History
Dan Brown says there are 896 steps in the famous stairs of the Washington Monument. Most sources and guides say there are 897; there were originally 898 but one step was covered by a wheelchair ramp.
Langdon says of the Washington Monument, “There’s a very old law decreeing that nothing taller can be built in our capital city. Ever.” The Height of Buildings Act, passed in 1899, said that nothing taller than the Capitol could be built (not the Washington Monument). The law was superseded in 1910.
In speaking of the engraving by Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, Langdon recognizes the symbol combining an A and D. Dan Brown notes that this symbol, “as any scholar of medieval art would recognize, is a symbature—a symbol used in place of a signature.” In fact, however, art scholars typically call it a “monogram” and sometimes it is considered a “logo.” It appears that “symbature” is Dan Brown’s own creation, since we couldn’t find it in any dictionary. Perhaps Langdon, our symbolist—another made-up word—will include a lesson on symbature for his next Harvard seminar.
Admiring his tattoos, Mal’akh contemplates the undecorated space on the top of his head, which Dan Brown calls the “fontanel . . . the one area of the human skull that remained open at birth. An oculus to the brain.” However, basic anatomical texts tell us that there isn’t just one fontanel, but six fontanels at birth: the anterior, posterior, and on each side of the head, the sphenoidal and mastoid fontanels.
Masonic Legends
There’s a fundamental plot point that bears a lot of pondering, since it’s disguised by a lot of different allusions and clues. But it readily explains why none of the real action in TLS is connected to the Founding Fathers, despite all the anticipation that the book’s secrets would involve Freemasonry’s putative great conspiracy among men like Washington and Franklin to mold the nation’s destiny.
Despite all the uses of the word “ancient” and the other descriptions that imply a long, hoary history of the secret hiding place and the clues to find it, the secret cannot be very old at all. The fact is that if the “secret” book containing the “Ancient Mysteries” was put into the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, that event occurred on July 4, 1848. This was long after the Founding Fathers were dead. This also was a period when the popularity of Freemasonry was recovering from a severe setback that had caused many lodges to go dark. It was certainly not a time when the Masons could be considered a powerful organization.
This also was two years before the legendary Albert Pike, a huge force in the Scottish Rite, even joined the Freemasons. It was under Pike’s leadership that the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction came to Washington around 1870. During Pike’s era, the Supreme Council had quarters on Third Street, not far from the Capitol, but miles from its location today.
In TLS, the Masonic Pyramid references the House of the Temple as the starting point for a two-mile journey due south along Sixteenth Street to the Washington Monument. Logically, the coded pyramid itself would not have been created until after the Scottish Rite’s current House of the Temple at 1733 Sixteenth Street was completed, which occurred in 1915. Thus, the Masonic Pyramid is less than one hundred years old.
After all of that, what is the “secret” information that was so carefully guarded for so long? Merely a book that was published many centuries ago, has many millions of copies in print, and which the Freemasons neither created nor kept hidden. We call it the Bible.
Finally, Dan Brown mixes up a quote that is at the center of the legends of Freemasonry, the plea, “Is there no help for the widow’s son?”
As Brown depicts it in TLS, “These same words had been uttered centuries ago . . . by King Solomon as he mourned a murdered friend.” But, according to Masonic legend, these words were actually uttered by Hiram Abiff, the master craftsman who was the builder of Solomon’s Temple, as he was being murdered for not divulging certain secrets hidden in the temple. Whether he was a “friend” of the king’s isn’t specified. The full quote is, “Oh Lord, my God, is there no help for the widow’s son?” and it is the signal of distress that one Mason conveys to another in a time of need.
Hiram Abiff is said in some traditions to be the first Mason. Whether he is or isn’t the first Mason, there’s no question that this important quote is always attributed to him, not to King Solomon. It is further interesting to note that both Kings and Chronicles reference the idea that Solomon called on Hiram to help him build his temple. Both passages refer to Hiram himself as a “widow’s son.” Dan Brown knows all this perfectly well.
Indeed, Brown made this phrase semifamous when he encoded it in boldface letters on the jacket flaps for the original hardcover of The Da Vinci Code in 2003, thus silently communicating to us and others that his next book would be about the Freemasons. So why the misattribution of this incredibly important phrase? That’s just one of the many modern mysteries of The Lost Symbol.
Dan Brown’s Great Work
An Exercise in Maybe Logic
by Ron Hogan
Going down the rabbit hole of “maybe logic,” Ron Hogan engages in a series of fascinating speculations in the following piece. He wonders about the motivations of Dan Brown in writing The Lost Symbol, he shares some intriguing ideas about the book’s structure, and he imagines some of the potential impacts this novel will have on readers. “Allegorical page-turner, postmodern sorcery, or just a clever yarn?” Hogan asks. After you read his piece, you will at least know how you feel about those three possible ways to summarize what The Lost Symbol is in its essence. Hogan is senior editor of GalleyCat, a Web site devoted to the book publishing world, where an earlier version of this commentary first appeared.
