Will Lynne McTaggart Get the Dan Brown Bump?

By Neal 

lostsymbol-intention.jpgSomewhere in the middle of The Lost Symbol, the scientist who spends her time trying to weigh the human soul and photograph mystic healers’ auras remembers how she’d been influenced by a woman named Lynne McTaggart and her book (and website) The Intention Experiment, which proposes, as Brown puts it, that “human consciousness [is] a substance outside the confines of the body. A highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world.”

McTaggart, The Intention Experiment, and “her global, Web-based study aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world” all exist in the real world, so the question is: Will she experience the same sudden influx of attention the authors of Holy Grail, Holy Blood got after Brown’s The Da Vinci Code popularized their “Jesus moved to France with Mary Magdalene” theory? “The Lost Symbol just went on sale this Tuesday so most people haven’t even finished it yet,” says Free Press publisher Martha Levin. “They’ll need to before we see a real increase in sales of our book. It has already started to slowly climb up the rankings at Amazon, but we don’t think we’ll see a significant change in sales until the week after next once people have finished The Lost Symbol and are hungry for more information. But we’re very excited and are confident those sales will come.”

We suspect there will probably be a similar boost in sales for another book Brown cites in his new novel’s epigram, Manly P. Hall‘s The Secret Teachings of All Ages. But for the infamous Aleister Crowley, who only merits a passing (and not entirely accurate) reference as an inspiration to the book’s insane tattooed supervillian, with no specific book title mentioned, probably not so much.