Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  In The Lost Symbol, once Peter Solomon understands that Mal’akh is, in fact, his long lost son, and that his son is trying to force him to sacrifice him like Isaac, he resists and strikes the knife instead into the granite altar, whereupon the sacrificial scene is interrupted both by Robert Langdon rushing in to tackle Peter before he plunges the knife and by the CIA’s black helicopter crashing into the skylight of the House of the Temple. (A black helicopter, which shadows Langdon on his search, is itself an allusion to a conspiracy theory about one world government taking over the country—see the interview with Michael Barkun in chapter 10.) Just as the angel stayed Abraham’s hand, so Mal’akh is not killed by his father. However, the narrator paints a picture of Mal’akh writhing in pain from presumed injuries caused by the shattering jagged shards of glass from the broken skylight overhead. But is he really dead? When Katherine comes into the room, the narrator tells us she sees a “corpse” on the altar table. But the same narrator referred to Robert Langdon as a “corpse” only a few chapters earlier, when Mal’akh left him for dead in the water tank. So we don’t know for a fact what has happened to Mal’akh, and there is no further mention of him in the book—just as there is no final mention of Isaac’s whereabouts at the end of the Akedah scene in Genesis.

  Dan Brown wants us to believe that Mal’akh has obtained the actual knife used in the Akedah on the antiquities black market for use in his own ritual sacrifice. Supposedly, this knife was “crafted over three thousand years ago from an iron meteorite” and has been through a succession of owners including “popes, Nazi mystics, European alchemists, and private collectors.” This is sheer fiction on Brown’s part.

  If Mal’akh hasn’t died, he has certainly had a near-death experience. In another clever twist, we hear Mal’akh’s interior monologue describe his near-death experience as heading into darkness and “infinite terror” as he encounters the blackness of a “prehistoric beast” rearing up and “dark souls” confronting him. This would be the opposite of most accounts of near-death experiences studied by the real-life noetic scientists Brown cites. Many accounts report bright white shining light, the feeling of ascendancy, and sensations of serenity and happiness. Not surprisingly after the destructive havoc he has wreaked, Mal’akh is apparently headed the other way.

  It isn’t just Mal’akh who has a near-death experience (NDE). There are several other NDEs in TLS. Robert Langdon has one in the water tank, when he comes within seconds of expiring. Katherine, who studies NDEs professionally, has one when she nearly bleeds to death in the wake of Mal’akh’s fiendish effort to turn her into a human hourglass with the blood draining slowly out of her.

  In the course of these near-death experiences, we learn something interesting about Dan Brown and his thinking. As the narrator shares each person’s near-death thoughts, it seems each one is more focused on their work and ideas that will be lost as a result of their death than thinking about their families, their loved ones, or their important personal memories from their lives. In real life, many people’s final thoughts are about their loved ones. But these characters have no loved ones. Langdon is unmarried and childless, and, so far as we know, hasn’t been on a date since he got to know about Vittoria Vetra’s hatha yoga expertise in Angels & Demons. (Following the recipe for DVC, TLS has no sex and only the very mildest romantic energy between Langdon and Katherine.) Katherine is unmarried, with no mention ever made of a significant other. She is apparently childless as well. Peter’s wife “never forgave him” for leaving Zachary to die in the Turkish prison, and their marriage is said to have fallen apart six months after Zachary’s presumed death. (Like a Disney movie where the central character has no mother—think Aladdin, Peter Pan, Little Mermaid, etc.—Zachary/Mal’akh is essentially a motherless child.) It would be important to note here that Dan Brown has no child either, so perhaps this is simply how he thinks about the world. But I believe he is actually referencing some of the ideas in Goethe’s Faust here. Faust, after all his travail, and all he has experienced, finds the moment of happiness he seeks in the free association of men and the collective work of the community—people he doesn’t even know. Brown is suggesting something along those lines with the metaphor of the Freemasons and the never-ending search for knowledge.

  Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514).

  Prior to the moment Faust finds his bliss, he is the prototype for the “dejected adept” in Dürer’s Melencolia I. Take a look at the image. (By the way, it is a woman in the Melencolia image in the opinion of most art historians, including our contributor Diane Apostolos-Cappadona whose essay is in chapter 8. Brown is apparently so gun-shy of the criticism he received for arguing that Mary Magdalene was in The Last Supper that he doesn’t even bother to mention that the central artwork of TLS is focused on a woman. Instead, he writes about the adept in the Dürer engraving in gender-neutral terms.)

  The school of ancient mysteries’ take on Melencolia I is that Dürer is reflecting the psychological pain of the adept who hoped to gain secret, sacred knowledge about the meaning of life and perhaps find a way to immortality, but has failed. The scientific and mathematical tools are all there. Several of them, like the compass and the “smooth ashlar” of the mystical polyhedron, are about to become standard symbols of Freemasonry in the two centuries after Dürer’s life. But in spite of access to the proper tools and the right knowledge, the desired result has not occurred. The adept therefore is frustrated, sad, melancholic, perhaps like Faust, suicidal. There is even a dog in the image, reminiscent of the stray dog Faust brings home, who morphs into the soul-collecting devil.

  The adept has been at this for a long time, but has not been able to figure out how to obtain physical immortality. Neither, we might note, have any of the ancient mystery school heroes of TLS. We, the readers, share the adept’s frustration in our own lives. We can come close to real sacred knowledge about the meaning of life, we can find metaphors and symbols to approximate our ideas, but almost by definition we can never quite catch it, any more than we can travel faster than the speed of light. As it turns out, like so much else, the meaning of life is all about the journey. The fact that the desired result of the quest for higher knowledge is unobtainable should not stop us from trying to reach for it. But our happiness and fulfillment will come from the process, not the unobtainable end product.

  TLS succeeds mightily in raising interesting questions and giving us enough to go on to trigger our own interior explorations should we be so inclined. But it certainly doesn’t offer much in the way of answers. Indeed, as we close page 509, having finished the final chapter (conveniently numbered 133), we aren’t even sure what we’ve been looking for all this time: The lost pyramid? The lost symbol? The lost word? Nor are we sure what we’ve found: The Washington Monument (lost pyramid)? The circumpunct (lost symbol)? The Bible (lost word)? Is Dan Brown’s most important book about preparing for our ultimate death . . . or about how to live our lives?

  The Lost Symbol’s focus on death is not pessimistic. Masons pay attention to death and reenact death scenes in order to increase the focus on the here and now. As much as TLS is about loss and sacrifice and death, it is also a novel about change and transformation. It references the alchemists’ search for transformation, the mystics’ search for transformation, the scientists’ search for transformation. And it celebrates the American revolutionaries who, learning from the ancients in Greece and Rome, made one of the world’s most important historical transformations, overturning centuries of government by kings and clergy and establishing the first modern government elected and run by ordinary mortal men.

  Dan Brown’s telling of The Lost Symbol story has apocalyptic overtones. All his books do. We live in those kind of times. But both Robert Langdon and Peter Solomon reassure us multiple times in the course of their night in Washington that the world is not really going to end in 2012 or any other time soon. Christian/Greek references to “apocalypse” mean only
the end of the world as we know it, and therefore the potential for Re-velation and with it, the beginning of a new and more wonderful world ahead, enriched by what will be re-membered from the ancient wisdom and re-called from the Lost Word. Rebirth and renaissance lie ahead. Perhaps even a new age of wonder.

  At least that is Dan Brown’s wish for humanity at the end of Robert Langdon’s long night’s journey through the mysteries of Washington.

