At the heart of The Lost Symbol lies one main tendency in the mystical tradition of Christian Europe, called in the novel “the Ancient Mysteries.” In general, ancient mysteries are just anything old and intriguing, but what Dan Brown means by the phrase, “the Ancient Mysteries,” is specifically the Christian counterpart to the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Like Kabbalah, the Ancient Mysteries involve a complex allegorical system, an array of signs composed at once of symbolic and conceptual elements.
In The Lost Symbol, the Ancient Mysteries, or at least a symbolic map to locating their documentation, has allegedly been hidden in a Masonic Pyramid. The villain Mal’akh forces hero Robert Langdon to discover the Pyramid and decipher the Mysteries so that he might possess the Lost Word and attain apotheosis. However misleading they are, none of the explanations Robert Langdon gives of the Ancient Mysteries and the Masonic Pyramid are clearly false, which circumstance gives the character of the Harvard professor a greater degree of verisimilitude than in The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons.
In between the lines of the text, Dan Brown shows, however, that he understands the Ancient Mysteries much better than even his hero. While Langdon merely uses the Ancient Mysteries to solve a series of puzzles, Brown writes them into the fabric of his text. Brown’s third mystery thriller thus becomes the most cryptographic of all, because it is also a mystery revelation. In order to better appreciate revelation according to Dan Brown, I propose to share something of my own comprehension of the Ancient Mysteries.
Origin of the Mysteries
The Ancient Mysteries come down to modern times from four main sources. First, there is the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, the final book of the New Testament, written, it is generally believed, in the mid-second century of the Common Era. The fact that the Ancient Mysteries are available, though in disguised form, within the Book of Revelation, makes it one of the chief texts in the canon of Western literature. Second, there is an important commentary on the Book of Revelation by Joachim of Flora in the late twelfth century, which became the lodestar of Franciscan theology. Third, there are the original decks of Tarot cards developed by unknown artists in northern Italy during the early to middle fifteenth century. Fourth, there is the great Spanish novel La Celestina, written by Fernando de Rojas in the very late fifteenth century and to which Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is evidently indebted. All four of these are Christian documents and display a fundamental command of the Ancient Mysteries.
The Ancient Mysteries have older antecedents. They were probably developed over the quarter millennium prior to the writing of the Book of Revelation in what is known as Alexandrian culture. This pre-Christian culture takes its name from the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, which, once founded by Alexander the Great, quickly grew to be the largest, wealthiest, and most cosmopolitan of all the Greek-speaking cities.
Among several intellectual tendencies, which are both characteristic of Alexandrian culture and present in the Book of Revelation, are these:
• the philological tradition of the library of Alexandria, represented (to us) by figures such as the poet Callimachus;
• Neoplatonic philosophy, represented by the Enneads of Plotinus;
• Neopythagorean mathematics as found in textbooks by Nichomachus of Gerasa and Theon of Smyrna;
• the allegorical biblical exegesis of Philo the Jew; and
• the kinds of astronomy and astrology represented, respectively, by Claudius Ptolemy and Macrobius.
Nature of the Mysteries
Ancient Mysteries are complex signs in the sense that they have multiple conceptual and symbolic aspects. They are wholes that may involve a number of components, such as:
• a geometrical figure,
• a number (for their place in the series of Ancient Mysteries),
• a graphic image (based on the geometrical figure),
• a name (for the graphic image),
• an emblematic device (based on the graphic image),
• a name (for the emblem),
• a pictorial composition (utilizing the emblem or other reference), as in Tarot,
• a name (for the pictorial composition), and
• a literary passage (based on one or more of the above), something found in the twentieth century in T. S. Eliot, Italo Calvino, Sylvia Plath, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.
Any of these components might be used to make reference to an Ancient Mystery.
The Ancient Mysteries are defined in terms of the systematic relationships they have with one another. These systematic contexts, which may vary over time and with purpose, determine symbolic interpretations. Among the purposes to which the Ancient Mysteries have been put are saving souls, predicting the future, making magic, codifying messages, and telling stories.
