Secrets of The Lost Symbol Read online

  Secrets of

  The Lost Symbol

  The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel

  by Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer

  Senior Contributing Editor

  David A. Shugarts

  Contributing Editors

  Lou Aronica and Paul Berger

  For Julie,

  Who, for thirty-nine years, has been both my Aphrodite and

  my Athena . . . and will always be so . . .

  And for David,

  Already so accomplished and so far down the road

  of his unique hero’s journey . . .

  —Dan Burstein

  For “D,”

  A great and gentle man, sorely missed . . .

  And, as ever, for Helen, and Hannah,

  warvb loza ddd sysssrt fua xhe wagvet xr ql lika

  —Arne de Keijzer

  Contents

  Editor’s Note

  Introduction

  by Dan Burstein

  Chapter 1

  Intellectual Alchemy

  Exploring the Complex Cosmos of The Lost Symbol

  by Dan Burstein

  Chapter 2

  History, Mystery, and Masons

  Dan Brown’s Freemansonry

  by Arturo de Hoyos

  A Mason Reveals His “Journey to Light”

  by Mark E. Koltko-Rivera

  Defining Freemasonry

  by Mark A. Tabbert

  Albert Pike: The Ghost in The Lost Symbol Machine?

  by Warren Getler

  Mozart and Ellington, Tolstoy and Kipling: Inside the Brotherhood of Famous Masons

  by David D. Burstein

  Searching for Masons in the Corridors of Power

  by Eamon Javers

  Chapter 3

  Secret Knowledge

  The Ancient Mysteries and The Lost Symbol

  by Glenn W. Erickson

  A Quick Guide to the Philosophers in The Lost Symbol

  by Glenn W. Erickson

  Secret Knowledge: Hiding in Plain Sight in the Infinite Universe

  an interview with Ingrid Rowland

  Isaac Newton: Physics, Alchemy, and the Search to Understand the “Mind of God”

  an interview with Thomas Levenson

  Chapter 4

  Science, Faith, and the Birth of a Nation

  From the Ground Up: Kindred Spirits Invent the Modern World

  an interview with Steven Johnson

  Franklin, Freemasonry, and American Destiny

  an interview with Jack Fruchtman Jr.

  Masons, Skulls, and Secret Chambers: The Postrevolutionary Fraternity

  by Steven C. Bullock

  Finding Himself in The Lost Symbol

  by James Wasserman

  Occult America

  an interview with Mitch Horowitz

  Chapter 5

  Man Meets God, and God Meets Man

  What’s Been Lost and What Needs to Be Found in Our Times

  an interview with Rabbi Irwin Kula

  Dan Brown’s Religion: Is It Me or We?

  an interview with Deirdre Good

  Science and Religion Face the Beyond

  by Marcelo Gleiser

  And Never the Twain Shall Meet?

  commentary by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins

  Science Requires That You Step Outside the Mental Cocoon

  an interview with George Johnson

  Chapter 6

  Ye Are New Age Gods

  The Energy That Connects the Universe

  an interview with Lynne McTaggart

  Noetics: The Link Between Modern Science and Ancient Mysticism?

  by Lou Aronica

  On Becoming a Fictional Character in a Dan Brown Novel

  by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz

  Bending Minds, Not Spoons

  an interview with William Arntz

  “Ye Are Gods”

  by the Editors

  Chapter 7

  Mystery City on the Hill

  A Masonic Pilgrimage Around Washington, D.C.

  by David A. Shugarts

  The Lost Smithsonian

  an interview with Heather Ewing

  Danger in the Wet Pod: Fact and Fiction about the Smithsonian

  by the Editors

  Hiding Out in Jefferson’s Palace of the Book: Why Robert Langdon’s Adventure Takes Him Inside the Library of Congress

  by the Editors

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

  by David Plotz

  Chapter 8

  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-Capppadona

  Venus, the Three Graces, and a Portal to a Divine World

  an interview with Michael Parkes

  Art, Encryption, and the Preservation of Secrets

  an interview with Jim Sanborn

  The Summer of the Clues

  by David A. Shugarts

  William Wirt’s Skull, Albrecht Dürer’s Magic Square: The Doubleday Clues and The Lost Symbol

  by Mark E. Koltko-Rivera

  Kryptos: The Unsolved Enigma

  by Elonka Dunin

  Chapter 9

  Divining Dan Brown

  The Pursuit of Dan Brown: From Secrets of the Widow’s Son to The Lost Symbol

  by David A. Shugarts

  Caught Between Dan Brown and Umberto Eco: Mysteries of Science and Religion, Secret Societies, and the Battle for Priority over New Literary Genres

  by Amir D. Aczel

  Chapter 10

  Brownian Logic

  Not All Is Hope: Reading the Novel’s Dark Side

  an interview with Michael Barkun

  The Politics of The Lost Symbol

  by Paul Berger

  Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

  an interview with Jeff Sharlet

  Geography, Holography, Anatomy: Plot Flaws in The Lost Symbol

  by David A. Shugarts

  Dan Brown’s Great Work: An Exercise in Maybe Logic

  by Ron Hogan

  The Critics Speak—Loudly

  by Hannah de Keijzer

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  About the Authors

  Other Books by the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Editor’s Note

  Secrets of The Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel follows the same format as the earlier books in our Secrets series, Secrets of the Code, Secrets of Angels & Demons, and Secrets of Mary Magdalene.

