Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  Years ago, my father and I attended a conference called “Scientist to Scientist,” an attempt to encourage scientists from different disciplines to converse with one another. I was put in as the humanist outlier. The particle physicists’ description of their work, with its four kinds of energy pointing toward a final unity, sounded strangely like the Pythagorean search for a transcendent One. And their idea that this final revelation would be fully available only to a few physicists sounded suspiciously like the Pythagoreans’ secret sect of initiates. To be sure, the particle physicists asserted that they could never make their discoveries without a huge, expensive instrument, the superconducting supercollider, whereas Pythagoras made his observations about music and its relationship to numbers on the strings of a lyre. But the legacies of Pythagoras and Plato live on in the aesthetic standards that scientists use for their proofs, which must be “robust,” “elegant,” and tend toward simplicity. The idea is remarkably persistent, and a number of younger scientists recognize that fact—Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe is a good example.

  Agrippa?

  Agrippa is another one of those names we always encounter in connection with “occult philosophy,” whether in The Lost Symbol or anywhere else that treats similar subject matter—Agrippa wrote a book called On the Occult Philosophy. In fact, I was thinking about the concept of the “occult” this morning, and realized that an easy way to make information occult and secret in earlier ages was simply to write it down.

  Wait a minute—write things down to keep them secret?

  Well, until the modern era, writing things down required knowing how to read in order to have access to that knowledge—a pretty good way to keep it hidden. Ironically, then, recording something in a book made it almost by definition secret and hidden. Agrippa’s book On the Occult Philosophy was totally incomprehensible to most of his contemporaries, who were illiterate peasants. His readers, like many people, really enjoyed that air of secrecy, and the fact that their knowledge was withheld from most people.

  Dürer?

  I suspect that Dan Brown would love to be an art historian but hasn’t quite figured out yet how to read art. His interpretations of Leonardo’s Last Supper in The Da Vinci Code weren’t really very sophisticated, and earned him a good deal of criticism. In The Lost Symbol he mentions Dürer’s amazing engraving, Melencolia I, but he doesn’t really give it the kind of formal analysis he attempted in The Da Vinci Code. All Brown needs for his immediate purpose is the magic square in the engraving’s background, and rather than tackle the still-unsolved problem of Melencolia’s symbolism and call down legions of irate scholars, he keeps his story focused on the arithmetical problem posed by the magic square.

  Again, I think we see a highly self-critical writer figuring out what he can and cannot do. He wants to get an enigmatic picture in there for atmosphere, but he realizes that he doesn’t have to explain the enigma, but rather evoke it. So he does what he does best, which is to weave Dürer’s Melencolia I into his thriller plot.

  You have a couple of references in your Bruno book to Dürer and potential interconnections there.

  Bruno was an Italian who spent a good deal of time in Germany, and Dürer was a German who spent time in Italy. There were some fascinating interchanges back and forth across the Alps in the sixteenth century. The Germans were more interested in mathematics and the more verbal aspects of learning, and the Italians developed a marvelous visual language to express some of the same ideas. Both Dürer and Bruno created systems of astonishing complexity: mental systems, visual systems, symbolic systems. And both believed that all these systems ultimately tied together. And despite Italy’s dominance over the artistic culture of early modern Europe, Dürer’s skill as an engraver and woodcut artist stood, and still stands, in a class by itself.

  Any other concluding thoughts with The Lost Symbol so fresh in your mind?

  Several things struck me about the book, all of them relating to the current Zeitgeist. I can’t help feeling that Brown’s choice of exposure on the Internet as his villain’s most dire threat must be a commentary on his own runaway success—the runaway, incontrollable aspect of it. First, he set out to write an adventure story, and ended up becoming an oracle. Out of their context the details of The Da Vinci Code are as silly as the sight of prominent senators performing Masonic rituals. And having propelled hordes of tourists to Paris, Rome, and Rosslyn, he has sensibly decided in a time of economic crisis to send them all to see Washington instead—good for their budgets, good for Washington’s need for income.

  Second, Brown basically says that the secret to all of the secret lore actually lies right under our noses, and we all know what that secret is: live a moderate life. We all know what it takes to lose weight, to listen to other people, to hold in our tempers—only it is just plain hard work to be virtuous.

  Interestingly, several of the new book’s characters have every reason to be deeply resentful of the United States: Sato, a Japanese-American woman born in the Manzanar internment camp, and Bellamy, an African-American who is keenly aware of a point that Langdon also makes, that slaves did the hard and ironic job of lifting the statue of Freedom to the top of the Capitol Dome. And yet, these characters are all loyal servants of the United States and dedicated to its ideals, even when reality often falls short of those ideals.

  Then, as if to reinforce the message of personal responsibility, we have villainy that comes from within human nature—no Russians, Nazis, or jihadists coming from outside, but instead the forces of bad or misdirected discipline that knock us out of balance. There is a strong biblical subtext: Peter Solomon is asked to reenact Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, but this time there’s no angel to grab his arm. Instead, this tormented father feels all his terrible, vengeful thoughts, but still drives the sacrificial knife into a table rather than into his son. In the end, this humanity, the humanity to which we all really aspire, prevails. And this ability to control our basest impulses is, to me, really the essence of civilization.