  Chapter Two

  History, Mystery, and Masons

  Dan Brown’s Freemasonry

  by Arturo de Hoyos, 33°, Grand Cross

  In The Lost Symbol, Freemasonry is portrayed as a benign, benevolent order dedicated to facilitating one’s journey toward “the light.” It protects protagonist Robert Langdon and provides him with the clues that will lead him physically to the villain and metaphorically to his discovery of “the Word” and the truth that can reunite man with his severed spirituality. These are no small feats in the space of the twelve-hour story.

  Before the novel was published, it was widely assumed that the Masons, with their love of secrecy and mysterious rituals, would get treated in The Lost Symbol in much the same way Dan Brown had portrayed the Illuminati in Angels & Demons and The Priory of Sion in The Da Vinci Code: as a shadow organization with shocking secrets to protect and great conspiracies to generate. Instead, Brown and his alter ego, Robert Langdon, seem not only intrigued with the Masons, but so admiring as to be about ready to join.

  So who are these Masons? What is their history, and how are they organized? And despite his admiration of them, does the novelist portray the brotherhood and its rituals accurately? To find the answers to these and other questions we reached out to the man widely regarded as America’s most authoritative scholar of Masonry: Grand Archivist and Grand Historian Arturo de Hoyos, a 33° Mason and holder of the Grand Cross of the Court of Honor in the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite in America.

  De Hoyos begins by tracing the roots and explaining the nature of Freemasonry. He then switches gears and addresses The Lost Symbol directly. While he finds the novel “respectful and inoffensive” on the whole, de Hoyos says that it is inaccurate and misleading in some places when it comes to the presentation of some of the finer points of Masonry.

  Freemasonry is the world’s oldest and largest fraternity, developed from the stonemason associations of the Middle Ages in Scotland and England. The word freemason is a contraction of freestone mason, meaning hewers of freestone, a fine-grained stone that could be carved equally well in any direction. In 1717 the first Masonic “Grand Lodge” (or governing body) was created in London, setting a model for fraternal development and self-governing organizational principles. Degrees were established as a type of initiatory ceremonial drama, using esoteric symbolism to teach life lessons in philosophy and morality.

  During the mid-1700s many additional degrees were created and so-called haute-grade (high-degree) “Appendant” Masonry became popular. The most successful of these Appendant orders, in terms of membership, is the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, which was founded in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 31, 1801. Its governing body today is called the Supreme Council, 33°. The Scottish Rite administers thirty-three degrees, the highest of which, the thirty-third, is given to only a few as an honor for faithful service, and to certain presiding officers. One need not be a stonemason anymore to join the fraternity. The governing rules state that membership requires only a belief in a Supreme Being, that one be of good moral character, and that one have a hope for a future state of existence. Freemasonry has no unique religious dogmas, and offers no plan of salvation. Indeed, religion and politics are not allowed to be discussed at lodge meetings.

  The purpose for the ancient regalia (e.g., aprons, gloves), titles, rituals, and symbols, as well as the practical working tools (squares, compasses, etc.), is to teach life lessons in philosophy and morality that will help the Mason reach a higher degree and move closer to “the light” of self-improvement and moral perfection. It is not to protect themselves as a secret society.

  In spite of what we know concerning Masonic origins, and how it was developed into a fraternity by skilled craftsmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Scotland and England, there are advocates of a “romantic school” within the brotherhood who assert that ancient writings, legends, mythology, symbolism, and circumstantial evidence suggest much older origins, including Solomon’s Temple, the ancient Egyptians, the mystery schools, the alchemists, Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, Knights Templar, and other arcane orders. In earlier times enthusiasts attributed the craft’s origins to Noah, Nimrod, and even Adam, because of his fig-leaf apron.

  For modern conspiracy theorists, however, it is of minor importance from whence Freemasonry comes, although it is of supreme importance whither it travels and what influence it allegedly exerts. Adolf Hitler, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and other dictators accepted the same anti-Masonic ravings as the conspiracy theorists who fear that the fraternity supports a one-world government known as the New World Order. Inevitably, they turn to forgeries, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or to hoaxes, such as the writings of “Léo Taxil,” or to pseudoscholarly works like those of C. W. Leadbeater. Such works advocate fringe notions such as Jewish-Masonic conspiracies, Luciferianism, or alleged connections to the ancient mysteries rather than relying on the work of competent historians.

