Lies, Damned Lies and Dan Brown: Fact-checking Angels & Demons

In a Q&A billed as an “interview” on his own website, Brown writes “My goal is always to make the character’s [sic] and plot be so engaging that readers don’t realize how much they are learning along the way.” Or how much misinformation they’re absorbing.

Quick, how did Copernicus die?

Dan Brown readers "know" the answer: "Outspoken scientists like Copernicus" were "murdered by the church for revealing scientific truths," according to a tag-team history lesson by Harvard "symbolist" Robert Langdon and CERN director Maximilian Kohler in Angels & Demons, the predecessor to Brown's blockbuster sequel, The Da Vinci Code.

On May 15, the new Ron Howard adaptation of Angels & Demons -- reworked as a sequel rather than a prequel to Howard's 2006 smash The Da Vinci Code -- will bring another installment of the Dan Brown version of history to millions of moviegoers. While the new film doesn't repeat the specific charge of the murder of Copernicus, it maintains the larger historical context set forth in Brown's Angels & Demons: the Church's murderous persecution of science, especially in the Illuminati, a secret society that Brown claims counted Copernicus, Galileo and Bernini among its members.

Here's how Tom Hanks's Langdon describes the relevant history in an exchange with Vatican police head Ernesto Olivetti: "The Illuminati … were physicists, mathematicians, astronomers. In the 1500s they started meeting in secret because they were concerned about the Church's inaccurate teachings, and they were dedicated to scientific truth. And the Vatican didn't like that. So the Church began to … hunt them down and kill them."

In another clip Langdon puts it even more succinctly: "The Illuminati were a secret society dedicated to scientific truth. The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever."

Specifically, Langdon cites a supposedly historical incident he calls "La Purga." In the film version, Langdon upbraids Swiss Guard head Commander Richter for his historical ignorance: "Geez, you guys don't even read your own history, do you? 1668, the church kidnapped four Illuminati scientists and branded each one of them on the chest with the symbol of the cross, to purge them of their sins. And they executed them, threw their bodies in the street as a warning to others to stop questioning church ruling on scientific matters. They radicalized them. The Purga created a darker, more violent Illuminati, one bent on … on retribution."

The specifics -- Copernicus, the year in which La Purga took place -- create an aura of facticity taken seriously by many fans of Brown's yarns. Although his defenders sometimes demur that Angels & Demons, as well as The Da Vinci Code, is "just fiction," Brown has never wavered in insisting on the solid factual basis for his stories -- and many of his more credulous fans have no idea just how much he routinely gets wrong.

In a Q&A billed as an "interview" on his own website, Brown writes (in a comment recently highlighted by Carl Olson in This Rock), "My goal is always to make the character's [sic] and plot be so engaging that readers don't realize how much they are learning along the way." Or how much misinformation they're absorbing.

Art and architecture

In particular, Brown claims that his narrative use of works of art and architecture is "entirely factual": "References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations)," he writes in an author's note in Angels & Demons, adding, somewhat ungrammatically, "The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual." (Statements may be "factual" or not; an institution or entity may or may not be historical, or accurately depicted -- and Brown's Illuminati manifestly isn't -- but in any case it can't be "factual.")

For years, Catholics, non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians with a low threshold for rampant disinformation have labored to set the record straight on countless points muddied in the book and movie versions of Brown's tales. Brown's inaccuracies start with the very point on which he claims strictest reliability: works of art and architecture -- and their "exact locations."

For instance, Brown locates Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome at Piazza Barberini, a half mile from its real location. He puts Santa Maria del Popolo at the southeast corner of the piazza, though it's actually on the north side, and describes Langdon looking up at its "rose window," though the church's circular window lacks the stone mullions and traceries of a rose window.

Brown also identifies Santa Maria del Popolo as a "cathedral." Later he has Langdon straining to "see a spire or cathedral tower jutting up over the obstacles." Possibly Brown doesn't know what a cathedral is. There is only one cathedral in any diocese, the church that is the seat (cathedra) of the local bishop. (The bishop of Rome is, of course, the pope. His cathedral church is the Basilica of St. John Lateran.)

Brown says that the rivers represented by Bernini's Four Rivers fountain represent "the four major rivers of the Old World -- The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata," though the Rio de la Plata, an estuary on the border of Argentina and Uruguay, belongs to the New World, the four rivers being chosen to represent the four continents of Renaissance cartography (Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas).