  The plot of The Lost Symbol assumes some real social responsibility: this is admirable proof that Dan Brown has thought carefully about his success and its larger implications. The Da Vinci Code ended by assuring us that there are descendants of a Merovingian monarchy living among us—who really cares? The Lost Symbol concludes with the vision of a United States that might really live up to its founding principles. That is, a vision that makes a tremendous difference in many lives all over the world. The book tells us in addition that redemption comes not as deliverance from outside, but as the hard-won result of a constant struggle between our better and our baser natures.

  This is the same message conveyed by the Ancient Mysteries, and it’s a hard message to hear. The Lost Symbol is lost by our own actions; it happens every time we lose touch with the real purposes of life.

  Isaac Newton

  Physics, Alchemy, and the Search to Understand the “Mind of God”

  an interview with Thomas Levenson

  If Dan Brown were going to invent an ideal historical icon, that creation would read an awful lot like Sir Isaac Newton. Newton is best known as the father of modern physics, but he was also an alchemist and he was obsessed with the Bible and the true meaning of Scripture. Since he didn’t have to invent him, Brown makes liberal use of this very real figure. The Lost Symbol includes twenty-six references to Newton, and, as Langdon fans know, Newton also figured prominently in The Da Vinci Code, with a climactic scene of that novel set in Newton’s crypt in Westminster Abbey.

  Brown invokes Newton to underscore many of his points about the connection between science and spirit. But how much of what he says about Newton adheres to history and how much did he bend for the convenience of his story? To find out, we spoke with Thomas Levenson, a professor at MIT who runs MIT’s graduate program in science writing. He has made several documentary films about science, and he is the autho
r of four books, including the recent Newton and the Counterfeiter, which chronicles a little-known episode in Newton’s life when he served as Warden of His Majesty’s Mint.

  One of the central themes of The Lost Symbol is that science and mysticism were once closely intertwined, that “hard science” drove out all semblance of spirit in the laboratory, and that a new science is reuniting the physical and the spiritual worlds. Do you see a dichotomy between Newton as a scientist and Newton as an alchemist?

  There’s no dichotomy between science and alchemy in the way Newton pursued it. I don’t think Newton had a mystical side in the way that twenty-first-century people think of mysticism or spirituality. He was someone who, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Hawking, wanted to “know the mind of God.” It wasn’t at all strange then to have deeply intellectual people thinking about things that looked like magic. This kind of exploration was just another way of trying to learn about the world. Robert Boyle, who many regard as one of the founders of modern chemistry, was an avid alchemist. John Locke was a great political philosopher, a voice for religious tolerance, and a theorist about money, and he, too, was an alchemist.

  Alchemy was an inquiry into how change happens in nature. Alchemists in Newton’s time wanted to understand chemical transformations. This had nothing to do with magic or mysticism. It would not have been inconsistent with his role as a scientist to pursue alchemical experiments.

  You mentioned Boyle. In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown refers to Newton’s letter to Boyle asking him to maintain “high silence” about their experiments because the world would consider them dangerous and inflammatory. What was the nature of the Newton-Boyle relationship? Did Newton really ask Boyle to maintain such a silence?

  Newton did write a letter suggesting that it was not a good idea for Boyle to talk about an alchemical sequence of experiments.

  There is a long-standing, alchemical tradition of secrecy and coded communication. This has a quasireligious element, along with elements of a religious closed society, which of course makes it great fodder for conspiracy theories and blockbuster fiction. Newton didn’t believe that alchemists should publish scientific papers because of the potential implications of their work. Boyle wanted to publish and create an exchange of information and Newton told him in this letter that it was dangerous to reveal these secrets.

  If we put these alchemical experiments in a modern context, it makes one think of enriching uranium or growing diamonds in a laboratory. The alchemists obviously lacked the tools to create fissionable reactions and so forth, but was this what they were going for?

  Yes and no. We now know today that we can transmute elements in the lab and that nature transmutes elements all the time. Stars start from hydrogen and helium and make the rest of the periodic table as they “burn”—through the process of nuclear fusion. When radioactive elements decay, they decay into other elements. We can make plutonium, which does not exist naturally. We can make Neptunium. We can make more than twenty elements above the naturally occurring ones. I think alchemists of Newton’s day, and perhaps Newton himself, would have seen the line of descent that lies between what they were doing and this work. But I think Newton would have been concerned with the radical erosion of the idea that one might detect the presence of God in such transformative events.

  In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown refers to “secret papers” discovered in 1936. Did such papers exist?

  They existed, but they weren’t secret. Newton’s papers were scattered somewhat after his death. In fact, individual letters are still turning up. But the bulk of his papers went to the Earl of Portsmouth. The papers that were sold at Sotheby’s in 1936 were alchemical papers that had been held by the Earls of Portsmouth for a long time. Earlier, they had attempted to donate a number of papers to Cambridge University Library, but the university turned down the alchemical papers, deeming them to be of no scientific interest.

