Book Read Free

Secrets of The Lost Symbol

Page 28

by Daniel Burstein


  So the future of books may not be as bleak as some fear. It is a challenged future, no doubt. And for that reason, it’s probably a good thing that among all the other ideas in TLS, Dan Brown rightly celebrates the written word. And part of that celebration is an evocation of the book’s most deservedly sumptuous shrine, the Library of Congress.

  What Does The Lost Symbol Get Wrong About the Nation’s Capital? Everything.

  by David Plotz

  As a fan of Washington conspiracies and a native of D.C., Slate’s editor David Plotz was eager to see what Dan Brown would conjure up from his city. A former political reporter and almost lifelong resident, Plotz knows the Washington people and places mentioned in The Lost Symbol better than most. He went to school on the grounds of the National Cathedral, his office overlooks Dupont Circle (where Langdon lands in a helicopter), and he is a friend of the current chair of the Smithsonian Institution. Moreover, as author of Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, Plotz is more than familiar with the text within which, according to Brown, the “Lost Word” is concealed.

  Here, Plotz explains why The Lost Symbol, devoid of sex and money, and fixated upon a spiritual quest for power, may be “the strangest novel ever written about Washington.”

  In the mid-1990s, just before Dan Brown discovered angels and demons, Washington, D.C.’s, alternative weekly, the City Paper, published a popular column in which it tried to solve local mysteries sent in by readers—uncovering the truth about the capital’s baffling buildings, locations, and phenomena. The column was called “Washington’s Mundane Mysteries” because, it turned out, that’s what all of them were. Those sinister brown metal boxes on certain downtown street corners? Merely storage bins for extra copies of the Washington Post. That massive vault looming over Rock Creek Parkway? Just a Department of Public Works pump house.

  But this is not the Washington you will meet in Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol. In Brown’s world, there are no mundane mysteries in the nation’s capital, no mysteries that can be solved with a quick Google search or a phone call or two. There are only two grand mysteries—mysteries so elaborate they make the Watergate conspiracy look like a nursery school picnic.

  When I heard that Brown was setting his newest book in the city where I’ve spent my entire life, I was secretly excited and curious. I’m an addict of D.C. books, a sucker for conspiracies in the halls of power. Having slogged through The Da Vinci Code, I knew that Brown’s Washington wouldn’t exactly be the city as seen on C-SPAN. I certainly expected a heavy dose of Freemasons—though I underestimated just how heavy that dose would be—but also hoped he could offer his cunning take on theologically suspect Supreme Court justices, ominous senatorial rituals, and the secrets of the White House. (“Robert Langdon slid the West Wing blueprints on top of the 3,900-year-old Codex Hammurabi, until the matching crescent symbols intersected. He stared at it, dumbstruck: so that was why it had to be an Oval Office!”)

  But I am sorry to report that The Lost Symbol turns out to be perhaps the strangest novel ever written about Washington. It is awesomely wrong about what makes the city compelling.

  TLS recounts—and recounts, and recounts—Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon’s race to discover the secret of the “Ancient Mysteries,” a long-concealed method of unlocking the power of the human mind, guarded for centuries by the Freemasons and hidden right here in the nation’s capital. All the while he is pursued by a biblically inspired, steroid-enhanced, excessively tattooed eunuch/psychiatrist—don’t even ask!—and the CIA through the crypts of the Capitol, the Reading Room of the Library of Congress, and the ceremonial hall of the Scottish Rite Temple. Among these and yet more postcard stops, Langdon uncovers a conspiracy involving ancient Egyptian adepts; the Rosicrucians; mathematical puzzles secretly encoded in the prints of Albrecht Dürer; “The Order”; the machinations of the Invisible College; an encrypted Masonic pyramid; the Institute of Noetic Sciences; Isaac Newton; the House of the Temple; the “Lost Word”; the circumpunct; the arcane symbol that will unlock . . .

  Oh, never mind. It’s beyond parody. Or maybe it’s not. At Slate, the magazine where I work, we built a Dan Brown Sequel Generator. You plug in a favorite city and organization, and our computer did the rest. Mormons in New York City? Robert Langdon is summoned to the New York City Public Library, where he discovers a hideously mangled corpse, and evidence of the resurgence of the Trumifori, a secret branch of the Mormon Church with a legendary vendetta against its ancient enemy, the Vatican. . . .

