Dan Brown has used his previous novels to acquaint readers with the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei, and artists and scientists from Bernini to Leonardo da Vinci. None of this has been hidden, or secret or concealed. Whoever wishes to unlock the so-called Secrets of the Ancients need look no further than the nearest library, encyclopedia, or nowadays Wikipedia. Brown’s greatest contribution may be his ability to identify for his readers curious aspects of our collective human heritage and reveal them anew to our generation. For the past five hundred years at least, men have searched the written historical record that preceded them for answers to the question of our mortality. The invention of the printing press largely coincided with a renewed European interest in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, and a new questioning of authority, leading to the Protestant Reformation or revolutions that challenged the power of the Roman Catholic Church. These all found resonance in a new set of searches and responses based on earlier texts. Brown is well read in this tradition, but unlike The Da Vinci Code for which he actually published a bibliography, in The Lost Symbol he merely alludes to dozens of individuals or traditions.
The book begins with the epigraph: “To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.” (The Secret Teaching of All Ages). Brown doesn’t identify the author of this classic text from 1928, an attempt by Manly P. Hall to assemble under one cover a description of esoteric thought from the beginning of recorded history. We shall return to that book, but it is clear that Brown is familiar with it and other writings by Hall. What is most notable is that here too the “secret teachings” are not all that secret. But they do lie outside the confines of the traditional religious beliefs and tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Whether these texts were largely ignored, or in some cases banned, most Westerners will find these writings as new today as Hall’s audience did in the 1920s.
The difference is that today some of these mysteries are being exposed to millions in an extraordinary number of volumes, whereas some of these earlier texts had far less exposure. In addition to the work of Hall, Albert Pike, Grandmaster of the 33rd Degree Scottish Right of Freemasons, wrote a legendary compendium, Morals and Dogma, that referenced hundreds of names extending back to earlier Egyptian and Classical civilizations.
Interested readers can make their own list, of course, and we shall try to examine in some detail the specifics of the Middle Ages through the Invisible College, the Hermetic tradition along with Hall’s contribution to the Ancient Mysteries, and finally the Bible. Many of the key writings are available in the Internet Sacred Text Archive.
INTERNET SACRED TEXT ARCHIV
www.sacred-texts.com