Last week the New York Times featured a crossword puzzle based on The Lost Symbol. You can now download that crossword as a PDF from the official Lost Symbol website. Test your knowledge of the book, and have some fun in the process – it’s a good challenge. Thanks to Bill Gates for the heads-up.

Just musing to myself about a few of the things that Dan Brown missed (or omitted, for unknown reasons) when writing The Lost Symbol. I thought of quite a few while reading the book, I should have written down a list. Here’s a couple that I mention in The Guide to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol – I’ll update it with more if/as I remember them:

1. The phrase ‘Laus Deo’: Dan mentions how this phrase is written on the pyramidion of the Washington Monument, translating to ‘Praise God’. What he doesn’t elaborate on is that ‘Laus Deo’ is a phrase used in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. It forms part of the rituals and has also been inscribed on jewels of the Scottish Rite (see The Guide for an image).
2. Edgar Mitchell: Dan Brown explains the strange research and history of the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), but for some reason omits one of the more fascinating aspects of IONS – it was created by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience while returning from the Moon. This seems perfect material for Dan Brown to elaborate on in TLS – why didn’t he use it (did his research miss this fact)? And, to double the Apollo interest factor in TLS: Edgar Mitchell founded IONS, and another Apollo astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, is a 33° Scottish Rite Mason – Aldrin even took a handmade Scottish Rite flag to the Moon on his famous mission with Neil Armstrong.

Feel free to add your own in the comments section.

Boing Boing recently featured an article on Dan Brown from Arthur Goldway, author of Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies:

No one has ever accused Dan Brown of being a literary stylist; he’s too easy to parody. His narrators natter on like chatty tour guides, bludgeoning us with trivia and heavy-handed exposition. His hero Robert Langdon seems to suffer from a testosterone deficiency; his celibate bad guys, with their bulging muscles and self-mortified flesh, are creepily fetishized. But ANGELS AND DEMONS, THE DA VINCI CODE, and now THE LOST SYMBOL do more than merely lead their legions of readers on merry chases; they exhort them to reconsider their world view. Though the answers he provides may be trivial and sometimes historically inaccurate, the questions Brown asks us to consider are worth pondering. Does the church misrepresent Christianity? Is history filled with mysteries and intrigues that mainstream chronicles elide? Are science and religion converging?

Brown earnestly wants us to expand our view of human potential, to open ourselves up to a whole new paradigm–one that is more capacious and filled with possibilities than either secular scientism or the traditional Judeo-Christian world view.

Some criticism in there mixed up with fascinating discussion about a number of the topics covered in The Lost Symbol. Intelligent stuff for the most part, and worth a read.