Matt Lauer remarked on NBC Dateline: “You might think the symbols came from Mal’akh’s twisted mind. They came instead from a mysterious book called The Secret Teachings of All Ages, a favorite of Mal’akh’s creator, Dan Brown.” Brown replied: “And that really is a core book for a lot of what I research and a lot of what I believe.” Katherine recalls along with Newton, then Ptolemy and Pythagoras, “Hermes Trismegistus. Nobody reads that stuff anymore” (58). Earlier Langdon had heard the words from Mal’akh that echo “an ancient Hermetic adage.... As above, so below” (39). The phrase is duly inscribed on the back of the dustcover. The Lost Symbol is replete with concepts known as Hermeticism. Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice Great) embodies a combination of the Greek god, Hermes, and the Egyptian Thoth, two traditions united in one. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance that figure gains popularity, in part because of the publication of the Emerald Tablet, with one edition prepared in English by Sir Isaac Newton. The document is supposed to hold the secret of alchemy, the key to transformation––and the claim, “That which is below is as that which is above, and that which is above is as that which is below, to do the miracles of one only thing.” This concept of transformation also attracted Manly Hall who devoted an entire chapter to Hermeticism which can basically be summarized as an alternative to the traditional religious approaches to salvation and afterlife. For the hermeticist, the secret is the Key to Immortality inscribed in The Book of Thoth and entrusted to the Master of the Mysteries. The Corpus Hermeticum that was translated into English as early as 1650 proclaims: “For it is possible, my son, that a man’s soul should be made like to God, e’en while it still is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good.” This quote corresponds to the philosophy of life articulated by Peter Solomon to Langdon. And this same central Hermetic text speaks of the light and the word, two recurring images in The Lost Symbol: “out of the Light … a Holy Word (Logos) descended on that Nature.”
The reasoning is essentially circular. The Lost Symbol or the quest for it is to find the Word, the Lost Word. But when the Word is discovered, it is only a symbol for another Word. “Robert, the Lost Word is not a ‘word’ … We only call it the ‘Word’ because that’s what the ancients called it … in the beginning (486).
Perhaps no one in the twentieth century did more for the study of the esoteric Word, to the key to finding it, than Manly Palmer Hall. Born in 1901, he was a prolific American author and mystic. He is perhaps most famous for his 1928 work The Secret Teaching of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. This is the book that Brown cites in his epilogue, and its contents provide the basis for the Hand of Mysteries and even for the major themes of human enlightenment and apotheosis. Hall reprinted and introduced Bacon’s The New Atlantis. He also published over 150 books, including The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, The Secret of Hiram Abiff, and The Secret Destiny of America. He was the founder of the Philosophical Research Society which continues his work today. His own definiton of philosophy and its mission was “to establish the relation of manifested things to their invisible ultimate cause or nature.” There is little doubt that Hall served as a primary source for much in the novel, from the themes of transformation and enlightenment to the historical figures and the rich symbolism. It is quite likely that The Lost Symbol will give newfound life to Hall’s life and work.
Trismegistus
“THE EMERALD TABLET”
www.sacred-texts.com/alc/emerald.htm
MANLY P. HALL, THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES
www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta
MITCH HOROWITZ, “THE INSCRUTABLE MANLY P. HALL”
www.mitchhorowitz.com/manly-p-hall.html
CORPUS HERMETICUM
sacred-texts.com/gno/th2/th202.htm