  Dan Brown’s Freemasonry dances near the perimeter of such notions. Mal’akh’s Freemasonry is esoteric, and borders on being conspiratorial. The fraternity’s true “principal tenets”—brotherly love, relief, and truth—are overshadowed by an obsession that rushes him toward a Kafkaesque metamorphosis he calls the “transformation.” By discovering and using the ultimate Masonic secret, the “Lost Word,” he seeks liberation from mortality. Also skirting the edge is the portrayal of Peter Solomon. True, his Freemasonry is benevolent and borders on the sacred, yet there are strong suggestions of political influence running like an undercurrent through Washington, D.C.’s halls of power. In general, however, Brown’s presentation of Freemasonry—errors and all—is respectful and inoffensive.

  Additionally, there are a number of more concrete elements to Dan Brown’s interpretation of Masonic practices and symbols, where facts tend to lose themselves in the fiction of The Lost Symbol. Here is a sampling:

  • The prologue of TLS describes a 33° initiation ritual as it is conferred upon Mal’akh in the Temple Room at the House of the Temple at 8:33 p.m. However, the 33° is neither conferred at the House of the Temple nor at night. It is regularly conferred mid-afternoon during biennial meetings (called “sessions”) of the Supreme Council 33°, Southern Jurisdiction, held near the end of September or the beginning of October in odd years, and usually at a Scottish Rite building located at 2800 Sixteenth Street, N.W., about ten blocks north of the House of the Temple. Furthermore, Mal’akh is too young to receive the 33°. He is described by Dan Brown as thirty-four; the Statutes of the Supreme Council require that he be at least thirty-five years old. Although Mal’akh is dressed “as a master,” and those present wear lambskin aprons, sashes, and white gloves, this is fiction, not fact. Initiates and attendees at 33° do not dress in aprons, sashes, or white gloves; a black tuxedo is sufficient.

  • Peter Solomon is called the “Worshipful Master,” but in reality the principal officer of the Supreme Council is the “Sovereign Grand Commander.” During his reception of the 33°, Mal’akh reminds himself that “the secret is how to die.” Although the importance of this phrase will escape most readers (including most American Masons), it occurs in many English rituals of the 33° Master Mason, during a part known as the “Exhortation of the Worshipful Master.” In this brief discourse, Nature is said to prepare us for the closing hour of existence and “finally instructs you how to die”—a definition of philosophy shared by Plato (Phaedo, 67d) and Cicero (De Contemnenda Morte, 30).

/>   • As a part of his 33° initiation, Mal’akh drinks wine from a human skull to seal his 33° oath. This has never been the practice within the mainstream of the Scottish Rite. It was the practice of a splinter group that called itself the Cerneau Scottish Rite, a pseudo-Masonic organization that competed with the Scottish Rite during the 1800s.

  • The interpretations of some of the symbols are also errant. For example, the red symbol displayed prominently on the front cover of the American edition of the book represents the seal impression of Peter Solomon’s 33° ring, which is thus described: “Its face bore the image of a double-headed phoenix holding a banner proclaiming ordo ab chao, and its chest was emblazoned with the number 33.” Its band, says the novelist, is engraved with the words “All is revealed at the 33°.” In reality, the seal of the Supreme Council 33° actually uses a double-headed eagle. Furthermore, the double-headed eagle does not appear on the 33° ring at all. Rather, the 33° ring is simply a triple band of gold, which may or may not bear the number 33 within a triangle. The inner band of the 33° ring is engraved with the words deus meumque jus (my God and my right), which is the motto of the degree. The motto ordo ab chao is instead the motto of the Supreme Council 33°, not of the degree itself.