It might be hard for some of us to imagine a grown man allowing himself to be blindfolded, led into a darkened room, threatened and ritually attacked by three men wearing aprons, pulled to the floor, and left there with a cloth over his head for an hour or more before he is allowed to see light again. It might be even harder to imagine Ben Franklin submitting to these indignities. Or George Washington. Or Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt. But all of them did, along with eleven other presidents, and a great many of the leading politicians, generals, artists and scientists of this country and several others. And some of them have done even more outlandish things as part of their commitment to Freemasonry. Perhaps because Masonry and its legends are already so bizarre, Dan Brown hardly needs to make anything up in his depiction of the fraternity in his new novel, The Lost Symbol.
Although they plunder art, history, and religion for subject matter, everyone knows that Brown’s books don’t rise very far above the grocery-store checkout aisle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol, he exposes the deep stratum of mystical thinking that underlies modern rationalism. However naive the novel may be, it testifies to the myths that helped to make the modern world, myths in which Brown places zealous faith. In so doing, it reads like a love letter to Masonry.
Brown takes to heart the adage that truth is stranger than fiction, like the reverse of a lousy historian: rather than finding himself bored by dry, ordinary facts and spicing them up with distortions and flights of fancy, he takes shallow, hackneyed fiction and makes it exciting by adding in the truth. Along the way, he can’t resist including some of the Masons’ absurd legends surrounding their supposed origins, and so allows fact, fiction, and myth to blend into a heady mixture.
The book reflects not the fear and suspicion often directed towards the Masonic mysteries but rather the continuing strength of the mindset—the mix of hope and terror surrounding the advance of human knowledge—that gave rise to the Masons in the first place and that set the stage for the modern imagination.
*
http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/exegesis/modernity%e2%80%99s-fraternity/I hope so the Freemasons have been demonized enough.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
