Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  There is one more level of Solomonic allusion important to mention here. Francis Bacon pops up seven times by name in TLS and more without specific mention. He was the subject of some of the more intriguing official clues offered up by Dan Brown and his publisher before TLS appeared. Bacon was a brilliant philosopher, and Bacon historians and researchers have seen him as the real Shakespeare, the brains behind the King James Bible, the founder of Rosicrucianism, and much else. Thomas Jefferson was a Bacon devotee, and Bacon’s image is used in the Library of Congress to connote the wise philosopher and brilliant writer. Just a generation ago, Bacon was much more widely known in America than he is today. Daphne du Maurier’s biography of Bacon, The Winding Stair, was a 1976 bestseller.

  Early in The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown refers to the Royal Society of London and its forerunner, “The Invisible College,” and the great minds that maintained “secret wisdom” there. According to Brown, one of those minds belonged to Francis Bacon. When the action heats up in the novel, Robert Langdon, making his escape from the Library of Congress, passes the Folger Shakespeare Library, which he notes houses “Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the utopian vision on which the American forefathers had allegedly modeled a new world based on ancient knowledge.”

  Bacon’s New Atlantis was published in 1627, right after his death. The novel tells the story of the imaginary Pacific island of Bensalem and the government-run scientific institution there, where advanced experiments of wide-ranging scope are conducted on all manner of nature and human interaction with nature. New Atlantis makes a strong case for humans (rather than God) being in control of humanity’s future, It posits a utopian vision of a world where scientific exploration leads to a flourishing of the human condition. Some of the experiments described sound a bit like Katherine Solomon’s research into noetics; the scope of the work done in this research institute at the heart of Bacon’s New Atlantis sounds a bit like the Smithsonian Museum Support Center. So what is this temple of scientific experiment—this world-class center of learning in the middle of this utopian society—known as in Bacon’s story? “Salomon’s House.”

  Katherine Solomon: In TLS, Dan Brown has continued the tradition he established in his prior books (including not just DVC and A&D, but Digital Fortress and Deception Point as well) of having a female lead who is both brilliant in some deeply technical way, as well as physically beautiful. There is usually a familial relationship between the beautiful, brilliant woman and the old wise man who has been murdered (or in this case has had his hand severed and is being held hostage). In A&D, Vittoria is a “bio-entanglement” physicist who got pressed into action together with Robert Langdon after her adoptive father was murdered. In DVC, Sophie is a top code breaker drawn into working with Langdon after the murder of the grandfather who had raised her. And here, in TLS, Katherine is the world’s leading noetic scientist, doing breakthrough research that will allegedly change the world’s understanding of human thought and the human mind. She is also the sister of Peter Solomon, who appears to have been murdered at the outset, but we later learn is still alive suffering “only” a severed hand. This time, Katherine is a bit older—fifty—than the beautiful/brilliant late-twentysomethings and early-thirtysomethings who inhabited this role in prior books. For the first time, Langdon is working with a female lead who is older than he is. This calls to mind the age gap between Dan Brown and his wife, Blythe, who is known to be very interested in noetics, just like Katherine Solomon. It should be noted that Blythe was also very interested in the “sacred feminine,” Gnosticism, Mary Magdalene, the legend of the bloodline, and the other topics that inspired DVC. She is clearly Dan Brown’s research partner. She is so important to his work that some analysts view her as a major intellectual and creative force in the partnership, with Dan as the master storyteller of the page-turner format.

  Katherine is also probably an allusion to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, also known as Saint Catherine of the wheel, who is legendary in the Alexandrian time period for her beauty and her brilliance. Condemned to death for the crime of converting Alexandrians to Christianity, her personal strength was so great that she broke the torture wheel that was supposed to break her, and in the end, had to be beheaded instead.

  If the TLS characters correspond to the Tarot deck, then Katherine may likely be connected to either the fourth or tenth trump. A correspondence to the tenth trump, the “wheel of fortune” card, would emphasize the connection of Katherine Solomon to St. Catherine of the wheel. The card usually depicts a female goddess of “fortuna,” which can mean both fate and financial fortune.