In January 2008, Stephen Rubin, then president of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group and Dan Brown’s publisher, was confronted by the question publishing industry observers had been asking for several years: Where was the sequel to The Da Vinci Code? “Dan Brown has a very specific release date for the publication of his new book,” Rubin assured Jeffrey Trachtenberg, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, “and when the book is published, his readers will see why.”
Trachtenberg suggested possible dates. Would the release of The Solomon Key (as it was then known) commemorate the laying of the cornerstones at the Washington Monument (July 4) or the Capitol Building (September 18) or the White House (October 13), all of which involved public Freemason rituals?
Nearly two years passed between Rubin’s statement and the publication of what had since been retitled The Lost Symbol on September 15, 2009—by which time that declaration about the significance of the release date had apparently been forgotten by the journalists covering the event. The statement was still out there, however, waiting for an explanation.
If you’ve read Secrets of Angels & Demons, you may recall the interview with Robert Anton Wilson, especially his explanation of maybe logic, “in which I consider ideas not simply true or false, but in degrees of probabilities.” It was in this spirit, shortly after reading The Lost Symbol, that I began to consider the mysteries of September 15.
A preliminary Google search didn’t turn up anything linking the date to Masonic history, and a Wikipedia page listing all the births, deaths, and major events occurring on September 15 throughout recorded history didn’t seem to offer anything that would fit with the novel’s narrative or themes. It was the birthday of the Italian king Umberto II and the American filmmaker Oliver Stone; could Dan Brown be announcing himself as the second Umberto Eco or paying tribute to a man who’d done as much as he had to popularize conspiracy theory? Those possibilities were amusing, but utterly improbable.
At the bottom of the page, however, I found one intriguing entry: in ancient Greece, September 15 marked “the second day of the Eleusinian Mysteries, when the priests of Demeter declared the public start of the rites.” The Eleusinian Mysteries were an annual celebration of the cult of D
emeter and Persephone, going back nearly three and a half millennia until they were forcibly ended in the fourth century c.e. by Christians working in tandem with Gothic armies attacking the Roman Empire. To this day, we don’t know the full extent of what took place during this multiday celebration, largely because initiates were forbidden to reveal what they witnessed and learned during the ceremonies—which were divided into “lesser” and “greater” mysteries—upon pain of death.
The obvious superficial similarities have inspired speculation that these ceremonies served as a template for Masonic initiation rites, though whether it’s a matter of direct lineage or a historical appropriation depends on who you’re reading. It’s highly probable Dan Brown came across the Eleusinian/Masonic connection during his research, and an enthusiasm for suppressed alternatives to contemporary religious institutions permeates his writing: as Peter Solomon tells Robert Langdon near the end of The Lost Symbol, “you and I both know the ancients would be horrified if they saw how their teachings had been perverted.” So how likely is it that Brown would select the publication date of his most anticipated novel as a subtle invitation to readers of the world to take part in an initiation ritual based upon an ancient template?
And what, exactly, would be the revelation he was attempting to impart?
To answer those questions, let’s make a brief digression into the field of twentieth-century occultism. It’s a subject with which we can assume Dan Brown has some familiarity, given a casual reference to the infamous ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley as one of Mal’akh’s inspirations. One of Crowley’s more widely known contributions to occult literature was a cotranslation of a seventeenth-century grimoire, or magical handbook, called The Lesser Key of Solomon (a possible source of inspiration for the original title of The Lost Symbol?) that describes how to summon and control seventy-two demons through a combination of ritualistic language and magical symbols known as “sigils” (from the Latin word for “seal,” because they were designed to hold the demon within a magical container). These sigils often draw upon the imagery of established mystical and alchemical traditions, such as the Hebrew alphabet or astrological notations. We can be sure Dan Brown knows this, too, because Robert Langdon notices the sigils Mal’akh has tattooed onto his flesh when they finally meet.
(As an aside, Mal’akh’s self-designed tattoo “masterpiece” is a rich symbolic field. Chapter 2 contains an extended description of how his legs have been inked to resemble two pillars supporting an arch defined by his groin and abdomen, while his chest bears a double-headed phoenix. The relevance of the phoenix in Masonic iconography becomes obvious later on, when the same icon—the symbol of Freemasonry’s Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite—appears on Peter Solomon’s ring. The meaning of the pillars is left obscure in the novel, but because Mal’akh refers to them by name—“Boaz and Jachin”—we know they represent the two pillars of the entrance to the biblical Temple of Solomon, which in turn became the foundation of much Masonic lore. Given Mal’akh’s true identity, his quest to transform himself into “Solomon’s Temple” is a particularly clever piece of the novel’s symbolic infrastructure.)
For centuries, aspiring magicians would use the classical sigils of The Lesser Key of Solomon and other grimoires when attempting to invoke supernatural forces. In the early twentieth century, however, a British artist named Austin Osman Spare began to experiment with designing his own “alphabet of desire,” creating abstract designs that would serve an individuated set of sigils keyed to his unique magical intentions. Spare believed every magician should create his or her own sigils, which would be more potent because of the subconscious imprints from the magician’s mental and emotional energies.
