Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  It strikes me that the great minds of the era flourished in part because of the free and open flow of their ideas, across all kinds of topics. And they did this in coffeehouses?

  Priestley met Franklin in the London Coffeehouse, which is not a minor detail in the story because coffeehouses were the intellectual hub of eighteenth-century London. Franklin had a group of like-minded souls, called the Club of Honest Whigs, who gathered at the coffeehouse every two weeks and spent hours there abusing caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, and eating immense quantities of food, all the while debating religious dissent, the new science of electricity, the American question, industrial engineering, and a thousand other topics. It was the cross-disciplinary nature of the coffeehouse space that made it such an engine of innovation during that period.

  You clearly see Priestley as a man with a cornucopia of ideas.

  Priestley was one of the great polymaths of the period. He did cutting-edge work in linguistics and physics (mostly focused on electricity). Along with Lavoisier, he helped usher in the age of modern chemistry and isolated oxygen for the first time. He discovered one of the founding principles of modern ecosystem science: plant respiration, the fact that the earth’s “breathable” atmosphere is entirely created by plant life. He cofounded the Unitarian Church in England, and wrote some of the most controversial religious books of the age. And he had a hand in the American Revolution as well, both as one of the most ardent English supporters of the American cause during the war, and as a major figure in the Alien and Sedition [Acts] controversy after his move to America. It’s almost impossible to imagine a comparable figure today: imagine if Al Gore were not only a former vice president, but also a pioneering climatologist who had helped found a new religious sect. Of course, Priestley’s talents as a polymath were matched by Franklin and Jefferson, but that’s one reason both men found Priestley such a kindred spirit.

  Why was Priestley so intellectually drawn to the Founding Fathers?

  The key thing to understand about Priestley and the American Founders—particularly Franklin and Jefferson—is that their intellectual worldview was profoundly connective in nature. They were constantly trying to detect or create links between different fields: they saw religion and science and political theory as a unified web, not a series of different disciplines with impenetrable walls between them. In a sense, academic disciplines hadn’t been fully codified yet, and so it was much easier to be a generalist back then, to dabble in a dozen different fields and make interesting links of association between them.

  Why did Priestley escape England and move to the United States?

  Priestley’s political and religious positions radicalized over the 1780s, and thanks to a number of controversial essays and sermons, he had become arguably the most hated man in England by the end of the decade. (His early support for the Americans didn’t help, of course.) In 1791, an angry mob burned down his house during the notorious Birmingham riots, which ultimately sent him packing to the young United States, where he was greeted as a hero. In moving to the United States, Priestley inaugurated one of the great traditions of this country: he was our first great scientist exile, seeking out the intellectual freedom of this new country. Unfortunately, that freedom turned out to be somewhat overrated, at least in the short term. He had a falling out with his old friend John Adams during Adams’s presidency and wrote several essays critical of the administration (and siding with Jefferson). Adams nearly had him deported during the Alien and Sedition [Acts] crisis. But when Jefferson was elected president, one of his first acts was to write a wonderful letter to Priestley that really captures how the Founders felt about him: “Science and honesty are replaced on their high ground, and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good like you.”

  Priestley’s religious views also had an impact on the Founders, particularly Jefferson. Moreover, Priestley’s ideas about the bond between science and religion would also fit in well with Robert Langdon’s.

  Priestley’s story is a reminder of how iconoclastic the founders were in their social and religious values. Priestley had the single biggest impact on Jefferson’s view of religion; in fact, Jefferson directly credited Priestley with keeping him, at least nominally, a Christian. Jefferson’s debt to Priestley stems in large part from the fusion of science and religion that Priestley had concocted in his very unorthodox vision of what it meant to be a Christian. He believed in the message and morals of Jesus Christ, but he felt that this original story had been distorted by centuries of priests and religious scholars who had felt the need to add layers of superstition and magic to the story to make it more captivating to the masses. This meant that Jefferson and Priestley believed in the words of Jesus, but they did not believe, for instance, that Jesus was the son of God, or that he came back from the dead. When Jefferson read Priestley’s writing, he was inspired to create the famous Jefferson Bible, which edits out all the supernatural elements and leaves only the core words of Christ himself. And of course, where religion was concerned, Franklin was even more of a nonbeliever. (Priestley remarked in his autobiography that he always wished he’d been able to convert Franklin to his maverick version of Christianity, but Franklin apparently never had time to read all the religious tracts that Priestley would send him.)

  Today we talk about the pros and cons of the cult of the amateur . . . but weren’t people like Priestley basically amateur scientists, amateur political thinkers, amateur theologians—and weren’t they able to have an enormous impact?

  The Enlightenment was really created from the ground up by amateurs. In part this was because the whole concept of a professional scientist hadn’t quite yet been invented. And in part it was because most fields were so nascent that you could do pioneering work without going to grad school for six years. So many discoveries were right there at the surface, waiting to have the scientific method applied to them.

