It might be hard for some of us to imagine a grown man allowing himself to be blindfolded, led into a darkened room, threatened and ritually attacked by three men wearing aprons, pulled to the floor, and left there with a cloth over his head for an hour or more before he is allowed to see light again. It might be even harder to imagine Ben Franklin submitting to these indignities. Or George Washington. Or Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt.
But all of them did, along with eleven other presidents, and a great many of the leading politicians, generals, artists, and scientists of this country and several others. And some of them have done even more outlandish things as part of their commitment to Freemasonry. Perhaps because Masonry and its legends are already so bizarre, Dan Brown hardly needs to make anything up in his depiction of the fraternity in his new novel, The Lost Symbol.
Although they plunder art, history, and religion for subject matter, everyone knows that Brown’s books don’t rise very far above the grocery-store checkout aisle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol, he exposes the deep stratum of mystical thinking that underlies modern rationalism. However naive the novel may be, it testifies to the myths that helped to make the modern world, myths in which Brown places zealous faith. In so doing, it reads like a love letter to Masonry.
Brown takes to heart the adage that truth is stranger than fiction, like the reverse of a lousy historian: rather than finding himself bored by dry, ordinary facts and spicing them up with distortions and flights of fancy, he takes shallow, hackneyed fiction and makes it exciting by adding in the truth. Along the way, he can’t resist including some of the Masons’ absurd legends surrounding their supposed origins, and so allows fact, fiction, and myth to blend into a heady mixture.
The book reflects not the fear and suspicion often directed towards the Masonic mysteries but rather the continuing strength of the mindset—the mix of hope and terror surrounding the advance of human knowledge—that gave rise to the Masons in the first place and that set the stage for the modern imagination.
Freemasonry first arose out of the craftsmen’s guilds of stonemasons in late medieval Britain. Like most artisans, men who built in stone wanted to limit their craft to those who had been properly trained, and so created a guild with a system of secret words and signs by which master craftsmen could identify one another. Masons were mobile, traveling long distances to the building sites of castles and cathedrals. They were detached from ordinary medieval society and regarded with suspicion by townspeople. Thus, the makeshift “lodges” where masons worked (and sometimes lived) at building sites became home to a subculture, an alternate world with its own ethics, lore, and customs. Their legends centered on the building of Solomon’s Temple, giving them a special connection to God and to the world of the Bible.
Later, in the seventeenth century, particularly in Scotland, the organization began to expand beyond its medieval foundation. Men who were not actually stonemasons, including other artisans, affluent gentlemen, and those with philosophical and scientific interests, started to join the lodges, drawn by their social conviviality and their traditions of ritual and secrecy. This custom of including non-stonemasons in the lodges, called “speculative Freemasonry,” spread from Scotland to England, and then took off as an international movement. Masonic initiations included some amount of mild ritual hazing, intended to disorient the initiate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity.
Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader array of middle-class farmers and craftsmen, like the Boston silversmith Paul Revere. Their ceremonies celebrated the ability of the human mind to take control over the body and the physical world, and so to ascend toward God—even to become god-like. Masons were encouraged to build confidence in their own intellects, and to form new commercial, religious, and educational institutions. The lodges also acted as little schools of government, training new, local elites in elections and legislative procedures. The influence of Masonry was part of the process that democratized and liberalized Europe and North America through a wave of revolutions. The Masonic faith laid the foundations for modern ideology: belief in each person’s and each nation’s right to run their own affairs, in the unlimited power of the human intellect, in the continuing forward march of history, and in the boundless ability of science to solve the mysteries of the universe. In the lodges, these beliefs went hand in hand with occult signs and rituals.
Drinking Wine from a Skull
The Lost Symbol’s premise is as formulaic as it is thrilling. The handsome and personality-free hero Robert Langdon, a professor of “symbology” at Harvard, must try to rescue a friend in danger: his mentor and confidant, the rich and powerful Peter Solomon. The mysterious kidnapper isn’t interested in money, though. He’s after secret knowledge that Solomon possesses as a high-ranking Mason. The villain forces him to admit that there is a secret Masonic pyramid containing ancient wisdom somewhere in Washington, DC, and then compels Langdon to find it for him. All the while, we learn, the villain intends to kill Solomon’s scientist-sister and to destroy the lab where she is exploring the hidden powers of the human mind.
The busy plot provides plenty of opportunity for putting Masonic rituals and secrets on display. They begin right on the first page, when we are introduced to the villain, a muscular eunuch covered in Masonic tattoos who calls himself “Mal’akh.” As part of a Masonic initiation, Mal’akh drinks red wine from a human skull. Though Mal’akh supposedly joins the thirty-third degree of the Scottish Rite, this act is in fact part of the initiation into the Knights Templar degree of the York Rite branch of Freemasonry, dating back to around 1790. Although some American Masons undergo the Knights Templar initiation ceremony, most do not; it is part of a system of “higher degrees,” a later development that certain Masons added onto the society’s original structure. We may forgive Brown these inconsistencies, though, since he at least presents us with a real Masonic ceremony.
Considering that Dan Brown’s last two books offer a paranoid conspiracy theorist’s tour of Catholicism, with secret orgiastic cults and terrorist plots involving anti-matter bombs, there’s little reason to expect his latest work to be factually reliable. Perhaps it shouldn’t need to be, except for Brown’s prefatory note claiming that “all organizations in this novel exist,” and “all rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.” As a student of Freemasonry, I can vouch that Brown’s claim is generally true. The strange rituals and traditions that the novel attributes to the Masons are all in fact practiced by some branch of Masonry.
Dan Brown is able to work so comfortably with real Masonic symbols and lore because they resonate with his own sensibility. Not only do Brown and the Masons both love secrets and encoded symbols, but they believe that all of it must surely add up to some single great truth. It is a worldview that flourished in the Enlightenment, in which occult science and a deep sense of mystery surrounded the rise of modern rationalism. What today might appear to be a contradiction between reason and occult mysticism was once a natural relationship, and no other movement illustrates this marriage so fully as the Masons.
Ceremonial Aprons and Pseudoscience
Tags: da vinci code, dan brown, freemasons
