Word: browning
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...entirely unexpected result pops up: the entry for scapegoats. The secretive organization that once counted George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire among its ranks has been a favorite target for conspiracy theorists since the 17th century, when Masonic lodges first spread across Europe. Now best-selling novelist Dan Brown has taken aim at the group's cultlike reputation in his latest book, The Lost Symbol - a fact that comes as no surprise to author Jay Kinney. In his own new book, The Masonic Myth, Kinney attempts to dispel some of the persistent rumors about the group by explaining...
Somebody has probably already pointed out that the publication date of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code - March 18, 2003 - came just two days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That isn't a conspiracy, it's just a coincidence. But it does - as fans of The Da Vinci Code often say - make you think...
...Consider: Brown's novel proposed an alternate history of Christianity, wherein a bitter schism took place shortly after Jesus' death, between the mean patriarchal faction who concealed Jesus' marriage and the nice faction consisting of startlingly liberal first-wave feminists. In other words, The Da Vinci Code recasts the history of Christianity into something that looks a lot more like the history of ... Islam, wherein an early schism took place between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. Could the book's passionate following in a predominantly Christian America express a secret, even unconscious sympathetic identification with Islam? Or a repressed...
...Probably not. But this is the name of the game in the Browniverse: at its most basic level the Brownian fantasy is that coincidences aren't just chance, and things are not just things: they mean something. Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, is after all a symbologist (following a branch of human intellectual inquiry that - it cannot be stated enough times - doesn't exist, at Harvard or anywhere else). Beneath his learned, oddly asexual caress, objects come to life and become symbols. A V isn't just a V, it's a chalice, a symbol of the eternal feminine. Chaos...
...Unlike the first two Langdon novels, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday; 509 pages) doesn't deal with the history of the Christian church. The mythology Langdon is decoding is that of the Freemasons (whose motto ordo ab chao, order out of chaos, could be Brown's). Langdon is summoned - dude is always getting summoned - to Washington, D.C., by a mysterious phone call that he thinks is coming from his old friend and mentor Peter Solomon, head of the Smithsonian. Langdon thinks he's going to give a speech at a Smithsonian fundraiser at the Capitol building. But when he shows...