When Robert Langdon opens the door to the mysterious basement room within the Capitol, he is horrified to see “something staring back”—a skull. After recovering, he explains to his companions that the room is a “Chamber of Reflection,” a place for peaceful introspection. His first reaction, however, is closer to the room’s original intent.
The Chamber of Reflection was part of the same postrevolutionary Masonic ceremony that included drinking from skulls—and it, too, was meant to provoke a strong reaction. At the start of the ritual, which has its roots in the Knights Templar legends featured in The Da Vinci Code, the blindfolded initiate was brought into a room and told he would find the Bible. Instead, to his horror, he discovered skulls and bones. Literally face-to-face with death, initiates were meant to be so overwhelmed that they could easily accept the degree’s important lessons.
The Chamber of Reflection was the first stop on a long ritual journey that lasted more than an hour. Playing the role of a Christian pilgrim, the candidate passed through a number of settings (and a seemingly endless series of Bible readings) before arriving in the Knights’ secret retreat. There he knelt at a triangular table bearing another awe-inspiring sight, a coffin lit by twelve candles, a skull and crossbones placed on top. He then received the skull whose wine would seal his promise to be faithful both to Christianity and Masonry.
But Masonic initiations were not thrills for their own sake, even if they inspired Shelley’s creation of Frankenstein. Like other rituals created during those years, the Knights Templar ceremony took advantage of the current thinking about education and human psychology. A century before, the English philosopher John Locke (known today mostly for his political theories that helped justify the American Revolution) had demolished long-held beliefs that people were born with ideas already within them. Instead, he suggested, people learned through their senses. This idea was revolutionary, not least because it encouraged hope that changing people’s environments could dramatically improve their lives. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers imagined the mind being marked by new experiences that, literally, in a term still used today, “made an impression.” Masonic degree ceremonies, bringing together overwhelming scenes with high moral lessons, sought to reshape the candidate internally, much as Mal’akh had done externally with his head-to-toe tattoos.
But there was another reason that the postrevolutionary fraternity turned to such overwhelming experiences. The brothers were anxious for rituals that fit their high visions of Masonry. The colonial fraternity had been relatively limited. Lodges were found only in the cities, and were frequented primarily by the upper levels of society as a means to build solidarity among the elite and to emphasize their elevation above the common people. During the Revolutionary years, however, Masonry was transformed, becoming larger, more relevant, more complex, and more democratic as it adapted to the Enlightenment ideals of the new nation. Within a few years, the fraternity reached every part of the new nation. By the 1820s, almost five hundred lodges met in New York State alone. Merchants, professionals, and politicians flocked to Masonry, finding it an invaluable means of establishing local reputations and building cooperative networks. The expanded fraternity took on a broader cultural meaning as well, becoming a central symbol of a new nation that was also committed to education, fraternal equality, and nonsectarian religion. By symbolically laying the foundations of monuments, public buildings, and even churches in cornerstone ceremonies, Masonry proclaimed postrevolutionary America’s highest ideals. While the Knights Templar ritual acknowledged the difficulty faced by young men struggling to establish themselves, it also promised that they, too, could join an inner circle reserved for the most meritorious.
Masonry first emerged as a fraternal order out of the older craft organizations in England during the early eighteenth century. But the new organization included many men who belonged to Britain’s pioneering scientific organization, the Royal Society, and participated in the cultural contradictions that Brown highlights in its president, Sir Isaac Newton. Even as Newton was helping to create modern science, he also drew upon a tradition that celebrated ancient wisdom as a deeper knowledge that had become obscured by human forgetfulness. These two sides, enlightened order and ancient knowledge, became central to Masonry as well, providing it with a flexibility that would allow succeeding generations to reshape it to fit changing times. Enthusiastic brothers in the postrevolutionary years found the tradition of hidden wisdom irresistible. In reshaping the brief, unsystematic, and relatively haphazard rituals of their colonial brothers, they helped to create a series of “higher degrees” that promised new levels of knowledge, even the discovery of the lost Mason’s Word that had formed the center of the primary degrees given in the lodge. In the Royal Arch ceremonies that became part of the system leading to the Knights Templar, this word was revealed to be nothing less than the secret name of God.
While The Lost Symbol captures some of this excitement, it is considerably more confused about the Founding Fathers who led the Revolution. This earlier generation had little interest in ideas of mystical knowledge. It is the case, as Peter Solomon pointed out to Langdon at the base of the Washington Monument, that Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted together his own version of the Gospels. But the ex-president was not seeking hidden realities revealed by mystic readings—quite the opposite. Jefferson believed that such metaphysical complexity was the root of the problem. Only by removing what he termed “nonsense” would the simple moral teachings of Jesus be revealed.