  Once again we have sought to provide a comprehensive reader’s guide to a fascinating and complex novel by carefully gathering original writing, extensive interviews with experts, and excerpts from books, publications, and Web sites. We are again intrigued by Dan Brown’s technique of weaving rich and historically important ideas into the heart of his action/adventure story. At the same time, Brown’s blending of real sources with the fictional needs of his
plot sets off the question, what is fact and what is fiction in The Lost Symbol? We have taken on the task of answering that question, exploring further the realm of history and ideas, and analyzing the plot points and devices used by the author.

  We have taken care to distinguish our editors’ voices from the authors’ contributions by setting our introductory comments in bold. The text that follows is in the original voice of the author or interviewee. The attribution “by the Editors” means it was an original contribution by one of our contributing editors but written in the collective “voice” of the book. All material is copyrighted by Squibnocket Partners LLC unless otherwise indicated in the copyright notice that can be found at the bottom of the first page of the contribution.

  Working with such a wide range of source materials, we have tended to regularize spelling and naming conventions in our own work, while leaving undisturbed the original spellings and conventions that appear in works that are excerpted here. For example, some experts refer to the Albrecht Dürer etching used to provide a major clue to Robert Langdon as Melencolia I—the intentionally misspelled name Dürer himself gave it; others spell it more expectedly as Melancholia. We have tended to standardize on the former, which is also the spelling used by Dan Brown.

  References to chapter numbers and cover artwork of The Lost Symbol—often abbreviated as TLS—refer to the U.S. edition published in September 2009. References to Dan Brown’s other works are sometimes shorthanded as DVC (The Da Vinci Code) and A&D (Angels & Demons).

  In giving readers a quick taste of the ideas and writings of a great many experts, we have inevitably had to leave things out we would have otherwise liked to use. We want to thank all the authors, interviewees, publishers, and experts who have so generously made their thoughts and materials available to us. In return, we urge our readers to buy the books written by our experts (often cited in our introductions as well as in the contributors section) and pursue the multitude of ideas referred to within these pages in their original sources.

  Introduction

  by Dan Burstein

  At precisely 3:01 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on September 15, 2009, my Kindle sprang to life soundlessly, unobtrusively. Two minutes later, it had downloaded Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol. A few minutes after that, I was busy using the Kindle’s search function to ascertain if this was the book I had long thought it might be. I had a list and I started checking off the items . . . Freemasons? Check. Masonic rituals? Check. Washington, D.C.? Check.

  Washington Monument—check.

  George Washington—check.

  Benjamin Franklin—check.

  Alchemy—check.

  Isaac Newton—check.

  Albrecht Dürer—check.

  Rosicrucians—check.

  Francis Bacon—check.

  Invisible College—check.

  Capitol Rotunda—check.

  The Apotheosis of Washington painting—check.

  Hermes Trismegistus—check.

  House of the Temple headquarters of Scottish Rite Masons—check.

  Albert Pike—check.

  James Smithson and the Smithsonian—check.

  King Solomon and his temple—check.

  The “widow’s son”—check.

  Thomas Jefferson—check.

  Deism—check.

  Egypt, Greece, Sumer—check.

  Kabbalah, Zohar, Old Testament, Gnostics, Buddhists, Hindus—check.

  Compasses, squares, magic squares, skulls, cornerstones, pyramids, pantheons, hieroglyphics, Zoroaster, codes, Kryptos, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Revelation, Apocalypse—check.

  So yes, this was, indeed, the book I had been expecting for more than five years . . . and now, in the late days of summer 2009, it was finally here.

  My journey into the meaning of The Lost Symbol (TLS)—and the archaeology of this book that you now hold in your hands—actually originated one night nearly seven years ago. Like many others, I came across The Da Vinci Code in the summer of 2003 when it dominated the bestseller lists. It was by a seemingly unknown author named Dan Brown. It sat by my bedside along with dozens of other unread books and all the other things typical of the competition for mind share in the complex, chaotic, information-intense world in which we all live.

  Then one day I picked up The Da Vinci Code and started reading. I read all night, fascinated. I literally couldn’t put it down. This kind of absorption in a book was an experience I used to have frequently in my younger years, but not so often in this season of my life, as I was then turning fifty. At one point, as I read the provocative assertion that there was a woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper—and that the woman was Mary Magdalene—I got out of bed and pulled the art books down from our library shelves. I looked at the Leonardo painting that I had encountered, of course, hundreds of times previously. Yes, it really did look like a woman seated next to Jesus!

  By morning, when I had finished the book, I was as intellectually challenged as I had been by any book I had read in a long time. I wanted to know what was true and what was not, what was fact and what was fiction. As soon as my local Barnes & Noble opened, I was there, sipping latte and rummaging through scores of books that had been mentioned or alluded to in The Da Vinci Code. I left the store with hundreds of dollars’ worth of books and went home to absorb this material.