  The fourth trump, the “Popess,” recalls the medieval legend of the female Pope Joan. Dan Brown mentioned this particular Tarot card in DVC, in a passage where we learned that heroine Sophie Neveu used to play Tarot games with her grandfather, the esteemed Saunière. This card is also known in many decks as the high priestess. A Wikipedia search tells us that “in the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, upon which many modern decks are based, The High Priestess is seated between the white and black pillars—‘J’ and ‘B’ for Jachin and Boaz—of the mystic Temple of Solomon. The veil of the Temple is behind her.” In addition to the general Solomonic connotation suggested by this card, and on top of the emphasis throughout Freemasonry on those particular Temple of Solomon pillars, Jachin and Boaz, there is another connection made here with the depiction on the Tarot card of the temple “veil.”

  This word veil and the concept behind it resounds loudly in the final pages of TLS. Here, Katherine Solomon and Robert Langdon debate whether the traditional message of the Bible allows for the interpretation that the temple is within each person, or whether the temple is, of necessity, a physical place for worshipping an exterior God. Robert Langdon says he thinks the Bible is clear: the temple is to be a two-part physical structure, including an outer Holy Place and an inner sanctuary, the “Holy of Holies.” These two structures are to be separated by a “veil.” But Katherine turns this literal reading of the Bible around on Robert and argues for the theory of personal apotheosis and divinity that she shares with her brother, Peter (and her nephew, Mal’akh). She tells Robert that the human brain is composed of two parts—an outer “dura matter” and an inner “pia matter,” and that these two parts are “separated by the arachnoid—a veil of weblike tissue.”

  Katherine is also the first major character in a Langdon novel to be clearly drawn, at least in significant part, from a real-life person. Except in her case, it’s not one but two people whose work bears a striking resemblance to Katherine’s research—Lynne McTaggart and Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, both of whom are contributors to this book. Of course Dan Brown has fast-forwarded the noetic research in TLS to a place where Katherine Solomon can claim she has established irrefutable, conclusive evidence and proof of her ideas. However, back in the real world, McTaggart and Schlitz, while highly confident of the separate research directions they are going in, would, I think, acknowledge that there is still a long way to go to prove their theories fully and to understand the experimental results they have seen.

  Warren Bellamy: Freemason, close friend of Peter Solomon’s, holder of the exalted title of the Architect of the Capitol, and keeper of the keys to all the Capitol’s secrets. The part of Warren Bellamy in TLS is written, as more than one reviewer has noted, as custom-made to be played by a distinguished African-American actor like Morgan Freeman.

  The name Bellamy is first and foremost a wink on Dan Brown’s part at his origins as a thriller writer. After graduating from Amherst, Dan Brown first tried to make it as a musician and a composer. As he tells his own story, he was on vacation in Tahiti during this period of his life and he picked up a Sidney Sheldon thriller, The Doomsday Conspiracy. After racing through it, he concluded that he, too, could use his talents to write thrillers like that. Soon thereafter, he was at work on what would become Digital Fortress, a novel that established many of the patterns we find later in A&D, DVC, and T
LS. The lead character in Doomsday Conspiracy, by the way, is named Bellamy.

  That’s a humorous nod to his past, but there’s more to Bellamy than that. Reverend Francis Bellamy, a Freemason, Christian socialist, and Baptist minister, is one of the famous Bellamys in American history. He wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. It was written to glorify the flag and the American ideal in the midst of the great movement to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, epitomized by the famous Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

  Francis Bellamy had a much more famous cousin, the utopian socialist Edward Bellamy. Edward, also a Freemason, is the author of Looking Backward, published in 1888. One of the most influential books of its day, the utopia pictured by Bellamy in Looking Backward owed much to the ideals of democracy and brotherhood he had learned in his Freemason lodge. One more detail not likely to have eluded Brown: while most famous for the Masonic-infused Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy wrote a more obscure short story in biblical parable language and form, designed to critique the failings of the robber baron capitalism he saw all around him. The title was “The Parable of the Water Tank.” Langdon, of course, is going to have a near-death experience in Mal’akh’s water tank.

