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Decoding the Real Lost Symbols Being an avid reader and a Freemason I eagerly devoured Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol novel when it came out in 2009. During my first read of it, I set it down dismissing it as a convoluted plot merely using the ‘secrecy’ of masonic imitation as a convenient for readers with a passing and not so passing interest in the occult.
During a recent holiday in Donegal, I picked it up again, and after laughing at the ludicrous nonsense of the prologues ‘33rd degree’ – which contain elements of suggested masonic content coming from hoax exposure rather than anything remotely resembling a masonic ritual. I came across some interesting pieces of Masonic mathematics, now as we know the greatest celebration of Freemasonry is the art of Geometry, the skill of seemingly being able to pluck numbers out of the air and create wonder buildings, tombs and meaningful artwork.
The Story of the Artesian
“Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it. Thus, beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end1”
Our journey amongst the secrets of masonic mathematics begins with one of the greatest polymaths the Renaissance had seen. Albrecht Durer was an engineer, mathematician, printer and painter. He lived in Germany during the early 1500’s, his family originally came from Hungry, their family name in Hungarian meant door (Atosi), when his father moved from Hungary to Germany, he changed his name to Durer, which meant Door Maker.
Fig1 – Carving of a Self-‐portrait of Durer at the age of 26
1 Albrecht Durer – Attributed the source material is unknown
One of the many key pieces of craftsmanship that Durer was famous for, was this wood carving called Melencholia 1
Fig 2 – The magnificent Melencholia 1 engraved around 1514
Now I love this image, at school I printed it out on an Epson colour jet and stuck it at the back of one of my science folders..(I wonder if children still do that, stick pictures and icons on their school folders…or if its all moved to Facebook now..) it struck a cord with me, at the
time I didn’t know what any of it meant and the books in the local library failed to mention any of Durer’s work. It was a few years after my initiation that I went back to study it again, remember the seven liberal sciences alluded to in the ritual of the Fellowcraft, I endeavoured to decipher this image and process it through the interpretation of my subconscious.
To a Freemason the first thing that can be noticed is the tools lying to the bottom right of the image, these are the tools of the engraver – the tools that Durer would have been familiar with. Moving the eye along the image, we also begin to see geometrical tools which Plato would have recognised as his ‘Platonic Solids2’, we also see the great source of all creative powers at the top left, which we shall in this paper, only call ‘light’
Look at the Angel, the sadness – the melancholy comes from being surrounded by all these tools of creation, but lacking the internal spark of creativity in order to construct magnificence from the basic elements scattered around him/her. There is also an instructive spiritual lesson present here…but I will not belay with it, allowing the reader to tease it out, if they so wish.
The Square
Often missed by most at first sight is the square of numbers behind the angel’s shoulder.
Fig 3 – The Magic Square
A magic square is an arrangement of numbers in which each row, each column and each main diagonal has the same sum, they all add up to the same number. There is also a specific calculation with this sum, M(M2+1)/2.
Taking this 4 x 4 square the sum is 4(4x4+1)/2 = 34
2 http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~sudzi/polyhedra/platonic.html -‐ there is also a mystical element for the Mason within these Euclidian shapes – Elucid being mentioned in Andersons Masonic constitutions of 1723 and the mystical concept of Metatron’s cube
Fig 4 – Take the lines on the image as an example of how the magic square works
16+3+2+13 = 34
16+10+7+1 = 34
16+9+5+5 = 34
This explains the first of the ‘Lost Symbols’ within Brown’s Book, the second is even more interesting, it involved our very own masonic cryptogram.
The Pig Pen Cipher
This is not an example of a secure Cipher, it is simplistic and is known as a monoalphabetic substitution. I want the reader to know that this cipher is not used anymore, it is defunct and is not a masonic ‘secret’ so the writer has not violated his obligations (the obligations merely restrict members of the craft as to showing methods of recognition – unfortunately the author has no knowledge of any world-‐wide plot or conspiracy)
Fig 5 – The Pig Pen Cipher – so called because the lines look like they represent a Farm Yard!
This Cipher can be traced back to the early 18th Century and has been used by Freemasons and possibly the Rosicrucian brotherhood. It was used primarily to keep rites and rituals noted down and secret and also would have been used in masonic correspondence, thankfully in the modern era, Freemasonry has no need of this cipher and everything is written in the native tongue of the indivi
dual reading it.
How the cipher works is quite simple – if you wanted to write a symbol corresponding to to the letter ‘A’ you would denote it by :
as if you look at figure 5 the letter is encased within this shape.
Therefore if the plain text was “I am a Freemason” – the cipher would look as follows
Hopefully this extremely short paper has helped any who have wondered what these Ciphers are and how they fit into any masonic context.