  The Teamsters in Jerusalem? Robert Langdon is summoned to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where he discovers a secret rune, and gruesome evidence of the resurgence of the Inquinati, a secret branch of the Teamsters Union. . . .

  Brown’s Washington does overlap with the Washington I know in some unexpectedly gratifying ways. The eunuch, for example, kidnaps the head of the Smithsonian, chops off his hand, and carries out grisly demonic rituals on him. In real life, the chairwoman of the Smithsonian is a friend of mine, with both her hands. Brown sets critical scenes at the National Cathedral, where I went to high school, conducts “harsh interrogations” at the U.S. Botanical Garden where I take my kids, lands a helicopter in the traffic circle outside my office window, and gives his psychopathic eunuch a sinister hideout a few blocks from my house.

  But don’t get me started about Brown’s supposed mania for accuracy! Langdon drives north to get from the cathedral to Kalorama Heights? The eunuch crosses the Anacostia River into Maryland on Independence Avenue? The tip of the Washington Monument is the highest point in the city? If I can’t trust Brown to get the location of the Tenleytown Metro station right, how can I trust him to reveal the truth about the Kether, the highest Sephiroth, the Monad, the Prisca Sapientia, the “at-one-ment of the mind and soul”? Also, he has the Washington Redskins making the playoffs. Please.

  But I digress. Despite Brown’s Google Maps checkoff of Washington landmarks, he managed to miss the city itself. The Lost Symbol is a novel about a Washington conspiracy, but it’s not the kind of Washington conspiracy you’ve ever heard about. There are no murdered Supreme Court justices, no slutty press secretaries or dissipated journalists. In fact, there are hardly any people at all. By cramming the events of the novel into a single Sunday night, Brown conveniently ensures that none of the people who actually make Washington Washington will intrude on his nutter antics. The closest he gets to a Washington notable is Warren Bellamy, his heroic Architect of the Capitol. In real life, the architect of the Capitol is a bureaucratic functionary who might barely be able to count the beans in the Senate bean soup.

  The fundamental premise of The Lost Symbol is that Washington is a “mystical city,” and it is this error that makes the book so maddening. In Brown’s Washington, the marble, the wide streets, and the monuments all signify some kind of connection with the divine. The city encodes transcendental secrets about God and the potential of the human mind. But anyone who has spent more than a tourmobile ride in D.C. knows that what makes Washington interesting is its very smallness, the contrast between its grand architecture and the human machinations that take place within it. From high to low, from Democracy to The Pelican Brief, Washington novels have exploited and reveled in the human spectacle this presents, the way in which ambitious, idealistic, flawed Americans wrestle each other for power and wealth.

  Yes, there are conspiracies in Washington, but not the sort Brown imagines. They are conspiracies about money, sex, elections, and public policy. These are absent from Brown’s Washington. Every few years, for example, Washington is diverted by the spectacle of a powerful figure done in by sexual weakness. But Brown’s characters are sexless. There’s that eunuch, of course, and the others might as well be. They float in a world of pure thought—nonsensical thought, but pure.

  Money, too, has no pl
ace in Brown’s world. Everyone has way more than enough of it, making the private jet rides, booby-trapped mansions, and lavish secret laboratories easy to come by. But no one in The Lost Symbol is motivated by anything so pedestrian as greed, or ever has even a momentary thought about using their knowledge to make a profit for themselves, or their friends. Again, this makes them unlike practically every person who has ever lived in Washington, whose prominent citizens are all too aware of the power of the purse.

  Most of all, Washington conspiracies concern power: which branch of government did what to whom? The Supreme Court case that will upend the environment; the congressional bill that will wreck trade policy. But neither power nor the business of the nation interests Brown. In his view, the epic events that occur in the nation’s capital are dust in the wind next to the coming grand revelation of the ancient wisdom. In real Washington, ideas are practical tools, ways to change the country to advance some interest, to win billions of dollars, to improve the lot of citizens, to tilt the global balance of power. But Brown treats this all as beneath notice. His ideas, you see, concern transcendence, the portal that will turn Washington’s all-too-mortal men into divine, philosophical supermen.

