Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  These curious manifestos were purportedly written by a secret society of scientists and scholars who also wanted to reform the Catholic Church. These people believed in science, and one of their stated goals was to distribute free medicines to all and to heal the sick. They pursued the study of mathematics and physics—and an inevitable part of physics was the conclusion that the earth revolves around the sun. This alone would have gotten them in trouble. They were hated by the Holy Office and searched for by the Inquisition. But they could never be found because membership in their society was secret. They were said to make themselves “invisible.” These people, authors of the new books and their associates, were called “Rosicrucians”—members of the secret Order of the Rosy Cross. Dan Brown has been fascinated by the Rosicrucians, as well as by Freemasons and other secret societies, because they are surrounded with mystery and mystery is what Dan Brown does so well. But many people believe that the Rosicrucians never existed.

  Others who pursued scientific ideas in the open, such as the philosopher Giordano Bruno, paid a heavy price for their convictions: in 1600 Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition at the Campo dei Fiori, in the heart of Rome, for professing his belief in the Copernican system and for proposing that life might exist elsewhere in the universe. If the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians indeed existed, they had very good reasons to remain in hiding.

  I crossed the bridge over the Tiber and continued to the secular center of the city of Rome. On my way, I passed two more bookstores, and both had my book in their windows—again right next to Dan Brown’s novels. Something weird was going on with my book here in Rome, I thought; it made no sense at all. Finally, I arrived at a mall in the heart of the city, and entered one of the largest chain bookstores in Italy. My book, next to Dan Brown’s Crypto (the title of the Italian edition of Digital Fortress), was in the window. And there were large stacks of both our books, one next to the other, on the table at the entrance to the store. I went to the counter, and talked to the bookstore manager.

  “Ah, you are Mr. Aczel? Wonderful! Would you like to sign your books?” the manager said with a big smile.

  I did, and when I finished, I asked him why the book was selling so unexpectedly well, and why it was always placed next to Dan Brown’s books.

  “You don’t know?” he asked, looking at me incredulously.

  “No . . . ,” I had to admit.

  “So you haven’t seen what Umberto Eco has said about you? . . . These were terrible things. Absolutely terrible. And he published them in L’Espresso—the most important magazine in Italy. Since then, the book has been selling like crazy.”

  I asked him if he could show me Eco’s article, or tell me where I might find it, but he mumbled something and quickly disappeared to take care of a customer.

  When I arrived back home in Boston, two letters were waiting for me. One was from the Jesuit father general, and it informed me in very polite language that I had been denied retroactive permission to see the document I had already seen. The other letter was from a friend who had come back from South America, and it contained a clipping from a newspaper in Santiago, Chile, which was a translation into Spanish of the terrible things Umberto Eco had said about me in Italy. As I later learned, newspapers all over the world—those published in romance languages from Spanish to Romanian—had republished Eco’s article about me.

  In 1614, the first of the so-called Rosicrucian texts appeared in Kassel, Germany. It was titled, in Latin, Fama Fraternitatis—the “Statement of the Fraternity.” The book told the fantastic story of a German man of humble origins named Christian Rosenkreutz (German for “Rosy Cross”), who was born in 1378. As a five-year-old boy, Rosenkreutz’s parents sent him to a monastery where he learned Greek and Latin. At the age of sixteen, he left the monastery and joined a group of magicians, learning their art and traveling with them for five years. When he left them, Rosenkreutz continued to travel on his own, to Turkey, Damascus, and farther into the Arabian Desert. He reached an oasis, a mystical city named Damcar, whose inhabitants were all philosophers and scholars. The people of Damcar appeared to have been expecting his arrival, for he was welcomed in the city with great honor. He taught them the magic he had learned from the magicians, and in turn they instructed him in philosophy, science, and mathematics. After three years of absorbing the wisdom of the East in Damcar, Rosenkreutz returned to Western Europe, bringing with him his new knowledge.

  Rosenkreutz followed a route from Arabia to Palestine and present-day Israel, crossed the Sinai Desert, and continued along the North African coast. He sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Iberian Peninsula, and then crossed the high Pyrenees and continued into the heart of Christian Europe. He brought with him the knowledge of the ancients, as transmitted through the Arab scholars of his day, and he tried to impart this information about science and mathematics and nature to the Europeans. But everywhere he went, he encountered only hostility to his ideas and a rejection of science.

  Upon his return to Germany, by now discouraged with the state of society on his native continent, Rosenkreutz built a large house and filled it with scientific instruments and continued to study mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy on his own. He died at the age of 106 and was buried in a cave. Exactly 120 years later, in 1604, his burial place was discovered by four scholars. When they entered the cave, they found golden vessels sparkling in light that emanated from inside the cave. They found books on science, and a chalice inscribed with the letters rc. This became their emblem and their secret code, and they decided to form the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross and to continue the work of Christian Rosenkreutz, bringing knowledge to the people and wedding science with religion. So the story goes.

