Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  Parkes lives in Spain and often paints images with mystical, esoteric, dreamlike, and surreal themes. Closely identified with a growing movement in the art world to capture the power and mystique of female creativity, intuition, and spirituality, Parkes was the guest of honor at a 2007 international show, Venus and the Female Intuition, exhibited in both Denmark and Holland.

  Dan Burstein reached Michael Parkes in Spain and talked to him about his unusual image, The Three Graces, and its role in The Lost Symbol. The image itself is reproduced here with the permission of Michael Parkes and his publishing company, Swan King Editions, LLC.

  Dan Brown was in Spain as an art history student while in college in the 1980s, and again in the 1990s with his wife, Blythe, who is an artist. You have been living and working in Spain throughout the last forty years . . . Did you encounter Dan and Blythe back then?

  No. I have never met Dan or Blythe.

  There are certain obvious similarities in your work and Dan Brown’s: you place a lot of emphasis on symbols in your paintings, there are many visual and psychological allusions to ancient mystical themes in your work; you are clearly interested in mythic references to Venus and the sacred feminine, as Brown is . . . So it makes sense that he would be interested in your work. But then one day in September 2009 you find out that The Three Graces is actually referenced directly in the new Dan Brown novel as “the original Michael Parkes oil.” Your painting is one of a handful of specific artworks mentioned by name. One of the others is Dürer’s Melencolia I. What did you think of that?

  It was quite intriguing to find the Dürer there as well. My background was in printmaking. I didn’t start painting until after graduate school. The most transformative graphic that I remember as an undergraduate was the Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer. It was this incredible, wonderful, surrealistic image, full of emotion, suggesting everywhere in the image that there was so much behind it . . . So yes, it was particularly interesting to me to find my work alongside Dürer’s.

  Your painting is used for a particular purpose in the home of Dr. Abaddon in the Kalorama section of Washington. Dr. Abaddon turns out to be the villain Mal’akh in disguise. He admires the painting and it is obviously one of his favorite possessions. But he also uses it as the hidden doorway to the chamber of torture, death, and destruction that lies beyond. (Abaddon, by the way, is derived from a Hebrew reference meaning “place of destruction.”) Do you see any special symbolic significance of your image to the world of ideas that is discussed in The Lost Symbol?

  The Three Graces © 2004, a painting by Michael Parkes. All Rights Reserved. Represented exclusively by Swan King Editions, LLC.

  I have no idea why it’s in the villain’s home, as opposed to being somewhere else in the story. But in terms of the painting having a place in the book as a whole, it makes personal sense to me because the painting is very much a kind of a “portal”-type painting and there is a lot of discussion in the book about portals and passages to otherworldly places.

  Tell us what was in your thought process when you originally painted The Three Graces.

  The three graces are always connected to Venus (or Aphrodite, if you want to use the Greek name). Venus, throughout the history of art, takes on different levels or layers of meaning. During the Renaissance, you have paintings of Venus as a sensual nude. In those images, the three graces are shown as handmaidens to this hedonistic Venus, emphasizing themes of desire and fulfillment.

  And then the next level up from that, Venus becomes a more noble figure. Venus now represents human love; love for mankind, harmony, unity, and so on. She moves away from this sensual portrayal and goes to a more humanitarian type of figure. The three graces then are often associated with chastity, beauty, and harmony, or platonic love.

  Plato suggested that the connections of Venus to sexual attraction are irrelevant. What’s important about Venus is the way she symbolizes what he called humanitas, in other words, the Venus that is giving order, harmony, and beauty to mankind. And then you have the other level, which is Venus the spiritual guide, offering divine love.

  I was particularly interested in the space between the humanitarian Venus and the divine love Venus. Inhabiting this role, Venus is like the intuitive counsel, nurturing higher ideals and the beauty of the arts. The three graces then become the muses of art, literature, and music, so you’re up one more rung still. If you continue on this ascending path, you arrive at what Plato called the Venus Urania, or “heavenly Venus,” divine love.

  This is where the idea of the portal arises in my Three Graces painting. Everything that I’ve talked about up until now—the three different stages of interpretation of Venus and the three graces–is a normal philosophical discussion. But then you reach the point of divine love and the door is closed because you have now arrived at the level of esoteric knowledge. And so you have to go into the esoteric legend of Venus to capture what’s going on behind the veil.

  And if we go through that portal, what do we find?

  In various esoteric texts, Venus is connected to the energy of divine creation or feminine active creation. So now you have a deity that is representing an energy that is descending from the highest planes down through the subtle physical levels, coming down to the densest of matter in the earth plane. And she is bringing beauty and order to an earth plane that was in total chaos. She is thus bringing order out of chaos.

  Or as Dan Brown would have it in The Lost Symbol, one of the most important Masonic axioms is “ordo ab chao”—order out of chaos in Latin.

  Yes. And as Venus descends through the planes, you can imagine this incredible, subtle, divine energy descending into the dense matter that’s getting denser and denser and heavier and darker. In the esoteric texts that I’ve read, the three graces are actually guardians of the three final portals that are opened for Venus to descend to the earth.

