Wow! What a breakneck pace Dan Brown sets in his latest book, The Lost Symbol, which is all about the Masons. Most folk I know who’ve read it really could not put it down for long. My read was just like that. Over 500 pages, and the book covers less than 24 hours.
Maybe if Robert Langdon, the hero, had had more time, we would all have figured this one out. While getting a Ph. D. in items Masonic, and the entire geography and architecture of Washington, D. C., especially the US Capitol. Even up inside the dome, looking at the unusual depiction of George Washington.
Brown is really an addictive writer, racing just ahead of the reader and throwing out secrets to keep us moving. So much about the CIA, science, arcane rituals. And of course all this is fiction. Right?
The story is fiction, the rest of it, the framework, is real. As in the DaVinci Code, the world Dan Brown recreates feels very real to many of us. Angels and Demons didn’t really matter, because the Catholic church is busy making itself irrelevant. But the DaVinci Code, which brings back the Sacred Feminine, is recaptured history, and writes women back into religion.
And this book about the Masons re-introduces the sacramental power of ritual. The power, the energy that focused minds create and hold is present here, whether with the good guys or the bad guy, whether through the scientist, the enigmatic CIA officer, the symbologist, the Capitol Architect, or in the National Cathedral. The book also, teasingly, gives us some of the findings of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which has, for instance, found that the human soul has weight.
Much to muse on after reading The Lost Symbol – a good feeling after an excellent read.