  Fast forward a few months into 2004. My writing partner, Arne de Keijzer, and I had put together a massive project, including more than fifty writers, editors, and world-class experts on subjects that ranged from theology to art history, Gnostic gospels and alternative scriptures to codes and cryptography. We deployed this team to develop a breakthrough book, Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code, which was published in April 2004. Secrets of the Code immediately became a bestseller in its own right. As it rose into the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list (eventually reaching number seven—not bad for a book about another book), I found myself suddenly, and quite surprisingly, in demand all over America and the world as an expert on all things Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown.

  We had developed some fascinating insights into The Da Vinci Code and had become experts ourselves on all of the ideas and arguments that swirled through the vortex of debate and discussion about Dan Brown’s novel. For the next two years, with the public’s fascination with The Da Vinci Code seemingly insatiable, I was interviewed by hundreds of TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, and invited to speak to religious groups that ranged from the 92nd Street Y in New York (Jewish) to the Pope John Paul II Museum in Washington (Catholic), from retirement homes to high schools, from community colleges to the Ivy Leagues, from New Age spas to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis, from medical conventions to movie theaters, from public libraries to corporate meetings.

  Regardless of what audiences thought of The Da Vinci Code—some loved it, some hated it, some enjoyed it as a good potboiler, some took it way too seriously as either gospel truth or diabolic heresy—I found a torrent of ideas and interest. Programs ran way longer than expected, people wanted to stay after the event was over, and many, many people who had never gone to an author event in their lives wanted to talk, explore, and discuss it into the night.

  Secrets of the Code went on to become the world’s bestselling guidebook to The Da Vinci Code (DVC). It was translated into more than thirty languages and appeared on more than a dozen global bestseller lists. Eventually, we would create additional titles in the Secrets series, including a guidebook to Angels & Demons, the 2000 novel that reads like a rough draft for The Da Vinci Code, for which Dan Brown first created the Robert Langdon character, and an anthology of fascinating new thinking about the woman at the center of the DVC phenomenon, Secrets of Mary Magdalene.

  Our team made many discoveries in the course of researching Secrets of the Code. We lea
rned about an eighteen-hundred-year-old carpet fragment that may offer the oldest depiction now extant of Mary Magdalene. We got early information about the world-shaking (and highly credible) discoveries having to do with the long lost Gospel of Judas, one of the most theologically/philosophically important of the Gnostic gospels. It had resurfaced and was being authenticated and studied—even though it wouldn’t be published for another two years. We heard a marvelous tale (although it turned out to be a nineteenth-century hoax) about the “Jewish Da Vinci Code”—involving the lost golden menorah from the Temple of Solomon, supposedly hidden in the Tiber River in Rome. We were among the first to hear a piece of music based on musical notes decoded from symbolic writing in Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel—a fifteenth-century chapel to which thousands of visitors had been flocking since reading about it in DVC.

  But the most tantalizing of all our discoveries was the one made by our investigative reporter, David A. Shugarts. (Dave contributed several wonderful commentaries to Secrets of the Code, and has done it again for Secrets of The Lost Symbol). With Dave’s help, we cracked the code that had been discovered in the form of slightly bolded randomized letters on The Da Vinci Code jacket flaps. Strung together, these letters spelled out the enigmatic question, “Is there no help for the widow’s son?” We would soon come to understand that this is a very important coded message in the history of Freemasonry. It refers back to the murder of Hiram Abiff, the legendary master builder of King Solomon’s Temple, who some see as either the first Mason or at least the archetype for future Masons. “Is there no help for the widow’s son?” has, for at least the last several centuries, been a distress call from a Mason in need to his brother Masons. From the research we did around this discovery, we felt confident enough to issue a press release in 2004 predicting that Dan Brown’s next book would be about Freemasons and would be set in Washington, D.C.

  Very shortly thereafter, Dan Brown and his publisher confirmed that yes, indeed, Brown’s next book, then thought to be titled The Solomon Key, would again feature Robert Langdon, would be set in Washington, and would feature a plot set against the backdrop of the history of Freemasonry in America—exactly as we had predicted.

  Soon, Arne de Keijzer and I would be having coffee and bagels and looking at six volumes of dossiers Dave Shugarts had compiled in his attempt to “reverse-engineer” the mind of Dan Brown. If we believed Dan Brown’s next book would be about Freemasons and would be set in our nation’s capital, what aspects of history, religion, and philosophy would likely prove interesting? What artworks? What elements of science? Symbols? Codes? Could we imagine, before Dan Brown even wrote a word of this sure-to-be blockbusting DVC sequel, what its contents might be? We adopted this bold experiment and set Shugarts off on the path that would become the 2005 book, Secrets of the Widow’s Son—a book by David Shugarts, with an introduction by me, that was, for all intents and purposes, a book about a bestseller that hadn’t been written yet (and wouldn’t be published until TLS almost five years later).