This book’s looker, Katherine Solomon, is a lithe, gray-eyed expert in Noetic science, the study of “the untapped potential of the human mind.” Brown must also want to explore the untapped potential of the human body, since he has made his heroine 50 years old, something that no doubt caused the Hollywood studio suits to spritz their Zico coconut water. I was eager to learn occult lore about our venerable marble temples and access the lost wisdom of the ages.Ĭredit. And my first memory as a little girl was picking up my dad from work at night from the brightly lighted Capitol. I’ve often driven past the Scottish Rite Masonic temple with its two sphinxes on 16th Street. As a native, I’ve loved the monuments here since I was little. I was really looking forward to Brown’s excavation of Washington’s mystical power, ancient portals, secret passageways and shadow worlds. founded by another Mason, Harry Truman! - and figure out that some of those wild tales were true? That Jack the Ripper was a Mason whose identity was covered up by the Masonic police commissioner? That Salieri and others murdered Mozart after the young Masonic composer revealed some of the order’s secret symbols in “The Magic Flute”? Of course, who can blame him? How can you not be frightened by a brotherhood that includes Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny Buzz Aldrin and Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s?ĭuring the five years he researched this book, did Brown begin to believe those sensational stories about how, if you expose the secrets of the Masons, they will slit your throat? Did he discover that the Masons are not merely a bunch of old guys dressed up in funny costumes enjoying a harmless night away from the wives? Could they really be, as a recent Discovery Channel documentary on the ancient order wondered, “Godless conspirators bound to a death pledge who infiltrate institutions and run the world”?ĭid Brown decipher the cryptic documents locked in a safe at the C.I.A.
Or as Brown, who is more addicted to italics than that other breathless Brown, Cosmo Girl Helen Gurley, might put it: What the hell? If the Masons are more intimidating than the Vatican, if Brown has now become part of their semiotic smoke screen, then all I can say is, God help us all.
His book is a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons, rather than to interpret the bizarre Masonic rites and symbols that illuminate - as in Illuminati! - how the ultimate elite private boys’ club has conspired to shape the nation’s capital and Western civilization ever since George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol building in a Masonic ritual wearing full Masonic regalia, including a darling little fringed satin apron. No, the terrifying thing about “The Lost Symbol” is that Brown - who did not flinch when the Vatican both condemned the “The Da Vinci Code” and curtailed the filming of “Angels & Demons” in Rome - clearly got spooked by that other powerful, secretive ancient sect, the Masons. Or the plot, which is an Oedipal MacGuffin. It’s not so much the barbarous machinations of the villain, another one-dimensional, self-mortifying hulk, that sends chills down your spine. The new Dan Brown puzzler is the scariest one yet.