Why all the use of italics? There are italicized words on most pages of TLS and the sentences in italics often offer no special reason as to why they should be italicized. The reviewers have had a field-day parodying Brown’s overuse of italics, often randomly italicizing words and sentences in their own reviews to demonstrate the apparent absurdity of this technique. But following Philo’s guidance, my bet is the italics are telling us something in one coded way or another.
And what’s up with all the repetition? Why is “hell”—as in Robert Langdon’s oft-uttered, “What the hell?”—used almost fifty times? Philosopher Glenn Erickson, a longtime student of the neo-Platonists, including Philo, tells us in chapter 3 that the phrase “Franklin Square” appears fifty-five times in the novel, and further that “fifty-five is the sum of the numbers on any side of any such pyramid with Dürer’s magic square at its base.” What’s more, says Erickson, “the ‘magic constant’ (the sum repeated in the rows, columns, and diagonals) in a normal six-by-six magic square is 111, the same number of times the sequence ‘Washington’ appears in the novel.”
Erickson goes on in chapter 3 to highlight the possibility that every character in TLS may correspond to a character in the Tarot deck, and to show us how a number of specific situations in the book are scripted to look like scenes from Tarot cards. Tarot, of course, has long been looked to by all kinds of mystics as containing coded messages of ancient wisdom. It was a favorite subject of Manly P. Hall, the best-known twentieth-century aggregator of ancient wisdom, whose Secret Teachings of All Ages Brown invokes in an epigram to launch The Lost Symbol, quoting him again five hundred pages later to conclude the book. Almost all the mystical names, theories, and ideas mentioned in TLS are also referenced in Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages. (For more on Hall, see Mitch Horowitz’s interview in chapter 4, describing Hall’s role within the long tradition of the occult in America.)
Call me credulous. But I believe that most, and possibly all, of the odd scenes that strike critics as simple cases of bad writing (or bad editing by Brown’s Doubleday editor, Jason Kaufman, who makes his now de rigueur appearance in TLS as Jonas Faukman) are structured around specific symbolic content. Katherine Solomon and Robert Langdon end up in the kitchen of Cathedral College, part of the National Cathedral complex, because Katherine gets the brilliant idea to boil the pyramid in order to see if it gives up its secrets. As Sato deadpans later, “You boiled the pyramid?”
The boiling of the pyramid gives Robert and Katherine a few minutes to act out a sweet domestic bit of comic relief, although it is hard to believe they are actually joking about the difference between a lobster pot and a pasta pot at a time like this, let alone thinking about fine dining experiences with celebrity chef Daniel Boulud. They also get the chance to talk about the little-known temperature system devised by Isaac Newton, well before Fahrenheit and Celsius overtook the scale. And what was the boiling point of water in the Newton Scale? Thirty-three degrees, of course, which gives Katherine and Robert the chance to go mano a mano over how much each of them knows about Newton and the importance of the number thirty-three to Pythagorians, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and other mystics. We learn that Jesus is said to have been thirty-three when crucified, that he is said to have accomplished thirty-three miracles, and that God’s name is mentioned thirty-three times in Genesis. It has apparently dawned on Katherine that the previous clue, All is revealed at the thirty-third degree, which Langdon had previously thought to have something to do with the highest rank in Masonry, should really be read as instructions to heat the pyramid to thirty-three degrees in the Newton Scale in order to learn the next clue. (“All,” it turns out, is never revealed in these games of clue hunting, or the game would be over.)
The bottom line: She boils the pyramid! And she gets results! Using boiling water as an agent of transformation (again, one of the big themes of TLS), and, after arguing about the difference between luminescence and incandescence, this magical pyramid begins to glow with previously invisible letters that now spell out “Eight Franklin Square.”
I believe at the heart of this scene, according to some structurally scripted language—Tarot, myth, religious pilgrimage, whatever script Brown is using here—he had to work in a ritual boiling of water. He finally came up with this madcap scene, and, while he was at it, he helped himself to the opportunity to engage in a game of speed–Trivial Pursuit over the number thirty-three.
