The George Washington National Masonic Memorial (completed in 1932). (Photograph by Julie O’Connor)
But Langdon and Katherine Solomon don’t actually arrive at the Memorial, since they are sneaking off to the Washington National Cathedral, in the northwest of the city.
The National Cathedral gets largely condensed in TLS into just three special items that figure into a riddle for Langdon to solve as he looks for a place that contains “ten stones from Mount Sinai,” one from “heaven itself,” and one with the “visage of Luke’s dark father.” Child’s play for Langdon. He solves this riddle instantaneously, since he immediately recalls that in the floor of the National Cathedral near the altar are ten stones from Mount Sinai; that there is a grotesque of Darth Vader on the northwest tower; and there is a small piece of an actual moon rock embedded in a stained-glass window, which is known as the “Space Window” commemorating the astronauts.
These are just tokens, since there are more than two hundred stained-glass windows, dozens of grotesques and gargoyles, and many special stones in the vast neogothic cathedral, the sixth largest in the world. For instance, the altar’s stones include some that were brought from Solomon’s Quarry, near Jerusalem, where the stones of Solomon’s Temple were said to have been quarried, and the pulpit was carved from stones brought from England’s Canterbury Cathedral. In addition to many religious scenes, some of the stained-glass windows also depict the Lewis and Clark expedition, or the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima.
The cathedral occupies a carefully nurtured place in American life as “the national house of prayer.” It is an Episcopal cathedral but has been open to congregations of many kinds. Many funerals of state or memorial ceremonies have been held there, including the funerals of President Ronald Reagan in 2004 and President Gerald Ford in 2007. Although it seems like an official cathedral, none of its funds, for construction or operation, come from the government. And although its focus is undeniably Christian, it is also emblematic of the cathedral’s attempt to fulfill a national, ecumenical role. There are statues of Washington and Lincoln, and seals and flags of the fifty states, and many pieces of art that relate to secular historical events. On sale in the bookshop are a variety of titles that would please the one-world spiritual vision of Galloway and the Solomons. These range from the Dalai Lama to the Koran, from the Gnostics to the noeticists. In the fall of 2009, there was a large display of The Lost Symbol on sale here.
Langdon eventually finds himself racing to the House of the Temple, headquarters of the Supreme Council 33°, of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasons, Southern Jurisdiction. Patterned after the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, this structure is a veritable treasure house of Masonic symbolism and architecture. It is the Scottish Rite that confers Freemasonry’s thirty-third degree, so it’s no coincidence that the House of the Temple has thirty-three columns, each thirty-three feet tall. It has a pair of massive sphinxes guarding the front stairs, which are built in sets of three, five, seven, and nine steps—numbers significant to Masons—leading to two massive bronze doors weighing twenty-four hundred pounds each. (Although the bronze doors may appear intimidating, the Scottish Rite Freemasons actually accept visitors and conduct regular tours.)
Inside the doors there is a large atrium lined with black marble columns and a staircase leading up to the Temple Room, where much of the action of TLS takes place. The roof of the House of the Temple is built as a thirteen-layer pyramid, topped by a square skylight. Dan Brown depicts this skylight as an oculus for dramatic purposes, as a conduit to the heavens. Beneath it is the Temple Room, the centerpiece being an altar. In TLS, this is staged as a sacrificial altar, but for the Masons it holds the sacred books of the major religions, such as the Bible, the Old Testament, and the Koran.
The House of the Temple also contains a large library, with many rare books, as well as a special alcove where the remains of Albert Pike are interred. Pike was a lawyer, Civil War general, poet, and scholar who led the Scottish Rite in the late 1800s. There are special rooms dedicated to famous Masons, such as the Founding Fathers, Burl Ives, J. Edgar Hoover, and several U.S. astronauts who were Masons.
In TLS, Peter Solomon ends his evening by showing Robert Langdon the views from the top of the Washington Monument. This is staged so that he can reveal the full meaning of the “Masonic Pyramid” and the gold capstone talisman that Langdon has been lugging around all night.
By a very loose interpretation of the structural forms of the Washington Monument, Solomon and Langdon are at the end of their allegorical journey, finding themselves, as called for by all the puzzles and riddles and codes, beneath a pyramidal stone, under which is a “spiral staircase winding down hundreds of feet into the earth, where the lost symbol is buried.”
It’s true that the top of the monument forms a thirteen-layer pyramid, or pyramidion, the topmost stone being also pyramidal in shape and weighing thirty-three hundred pounds. Capping that is an inscribed one-hundred-ounce pyramid of aluminum, with Brown’s oft-mentioned “Laus Deo” inscription on its east face. And it’s true there is a staircase, although it doesn’t descend “into the earth,” but merely to ground level, via 897 steps. Somewhere in the base of the monument is the original cornerstone, its exact location now unknown. In a recess of the cornerstone, we are told by TLS, lies the “Lost Word.”