  Brown posits a Washington oozing with spiritual energy and secrets of the known universe. But in the real Washington, if you held a panel about the Ancient Mysteries, the unification of religion and science, and all that other Brownian hoo-ha, you couldn’t fill a small conference room at the Brookings Institution—even if you served a free lunch and invited all the interns. Washington may strike the visitor as majestic, but at its heart it is the least spiritual, and least mystical, place imaginable: no one has thought about their immortal soul here since Damn Yankees.

  The Lost Symbol bizarrely resembles those other well-known mega bestsellers about ancient prophecies, the Left Behind books. That series chronicles the end of days, as recounted in the Book of Revelation, from the Rapture to the Antichrist to the Second Coming. Like The Lost Symbol, the Left Behind books mock the reality of actual life as mere trivia, when we all should really be concentrating on our immortal souls. And though the Brown books reach radically different conclusions than the Left Behind series—one follows Christian fundamentalism, the other New Age pantheism—they also share a similar apocalyptic mania about the Bible.

  Having recently published a book about reading the Bible from cover to cover for the first time, I was bewitched by the biblical conclusion of The Lost Symbol. At the climax of the book, that eunuch attempts to reenact Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, with himself as the victim. He believes, for reasons I still can’t fathom, that being sacrificed will endow him with supernatural powers. (The Lost Symbol’s version differs from the Genesis account in other ways, too, notably in this one: Isaac is silent during the entire episode, but the eunuch never shuts up! I would have killed him just to end the crazy ranting.) After the sacrifice fails, Freemason boss Peter Solomon reveals to Langdon that the vessel containing the Ancient Mysteries is in fact . . . the Bible, buried in the cornerstone of the Washington Monument.

  According to Solomon, the biblical fundamentalists who believe literally in the stories of the Bible are all wrong. Rather, concealed within that superficial Bible is another, secret Bible, and that secret Bible contains the Ancient Mysteries, the understanding that we need to realize that God is within all of us. According to Solomon, this is why so many of the great thinkers of history, from Isaac Newton to William Blake, have expended so much energy trying to unscramble the Bible, to find the codes within it. (The Bible is not unique in containing that secret, Solomon says: so do all lasting religious texts, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran—and presumably, the Book of Mormon, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, etc. Incidentally, I am sure you have not failed to notice that Peter Solomon bears the name of the Old Testament and New Testament’s two greatest wisdom figures.)

  Of course we shouldn’t make the mistake of conflating the incoherent ooga-booga spewed out by Brown’s characters with his own actual theology, or anyone else’s for that matter. But it did strike me that this particular kind of biblical interpretation reveals the essential mushiness of Brownian thought, which is as irritating in its own way as the stupid literalism of the Left Behind books. In one sense, Peter Solomon’s insistence that we ignore the surface meaning of the Bible is appealing. After all, anyone who has actually read the whole Bible—particularly the Old Testament—can’t help but notice the violence, the unlovingness of God, the absence of moral lessons, and the shortage of heroes. It’s true that you can find pleasant moments—a Ten Commandments here, a gentle Psalm there—but overwhelmingly the book is about antiheroes like Jacob, meatheads like Samson, and a disturbing amount of inexplicable smiting.

  Faced with this moral mess of the Bible, you can make one of five choices. First, you can take the fundamentalist approach, accept that it’s all true, and tell sinners they better shape up before they’re cast into the pits of hell. Second, you can reject the book as a collection of fairy tales and lies. Third, you can cherry-pick, concentrating on the most agreeable passages and reinterpreting ugly stories to make them more palatable. This is what both Judaism and Christianity have done, quite successfully. Fourth, you can focus instead on the historical context of the Bible, as James Kugel did in his magnificent book, How to Read the Bible. This academic interpretation ignores the Bible’s divine claims, and shows how a series of ancient tribes assembled, edited, and reedited the books that would become the Bible, plagiarizing laws and stories from all over the Near East, merging at least two different Gods into a single monotheistic God, and fabricating stories about Exodus, patriarchs, and the conquest of Israel.