Remember Philo, who calls upon us to be on the lookout for omissions, and think about the passage where Langdon heads into the bowels of the Senate to find Peter Solomon’s Masonic Chamber of Reflection, replete with all its symbols of mortality and death. On the way down, Langdon thinks to himself that he is on a “journey to the center of the Earth.” A little melodramatic for a few floors of an elevator ride, although we know Langdon doesn’t like elevators, gets claustrophobic in them, and has apparently had a childhood trauma in the Eiffel Tower’s elevator. Of course the italicized phrase is actually a reference to Jules Verne’s novel of the same name, even if Verne is not mentioned. Verne is thought by many to have been a disciple of Rosicrucian thought, and so the “omission” is another way of pointing at Rosicrucianism. (The Eiffel Tower’s excellent restaurant, high above the ground, is also named for Jules Verne.)
Speaking of the Eiffel Tower, United Technologies wonders if their corporation somehow fits into a Dan Brown code. According to the Hartford Courant, “No one around here is sure why, but The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has some kind of fascination with United Technologies. Before you barely turn a page in his new thriller, The Lost Symbol, two UTC companies, Otis Elevator and Pratt & Whitney, are part of the story. ‘We called Doubleday because we are curious,’ said UTC spokesman Peter Murphy. Brown’s novel opens with an ‘Otis elevator climbing the south pillar of the Eiffel Tower’ and, a few paragraphs later, main character Robert Langdon awakens in a corporate jet where ‘the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.’ ” Murphy thinks this is most likely simply a reflection of the ubiquity of his company’s products, but with Dan Brown, we just never know. It would be a mistake to assume these are random well-known corporate names selected without a conscious purpose.
On a recent tour of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, I entered the elevator that takes visitors to the rooms dedicated to re-creating the Temple of Solomon, a Templar church, and other wonders and curiosities inside this 1920s-era building, which is designed to honor George Washington’s life as a Mason, and to physically resemble an artist’s impression of the great Lighthouse at Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia).
The first thing the guide said on entering the elevator was that it was built by the Otis elevator company. As he went on to explain the engineering marvel behind this particular set of dual elevators that incline at inward angles toward each other rather than moving straight up and down vertically, I felt I was re-experiencing the early pages of The Lost Symbol, where for no apparent reason, one encounters the Otis elevator at the Eiffel Tower.
The tour guide was an interesting fellow. From him I learned that Dan Brown had spent a full day here several years earlier, researching Washington’s Masonic beliefs and engagements. Members of the staff had read TLS as soon as it came out, and found themselves happy that their institution was mentioned in the book, as well as relieved that their precisely 333-foot-tall tower had not been used by Brown as a venue for a murder. They also felt that Brown had generally treated Freemasonry with reverence, respect, and accuracy. But they were ultimately disappointed that their building figured only as a diversion and didn’t even get an actual visit from Robert Langdon in the book.
In an oddly eerie moment, it turned out I was visiting this intriguing place on the exact day of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Dan Brown likes to call atonement, “at-one-ment,” making a wordplay that works only in modern English, not in the original Hebrew from which it comes. Ne
vertheless, it’s a good try at a humanist view that says our sins against our fellow man are the most important ones. We might all be well served by using the meditative process called for on the Day of Atonement to think of ways to bring all of us—all peoples, all religions—together.
Inside the George Washington National Masonic Memorial there is a replica of parts of the Temple of Solomon, and we looked at a display that sought to capture the Ark of the Covenant in the interior of the Holy of Holies. Scripture suggests the Holy of Holies was opened only by the high priest once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Even for a completely secular person such as myself, standing in front of a somewhat dusty, old-fashioned museum replica, I felt the psychological power of being privy to secrets, of gaining access to the most sacred knowledge and experience.