Detail of the Sphinx statue from the House of the Temple of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (completed in 1915). (Photograph by Julie O’Connor)
Thus Dan Brown works hard to make the pyramidal form carry the symbolic potency. One has to ascend to the top of a 555-foot obelisk to experience its mystical emanations, which somehow are supposed to transmit to the base of the monument, following a variation on the hermetic world view, “As above, so below.”
In stretching to make the Washington Monument obelisk into a conceptual pyramid, Dan Brown fails to mention that a pyramid is exactly what was first seriously intended for George Washington’s tomb.
While Washington was still alive in the 1790s, it was assumed that a great equestrian statue would be erected to honor him, at approximately the same location where the monument now stands. However, this plan was set aside after his passing in late 1799.
In 1800 Congress resolved to build a mausoleum for him “of American granite and marble in pyramidal form.” Thus, if Congress had had its way, George Washington would have been entombed like an Egyptian god-king.
Since Congress never got that plan to work (partly because of lack of funds and partly because the Washington family would not allow Washington’s remains to leave Mount Vernon), the stage was set for a long and fitful birth of what would become the mighty obelisk we have today.
Along the way, many designs were proposed and dismissed, including a truly massive pyramid offered by Peter Force in 1837. The pyramid imagined by Congress would have been one hundred feet on a side, but Force’s pyramid would have been on the scale of the pyramids of Giza, several hundred feet on a side.
But a pyramid was not to be. In the 1830s when a serious effort was made to get started on the long-discussed monument, the winning design was a combination of a six-hundred-foot obelisk with a nearly flat top, surrounded by a circular colonnade that was intended to house statues of the Founding Fathers. The designer, Robert Mills, called it a “National Pantheon.” However, the design was modified over the years and the colonnade was omitted in favor of a very Egyptian obelisk with its pyramidal top.
Washington Monument (completed in 1884). (Photograph by Julie O’Connor)
The cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848, in a full Masonic ceremony. Construction began, but it was halted in 1856 when only the first 150 feet had been built. The monument then sat as an eyesore for almost three decades until it was finally completed in 1884. At the time, it was the tallest structure in the world, and even today it is the tallest free-standing stone st
ructure.
The monument was funded by donations, and an invitation was made for citizens from all over the country, and many civic organizations, to donate decorative stones that would line the interior walls. Altogether, some 193 stones were eventually installed, to be seen at landings along the stairs. Many of the stones were donated by Freemason groups, but there were plenty of other organizations, such as the Sons of Temperance, the Odd Fellows, and the Order of Red Men. Today, most visitors do not get to see all these stones because the stairs are only open for occasional walk-down trips, but visitors can glimpse some stones through a window in the elevator car.
One stone, known as the “Pope’s Stone” because it was sent by the Vatican under Pope Pius IX, was mysteriously stolen in 1854 when it sparked the enmity of the American Party, also called the “Know-Nothings.” The Know-Nothings, who were opposed to immigrants and Catholics, viewed the stone as a beachhead for an eventual invasion by the Vatican, and they vowed that it would never become a part of the monument. The stolen stone was never recovered and it may have been smashed to bits or dumped into the Potomac. But in 1982, a replacement stone from the Vatican was quietly installed at the 440-foot level. Brown references none of this fascinating history, although it is lurking in the shadows of his historic themes.
A big mystery is the location of the Washington Monument’s cornerstone. Although it had been laid in a very public ceremony, it became lost from view as the different stages of construction progressed. Thus, no one knows exactly where it is today.
In TLS, Dan Brown makes it seem as though a Bible was secretly put into the cornerstone by the Masons as the hidden “Lost Word.”
Actually, there were at least fifteen thousand witnesses to the laying of the cornerstone, including then-president James Polk (a Freemason) and many dignitaries. In a zinc case recessed into the 24,500-pound stone was placed a very eclectic collection of many dozens of items that had been contributed by many different groups. There was indeed a Bible, but it was given by the Bible Society (not the Freemasons).
But also, there were nearly two hundred other items, including copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, a portrait of Washington, all U.S. coins then in use from the ten-dollar gold eagle to the half-dime, an American flag, a copy of the U.S. census from 1790 through 1848, a description of the telegraph machine, a one-cent coin minted in 1783, some almanacs and various nautical maps and charts, not to mention seventy different newspapers from fourteen states. There were many dozens of other odd items, contributed by all kinds of groups and individuals. The entire list of items was not secret at all, but was published during the dedication of the monument. Thus, if the Bible is to be considered the “Lost Word”—lost in the mystery of the missing Washington Monument cornerstone—must we also assume that the “Annual Report of the Comptroller of the State of New York on Tolls, Trade, and Tonnage on the New York Canal System”—just one of the two hundred documents buried in this time capsule—is also a repository of mystical knowledge?
Finally, there’s the big picture: Langdon eventually takes a little time to ponder the overall layout of Washington. In one passage Langdon dismisses the theories that the street layout forms satanic pentagrams and other Masonic or arcane symbols. This by itself must be a major disappointment to conspiracy theorists who have long bubbled their wares just below the surface of public consciousness, waiting for Dan Brown to legitimize these themes.
