Two of the most intriguing mysteries in the novel can be unraveled only when one employs magic squares to unscramble the letters or symbols. Magic squares appear in the ancient cultures of China, Egypt, India, and Persia. In a magic square the numbers in the rows across, the columns up and down, and the diagonals all add up to the same number. These squares were traditionally believed to have magical and mystical qualities, and often had astrological significance. Saturn corresponded to the number 3, Jupiter to 4, Mars to 5, the Sun to 6, Venus to 7, Mercury to 8, and the Moon to 9. The magic squares were just one use of combinations of letters and numbers found in occult or esoteric texts.
In the West some of the first magic squares appeared in the work of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Of Occult Philosophy, written in 1510. The squares also appear in another esoteric text, The Key of Solomon or The Clavicle of Solomon, that dates back to at least the 1500s. The magic square from The Key of Solomon is the simplest three-by-three combination: the numbers 1 to 9 are arranged in three rows and three columns and add up to 15, across, down, and diagonally.
Robert Langdon is at first mystified after having deciphered the Masonic Cipher consisting of four rows of four letters. Another clue points him to examine the enigmatic engraving by Albrecht Dürer who depicted a four-by-four magic square in his 1514 engraving Melencolia I. The engraving contains both its title and the year of its creation. Melencolia I appears in a scroll in the upper left hand of the engraving. The engraving or engravings (two copies exist) depict a female, Melancholy with wings, an angel, a rainbow, an hourglass, a ladder, a bell, and a polyhedron. All these constitute a seemingly chaotic or random array of alchemical, mathematical, and mystical objects. Even today the work continues to find new interpretations. Melencolia, as one scholar has pointed out, could also be an anagram and read as the Latin Limen coela or “threshold to heaven.”
The most intriguing element of the work is the magic square, a four-by-four set of the numbers from 1 to 16, where each row and column adds up to 34, a number related in some Hermetic texts to the planet Jupiter. The bottom row contains the numbers 4-15-14-1, which some see not only as the date (1514) but also use a Masonic cipher to change the letters A=1 and D=4 for Albrecht Dürer.
Using the numbers contained on Dürer’s square, Langdon unscrambles the letters.
S O E U |
16 3 2 13 |
J E O V |
A T U N |
5 10 11 8 |
A S A N |
C S A S |
9 6 7 12 |
C T U S |
V U N J |
4 15 14 1 |
U N U S |
This spells Jeova Sanctus Unus, which as any Latin student knows, translates as “One True God.” (266). But Langdon is not finished, for we will find that this in turn is an anagram for Isaacus Neutonnus, Sir Isaac Newton (322). Newton, Dan Brown fans will remember, made a brief appearance in The Da Vinci Code in connection with Sir Francis Bacon. Both were scientist philosophers and Bacon was the author of his own code, the Baconian Cipher. The name of Newton will itself provide a clue for deciphering the hidden symbols on the gold pyramid. Under a cover of wax are concealed symbols. But by utilizing the 33 degrees on the Newton Scale at which water boils, the symbols miraculously appear. They are for Langdon a revelation of sixty-four symbols that are also desperately in need of rearranging.
WOLFRAM MATH WORLD “MAGIC SQUARE”
mathworld.wolfram.com/MagicSquare.html
MELENCOLIA I AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=6640&image=3660&c=
Detail from Dürer’s Melencolia I