On the walls of this particular room, there were some Hebrew words written, and the guide explained that they had to do with the name of God, which, as most Old Testament readers know, is never pronounced out loud. There is a deep intellectual river running through the history of Freemasonry (not to mention Judaism itself, as well as Kabbalah and various mystical trends), that is focused on the name of God as one of those bits of powerful secret knowledge that creates centuries-long searches for lost words and lost symbols. It is said that God told his name to Moses at the burning bush, and it is believed by some mystics that Solomon too knew this name of God and used that knowledge to summon angels and spirits. Those who read Hebrew in modern temple prayers all know not to pronounce out loud the name that is spelled out by the Hebrew letters for God, but to pronounce one of several euphemisms instead. In any event, the guide explained that the writing on the walls was intentionally imperfect in order not to cross the line over things that should not be written or said.
He volunteered that he thought Dan Brown’s mistakes were a bit like that as well—that is, mistakes by intention. Again, I thought of Philo: where we find a mistake in The Lost Symbol—and there are many—could it be a portal to take us to a different level of the code?
What’s in a Name? Identity, History, Myth, Context, Connotation.
The character names within TLS, and the characters themselves, form their own kind of coded, metaphoric, allusive ballet. You can certainly get at least one or two additional levels of meaning from TLS by deconstructing what went into their selections.
Robert Langdon, of course, is back from two prior novels. He was first used in Angels & Demons, where Brown also introduced a series of “ambigrams” (artistically calligraphed words that can be read upside down as well as right side up). The ambigrams were each important to the plot development of A&D. While the novel tried to make much of the secrets of ambigrams as a kind of coded language used by the Illuminati, the fact is that, as an art form, they are very twentieth century. Their leading designer is John Langdon, who happened to be a friend of Dan Brown’s father, and who agreed to design the ambigrams for A&D. Another John Langdon was an American revolutionary, a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Constitution, one of the first senators from Dan Brown’s home state of New Hampshire, and later governor of New Hampshire. Surprise, surprise: he was also a Freemason. Yet another Langdon, Samuel Langdon, was a real-life president of Harvard, and his tenure extended through most of the American Revolution. He helped Washington set up headquarters on the Harvard campus after the battles of Lexington and Concord. Robert Langdon no doubt knows that history of his Harvard forebear.
Mal’akh is a transliteration into roman characters of the Hebrew word for angel. So we begin our tour of this pathological villain by understanding that he has given himself a name that means “angel.” We learn through his rambling monologues that he sees no difference between angels and fallen angels. This is an allusion to Lucifer/Satan, who, in some accounts is considered a “fallen angel.” It may also be an allusion to the recent scholarship that has been done on the long-missing Gnostic Gospel of Judas, which emerged as accessible and in translation in the years between DVC and TLS.
During his days on his Greek island after escape from his Turkish jail, Mal’akh first called himself Andros, a reference to his androgynous sexual status (he will later castrate himself in his search for purity). Mal’akh has escaped from jail under unusual circumstances. This mirrors the experience of Silas in DVC, as well as the experience of Silas, the fellow traveler of Paul’s in Acts:16. Like Silas in DVC, Mal’akh eventually becomes a fanatic and a murderer. Both men engage in ritual “mortification of the flesh” (originally recommended by Saint Paul). Silas does this through his self-flagellation and his spiked cilice belt; Mal’akh through self-tattooing and ultimately self-castrating. While in Greece, he reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and becomes fascinated with what Mal’akh calls “the great fallen angel . . . the warrior demon who fought against the light . . . the valiant one . . . the angel called Moloch.” In frightening lines of poetry, Milton tells the story of the demon Moloch, a “horrid king besmear’d with blood of human sacrifice and parents tears,” who deceives King Solomon into building a temple to him adjacent to Solomon’s great temple to God. Moloch was a Canaanite god, contemporary with the early days of Jewish religion, who demanded not just human sacrifice but particularly the sacrifice of children. Milton notes in the poem that the cries of the children were drowned out by the playing of drums and timbrels (tambourines). We will learn in TLS that Peter Solomon failed to understand the plight of his son Zachary (now Mal’akh) in the Turkish jail.