  Warren Bellamy and Katherine Solomon as a pair: Dan Brown uses Katherine Solomon and Warren Bellamy in an unarticulated subplot. Brown knows that one of the most obvious weak links in Freemasonry’s claim to openness, tolerance, and inclusiveness is the fact that the vast majority of Masonic lodges do not admit women and are specifically designed as fraternities of men. Moreover, he is aware of the historic fact that Albert Pike, the nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemason leader credited with codifying and spreading the gospel of modern Masonry, was a Confederate general (the only Confederate leader honored with a statue in today’s Washington, D.C.). Any discussion of Pike inevitably triggers the historic rumors that he may have been in involved in some way with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. The fact that many African Americans have been Freemasons, and that there is a historically African-American group of Masonic lodges (the Prince Hall movement), doesn’t fully defuse the suggestion of racism. Brown skips the logical argument that other American institutions we respect and revere today (and heroes like Thomas Jefferson himself ) were less than modern in their thinking about gender and race—so it’s no surprise that Freemasonry may have suffered from the same historic biases. He vaults to the next step and creates the characters of Katherine Solomon and Warren Bellamy to make his point. Bellamy couldn’t be more distinguished. He is the Architect of the Capitol and close friend of Peter Solomon’s. As a leading African-American Freemason, his persona seems designed to obviate any wonder about racism among the Masons. As for Katherine, she actually says toward the end of the book that Peter “initiated” (the word is a very specific choice) her into his secret philosophical and mystical knowledge of Freemasonry years ago. Peter and Katherine have a platonic brother/sister love for each other and each other’s minds. So, too, it is said, did Albert Pike have a very special relationship with his friend Vinnie Ream. He spent the better part of two decades meeting with Vinnie regularly and exchanging letters with her, as he sought to bring her, a woman, into the intellectual world of Freemasonry. Brown shorthands the argument that Freemasonry really is inclusive through the personas and characters of Katherine Solomon and Warren Bellamy.

  Christopher Abaddon: This is the identity assumed by Mal’akh for his life in the outside world. He uses this name in his first encounters with Katherine when he is posing as Peter Solomon’s psychiatrist. “Christopher” suggests Malakh’s Christlike aspirations—for personal apotheosis, martyrdom, and resurrection in a heavenly world. His surname, “Abaddon,” connotes “place of destruction” or “the destroyer,” in Hebrew. In the Book of Revelation, Abaddon is the angel of the Abyss, the bottomless pit, and possibly another way to refer to the Antichrist. Mal’akh embodies all of this evil, and his basement laboratory is indeed a place of death and destruction. The word abyss is mentioned multiple times in TLS, especially as Robert Langdon sinks into the near-death abyss of Mal’akh’s “liquid breathing” tank. Indeed, the 1989 movie The Abyss is recalled as one of the first depictions of total liquid ventilation.

  Inoue Sato, the female CIA official of Japanese ancestry, has been roundly criticized by reviewers as one of the most inexplicable and annoying characters in recent fiction. What inspired Dan Brown to invent this character with this set of attributes is far from clear. Sato is an extremely common Japanese name. But there is one notable Sato of recent stature who might have come across Brown’s radar screen: Mikio Sato. Although male, this Sato has done path-breaking work in mathematical physics. He is known especially for his work on something known as the FBI Transform, which has nothing to do with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but is named after the mathematical physicists who developed it. However, one can imagine Brown being attracted to a scientific undertaking called FBI—for its resonance to the fact that longtime twentieth-century FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover was a Freemason, and Sato, although she works for the CIA, is carrying out what should decidedly be the FBI’s work on American soil. Brown may also like the second part of the FBI Transform, since the theme of transformation is such a continuous subtext of TLS.

  Sato’s work, meanwhile, sounds like it would fit right in with Brown’s vision of noetics and ancient wisdom being new again: those experts who understand Mikio Sato’s work say that “it relies on an old idea in the Orient that phenomena in the real world are shadowed by phenomena in an imaginary world which lie outside the real world but infinitely close to it.” Sato is seen by some as the modern inheritor of Newton and Leibniz, both of whom have roles in TLS.