The Ancient Mysteries have been seen as Forms (Platonism), Emanations (Neoplatonism), and the Language of Angels (Gnosticism). They also have multiple meanings and roles in Tarot: Ancient Keys, Major Arcana, Triumphs or Trumps, and Tarot cards more generally.
In TLS, note the abundance of keys (and doors) in the stretch of text between “Keys will be arriving any moment” (chapter 32) and “I now have my own set of keys” (chapter 37). Cards appear in various places, for example, “Mal’akh had played his cards artfully” (chapter 12) and “Katherine realized she had one final card to play” (chapter 47).
Geometrical Figures
The doctrine of the Ancient Mysteries begins with the idea that Divinity would manifest itself in the physical universe as the most beautiful of forms. This “Paragon of Beauty” turns out to be the simplest right-angle triangle and its height, where the ratios of its sides and height are expressible in whole number ratio. The hypotenuse of the triangle in question is twenty-five; the other two sides, fifteen and twenty. Its height of twelve, which splits the hypotenuse into segments of nine and sixteen, divides the triangle into two similar triangles.
The geometrical figures associated with the other twenty members in the series of Ancient Mysteries are produced by multiplying this figure by the counting numbers from two through twenty-one. Stated differently, each figure is bigger than the last one by the size of the first.
Matter
A Geometrical Figure as a whole is called “Trinity” because it is the union of three component triangles. The smallest component triangle is “Mother,” the middle one is “Father,” and the largest, which is formed when Father and Mother join, is the “Son.”
The height of a Geometrical Figure, plus its hypotenuse, let us call “Matter”; the sum of the other two sides (or legs) “Spirit.” The aspect that is most often named to refer to the Ancient Mysteries is Matter.
In the First Ancient Mystery, Matter is the hypotenuse of 25 plus the height of 12, making 37. One of the names by which Mal’akh goes by in the novel is Inmate 37 (chapter 57). Meanwhile, in chapter 15, it is said that “thirty-seven Random Event Generators” become less random.
The Third Ancient Mystery has its Matter as 3 times 37, making 111, and comes into the Tarot as “III The Emperor.” The sequence of letters “Washington” appears exactly III times in The Lost Symbol. This is ironic insofar as George Washington refused to be king, much less emperor. But TLS is filled with references to the Hebrew names for God, including “Lord,” and to the artistic and philosophical apotheosis of Washington, so there are many connections to be made there. In any event, the patterns are clear enough: Brown is not picking numbers out of the air. There is method to his madness here.
The Matter of the Fifteenth Ancient Mystery is 15 times 37, or 555. In TLS, it is stated four times that there are 555 feet in the Washington Monument (chapters 1, 20, 128, 129). Fittingly, in one main version of Tarot, the Fifteenth Ancient key is named “The Tower.”
The eighteenth of the Ancient Mysteries has a Spirit of 630 and a Matter of 666,
which successive triangular numbers add up the square of 36, or 1,296, the Trinity of this Ancient Mystery. The Graphic Image produced by these polygons is the most magnificent of them all, producing the Eighteenth Ancient Key in Tarot, “The Sun.” Revelation 13:18 names this Ancient Mystery through the number 666, calling it “the Number of the Beast,” and using it to represent the planet Saturn.
Graphic Images
Graphic Images are made from seven polygons, which are made by arranging stones and which are called the “Seven Stars.” The simplest of these is the equilateral triangle, and the other polygons are constructed from this triangle. The other Stars are the cube, the hexagon, the four-point star, the six-point star (“Seal of Solomon,” “Star of David”), the eight-point star (“Nativity Star”), and the twelve-point star.
Each of the Seven Stars comes in different sizes, and they are used to represent the values of selected aspects of the Geometrical Figures. Two polygons are selected when available. The larger is the basic figure of the graphic image, and is constructed of white stones. The smaller polygon (or at least a design with the same numerical value) is placed inside the larger by substituting the white stones with black ones.