Brown's claim of accuracy regarding "tombs" is equally false. Angels & Demons claims that a plaque in the Pantheon indicates that Raphael's body was only relocated to the Pantheon in 1758, and that he was originally buried in Urbino. No such plaque exists, for the excellent reason that Raphael was buried in the Pantheon from the start. Brown also places the body of Pope Alexander VII, Alexander Chigi, in the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. In fact, Alexander VII is buried in the tombs of St. Peter's Basilica.

Brown ascribes to Michelangelo the design of the Swiss Guard uniforms and the spiral staircase leading to the Vatican Museums, which he incorrectly calls the Musèo Vaticano rather than the Musei Vaticani. In fact it appears that Michelangelo was not involved in the design of the Swiss Guard uniforms, and certainly had nothing to do with the spiral staircase of the Vatican museums, which is of 20th-century origin, designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932. Among the treasures housed within the Vatican museums, Brown lists St. Peter's Basilica, a separate structure.

These are fairly incidental (if often glaring) errors. More problematic is a key reference to a tile in the pavement of St. Peter's Square, the "West/Ponente" tile. The tile depicts the west wind personified as a classical godlike head blowing from the west.

Brown presents the "West/Ponente" tile as an all-important clue left by Gianlorenzo Bernini, who designed St. Peter's Square, supposedly pointing the way to the next location in the book's scavenger hunt. Brown also claims that the use of the English word "West" on the tile represented, in Bernini's day, a disreputable Anglicism -- English in the 1600s being, in Brown's mythology, "the one language the Vatican had not yet embraced" and "did not control" (whatever that means).

There are a number of problems here. First and most obviously, the "West/Ponente" tile is one of sixteen markers in St. Peter's Square arrayed in a circle and aligned to the points of the compass, forming a "compass rose" or "wind rose" (rosa dei venti) -- i.e., pointing in every direction.

For instance, directly opposite the "West/Ponente" marker is the "E[a]st/Levante" marker -- and, if I saw correctly, the new film actually includes a doctored shot of this marker, with the wind/breath lines airbrushed from the image, thereby suggesting that only the "West/Ponente" tile points in a specific direction.

For another thing, the current wind-rose markers aren't Bernini's work at all. According to www.StPetersBasilica.org, they were added three centuries later, under Pius IX (and whatever the status of English in Bernini's day, there was certainly nothing disreputable about it in 1852).

One art-related charge made in both the film and the book is the notion of Pius IX's "Great Castration" of Vatican City's male statues in 1857, which supposedly involved the pope taking a mallet to the male organs of every single statue in the Vatican. (In the book, Langdon wonders if the Vatican still has a heap of stone penises somewhere as relics of this systematic vandalism.)

Did it really happen? More pointedly, how many people exposed to the idea will ever find out? (The truth is that fig leaves were added, but the statues were not castrated; rather, subsequent efforts to remove the leaves proved more damaging than leaving them in place.)

Brown's misrepresentation of matters of art and architecture are not confined to the fiction of his novels. Here is how Brown describes how he got the inspiration to write Angels & Demons in a Q&A billed as an "interview" on his website:

"I was beneath Vatican City touring a tunnel called il passetto -- a concealed passageway used by the early Popes to escape in event of enemy attack. According to the scholar giving the tour, one of the Vatican's most feared ancient enemies was a secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati -- the "enlightened ones" -- a cult of early scientists who had vowed revenge against the Vatican for crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus. I was fascinated by images of this cloaked, anti-religious brotherhood lurking in the catacombs of Rome. Then, when the scholar added that many modern historians believe the Illuminati is still active today and is one of most powerful unseen forces in global politics, I knew I was hooked … I had to write an Illuminati thriller."

Copernicus was never at odds with Church authority. A cleric and bishop's nephew, Copernicus published his six-volume work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres at the urging of the Cardinal Archbishop of Capua, Nikolaus von Schönberg, and dedicated the work to Pope Paul III.

This biographical anecdote story garbles the fact that the Passetto di Borgo is not a "tunnel" located "beneath Vatican City." It is an elevated passageway, partly covered and partly open, disguised as a wall running from Vatican City to Castel Sant'Angelo. If Brown had made that mistake in the fictional narrative of the novel, it might be just another blunder, but he says that he toured the Passetto and was even inspired to write the book there. How could Brown make that mistake if he had really toured it as he says?