But Langdon, near the end of TLS, does perceive meaning in the layout of the city. He carefully contemplates the cross-shaped formation of the major vistas, the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial on the east-west axis and the White House to the Jefferson Memorial on the north-south axis, with the giant obelisk at the crossing. Langdon perceives this as “the crossroads of America” and also likens it to a Rosicrucian cross.
This doesn’t exactly fit the origins of the city design, which didn’t have space for such a cross. It was first laid down by Pierre Charles L’Enfant (who either was a Mason or was well-versed in Masonic thinking) around 1791, when the Potomac lapped its bank just west of the current site of the Washington Monument. For about one hundred years after the plan was laid, the areas where the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials now stand were underwater. Rather than a cross, the major vistas of Washington would have formed a large “L” or a large right triangle, perhaps of mystical interest to the Pythagoreans among us. Whatever monument was erected for George Washington—and many ideas were considered—would have stood on the banks of the Potomac.
Of course, the city plan evolved, and in the 1880s and 1890s, the Potomac was filled in and the land was built on, yielding the magnificent cruciform layout we have today. Whether this was governed by a larger, Masonic plan or was merely the result of great designers falling into step with a broad classical concept over the years, is open to endless debate. Certainly, there were plenty of Masons involved in the building of the city throughout its many phases, but there were plenty of non-Masons, too.
Langdon’s notion of the “crossroads of America” is apt in several ways. First of all, no visitor to this location can fail to miss the power, majesty, and interconnectedness of the Founding Fathers to modern America, and of the seat of Congress to the White House, and other themes crucial to our democracy. But there is another way in which the “crossroads” allusion is appropriate, if off by a few hundred feet in a technical sense.
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown focused on various competing attempts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to define the world’s prime meridian, or zero point of longitude, including a “Rose Line” that went through the heart of Paris. As the new American nation unfolded, Thomas Jefferson in 1804 launched an effort to create a prime meridian centered where the Washington Monument was intended to be built.
But because of the soft soil, the monument’s center was moved several hundred feet south and east. The marker that remains in the true center of the cross is a knee-high stone known as the Jefferson Pier Stone. It was the zero longitude of American maps for a long time, but was eventually superseded after an international agreement in 1884 selected Greenwich, England, as the world’s prime meridian.
While the Washington Monument’s present location may not be the technical crossroads of anything, there are few visitors to its top who are not moved at least in some small way by seeing the vision of the founders of American democracy spelled out before their very eyes. And therein lies the beauty of fiction. Dan Brown may have many of his facts wrong, but in the closing chapters of TLS he has painted a good picture of the overall spiritual quality of at least one important strand running through the American tapestry of experiences.
The Lost Smithsonian
an interview with Heather Ewing
Dan Brown conjures up a Smithsonian Institution that few people have ever seen. From the incredible, hidden collections of its Museum Support Center—meteorites, poisoned darts, and fantastic sea creatures—to the enormous, hangar-size pods where, Brown hints, cutting-edge, secret experiments could be carried out without the world’s knowledge, the Smithsonian seems like a wonderful yet weird place. However, the real-life Smithsonian story is only half-told in The Lost Symbol.
As surprising as it might seem, Brown neglected to mention the mysterious backstory to the founding of the institution. It is a tale hinted at, but not told, by Peter Solomon during a lecture at Philips Exeter Academy when he says the Smithsonian was established thanks to the bequest of an English scientist, James Smithson, who “envisioned our country to be a land of enlightenment.” But what Solomon fails to mention is that Smithson had never visited America. Even today, questions remain about who he was and why he chose the United States as the beneficiary of his fortune.
Heather Ewing is an architectural historian who worked at the Smithsonian during the 1990s and who recently published a biography of James Smithson and an architectural history of
the Smithsonian’s buildings. Here, she discusses the institution’s fascinating history and examines what Dan Brown got right—and wrong—about the Smithsonian today.
Peter Solomon portrays James Smithson as a man who left his fortune to the United States because he viewed it as a “land of enlightenment.” Do you agree?
I do believe that Smithson saw the U.S. as a land of enlightenment and possibility. But there’s an awful lot of mystery to his bequest. It’s certainly not as absolute as Brown makes it seem.
For a start, Smithson actually left his fortune to his nephew but because the nephew died at a young age, the fortune passed on to Smithson’s second choice: the United States. Also, Brown omits Smithson’s personal story, which is that he was the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat. That weighed heavily on him his whole life. He was probably attracted to America as a place where inherited privilege was being rejected and where a country based on laws and reason was being established. He was also probably snubbing England, a place that had rejected him.
There are many questions surrounding Smithson’s life; what do we know about him?
He was born around 1765. We don’t know the exact date because he was born in secret in Paris, where his mother had gone to have the child away from English society. His father was the first Duke of Northumberland and his mother was a wealthy widow, a cousin of the Duchess of Northumberland.
Smithson grew up in a society in which name and background meant everything. He had a very strong mother who instilled in him the idea that he was descended from kings and destined for great things. Yet, as an illegitimate child, he felt outside accepted society.
But in the scientific world he was very highly regarded.
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