  From your work on technology and pop culture, can you help us compare what life was like in the late eighteenth century, with all these amazing industrial and scientific breakthroughs, inventions, and new cultural trends unfolding, with our own times? Are there similarities? You also have a great interest in the confluence of technology, society, and culture in the present, as evident by your recent book, Everything Bad Is Good for You. Do you see any parallels between the remarkably inventive world of the late-eighteenth century with the present day?

  I think there are some exciting commonalities between today and Priestley’s time. The digital revolution has created a comparable sense of open exploration: a sense that the world is most certainly on the edge of radical change, and that science and technology are driving that change. And of course, we have our own culture of amateur engagement now, thanks to the blogosphere and other forms of democratic media. (Priestley would have loved Wikipedia, for instance.) But where I think we can learn from Priestley and the American Founders is in the space between science and religion. For the Founders, as intellectuals, one of their primary goals was to forge connections between those two worlds, to figure out a way to make their religious values compatible with the new insights of science. That pushed them into some unusual religious views (even by today’s standards), but there was great integrity to that struggle. Today, I fear, too many people of faith have decided that their religious beliefs and the world of science cannot be usefully connected. On this front, at least, it’s time we got back to our roots.

  Franklin, Freemasonry, and American Destiny

  an interview with Jack Fruchtman Jr.

  Yes, Benjamin Franklin was a Freemason. He was also the publisher in 1730 of a set of Masonic rituals, a member of a Masonic lodge in Philadelphia as well as in Lon
don and Paris, and, of course, one of the most important Masons in the fraternity of founding brothers. These facts might easily lead to the assumption that Masonic beliefs had a major impact on our system of government—for better (as many Masons would have it) or worse (as conspiracy theorists claim).

  But just how important was Freemasonry and its beliefs to Franklin? To find out we turned to Jack Fruchtman Jr., one of America’s leading authorities on Franklin and the intellectual influences that shaped his broad-ranging thinking on politics, philosophy, religion, and science. Fruchtman, interviewed here by Arne de Keijzer, teaches at Towson University and is the author of Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends.

  Dan Brown places Franklin hip-deep into the stream of Freemasonry, implying that it had a profound impact on his political, philosophical, and religious beliefs, which in turn influenced the foundations of our country. Is Brown right?

  Franklin was indeed a Mason, a member of the Philadelphia Masonic Lodge (St. John’s) as well as the legendary Paris Loge des Neuf Soeurs (Lodge of Nine Sisters). But Freemasonry was no more important to Franklin than any other civic or social association, many of which he himself created: for example, his club of fellow leather-apron men (the Junto), the Philadelphia Militia and Fire Company, the Library Company of America, and so on. Freemasonry fits into the many religious, scientific, and pseudoscientific phenomena that permeated the eighteenth century, and Franklin was clearly part of this development, especially when it had to do with powerful, mystical, and unknown forces like gases and air, electricity, ballooning (with its seeming ability to defy gravity), and vegetative and animal “magnetism” (which today we might well call hypnotism). Franklin viewed Freemasonry positively for its spirit and basic nontraditional views of religion. But he also saw it as a means for him to succeed as a socially mobile, middle-class tradesman. It is accurate to conclude that he used Freemasonry as one of his many stepping stones for self-improvement and upward mobility.

  Still, Franklin counted the leading scientists and intellectuals of the day among his friends, sometimes having long, “secret” discussions with them in Masonic lodges in Paris. Many of these men were fascinated by the same search to understand and unlock the Ancient Mysteries that pervade The Lost Symbol. Many of Franklin’s contemporaries and peers saw in Freemasonry a path to blend their interest in ancient knowledge with their political, scientific, and spiritual quests. Wouldn’t all this have influenced his perspective?

  Among Franklin’s leading personal characteristics was his vast curiosity. He was interested in just about anything and everything that he came across, from the effects of oil on water to the underlying meaning of the game of chess. We see this in all of his scientific experiments, but also in his interest in the occult and the Ancient Mysteries. His friends in France were keenly aware of the ramifications of those subjects as well, which is why Franklin was drawn to people like Jérôme Lalande and La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, among others. The conventional and historic Masonic organization is the lodge, which refers not so much to the physical structure, but to the association of similarly minded, focused members. A lodge is like a chapter or a branch, and the lodges he joined in Philadelphia and Paris were among the most prestigious. Lalande was a well-known astronomer, and La Rochefoucauld was one of the first members of the French aristocracy to join the Third Estate during the Revolution. However, I do not think Franklin had a special interest in the occult and other mysteries other than what drew his attention to them in the first place, namely his unquenchable curiosity in trying to understand the natural world.

  While imagining himself about to drown in the confines of a water tank, Langdon hears a chant tumbling through the void “like the drone of voices in a medieval canticle: Apocalypsis . . . Franklin . . . Apocalypsis . . . Verbum . . . Apocalypsis.” Can you imagine why Brown might have invoked Franklin in this scene?