  Could Newton have also been a Freemason? Dan Brown seems to think so, even though by all accounts Freemasonry didn’t have any real organized presence until very close to the end of Newton’s life.

  I think this makes for great fiction. People have had fun with the notion of secret societies for a long time. The associations that novelists ascribe to Newton and other brilliant figures are either not in the right time frame historically or are so elusive that it’s difficult to give them any credence. I suppose there is a chance that Newton was a Freemason, but I strongly doubt it. For one reason, there isn’t any institutional record of Masonic lodges in England until Newton was in his late seventies. And for another reason, Newton kept a lot of records—private papers on all kinds of things that he kept out of the public eye, such as stuff about his religious and alchemical beliefs—but I’ve never seen any papers in Newton’s hand mentioning any connection to Freemasonry. Newton’s major association and involvement was with the Royal Society, which he presided over for the last quarter of his life. That role of his is extremely well known and well documented.

  Brown refers to a 1704 Newton manuscript seeking to extract scientific information from the Bible. Brown claims that, over his lifetime, Newton wrote more than a million words about Scripture.

  I haven’t actually totaled up the amount Newton wrote on religion, but it would add up to many thousands of words. Newton’s interest in this subject was enormous. He wrote a huge amount about religion—and he rewrote and rewrote. However, I don’t think he was attempting to extract scientific truth from Scripture. I think he was attempting to use his kind of scientific reasoning to recover Scripture from its decayed state. He felt that there had been decisions made in some of the early church councils that undermined a true religion and he sought to fix this.

  What he did say in print in the early eighteenth century was that the universe is “the sensorium of God”—and that God extends throughout creation, all powerful and fully aware of all that exists within His creation. That is Newton’s science informing his religion and his interpretation of Scripture, not the other way around.

  Chapter Four

  Science, Faith, and the Birth of a Nation

  From the Ground Up

  Kindred Spirits Invent the Modern World

  an interview with Steven Johnson

  The eighteenth century was an extraordinary age of great ideas and groundbreaking innovations. The great minds of this European Enlightenment—Voltaire, Priestley, Banks, Herschel, and many more—were exploring all areas of human knowledge at once: philosophy, political theory, chemistry, astronomy, physics, mathematics, medicine, and more. Radical new ideas emerged from a number of loosely organized social networks of alchemists, proto-scientists, and scientists, meeting in coffeehouses, taverns, and even Masonic lodges—anywhere they could escape the suspicious eyes of Church and State. Sometimes facing marginalization and persecution by this “old order,” a number of leading intellectuals increasingly saw America as the future, a land where freedom of speech and expression were taking hold. Although Europe continued to see itself as the center of the Enlightenment, some visionary thinkers already understood that the energy for innovation was shifting to the New World. This history fuels Dan Brown’s view of the Founding Fathers’ self-knowledge about the intellectual revolution they were making. In their integration of politics, science, cosmology, and new approaches to religion and faith, and in the way they remained fascinated and informed by “ancient knowledge,” the thinkers of the time become the perfect reference point for several of Robert Langdon’s soliloquies.

  Contemporary author and polymath Steven Johnson calls this late-eighteenth-century moment the era of “intellectual plate tectonics.” The title of his most recent book captures it perfectly: The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. In it, Johnson explores the way new ideas emerged and spread, and the environment that fostered their breakthroughs. Johnson is also known for his writing ab
out a wide variety of intriguing twenty-first-century topics. His previous book is Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

  In this dialogue with Arne de Keijzer, Johnson shares his perspectives on Enlightenment ideas and their influence on the founding of America through the person of Joseph Priestley. Priestley was one of the most celebrated men of the era as a scientist (a leader in the discovery of oxygen), a religious figure (a minister who broke from the church of England to help found Unitarianism), and a political activist (he supported the French revolution). Priestley makes only a cameo appearance in The Lost Symbol, but, as Johnson makes clear, Priestley represents the ideal intellectual synthesis that is always in the background of Dan Brown’s novel.

  While Dan Brown doesn’t really delve into it in the way he did the era of Galileo in Angels & Demons and early Christianity in The Da Vinci Code, the Enlightenment is surely the stage for the ideas behind The Lost Symbol. What was it about the eighteenth century that made it so important and such a turning point in history?

  The scientific, social, and political principles of the modern world were, in many ways, invented in the eighteenth century: the experimental method, the U.S. Constitution, the first great wave of the industrial revolution in northern England. Along with those extraordinary developments there arose another critical way of thinking about the world: the idea that society was advancing up a steady and predictable ladder of progress. The Renaissance had unleashed its own revolutions in human understanding, but the governing idea during that period was cyclical: historical periods of clarity were quickly followed by periods of darkness. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that we started to assume that science and technology were going to continue to advance, perhaps at accelerating rates. This idea is one of Priestley’s great legacies; it’s a dominant theme in his first big book on the history of electricity, and it was one of the things that I think appealed to Franklin and Jefferson about him.