  Again, no surprise after The Da Vinci Code, which emphasized the sacred feminine and the role in prehistory of the female goddess, that Dan Brown would find your vision of Venus and the three graces to be of interest . . . What are your thoughts, looking more generally at The Lost Symbol? What interests you about it, aside from seeing your own work in it?

  Dan Brown’s new book arrives at a pivotal point in history. There is now a long history of humankind’s physical evolution; but now we can also talk about our spiritual evolution. His basic premise is that we, as humans, also stand as gods. And I think: okay, that’s a wonderful concept. The whole point is the transition between the animal human and the divine human; that’s the crux. We have reached a crisis point in our evolution where we must evolve spiritually if we are to survive. But we can’t just do it as a great Buddhist master might. Our own individual spiritual elevation is not the central issue. What’s important now is our collective spiritual evolution.

  That’s when it really becomes interesting, frightening, exciting—all of those things all mixed in together, because it’s something that has never happened in the physical plane before. Dan Brown is saying something like: yes; right here, right now. The secret is that it’s here, it’s now, and it’s happening, so you have to know there’s no turning back. You have to say okay, I have to embrace this because there’s really no choice.

  Art, Encryption, and the Preservation of Secrets

  an interview with Jim Sanborn

  Cryptic messages carved into durable materials and created to assure their longevity go back centuries. Many of these messages are readable today, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs that finally revealed their secrets after the discovery and analysis of the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. Other messages remain unsolved. Among the most famous of these is the Phaistos Disk, a circular clay tablet discovered in Crete from the second millennium b.c., and encoded with an “alphabet” of 45 different symbols and 241 signs stamped into both sides in a spiral pattern. The code has yet to b
e cracked on thousands of older objects from the Bronze Age, inscribed with the still-undeciphered pictographic Indus script from the Indian subcontinent. Many other examples from the ancient world continue to defy even the best linguists and code breakers working with twenty-first-century software tools.

  The most famous such message in our own time was carved into the Kryptos sculpture. It was created by the sculptor Jim Sanborn and is comprised of copper sheets, red and green slate, white quartz, and petrified wood. Commissioned for the central courtyard of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Kryptos is described by the narrator of The Lost Symbol as “a massive S-shaped panel of copper, set on its edge like a curling metal wall. Engraved into the expansive surface of the wall were nearly two thousand letters . . . organized into a baffling code” (see illustrations). As we will learn from Elonka Dunin’s essay that concludes this chapter, Kryptos, too, may be among those long-kept secrets in history. Although the code has been broken for three of its passages, the fourth riddle has yet to be solved, despite copious efforts by the world’s best cryptographic minds and their sophisticated computer programs.

  Jim Sanborn is noted for his science-based installations that illuminate hidden forces. He has created artwork for major U.S. museums, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also designed the espionage-inspired decor for the Zola restaurant, ironically enough next door to Washington, D.C.’s International Spy Museum.

  Here, Sanborn is in conversation with Elonka Dunin, who, along with Jim Gillogly and a tiny handful of other cryptographers, have come as close as anyone—at least anyone who has come forward—to solving a set of symbols and codes not even Robert Langdon could solve. Intriguingly and tantalizingly, Sanborn tells us here that even after the fourth panel of Kryptos is decoded, there could still be a “riddle within the riddle.” Hmmm. Sounds a bit like The Lost Symbol itself.

  Where did you get the idea for Kryptos?

  When the Central Intelligence Agency was constructing the New Headquarters Building in 1988, the General Services Administration selected artists for the CIA project as part of their Art in Architecture program. The panel reviewed the work of many artists and then chose me for the outdoor work, in part because I already had a reputation for creating public artworks, and because my work tended to deal with the hidden forces of nature, like the earth’s magnetic field, and the Coriolis force. The panel felt that my work with the invisible forces of nature could transfer to the invisible forces of mankind. A stretch perhaps, but I guess it worked. I spent six months doing research about the agency and decided to create a work that was encoded. My first presentation of Kryptos to the panel was accepted.

  Kryptos sculpture (1990) by Jim Sanborn at the CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia.

  Was there anyone from the CIA directly involved in creating the encryption on the work?

  During its development, while I was casting about for assistance with the code, the agency suggested Ed Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center.

  In the early stages of planning for Kryptos, you said that you were doing it in conjunction with a “prominent fiction writer.” Who did you have in mind?

  That was an idea that I entertained when I was trying to decide how I was going to write the plaintext. I considered using somebody, but that idea got scrapped early on. Why let someone else in on the secret? I decided instead to keep my project compartmentalized so that as few people as possible would know what the code was.

  Have you used puzzles and encryption in other pieces that you’ve done?

  Kryptos was the first to use actual encryption. A year after its dedication, I had an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington called Covert Obsolescence, which included encrypted pieces. My other encrypted works include Binary Systems at the IRS Computing Center in West Virginia; Circulating Capital at Central Connecticut State University; the Cyrillic Projector at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and numerous smaller gallery works.