Jefferson was not a Mason, but many of the other leading figures of the Revolution were. Members included Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere as well as John Hancock and George Washington, the two men who presided over the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, respectively. In all, one-third of the delegates who followed Washington in signing the Constitution belonged to the fraternity. For these men, coming of age before or during the Revolution, the fraternity symbolized an enlightened identity that helped to proclaim their social standing and their cosmopolitan connection with the centers of culture, not as a place to find mysterious wisdom.
The Lost Symbol similarly mythologizes Washington, D.C., following the current trend of casting a city designed according to Enlightenment principles as an embodiment of occult mysteries instead. To his credit, Langdon rightly rejects the fears of an eager undergraduate who traces satanic symbols and Masonic conspiracies in the street plans. But the professor is less sure-footed about Washington’s layout, seeing it as organized around the Washington Monument rather than the Capitol and the White House. And he perpetuates an even more bizarre confusion about the September 1793 cornerstone laying for the United States Capitol. In Langdon’s description, the event was planned around propitious astrological conditions available only between 11:15 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on that day. In reality, the many demands of that day seem unlikely to have allowed for such careful attention to timing. The difficulties in Langdon’s account extend to Masonry as well. He suggests that three brothers planned the key design elements of the city. He is correct at least about Washington’s involvement. But Pierre L’Enfant, the first architect of the capital city, never seems to have become a Freemason. (Franklin was technically no longer a Freemason in 1793, since he had, by then, been dead for three years.)
Besides rituals and the Founders themselves, a third element from the new nation plays an important role in The Lost Symbol. One of the book’s central mysteries is the continuing involvement of Inoue Sato, the director of the CIA’s Office of Security, in seeking to track down Peter Solomon’s kidnapper. Only later does Brown reveal that she is driven by a concern for national security. Her fears that Mal’akh would release his videotapes of Masonic rituals were so strong that the loss of the life of the head of the Smithsonian Institution seems small by comparison.
From one perspective, Sato’s fear of this exposure looks almost laughable. Accounts of even the most arcane M
asonic rituals are easily available on the Internet. And the tradition of these exposés is almost as old as the order itself. No sooner had Masons started organizing their fraternity than outsiders grew interested in what took place behind closed doors with a sword-wielding guard. Americans published thirty editions of such revelations in the generation after the American Revolution. Even Masons themselves used these volumes to help them memorize rituals.
Despite this long history of exposés, Sato’s fears of a major crisis created by the exposure of Masonic secrets are not entirely far-fetched. Such a revelation actually took place soon after Avery Allyn had taken the skull to his lips in the mid-1820s. And it set off a series of events that reshaped the nation. By that time, the rituals for the older degrees were widely available, but the specifics of the newer “higher degrees” remained a mystery. Attracting many of the most active and enthusiastic postrevolutionary brothers, these complex ceremonies seemed to many of them clear signs of the fraternity’s high significance. Some even speculated that they showed evidence of its divine origin.
So when, in 1826, an upstate New Yorker, William Morgan, announced plans to publish a book revealing the full range of the new rituals, many area Masons were horrified. While they never sought official fraternal action, a number of brothers became determined to stop the publication and abducted Morgan. After being hidden for days in a deserted fort, he was never heard from again. Public outrage at the disappearance grew as Masons tried to cover up the crime, even going so far as to pack grand juries investigating the case with men sympathetic to the fraternity.
Avery Allyn, who had nearly refused to complete the Knights Templar degree, learned from a fellow Mason the identity of the culprit. Despite his vows of secrecy, Allyn found the knowledge so troubling that he finally decided his civic duty required him to reveal the truth. He soon went even further and turned against the Order itself. He took up the task of completing the work that Morgan never finished, publishing a “Ritual of Freemasonry” that remains the fullest source of information about postrevolutionary Masonic practice. Allyn also became a leading expert on Masonry, delivering lectures that included public demonstrations of rituals.
Anti-Masonic attacks on the fraternity did not create a national crisis. But the rise of organized opposition to Masonry did bring significant change. So many Masons left the order that it was crippled throughout the northern United States. Some states simply ceased all Masonic activities. An anti-Masonic political party ran a national presidential candidate and created the national nominating convention. The prodigious work of the anti-Masons helped train a generation of activists who led the way in many of the period’s most significant social reform movements, including abolitionism. John Quincy Adams, whose extraordinary postpresidential career included years in Congress fighting slavery, ran for both the House of Representatives and the Massachusetts governorship as an anti-Masonic candidate. Adams wrote that he was particularly struck by a moment when Rhode Island legislators questioned a leading Mason desperately seeking to avoid confirming that he swore the Knights Templar oath and drank from a skull. Both the ex-president and the legislators had learned of the ritual from Avery Allyn.