His ideas remained somewhat marginal even within occult circles until the late 1970s, when a new generation of British “chaos magicians” began to develop a more individualized style of sorcery. The chaos magicians took one aspect of Aleister Crowley’s teachings—the idea that ceremonial magic was a form of applied psychology—and pushed it to the next level. If the beings invoked in such rituals were projections of the magician’s own psychological state, they reasoned, why limit oneself to the angels and demons described in the historical grimoires when you could invoke H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, or the Marvel Comics version of Thor (or any other fictional character, for that matter)? Spare’s concept of personalized sigil design became one of the most popular planks in the chaos magic platform, with various techniques available. (The most common consists of writing one’s desire out as a sentence, then rearranging the letters to create a unique design.)
As the body of literature on chaos magic grew, the concept of the sigil took on additional complexity. Grant Morrison is a writer who has spoken openly of the influence of chaos magic on his work, particularly a comic book series published in the 1990s called The Invisibles which chronicled, in part, the recruitment and training of a young man by a secret magical society fighting to liberate humanity from extradimensional aliens who are keeping us from recognizing the true nature of reality. Morrison has described that multivolume work as a hypersigil, a complex work of art crafted to achieve a magical purpose, charged not by the magician’s attention but by the audience’s. In an essay called “The Palimpsest,” the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey elaborates on the concept, describing “a consciously-devised ‘seduction machine’ or magical engine meant to awaken true desires, anger at the repression of those desires, [and] belief in the non-impossibility of those desires.”
The goals Bey identifies are similar to those of many initiation rites: opening the initiate’s eyes to hitherto secret knowledge, which results in a new, fuller understanding of reality. Grant Morrison’s descriptions of his own work give us a verified example of a creative artist producing a hypersigil and releasing it for public consumption. We wouldn’t necessarily know about that layer of intentionality, however, if Morrison himself didn’t speak about it publicly. That raises the question: How many other creative artists are creating hypersigils and not letting readers in on their plans?
And: could Dan Brown be one of them?
A mega-bestselling author trying to transform the consciousness of millions of readers through a complex framework of magical symbolism? It hardly seems possible. But what would a careful examination of the narrative structure of The Lost Symbol tell us?
We don’t even have to look that hard. Robert Langdon himself tells us at the end of chapter 17: The severed hand of Peter Solomon on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda is “an invitation to receive secret knowledge—protected wisdom known only to an elite few.”
After receiving that invitation, Langdon remembers how Solomon, the Worshipful Master of a Masonic Lodge, came to him earlier bearing a box the contents of which, he said, “imbue its possessor with the ability to bring order from chaos.” Giving the box to Langdon, Solomon charges him with a mission: “I would like you to keep it safe for me for a while. Can you do that?”
“Peter Solomon would be horrified to know how badly Langdon had failed him,” Brown writes, but that’s just the beginning. Warren Bellamy, the Architect of the Capitol, Peter Solomon’s close friend, and a 33° Mason, rescues Langdon and brings him to the Library of Congress, where he elaborates upon the nature of the Masonic Pyramid (“a map that unveils the hiding place of mankind’s greatest treasure”) and then warns Langdon, “[I]t is our duty to ensure this pyramid is not assembled.” Langdon, who brought the base of the pyramid with him from the Capitol basement, wants to save Solomon, but Bellamy insists “the great secret our brotherhood protects for all mankind” cannot be surrendered “even in exchange for Peter Solomon’s life.”
So what’s the first thing Langdon does once he’s separated from Bellamy? He stands by helplessly while Katherine Solomon opens the box her brother entrusted to him and reads the inscription on the golden capstone.
The significance of this act is underscored when Langdon and Katherine
encounter another 33° Mason, the Reverend Dr. Colin Galloway, dean of the Washington National Cathedral. When they share what they have discovered, Galloway does not praise them for their resourcefulness. “The package containing the capstone was sealed,” he reminds them. “Mr. Bellamy told you not to open it, and yet you did. In addition, Peter Solomon told you not to open it. And yet you did.” The consequences for their failure to protect the secret are grave: “[W]hen you broke the seal on that box, you set in motion a series of events from which there will be no return. There are forces at work tonight that you do not yet comprehend. There is no turning back.”
After they leave Galloway and extract another layer of meaning from the pyramid, Langdon and Katherine are lured into a trap. Mal’akh places Langdon in a sensory deprivation tank which he then begins to fill with water. Faced with the threat of drowning, desperate to survive, “with his last few seconds of air, Robert Langdon shared the secret of how to decipher the Masonic Pyramid.”
To recap: as three high-ranking Masons—a Worshipful Master, an Architect, and a “High Priest”—use highly charged language to impart secret knowledge to Robert Langdon and urge him to protect that knowledge at all cost, he fails in that duty over and over again until he is confronted by a magical adversary who (unknown to Langdon, and possibly forgotten or unrecognized by readers) has used deception to assume the status of an equal degree to the other Masons encountered along this journey—and whose body is, as discussed above, a grotesque parody of the Masonic temple. The consequences of Langdon’s compounded failures is death.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 39