More than one graphic image may be produced from the same Geometrical Figure. The First Ancient Mystery has two Graphic Images, traditionally called the “Eyes of God.” The Left Eye of God corresponds to the emblematic device called the Square and Compass, which is the symbol of Masonry. The Right Eye of God is the Graphic Image behind the emblems utilized in the Pictorial Composition of the First Ancient Key in Tarot, named The Bagatelle or The Magician. This Right Eye also produces the literary vignette in Revelation in which the Son of Man appears before John with seven stars in his right hand. One of these eyes appears on top of the unfinished pyramid on the one-dollar bill (chapter 75).
Serial Numbers
The number of an Ancient Mystery (or of an Ancient Key of Tarot) is the place of its Geometrical Figure in the series from one through twenty-one.
The room in the subbasement of the Capitol Building to which the clues send the seekers is “SBB13,” the thirteenth office, as in “XIII Death” in Tarot, because the story being told is that of a descent to Hell (as in “Homer’s Odyssey,” mentioned in chapter 57). When Langdon asks whose office it is, the answer is “Nobody’s” (chapter 28), just as the Graphic Image of the Ancient Mystery is empty because none of the aspects of its Geometrical Figure correspond to any of the Seven Stars.
Note as well another key reference here: “the coyly nicknamed explosive Key4” (chapter 58).
An Allegorical Veil
Once again, the pictorial artist enjoys a certain degree of latitude in the constructing of Graphic Images; the Book of Revelation, Tarot, and Rojas offer alternatives. In Revelation, the Twelfth Graphic Image suggests the emblem of the Bottomless Pit (in TLS, Brown plays with a variety of references to pits, especially a Vestal fire in the basement of the Capitol). But in Tarot tradition, a different treatment of the smaller polygon yields the Purse and Noose, which are, respectively, the evangelical and the martyrological emblems of Judas Iscariot, emblems not available to the author of Revelation.
In Tarot, these emblems are always employed within a more inclusive Pictorial Composition. In the Twelfth Ancient Key of Tarot, the Purse and Noose emblem appears as a man holding a purse of silver coins and hanging from a noose by a foot. To be hung upside down, called “baffling,” was a torture for traitors such as Judas. Intriguingly, Officer Alfonso Nuñez is said to be “baffled” by Warren Bellamy (chapter 42). (Incidentally, Dan Brown reports hanging upside down with gravity boots whenever he has writer’s block or needs to work out a plot point.)
The Matter of the Twelfth Ancient Mystery is 444. In the Twelfth of the Major Arcana of Tarot, “The Hanged Man,” the man crosses his legs in a figure 4.
Dan Brown may allude to XII The Hanged Man when Mal’akh wears a noose in the Masonic initiation in the prologue. What is more, since the Twelfth Ancient Mystery is cosmologically the Moon (see next section), it makes sense for Mal’akh to be called a “lunatic” various times.
Brown has Mal’akh assume the pseudonym Abaddon, which is the Hebrew name for the Angel of the Bottomless Pit in the Book of Revelation. Mal’akh/Abaddon then places Robert Langdon in an “endless abyss” (chapter 108); Brown may well be alluding to the Bottomless Pit symbol from Revelation.
Cosmic Psaltery
The Ancient Mysteries have been arranged in different geometrical models to express the spatial and temporal dimensions of the universe. Joachim of Flora, for example, places the Ancient Mysteries in a diagram called the Cosmic Psaltery. Each of ten cosmic spheres (in some of which planets orbit) is expressed by two Ancient Mysteries, but the Eleventh Ancient Mystery represents the Earth as Center of the Cosmos. Thus the sphere of the Moon is represented by the Tenth and Twelfth Ancient Mysteries, that of Mercury by the ninth and the thirteenth, and so forth. Between each pair of Mysteries is stretched a chord of the psaltery, on which God the Father, Christ, or David plays the Music of the Spheres. This diagram was frequently reproduced in medieval manuscripts.
Dan Brown seems to grasp this scheme in The Lost Symbol. In the Tarot, “XI The Old Man” (or “The Hunchback”) is followed by “XII The Hanged Man.” And Dean Galloway´s surname might be understood as on the way to the gallows, as it were, of the hanged man. He is described as “stooped” (chapter 82) like a hunchback, and called an “old man.”