  While of course this tale is fictional, any historian of science would recognize in it a germ of truth. For we know that the science, mathematics, and philosophy of the ancient Greeks declined quickly at the end of the Classical Age as the West entered the Dark Ages with the fall of Rome in the fifth century. This knowledge was then passed on to Arabia, and science and ideas thrived there during the caliphate in Baghdad. Science and philosophy, firmly based on Greek ideas, flourished in Arabia and the Fertile Crescent during the ninth and tenth centuries. Three hundred years later, this knowledge was injected into a reawakening Europe. We know, for example, that Euclid’s Elements traveled into Europe following the same route as did the mythical Christian Rosenkreutz: from Arabia to North Africa and Spain, and then across the Pyrenees into Christian Europe (eventually to become one of the first books printed on the new presses in Venice). So the Rosicrucian myth actually contains the story of the transfer of ancient knowledge from East to West during the end of the Middle Ages—including its exact route. The European Renaissance is based on this ancient Greek cultural essence, kept alive in the East during the Dark Ages, and reimported into the West.

  Once science, philosophy, and artistic ideas arrived in Europe, they faced a staunch religious establishment that by its conservative nature was resistant to change. Painters and sculptors had to pay homage to the church by concentrating on religious themes, as did writers and philosophers. Scientists had a much harder time because science had been discovering truths that were unpalatable to the church and contrary to traditional interpretations of Scripture. The resulting conflict between science and faith that erupted in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe created an atmosphere of secrecy, intrigue, and mysticism. Science was seen as possessing hidden powers, and its information content had to be coded to hide it from the church. The mythical Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross was founded on such secrecy and hidden codes, but real scientists such as Galileo, Da Vinci, Leibniz, and Descartes also relied on cloak-and-dagger methods to hide their scientific findings. Descartes, for one, was the inventor of an intricate code that he used to hide his scientific findings about the rotation of the earth from possible discovery by the Inquisition
. His letters to his friends show that he was very worried about meeting a fate similar to Galileo’s, and this concern drove him to resort to secrets and codes, which he felt were necessary for his protection.

  But intrigue and codes are the stuff of legends, and soon enough, modern writers would seize the opportunity to capitalize on these promising themes.

  While Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, he says the following in a note before his story begins:

  FACT:

  The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. . . . All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.

  And the new The Lost Symbol claims in its opening page, under “Fact”:

  All organizations in this novel exist, including the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.

  What Dan Brown did with The Da Vinci Code and then with The Lost Symbol was to use the mystery and intrigue (real or imagined) resulting from the historical clash between science and religion within works of fiction. And the claims made in the novels were presented in a way that implied they carried real historical value: namely the author’s theories, based on some historical research. I must take issue with Brown’s statement that the “science” in The Lost Symbol is true. In chapter 15 of his novel, Brown says: “ ‘Well . . . like entanglement theory, for one!’ Subatomic research had now proven categorically that all matter was interconnected . . . entangled in a single unified mesh.” As I show in my book, Entanglement (Plume Publishing, 2002), and as every physicist knows, entanglement is a very complicated phenomenon that is difficult to obtain in practice. We are certainly not all entangled in a mesh—far from it—in any physical way. But science had nothing to do with Eco’s objections to Dan Brown’s work.

  Umberto Eco was born in 1932 in the northern Italian city of Alessandria, located between Turin and Genoa. He earned a doctorate from the University of Turin, took up a professorship of semiotics—the philosophical study of signs and symbols—at the University of Bologna, and within a few years, publishing prodigiously, became Italy’s leading intellectual.

  In 1980, Eco published a novel in Italy, The Name of the Rose (as it was titled in English, published in translation in 1983)—a mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery. The book became an international bestseller, and eight years later, Eco followed it with another very successful book, Foucault’s Pendulum. This novel dealt with science, Kabbalah, mysticism, and the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. With this book, Eco indeed founded a new genre: a historical mystery novel about science and religion. Both of these immensely successful and innovative novels, especially the latter, bear an uncanny resemblance to Dan Brown’s novels.

  Eco was not pleased with Dan Brown’s earlier work, The Da Vinci Code, appearing fifteen years after Foucault’s Pendulum. It wasn’t that he was envious—his own books had been huge commercial successes. It was simply that he felt that Brown had taken his idea, shed the philosophical-intellectual milieu of his novels, stripped them of their cultural value, and run away with a good story. Now, of course, Brown had done the same with The Lost Symbol. Eco retaliated against Brown right after the appearance of The Da Vinci Code by using his Web site. Visiting the page, umbertoeco.com, one can find Eco’s books as well as some biographical and other information. But a place of honor in Eco’s home in cyberspace was reserved for an essay entitled: “About God and Dan Brown,” which ends with the following bizarre statement.

  The “death of God,” or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church—from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

  Eco also reportedly refused to attend an international meeting in the town of Vinci in Tuscany some time ago because he knew that Dan Brown was also invited to speak there. But he couldn’t do much more to show his anger and frustration, and nothing could stop Dan Brown’s juggernaut.