The credibility of Brown's anecdote is further eroded by his description of the comments from the (here unnamed) "scholar" giving the tour: a thoroughly unhistorical description of the Illuminati as a "cult of scientists," one of the Catholic Church's "most feared ancient enemies," who had "vowed revenge against the Vatican for crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus." (Who is this "scholar"? In his acknowledgements Brown thanks "Sylvia Cavazzini" for his tour of the passetto. Whoever "Sylvia Cavazzini" may be, she hasn't published or otherwise left any scholarly paper trail that I could find; as far as I can tell, Dan Brown's acknowledgement is the only obvious evidence of her existence anywhere on the Internet. )

This, of course, just happens to touch upon the central premise of Angels & Demons, the meta-narrative around which the action of the novel is constructed: the picture of the Church and science at war with one another. Brown connects this supposedly historical theme to a supposedly biographical event in his own life, implying a credible, "scholarly" basis for it, reinforcing the claim of his author's note regarding the "factual" nature of the Illuminati.

In fact, the whole premise -- much like Brown's moment of subterranean "inspiration" and possibly the tour, the "scholar" and the history lesson he describes -- is almost completely lacking in reality.

Science, the Illuminati and the Church

The historical Illuminati was was not founded in the 1500s, and its membership did not include Copernicus, Galileo or Bernini, all of whom died long before the Illuminati existed (in Copernicus's case, well over two centuries; in Bernini's, nearly a century).

The Illuminati was an Enlightenment-era secret society. It was founded in the late eighteenth century, in 1776, the same year as the founding of the United States. Its members were politically minded freethinkers with no particular interest in science.

Although the Illuminati were not friendly toward religion, there were no "vows of revenge" against the Church for "crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus." On the contrary, one would be hard pressed to come up with any evidence of any ecclesiastical "crimes" committed against Copernicus, and while the Galileo affair is certainly a black mark on church history, his fate (lifelong house arrest) was not the sort of outrage that tends to inspire murderous vows of revenge centuries after the fact.

Copernicus was never at odds with Church authority. A cleric and bishop's nephew, Copernicus published his six-volume work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres at the urging of the Cardinal Archbishop of Capua, Nikolaus von Schönberg, and dedicated the work to Pope Paul III. Years earlier, Copernicus was invited to advise the Lateran Council, invoked by Leo X, regarding reworking the calendar, and his work informed the Church's eventual reformation of the calendar. Although his writings proved controversial for a time after his death, the controversy centered on a few passages and isolated words.

Copernicus died at the age of 70, of a stroke. The claim that he was "murdered by the church for revealing scientific truths" is sheer fiction, even libel.

If the larger picture of the Catholic Church's opposition to science and systematic persecuting scientists like Copernicus -- the meta-narrative around which Angels & Demons is constructed -- is almost completely without reality, it is also not a mere "product of the author's imagination." Just as The Da Vinci Code's reading of history is drawn from sources like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Angels & Demons exploits a misconception with long roots in American anti-Catholicism: a kind of anti-Catholic master myth celebrated in books like Charles Chiniquy's 1886 diatribe Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.

As Dr. Thomas Woods notes, "For the last fifty years, virtually all historians of science -- including A. C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Stanley Jaki, Thomas Goldstein, and J. L. Heilbron -- have concluded that the Scientific Revolution was indebted to the Catholic Church"

Chiniquy's nineteeth-century polemic claims that Blaise Pascal as well as Copernicus was excommunicated, while Galileo was publicly flogged and sent to a dungeon. None of this is true (Pascal may have had heretical leanings, but never faced excommunication, while Galileo suffered nothing worse than house arrest, and was never flogged, tortured or imprisoned in a dungeon). Nevertheless, even today the picture of the Church systematically persecuting and executing scientists is popularly perceived as having some basis in history.

La Purga is a wholly fictional event (perhaps Richter has read his history after all). There was no murder and branding of four scientists, Illuminati or otherwise, nor did the Church toss bodies in the street as a warning. (The only remotely scientifically minded historical figure I am aware of who was executed by Catholic civil authorities is the sixteenth-century Dominican Giordano Bruno. Although Bruno was a heliocentrist, his conviction by the Roman Inquisition appears to have been for sadly typical reasons -- heretical beliefs regarding the nature of God, the Trinity, Jesus Christ and other points of fundamental dogma, in keeping with his pantheist worldview -- rather than for his heliocentrism.)

Brown depicts CERN scientists routinely petitioning the Vatican for "apologies for Copernicus and Galileo." In the case of Copernicus, the only conceivable response would be "For what?" Even Galileo, almost the only shred of fact in the anti-Catholic master myth of the Church's persecution of scientists, has been both distorted beyond recognition in popular imagination and misrepresented as archetypal rather than exceptional.