  Brown makes the fifth and final choice: he supposes a second Bible hidden within the Bible itself. All evidence suggests that the Bible was compiled in no systematic way, but tossed together haphazardly over hundreds of years. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that there is a coherent plan behind it, or that secret laws and ideas are encoded in the text. But this fact does not deter Brown. The Bible may seem to be a book about a jealous God, a faithless people, and a struggle for belief. Actually, Brown says, this is mere misdirection to keep superficial readers away from the real Bible, which consists of hidden knowledge about how we humans are actually gods, if we would only learn the mysteries.

  It is, of course, impossible to refute this claim. If Robert Langdon were to say to Peter Solomon: “Your theory is wacky. There are no mysteries hidden in this book,” Solomon could simply respond: “You don’t recognize them because you’re not ready for them. You’re not willing to open your mind to them.”

  Brown isn’t a religious leader, and anyone who adopts a belief system based on a reading of The Lost Symbol obviously needs her brain chilled in an ice bath. Even so, Brown’s idea of a secret Bible is maddening to anyone who has ever grappled with the actual Bible. Rather than struggle with the messy reality of the Bible, Brown joins the all-too-many people—the Kabbalists, the Torah code seekers, etc.—who seek solace in mystical mumbo jumbo. The Bible is a complicated, morally difficult book, just as we are complicated, morally difficult people. Solomon’s secret Bible invites us to reject ambiguity and embrace a purported Bible that is pure and perfect.

  The message of the secret Bible, and of The Lost Symbol, and, indeed, of all Dan Brown’s work, is that there is an order to everything, a meaning to everything, and everything happens for a reason. Ordo ab chao, as Brown puts it in the book, using the Latin to lend gravitas to his proposition. This is antithetical to the actual Bible—as it is to the actual Washington, D.C.—which actually shows us that life is always a mess.

  Chapter Eight

  Into the Kryptic. . . . Art, Symbols, and Codes

  The Clues Hidden in Circles and Squares

  The Art and Symbology of The Lost Symbol

  by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona

  In his two prior Robert Langdon nov
els, Dan Brown clearly wanted to let his readers know he was an aspiring and innovative art historian in addition to showing his mastery of alternate history, esoteric codes and symbols, conspiracies, and the action-adventure novel. Art has an important role in The Lost Symbol, to be sure. Brumidi’s The Apotheosis of Washington plays with the theme of the divine connection between man below and god above, with the inventive power of the mind on earth blessed by the divinities. Dürer’s Melencolia I, richly symbolic in its own right, plays a more mundane role in the novel, its offering by and large relegated to the magic square in the engraving that helps our hero on to the next challenge he will have to face. But something is different from the previous novels, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona tells us. Brown seems to back off from introducing his own interpretations of the art in TLS—even omitting facts about them that this time are in plain sight.

  Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is adjunct professor of religious art and cultural history at Georgetown University and has been called the closest thing the academic world has to a real “symbologist,” at least when it comes to the connections between art and the myths and traditions it conveys. We asked her to share her insights on the artworks of The Lost Symbol, including the Brumidi, the Dürer, and a third work that makes an appearance in the novel as well: the statue of George Washington sculpted by Horatio Greenough. A fourth work, The Three Graces, by the painter Michael Parkes, is discussed by the artist himself in the interview that follows.

  The use of art in service to his story has been a Dan Brown trademark. Controversial as his interpretations may have been, he has had us look again, and in a whole new way, at Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in The Da Vinci Code and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa in Angels & Demons. Art also plays a role in The Lost Symbol, but it is a substantially different one, and worth puzzling over. In the earlier books, he organized his plot around “secret codes” sculpted or painted in the art of a single master. In TLS there is no central artwork or single artist whose symbolism must be decoded to solve the mystery, save the heroine, or preserve the world from imminent disaster. Rather, Brown utilizes the work of four diverse artists of varying reputations: Constantino Brumidi, Horatio Greenough, Albrecht Dürer, and Michael Parkes. Each expresses his art in a different medium and each plays a role in the story, some of more significance than others. What, then, might bind them together? Most likely, with Brown’s clever habit of layering meanings, it is a way of underlining his theme of E pluribus unum, “out of the many, one.”

 

‹ Prev