for an entirely different meaning by a different combination of the words, disregarding the ordinarily accepted division of the sentence into phrases and clauses.
• A play on words can signal a deeper meaning.
• If something is omitted that by all reason should be there, it means something.
• References to numbers and quantities are important. Numbers aren’t just numbers, but mean something particular.
• Interpret words according to their numerical value (Hebrew letters each have a numerical value; thus words are the sum of the letters within them). One word with the same total numerical value can be used as a clue to point to another word of similar numerical value.
Dan Brown knows these forensic tools of Philo’s—and the many other mystics who have used similar methods to discern various Bible codes. In his love of puzzles, anagrams, and cryptic phrases, Brown constantly signals us to understand that these codes are the creation of mortal men—like Benjamin Franklin and Albrecht Dürer—not the divine work of a God who wanted to leave us a coded message about how we are supposed to worship him.
The Lost Symbol Can Be Read as a Coded Message
Narrowly speaking, there are specific coded messages in the text. For example, the “Thread #” that appears on page 475, in reference to a Web chat room where CIA employees are discussing the meaning of the Kryptos statue, is given as 2456282.5. Elonka Dunin, a contributor to this book (see chapter
8), one of the world’s leading experts on Kryptos, and the real-life near anagram of TLS character Nola Kaye, tells me that the thread number is “obviously intended to mean the Julian date, December 21, 2012, which ties in to the 2012 reference in the same chapter.” Here TLS is referencing the growing media hype imagined in the novel by Peter Solomon over the interpretation of the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the end of the world on that date in 2012. Solomon sees no reason to believe the world is actually going to end, and knows that those who are worried are misinterpreting the meaning of the symbols and the texts. Although it only gets only passing mention here, the Mayan calendar prediction could well figure in Dan Brown’s next book.
In any event, Elonka Dunin’s decoding of a seemingly haphazard number in the text, 2456282.5, seems to be a case in point of Philo’s approach to dissecting sacred texts.
Much has been made by reviewers of Dan Brown’s “bad writing” in The Lost Symbol. And it may just be a case of horrendously bad writing in many places. There are any number of wickedly funny and biting critiques of Brown out there, but my personal favorite is to be found in blogger Maureen Johnson’s online guide to The Lost Symbol at http://maureenjohnson.blogspot.com/. Johnson expresses every moment of outrage over the plot and the text that I felt when reading TLS—and much more. She calls Mal’akh the “hardest working bad guy in literatire,” and parodies Brown’s amazing list of evil feats he performs—in one night, all by himself, with no henchmen, coconspirators, or posse to provide even minor assistance. Plus she brilliantly satirizes Brown by reading some of his short, staccato passages as if they were modernist poems and comparing them to similar passages from T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Walt Whitman.
In chapter 10, our own investigative reporter, Dave Shugarts, writes another tour de force critiquing Dan Brown’s errors of fact, geography, technology, anatomy, and much else. But my guess is that the story behind the bad writing, plot flaws, and factual errors may be more complicated.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 4