  I think Dan Brown was attempting to link Franklin and perhaps the founding of the American nation to Freemasonry and its rites, which is a link that need not be overstated. Franklin never envisioned his apotheosis along the lines Brown describes when he writes about George Washington as depicted on the ceiling in the Capitol Rotunda. Franklin believed in an afterlife, but it was a belief that had more in common with the views of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Franklin was a deist, not a Christian. He did not have orthodox views about a personal God or of human salvation. Langdon, at this point in the novel, knew that the key to his search lay in Franklin’s magic squares. It is thus unsurprising that he would conjure up Franklin in his reverie. I believe Brown was doing his utmost to persuade his readers to accept the idea that Franklin was far more involved than he actually was in the rites and rituals of Freemasonry. Brown has given Franklin’s Freemasonry far too broad a reading, much like his overstatement that the CIA might be engaged in a large-scale investigation, complete with military components, on U.S. soil.

  Mention Franklin and most of us immediately think of bits of history we know—Poor Richard’s Almanack, a sometime scientist who flew a kite in a thunderstorm, an envoy to France, and, of course, a Founding Father. But we don’t often think of him within the context of the history of ideas. Can you place him there for our readers?

  Franklin stands at the front and center of the American Enlightenment with his openness about the idea of republican government as the guarantor of free speech, freedom of religion, and especially freedom of inquiry. This last item is key to all of his thinking and his writings: his scientific experiments and diplomatic experiences afforded him ways to investigate the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings in differing geographical and social contexts. Franklin believed that if people do not have the right to investigate just about every political, social, and scientific problem, there can never be a free society and the alternative will be a government that shutters the mind from all that is worth exploring.

  Active in America, England, and France, Franklin was a world-renowned natural philosopher (or scientist, as we would call him today) and a world-class diplomat, first on behalf of his colony of Pennsylvania, then three others (Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts). He ultimately became America’s first formal diplomat when he represented the United States in France in 1776. He literally knew hundreds of people and many thousands knew him or knew of him. Many people read his works—whether published anonymously or under his own name—and he was almost universally admired and respected.

  It is no wonder that he had such wide-ranging contacts. He met Voltaire, one of the great figures of the French Enlightenment, just before the great philosopher’s death in 1778. He knew and corresponded with Joseph Banks, a fellow member of the Royal Society of London (the most prestigious scientific organization in Britain, to which Franklin was elected as a foreign member in 1756). He was Joseph Priestley’s friend, but even more important, his mentor, instructing him in scientific matters and reviewing in advance Priestley’s major contributions to the history of electricity and the understanding of vision and color. It was a natural outcome that Franklin, along with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, designed the new Great Seal of the United States to include the date of independence and the eye of Providence (note: not God, but Providence). To be sure, the Great Seal of the United States possesses a measure of Freemason imagery that was prevalent at the time. But there are also purely secular and indigenous aspects of its imagery: American independence, American unity, American power, American destiny, and American originality.

  Franklin was the model of the uniquely American self-made activist, intellectual, and investigator. Nothing escaped his inquisitiveness. He produced a large body of work that extols the great principles that underlie American civil liberties and civil rights. No individual thinker or writer is indispensable. But if there ever were a single individual who embodied the founding of America, that would, in my judgment, be Benjamin Franklin.

  Masons, Skulls, and Secr
et Chambers

  The Postrevolutionary Fraternity

  by Steven C. Bullock

  The history of the Freemasons is intertwined with the birth and the early decades of the American republic. It’s a story so rich that, with hindsight, it seems almost impossible for Dan Brown to have based his first American-inspired Robert Langdon thriller on any other group.

  Steven C. Bullock, associate professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is a leading historian of Freemasonry and its connections to the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers. Here, he charts the evolution of Masonic rituals, of Masonry in America, and of the causes and consequences of anti-Masonic hysteria that helped to trigger Freemasonry’s decline.

  Almost two hundred years before Dan Brown’s terrifying villain Mal’akh infiltrated the Masons, another man who would try to expose Masonic secrets was given a wine-filled skull and told “it’s time.” Shocked by the ghoulish gesture, he protested. Immediately, six brothers drew their swords and surrounded him. Only after a minister explained that this ritual was necessary to join the brotherhood did Avery Allyn drink the wine. The oath he swore on that day in the 1820s was even more chilling than Mal’akh’s calling for the wine to become poison if he revealed Masonry’s secrets: Allyn extended his vows to the afterlife. In case of such infidelity, he said, “the sins of the person whose skull this once was” should be added to his own on Judgment Day.

  The ritual was shocking. It was meant to be. The ceremony was developed in America in the period after the Constitution was written, roughly between 1787 and 1827, a time when many Masons believed their fraternity was of enormous importance. After all, as the fictional Harvard professor Robert Langdon tells students every spring in his Occult Symbols course, in 1793 it was brother George Washington himself who laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol. Over the next forty years, initiates drank wine from skulls and, as Peter Solomon would do in the Capitol, sat in Chambers of Reflection. The real history of these rituals, the Founders, and the revelation of their secrets is as fascinating as the thriller itself.