After yesterday’s item detailing a bizarre theory about The Lost Symbol, we got in touch with Doubleday to ask if September 15 was the “very specific release date” that then-publisher Stephen Rubin had hinted at back in January 2008. Rubin himself was not available, but a spokesperson told us, “The significance to The Lost Symbol release date is classic Dan Brown fun: September 15, 2009 or 09+15+09=33,” which is a number of great significance in Masonic symbolism. In other words, it’s just a simple numerological prank, and there’s no evidence to suggest that the publication date was keyed to one of the most mysterious ritual cycles of ancient history as part of a colossal magical operation aimed at transforming human consciousness… right?
Well, as we pointed out yesterday, when it comes to hypersigils, there can be layers of meaning you’re meant to see, and layers of meaning you aren’t meant to see—and if we were trying to hide something from prying minds, we can think of few more elegant solutions than using intellectual sleight-of-hand to create an entirely different layer of secrecy to satisfy people’s curiosity and let them feel clever for having “solved” the “riddle.”
What follows, then, is completely unsubstantiated speculation—which we may or may not even believe ourselves—about the significance of what readers will find in The Lost Symbol. We have absolutely no idea whether it accurately reflects Dan Brown’s true intentions in writing the novel; we merely offer it for your consideration as a perspective that other critics have not yet (at least as far as we’ve seen) articulated in quite this way. Also, it contains spoilers, so you might want to think about that before you keep reading.
Now, over the weekend, we stumbled onto a possible insight into The Lost Symbol, which is that it’s basically two books jammed together. There’s the occult-tinged thriller plot, about a tattooed madman who infiltrates the Freemasons looking for their Secret Word so he can obtain God-like powers, then kidnaps Robert Langdon’s mentor and forces Langdon to go on a scavenger hunt all over Washington, D.C., for the clues leading to the discovery of the Word. Then there’s the book that attempts to cram a lot of information about “noetic sciences” into a fictional narrative, which most critics so far seem to agree is a terrible burden on the first book. But Dan Brown must have thought he had a good reason for loading all that stuff about human consciousness and healing energy and the link between the ancients and the moderns into his novel, right?
What, then, is all this “noetics” stuff, anyway?
We’ll just focus on two key passages for now, starting with the things “scientist Katherine Solomon” thinks to herself as she walks into her lab during an early chapter. “We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities,” according to her italicized thoughts. “Human thought, if properly focused, [has] the ability to affect and change physical mass… [O]ur thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic level… Human thought can literally transform the physical world… We are the masters of our own universe… This is the missing link between modern science and ancient mysticism.” Oh, and when it comes to developing your mental powers of intention, practice makes perfect.
If all that sounds like The Secret to you, well, it sounds a bit more like What the he #$*! Do We Know!? to me: Brown even gives a sly nod to one of that film’s interview subjects, Masaru Emoto, the author of The Hidden Messages in Water; there’s also an explicit shout-out to the ’70s mystic-physics classic The Dancing Wu Li Masters on the very next page, after which there’s a scene in which Katherine’s brother throws a bunch of ancient spiritual texts at her and suggests they all describe conditions which modern physicists have only just now begun to imagine, which “proves” that the ancients possessed cosmic mindblowing secrets human civilization somehow forgot.
(Later, towards the end, Peter will argue with Robert Langdon: “If the Bible does not contain hidden meaning, then why have so many of history’s finest minds… become so obsessed with studying it?” The logic is easily assailable: The authenticity of a hidden message is in and of itself no proof of its accuracy.)
At the very end of the novel, once the Word has been revealed to Langdon, he gets back together with Katherine and she goes after him from the “scientific” angle: “I have witnessed people transform cancer cells into healthy cells simply by thinking about them,” she insists. “I have witnessed human minds affecting the physical world in myriad ways… [O]nce this becomes part of your reality, then some of the miracles you read about become simply a matter of degree.”
(By the way, nice subconscious prompt there, Dan Brown, using the word “degree” in a novel about Masonic lore and symbolism.)
“Don’t think of it as faith,” she continues. “Think of it as simply changing your perspective…” A bit more of this, and then we get to the nut graf: “We have scientifically proven that the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought… The idea of universal consciousness is no ethereal New Age concept. It’s a hard-core scientific reality… and harnessing it has the potential to transform our world. This is the underlying discovery of Noetic Science.”
Which leads straight to this brilliantly self-referential bit: “I guarantee you, as soon as I publish my work, the Twitterati will all be sending tweets that say, ‘learning about Noetics,’ and interest in this science will explode exponentially.” Actually, that isn’t just an in-joke, it’s a prompt.
In other words, if you buy into this theory, Dan Brown had to include all that stuff about human consciousness and mental intention throughout the novel in order to keep readers thinking about noetics, keep them so absorbed in the subject so that when they got to the end of the novel, they would be primed to activate the hypersigil (or run the intention experiment, if that language makes you more comfortable) by repeating the magic words he gives them, through Katherine Solomon, on Twitter.
But, the skeptical among you ask, how could he be sure readers wouldn’t just put the book down and get on with their lives?
That’s where the “first book,” the thriller story, comes in—and this is something that didn’t really click with us until we came across Wikipedia’s plot summary of Angels and Demons (which we were never able to bring ourselves to read), and we realized the whole thing about Robert Langdon running the Path of Illumination was that it was an initiation rite, in which the journey itself is meant to alter the traveler’s consciousness and reveal a previously hidden truth… which led us to recognize that (1) The Lost Symbol operates on the exact same principle, with Robert Langdon’s overnight run through Washington, D.C., pushing him to a mental/physical breaking point—heck, he even “dies” just before the climax—before he can be told the true meaning of “the Solomon key,” and (2) the reader is being put through a similar initiation, thrust into an strange and unfamiliar world and barraged with challenges designed to overwhelm his or her conscious mind (can’t put it down now! keep reading!) until the initiate has been brought to the point where he or she is mentally and emotionally ready to set aside what was once held to be true and accept a new wisdom and incorporate it into their lives, even if only at an interior level.
If you buy into this theory—and, again, there’s no particular reason you should—the parallels to Langdon’s quest in The Lost Symbol and Masonic ritual aren’t just deliberate from a literary perspective. They are a crucial element of what the sorceror Hakim Bey describes as an an artwork emerging from a “utopian poetics,” or, more fully, “a consciously-devised ‘seduction machine’ or magical engine meant to awaken true desires, anger at the repression of those desires, belief in the non-impossibility of those desires.”
If “human thought can literally transform the physical world… we are the masters of our own universe isn’t utopian poetics, well, we don’t know what is. (Maybe Ralph Nader‘s new novel?) As to whether The Lost Symbol is intended to prod humanity into reaching the next stage of its mental and spiritual evolution, that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself.
(If we were to return to this subject, however, we would begin by discussing at least one author, possibly more, who is not only known for creating the kinds of “magical texts” we’ve been describing, but is himself quite open about his aims…)