At one point Dean Galloway asks, “How many do you need to detain an old man?” (chapter 92). Whereupon Inoue Sato replies, “seven of us [. . .] including Robert Langdon, Katherine Solomon, and your Masonic brother Warren Bellamy.” There are seven because there are seven planets that circle the Eleventh Ancient Mystery, interpreted cosmologically as the Earth, and perhaps because several characters in the novel, including those named, are symbolically associated with the planets. Finally, Galloway responds, “Thank heavens.”
The Game Is Afoot!
The Lost Symbol calls for the mystically inclined reader to participate in a treasure hunt for the Ancient Mysteries. If Brown has really developed his characters in terms of Tarot trumps, we should be able to guess who’s who. Here are some guesses about fifteen trumps, listed according to the names and numbers given in a late-fifteenth-century sermon.
0 Fool—Zachary Solomon and all his other identities: Inmate 37, Andros Dareios, Mal’akh, Dr. Christopher Abaddon, Anthony Jelbart
1 Bagatelle—Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist
2 Empress—Inoue Sato, director, CIA Office of Security
3 Emperor—Trent Anderson, Capitol police chief
4 Popess—Katherine Solomon, Noetic scientist
5 Pope—Peter Solomon, Supreme Worshipful Master
6 Temperance—Nola Kaye, CIA senior analyst
7 Love—Trish Dunne and Mark Zoubianis, hackers
8 Car—Omar Amirana, cabbie
9 Force—Hercules, mastiff
10 Wheel—Turner Simkins, CIA field operations leader
11 Hunchback—Colin Galloway, dean of Washington’s National Cathedral
12 Hanged Man—Alfonso Nuñez, Capitol security guard
13 Death—Rick Parrish, CIA security analyst
14 Devil—Warren Bellamy, Architect of the Capitol
15 Arrow—Washington Monument
The Masonic Pyramid and The Lost Symbol
Given Dan Brown’s fascination with magic squares, it might turn out that his take on the Masonic Pyramid is for it to be a stack of increasingly large magic squares or their simulacra, such as Dürer’s four-by-four square and Franklin’s eight-by-eight square. It bears noting that the sequences of letters “Franklin Square” appears 55 times in the novel, and that 55 is the sum of the numbers on any side of any such pyramid with Dürer’s magic square at its base. What is more, the �
�magic constant” (the sum repeated in the rows, columns, and diagonals) in a normal six-by-six magic square is III, the same number of times the sequence “Washington” appears in the novel, and the sum of the numbers in such a square is 666. Perhaps these things are not coincidences, but clues to a Masonic Pyramid embedded in the novel.
The Masonic Pyramid might also be a stack of what we are calling the Geometrical Figures of the Ancient Mysteries. This pyramid is four-sided, not five-sided like those built in ancient Egypt, as well as lopsided, because none of the sides is equal. The Mason is supposed to climb the steps of the pyramid, as well as he might, toward enlightenment and apotheosis.
In Neopythagorean mathematics, any series like the Geometrical Figures of the Ancient Mysteries is thought to derive from a collapsed figure consisting of a single point. This simple unit expresses, through geometric allegory, the (divine or Platonic) One from which the emanations flow in Neoplatonism.
Thus there is one more Ancient Mystery than the Twenty-One. Its Geometrical Figure is a single white stone. In Tarot, the One appears as the (zero or unnumbered) card called The Fool, and later as the Joker of the deck of regular playing cards. If the Lost Symbol of the novel’s title is this One, Dan Brown has found both the most succinct and most sublime of all MacGuffins for his thriller!
An elaboration of this last figure would be the circumpunct, which places the single white stone inside a circle that represents, say, the Emanation of the Logos from the One. This figure, according to The Lost Symbol, is the false solution to the question of the Lost Symbol, the one accepted by foolish Zachary Solomon. The true solution understands word for symbol, and for word the Word of God, the item “lost” being the Masonic Bible buried in the cornerstone of the Washington Monument. This monumental obelisk—being a rather tall, thin pyramid—is then the materialization of the Masonic Pyramid itself, surrounded by decorative circles that suggest the combination of the monument in the circle as the circumpunct. Yet with all this of true and false, we might profitably recall that God’s Word is the Logos, and that none do aspire higher than to be the Fool of God.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 11