Focusing attention on skulls and secret chambers, ritual elements that have long since been discarded and (until Brown’s book) largely forgotten, is clearly problematic, perhaps even perverse. Masonry has always nurtured such everyday virtues as sociable interaction and charitable concern. But thrillers depend on their distance from everyday life. Few professors live lives as interesting as Robert Langdon’s, and even fewer fifty-eight-year-old men climb down the Washington Monument’s 897 steps hours after having had a hand chopped off. Avery Allyn and the other postrevolutionary men who passed through the higher degrees were similarly participating in the work of storytellers, not scientists. They were not just reading but were experiencing what might be considered the Dan Brown novels of their day. Brown’s decision to use this earlier Masonic material in The Lost Symbol may reflect a recognition of that kinship, an instinctive understanding that Masonry offers, like his own work, a means of infusing serious moral and intellectual issues with high drama.
Finding Himself in The Lost Symbol
by James Wasserman
For more than thirty years, James Wasserman has been thinking and writing about most of the issues that interest Robert Langdon in The Lost Symbol. Among the subjects of Wasserman’s books are the Knights Templar, Aleister Crowley, the interactions of the Christian Templars and Islamic Assassins during the Crusades, the Mystery Traditions (or, as Dan Brown would have it, the Ancient Mysteries), the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the art and symbols of the occult, the Tarot deck, secret societies, the Illuminati, and King Solomon and his temple. A year before The Lost Symbol was released, Wasserman published his own guidebook on the influence of Masonic architecture and philosophy on the development of Washington, D.C.: The Secrets of Masonic Washington: A Guidebook to Signs, Symbols, and Ceremonies at the Origin of America’s Capital. No traveler to Washington who wishes to explore the city in the footsteps of Robert Langdon should be without Wasserman’s book. Having spent most of his adult life on his own spiritual path that includes many of the ideas familiar to readers of Dan Brown’s books, we asked Wasserman, a contributor to both Secrets of the Code and Secrets of Angels & Demons, to tell us what he thought of The Lost Symbol.
In both Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon kept an emotional distance from his subject matter. The master symbolist was portrayed as brilliant, intuitive—a human calculator. But Langdon—and I suspect Dan Brown—seems to have achieved a vision of the transcendent reality behind the symbols with which he is so expert. In the last scene of The Lost Symbol, Langdon seems to achieve the integration of mind and heart (that I would describe as initiation) when the symbol set he discovers in the sacred architecture of Washington, D.C., finally begins to penetrate his soul. It’s a transformation we have been primed to expect from the book’s opening, when Brown quotes from Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages, “To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.” Robert Langdon has at last touched the books.
Langdon and Brown have grown spiritually before our eyes. There is an absence of that hostility to the Church and religion in The Lost Symbol that mars the earlier books. I was delighted to find Brown at peace with Freemasonry’s spiritual system, which acts as a résumé of all religions. The universal nature of Freemasonry, its celebration of rationality and religion, science and symbolism, its balance between tolerance of others and the exclusivity of its own brotherhood, seems to have at last struck a chord with Langdon and his creator. The consummate outsider finds hope, the very key to the Mysteries.
It is fascinating that this would take place in communion with the same forces I hold in such reverence. For the spiritual path offered by the inner essence of America is a profound reality that has become increasingly elusive in modern culture.
Brown appears to have reached the same conclusions as many others concerning the spiritual nature of the establishment of America. The farsighted luminaries we know as the Founders shared a vision of liberty rooted in the concept of human beings as sacred participants in the Divine order—worthy of accessing the highest realms of the Holy Spirit, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” When Brown suggests that the Chamber of Reflection in the depths of the Capitol may be a sanctuary “for a powerful lawmaker to reflect before making decisions that affect his fellow man” (chapter 38), one can only hope a reasonable percentage of modern leaders retain such sincerity.
Brown recognizes Freemasons as the high priests of the national religion of America. Masonry’s influence on our founding is beyond debate. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, 16 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 33 percent of the signers of the Constituti
on, and 45 percent of the Revolutionary generals were Freemasons. Brown mentions the elaborate, ritualized, and very public cornerstone-laying ceremonies used to consecrate the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and so many other buildings in Washington, D.C.
I believe the spiritual forces so energetically summoned in the founding of our republic have indeed blessed this nation, and we must keep ourselves worthy of our birthright. As John Adams stated, the Constitution and the American system of government were designed for a moral and religious people. Only those capable of following the dictates of self-discipline may be free from the need of external tyranny.
I spend some time in my book, The Secrets of Masonic Washington, discussing the structure of the American government and its derivation from Masonic principles. One of the symbols I highlight is the triangle. Albert Mackey, renowned Masonic historian, described the triangle as “the Great First Cause, the creator and container of all things as one and indivisible.” The political structure erected by the Constitution establishes three separate and competing centers of power—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. Another triangular energy grid is created by the tensions between the national, state, and local governments. The Founders counted on the three-way tug-of-war that would exist between the government, the people, and the individual. For the Founders understood that the unity of the triangle is by no means a state of passive equilibrium. Rather, we find three sovereign centers held in check by one another—each boldly asserting its own individuality while trying to dominate the others, yet bound by mutual agreement to form the whole.
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