  In Part 2 of Kryptos, a portion of the answer says, “Who knows the exact location, only WW.” You have since said that this refers to William Webster. Can you expand upon why you included his initials in the answer?

  He was the brainchild behind the commissioning of artworks for the agency, as a way to increase the agency’s “openness.”

  Is Webster, also a former director of the FBI, necessary to solve the puzzle? Does he have information that is needed?

  Only insofar as he was the progenitor of Kryptos.

  Part 2 also has latitude and longitude coordinates. Where do those point to?

  The coordinates were based on a United States Geologic Survey benchmark that was on-site during construction (1988–1990). However, when I revisited the sculpture this year, 2009, I noticed that the marker didn’t seem to be there anymore. I also noticed that the landscape around the buildings has changed quite a bit since the 1990 installation. Some areas have been excavated that weren’t before, and the topography has changed.

  Part 2 also has the phrase “It’s buried out there somewhere.” Did you bury something at the CIA?

  Maybe, maybe not.

  Outside the front entrance of the New Headquarters Building, you also created some pieces with large granite slabs, and Morse code messages. These say things such as “SHADOW FORCES,” “T IS YOUR POSITION,” and others.

  Maybe, maybe not. I have almost zero recollection of the Morse code part that I wrote. I don’t remember the words Shadow Forces.

  Do the Morse messages continue under the granite slabs?

  Yes, they do, for some distance.

  How would researchers find out what the hidden parts of the messages say?

  I have no idea.

  Have you made any provisions for the full plaintext to be revealed at some future time, such as a date sometime after you are departed?

  A date for it to be revealed? No.

  When did you first hear about Dan Brown’s use of Kryptos?

  I first learned of this from a reporter for Wired.com, Kim Zetter, who wrote an article about Kryptos that was published in early 2005. Through her article, I learned that there were two hidden references to Kryptos in the book jacket of The Da Vinci Code. One had the latitude and longitude coordinates from Part 2, but were off by one degree. The other was the message “Only WW knows.”

  And what did you think about that?

  All artworks should be open to interpretation. It’s almost the definition of what art is. Everybody is going to look at an artwork and have their own opinions about it. To be honest though, I was a bit annoyed when I heard about the inclusion of Kryptos on the cover of The Da Vinci Code, only because I had not been contacted.

  Have you read any of Dan Brown’s books?

  Ordinarily, I am a reader of nonfiction. But yes, once I heard there were references to Kryptos in the book jacket of The Da Vinci Code, I felt I had to, and I was advised to.

  What is your opinion of The Lost Symbol?

  I haven’t finished reading it yet, but several people have called to tell me about it. So far, as it relates to Kryptos, it looks like a process of atonement.

  In his novel, he implies that Kryptos may have some Masonic messages. Are you a Freemason?

  No, I’ve never been a member of any fraternal organizations. I’m just not a joiner. However, in the past, I have considered myself to be a stonemason of sorts, in the original and ancient sense of the word, going back to the masons who worked on such archaic structures as the pyramids. I have made two trips to Egypt, and was deeply influenced by what I saw there. I have also created several large works in stone, including some with the pyramidal form, or truncated pyramids, such as Elk Delta, in Charleston, West Virginia, and Patapsco Delta, in Baltimore, Maryland.

  As a stonemason, what do yo
u think of the Masonic art and architecture around Washington, D.C.?

  I am of course familiar with the Washington, D.C., architecture, and enjoy the monumental scale and the Egyptian elements. The Freemasons have definitely made some interesting architectural choices. The café I frequent is near the House of the Temple on Sixteenth Street, and I have frequently walked past it and admired the sphinxes.

  What’s your next project?

  For three years I have been working on an installation called Terrestrial Physics, which is a working re-creation of the first particle accelerator to fission uranium. This experiment was critically important to human history, and in addition, it took place in my hometown of Washington, D.C., in 1939. The accelerator will be shown at the Biennial of the Americas Denver in summer 2010.

  What has been the most surprising thing for you about creating Kryptos?

  Its persistence on the stage of popular culture. I honestly believed that the game would be over by now, so I am pleased with its longevity. Of course, once the code is deciphered, I’m not convinced the true meaning will be clear. There’s another deeper mystery, a riddle within a riddle, and I don’t know that it will ever be totally understood. This is a good thing. I think it’s important that every artwork hold a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.

  The Summer of the Clues

  by David A. Shugarts

  The sequel to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code had been anticipated for years. But when Doubleday, Brown’s publisher, finally confirmed in early 2009 that The Lost Symbol would be published in September, the collective blood pressure of Dan Brown watchers started to rise. Interest in The Lost Symbol was hyped even higher by a buzz-generating campaign by Doubleday to seed clues in cyberspace throughout the summer of 2009. The game was on for those whose interests run to code breaking and arcane bits of history.