  I had been oblivious to the conflict brewing between Eco and Brown, and while I had read their books, I’d never found anything in the works of either author of relevance to my own. But on July 6, 2006, three weeks before my arrival in Rome, Umberto Eco struck at me. He devoted his entire weekly column in the influential Italian magazine L’Espresso to my book Descartes’ Secret Notebook. Eco tried to destroy my thesis that Descartes used secrets and codes to hide his scientific work from the Inquisition by attacking my descriptions of putative connections between Descartes and the Rosicrucians, which were secondary to the main thrust of my book. He ended his essay with the following (my translation from the Italian):

  Aczel . . . comments on his various suggestions by saying, “A coincidence? Perhaps.” This is the typical method of such writers trying to exploit casual coincidences to squeeze money out of fools. Pure Dan Brown.

  I responded to the article once I found out about it, and L’Espresso published my response. I pointed out that my book simply quoted Descartes’ biographers, including the contemporary Baillet, that the Rosicrucians were not the key to my thesis, and that I never did claim that they existed. The magazine then published Eco’s answer to my response. Umberto Eco did not give in. He admitted that he had criticized me with “excessive polemical force,” but maintained that because the Rosicrucians did not exist, there could not have been any connection with Descartes.

  But did the Rosicrucians exist? This remains an open question. Scientists and reformers living during the time of the Inquisition had to hide in order to remain alive. They also felt the need to write and disseminate their ideas to others. So the people who wrote the Rosicrucian texts must have existed in one way or another since someone did develop the science described in these books, and someone did write the books. Was it all a hoax? We simply don’t know. But Descartes’ early biography makes it clear that he was influenced by a certain kind of mathematics—much of it done by a mysterious German mathematician named Johann Faulhaber, who most sources claim was indeed a Rosicrucian. And we know that Descartes had read some of the Rosicrucian texts, so at least from this point of view, there were connections between him and Rosicrucian ideas.

  In an effort to understand Eco’s rage, I picked up Foucault’s Pendulum. On page 167, I read:

  Descartes—that’s right, Descartes himself—had, several years before, gone looking for them in Germany, but he never found them, because, as his biographer says, they deliberately disguised themselves. By the time he got back to Paris, the manifestos had appeared, and he learned that everybody considered him a Rosicrucian.

  So that was what was bothering Umberto Eco. My book had the same stories he had in Foucault’s Pendulum about Descartes and the Rosicrucians—taken from the same source: Baillet’s 1691 biography of Descartes. Eco was upset because he believed that I (and Dan Brown before me) had taken over his genre. But did I? I wrote strictly nonfiction. And the historical events themselves did not need any fictional embellishments, as I see it. There is more than enough intrigue, secrets, and codes to be found whenever science and religion clash—be it four centuries ago or today. My vindication came in February 2007. That month, the French literary magazine Lire published a review of the French edition of my book on Descartes. It described my book as: “a ‘philosophico-historical thriller’—a new genre.” What made me even happier was a sentence toward the end of the review: “The book respects historical truth (nothing in common with the fantasies of The Da Vinci Code).”

  Two and a half years later, Dan Brown’s much anticipated next book, The Lost Symbol, was published. I was not surprised by the book’s increased resemblance to Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which is dense in symbolism, since this is the kind of writing Brown alway
s does. I was surprised, however, by the reference to noetics—an area championed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I hadn’t expected Brown to move in this direction. But this innovation delighted me. Teilhard de Chardin’s work has all but been forgotten by modern readers, and I compliment Brown for bringing his work to the fore. We need to hear more about the powerful ideas of this progressive Jesuit thinker who was decades ahead of his time.

  On September 15, 2009, the official publication day of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown gave a radio interview in which he was asked about the profession of his protagonist Robert Langdon. In this book, as in previous ones such as The Da Vinci Code, Langdon is identified as a Harvard professor of symbology. Brown explained that there is no department of symbology at Harvard. What he meant by “symbology,” he said, was the science of semiotics, but he said that he felt the public would not understand what semiotics means. Perhaps Brown had another reason for not using this term. Brown is fully aware that Umberto Eco is, in fact, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.

  Chapter Ten

  Brownian Logic

  Not All Is Hope

  Reading the Novel’s Dark Side

  an interview with Michael Barkun

  Dan Brown’s first two Langdon novels were thrillers involving vast, potentially world-changing conspiracies. The Lost Symbol, however, has no massive conspiracy to propel it, and the “terrible secret” the lone villain threatens to release would likely rate little more than an embarrassing titter on YouTube. Ordinarily a favorite shadow organization for film, TV, and book plots, the Masons are instead portrayed in TLS as a rather benign brotherhood bent on nothing more than enlightenment for themselves and the sharing of knowledge and insight for the benefit of others. But take a second look, suggests Michael Barkun in the interview here, because below the novel’s beatific veneer conspiracy theorists will find plenty to feed their fears.