  Big Themes: Loss, Sacrifice, Mortality, Melancholy, Death, Transformation, Rebirth.

  The Lost Symbol is an extremely ambitious novel. In addition to big philosophical issues from five thousand years of civilized history, it also attempts to wrap in several of the major literary themes that have captured novelists and storytellers throughout the ages. Dan Brown is working against some long odds here, as he tries to comment on issues that have been tackled in history by many great novelists, and specifically the great novelists who have been Masons. Faust, Goethe’s central work, occupied the great German writer for six decades. The completed book, published only after Goethe’s death in 1832, deals with deep questions about the soul, man’s search for happiness and satisfaction, and the meaning of life. Faust is a psychological novel before there was psychology; it is a political novel that rings with the spirit of Freemasonry; it is a religious novel that deals with good, evil, God, and the devil. It may have been based on a German legend about a medieval alchemist. In many ways, The Lost Symbol is another retelling of the Faust story, obviously not as brilliant as Goethe’s, but addressing similar issues of life and death, of science, magic, and religion, and of trying to obtain the immortality of the soul through methods both holy and unholy.

  The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s novel about birth and life. It features the sacred nature of sex (hieros gamos, in Greek) and of femininity in early religions. The theme of the sacred feminine runs throughout the book. Mary Magdalene is the star of the story. The plotline emphasizes the secret of the marriage of Jesus and Mary and the presumed bloodline they engendered through their children.

  The Lost Symbol is Dan Brown’s book about loss and death. It opens with the sentence “The secret is how to die.” It is filled with imagery of death. Consider, for example, the Masonic “Chamber of Reflection” in the secret Senate basement, where we find a scene complete with skulls, grim reaper scythes, and other death imagery, all designed to focus the Mason’s mind on his mortality and on making the most of his brief life on earth. The climactic scene of the book takes place in the House of the Temple, which in actuality is stylized not on the Temple of Solomon, but the mausoleum at Halicarnassus—an ancient wonder of the world devoted to housing the dead. The ancient philo
sophers Brown references were interested in the immortality of the soul; Katherine is doing research on what happens to the soul after death; Mal’akh is trying to immortalize his soul through mystical means and ritual death.

  The problem of loss is ever present in TLS. We moderns have lost the ancient knowledge and need to get it back. The lost pyramid, the Lost Word, the reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost, are all emphasizing the deeper knowledge we have lost in the course of modernity’s progress. The descendants of King Solomon have lost their temple. Books have been lost in wars and fires. The cornerstone of the Washington Monument has been lost. In this book whose very title emphasizes the theme of loss, Peter has lost his son and Zachary has lost his father. Although Katherine is an important character, this is a very male-oriented book, based on a story about the Freemasons, a virtually all-male fraternal order. It is also about fathers and sons.

  The story brings to the forefront the biblical story of the Akedah—the binding of Isaac and his aborted sacrifice by Abraham (Genesis 22: 1–19). One of the most troubling of all Bible stories, the Akedah episode has engendered long-standing debates about what kind of God would ask a father to sacrifice his son, and what the meaning and intent of Bible writers and editors may have been in this passage. Mal’akh is perversely seeking to re-create every detail of this frightening, terrifying, profoundly disturbing story from Genesis, with the desired goal of having his own father, Peter, forced to sacrifice him like Isaac, and thereby release his soul from his earthly bindings. Like the maniacally meticulous Matthew Weiner on the set of TV’s Mad Men, Dan Brown has worked to an amazing level of detail in re-creating this tableau from Genesis. Consider just this one small example. In Jewish study circles, where every detail of the Torah is parsed to an infinite degree, it is not always seen as completely clear what happens to Isaac when the angel stays Abraham’s hand and gives Isaac his reprieve from being sacrificed. We learn that Abraham sacrificed a ram instead. We also learn that Abraham came back down the mountain, but Genesis does not specifically say Isaac descended the mountain with him. (The mountain in question is believed in biblical tradition to be the same Mount Moriah where King Solomon would later build his temple, and which today is home to the sacred Muslim site the Dome of the Rock.)