“Robert, buried within the hollow cornerstone of this monument, our forefathers placed a single copy of the Word—the Bible—which waits in darkness at the foot of the staircase.” (488). Like so many surprises in the novel, this one had been hinted at so much earlier. Upon entering the Library of Congress, Langdon passes the display case with the Giant Bible of Mainz, one of three existing original Gutenberg Bibles (181). The Akedah knife, both in Masonic rituals and in Mal’akh’s planned mystery play, is intended to re-enact the Biblical scene of the “most august gift ever offered to God … the submission of Abraham to the volitions of the supreme being by proffering Isaac, his first-born.” (445). The Book of Genesis 22, recounts the sacrifice of Abram, who had been renamed Abraham by God himself. The story inspires Zachary, renamed Mal’akh, to force his own father, Peter, to transform him into a sacrificial lamb. The Covenant between God and Abraham, the promise of father to son, is distorted in Zachary/Mal’Akh/Abaddon’s evil mind. The Covenant of the Old Testament gives way to the new: “In the beginning was the Word”(487). Brown, I suspect, hopes that his readers will recall, or look up, the remainder of the passage from the Gospel of John I:
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
The ultimate secret, the Word, buried and now found is the Masonic Bible buried in the cornerstone of the Washington Monument in 1848. The Masonic Bible combines the Old and New Testaments, along with facts on Freemasonry which itself draws heavily on a number of traditions while tracing its origins to Solomon’s Temple. Perhaps not since Dostoevsky, who in the novel is dismissed as reading material for the elite at Yale, has an author imparted to his text such explicit biblical references. From Genesis and the creation of the world, we encounter the selection of the Jews as God’s chosen people. Peter Solomon takes up a knife to slay his son before a miraculous intervention. The Solomon father and son embody richly symbolic Old and New Testament associations: from King Solomon and Solomon’s temple, the foundation of the modern Masonic legend, to the Apostle Peter in Rome and Angels & Demons, St. Peter’s Square and Basilica, and the pope who holds the Keys of Peter. The angel Gabriel appears to Zachary (Zechariah) to announce the birth of a son and that son, John the Baptist, will herald the coming of Jesus Christ.
The Bible has for centuries interested scholars, and the novel’s final pages remind us of the work of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, not only the author of the Declaration of Independence, but also of the Jefferson Bible which sought to find common ground and eliminate the “supernatural aspects” and “miracles” of Christ.
Masonic Bible
This all brings us back to the opening quote from The Secret Teachings. Mal’akh believes: “The secret is how to die.” The phrase is repeated twice more for the symbolic three of religious incantations—the trinity. In fact, the secret is not so much how to die, but how to transcend death. In John 11:25, we read, “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” The miracle of the healing of Lazarus is for Christians the clearest indication that death is but a beginning, a portal into eternal life. The Apotheosis is seen as symbolic, not of the resurrection of Christ, but the ascending into the heavens of a mortal man, George Washington, to be at one with the gods.
The final pages of the novel attempt to tie everything together. The Ancient Mysteries and the Bible are the same thing. (491). All unite in “The circumpunct. The symbol of the Source. The origin of all things” (459). The symbol of One Holy God. “E PLURIBUS UNUM. Out of many, one” (505). The novel, its characters, and we readers have all been on a path leading to transformation and illumination, the enlightenment of the human mind. The resolution or revelation is one that elevates the human mind above all else. The Lost Symbol is a new attempt to follow in the footsteps of the ancients and wise men through history to reconcile science and religion in the mind (our temple) and at the same time to reunite the mind and the soul for the attainment of at-one-ment. “God was the symbol we all shared … the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not understand. The ancients had praised God as a symbol of our limitless human potential, but the ancient symbol had been lost over time. Until now” (509).
All great truths are simple (459).
JEFFERSON BIBLE
www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible
THE BIBLE
www.bible.com