King Solomon may have been induced by one of his wives to build an altar to Moloch, not realizing that child sacrifice would be required to appease this god. Thus, the Moloch story leads us leads us right to Solomon, Peter Solomon.
Peter Solomon: The name most obviously brings together two of the most important figures in Christianity and Judaism. First is Peter, the leader of the Apostles, the “rock” upon which Jesus built his church according to the Gospel of Matthew (petros meaning “rock” in Greek), the first Pope, the arbiter of who gets into Heaven.
As for Solomon, he is, of course, the great King of the Jews, and the builder of the first great temple, and known throughout the Middle East of that time period for both his wisdom and his wealth. In a flashback scene in TLS, Peter Solomon forces his son Zachary to make a choice between wisdom and wealth, even though the biblical King Solomon is said to have had both. (For an interesting commentary on this dilemma, see our interview with Rabbi Kula in chapter 5). In both Kings and Chronicles, it is said that when Solomon started on his temple-building project, he sent for Hiram Abiff, a “widow’s son” and master builder to help. Some Freemasons identify Hiram as, in effect, the first Freemason, and his murder by some of his workers in the course of building the Temple as the “primal moment” reenacted in Freemason rituals of death and rebirth. In the nonbiblical mystical tradition, Solomon is known not just as a wise and wealthy king, but as a magus, a magician/alchemist type, with incredible powers of sorcery and conjuring. For several years, the book that became The Lost Symbol was said to be titled The Solomon Key. (Some critics, notably Janet Maslin in the New York Times, have argued that The Solomon Key is actually a much more compelling title for this book—and I agree). Solomon’s powers as a magus are commemorated in a mystical book, The Key of Solomon (in Latin Clavis Salomonis or Clavicula Salomonis), a grimoire, or book on magic, attributed to King Solomon, but most probably written during the early part of the Italian Renaissance. In addition, there is a seventeenth-century grimoire known as The Lesser Key of Solomon. This version of “the Solomon Key” is cited in Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, among many other ideas about Solomon that have obviously seeped into TLS.
Solomon is central to alchemy, since it was thought that he had access to the “philosopher’s stone” and the techniques and incantations for transforming base metals into gold and for summoning demons and spirits to do his bidding. Isaac Newton spent years trying to use the clues in the Bible to draw up a det
ailed map showing what the original Temple of Solomon must have looked like. You can see Newton’s drawings in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms.
In TLS, Peter Solomon is said to be brilliantly wise, enormously wealthy, and a respected 33° Mason, who has a day job as “secretary” of the Smithsonian. In this particular role, Brown may have had two influences. One might be James Smithson himself, the endower of the Smithsonian. Smithson was a brilliant chemist, perhaps an alchemist, perhaps a Freemason, and a very wealthy man. He left instructions in his will that, on the death of his last relative, his fortune should go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” He gave these explicit instructions even though at the time of his death, he had never even set foot in America, and it was not at all common in those days for wealthy individuals to endow institutions for science and the diffusion of knowledge.
Peter Solomon may also draw from the persona of Andrew Mellon, the industrialist, financial genius, treasury secretary, Freemason, and philanthropist. Mellon was a kind of modern alchemist, first with his investments in coking technology that turned what was essentially industrial waste into valuable products, and then with his creation of financial wealth more generally. As a philanthropist, he seeded the creation of the National Gallery in Washington with masterworks from his own art collection and $10 million in cash. John Russell Pope, the architect and fellow Freemason who designed the House of the Temple and the Jefferson Memorial (aka “Pope’s Pantheon” in Brownian code), designed the National Gallery. Moreover, the Mellon family remained closely involved with the National Gallery for the next six decades, with Andrew Mellon’s son Paul (who apparently was never faced with the choice of wealth or wisdom, and ended up with both) serving as the National Gallery’s first president in 1938 and continuing various involvements until his death in 1999.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 5