Brown expoits and reinforces this misperception, claiming that Galileo was convicted of heresy (in fact the finding was not heresy, but "vehemently suspect of heresy") and was "almost executed" (nothing of the sort was ever in question) for "daring to imply that God had placed mankind somewhere other than at the center of His universe." This last implies that the medieval geocentric model was flatteringly anthropocentric; in reality, the medievals saw the earth as the lowest and least glorious location in the universe, the farthest from the heights of Heaven (with hell itself at the very center).

Brown shamelessly transposes a philosophical blind spot affecting Galileo himself to his critics, representing ecclesiastical authorities as insisting that heavenly bodies must move in perfect circular orbits and therefore attacking Galileo for daring to propose elliptical orbits. Actually, it was Galileo himself -- not church authorities -- who esteemed the perfection of circular orbits, and rejected the notion of elliptically orbiting heavenly bodies. (This wasn't Galileo's only mistake, scientific or otherwise. For more, see The Galileo Controversy.)

Although Brown acknowledges that many scientists -- including Galileo -- were devout believers who saw faith and reason as complementary rather than opposed, he insists that the enlightened attitudes of Galileo and others conflicted with the Church's claim to be "the sole vessel through which man could understand God" (emphasis in original).

In doing so, Brown blithely ignores the crucial role of Christianity in the origins of modern science as well as the Church's patronage of the sciences in the time of Copernicus and Galileo. As Dr. Thomas Woods notes, "For the last fifty years, virtually all historians of science -- including A. C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Stanley Jaki, Thomas Goldstein, and J. L. Heilbron -- have concluded that the Scientific Revolution was indebted to the Catholic Church" (How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, p. 4).

Not only did Catholic theology provide the theoretical framework for the development of modern science -- since the first modern scientists believed that a cosmos ordered by a rational Creator was a cosmos governed by laws comprehensible to the reason of men created in His image -- many of the early scientists were priests and religious. Beyond that, the Church itself provided direct monetary and social support to science, particularly astronomy.

Yet Brown claims, in a speech in the mouth of the camerlengo Carlo Ventresca in both the book and the film, that "Since the days of Galileo our church has tried to slow the relentless march of science." Even educated people today have little notion of the Church's role in the origin and growth of modern science -- and they won't learn about it from Brown.

Bad science

Although Brown's treatment of scientific matters falls fairly under the rubric of legitimate science fiction, at least in part, it's not very smart sci-fi (I would like to have read Michael Crichton's take on an antimatter bomb), and Brown routinely botches things he could have gotten right without harming his premise.

The basic conceit of an "antimatter bomb" is fair enough sci-fi, even if it is about as scientifically feasible as Star Trek's transporters and warp drive.

The basic facts are these. Antimatter is real, and it is routinely created in miniscule quantities at laboratories like the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, as Brown describes in Angels & Demons. Anti-particles do annihilate on contact with corresponding particles of normal matter, releasing energy equivalent to the two particles annihilated. In principle, annihilating a very large amount of antimatter at once -- a gram, say, as posited in the book -- would have the devastating effect Brown describes.

However, Angels & Demons gets a great deal wrong that falls outside the scope of what is required by the story or what can be projected of future science. For example, both the book and the film speak of antimatter as a possible "energy source." In fact, Brown himself presents this possibility as fact, not just in Angels & Demons, but in a Q&A interview on his website. Here is his response to the question "Is antimatter for real?"

Absolutely. Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5% efficient.) Antimatter is 100,000 times more powerful than rocket fuel. A single gram contains the energy of a 20 kiloton atomic bomb -- the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In addition to being highly explosive, antimatter is extremely unstable and ignites when it comes in contact with anything … even air. It can only be stored by suspending it in an electromagnetic field inside a vacuum canister. If the field fails and the antimatter falls, the result is a "perfect" matter/antimatter conversion, which physicists aptly call "annihilation." CERN is now regularly producing small quantities of antimatter in their research for future energy sources. Antimatter holds tremendous promise; it creates no pollution or radiation, and a single droplet could power New York City for a full day. With fossils fuels dwindling, the promise of harnessing antimatter could be an enormous leap for the future of this planet. Of course, mastering antimatter technology brings with it a chilling dilemma. Will this powerful new technology save the world, or will it be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made?

This is very largely nonsense -- and again, nonsense presented as fact, not as fiction.

The notion of antimatter as an "energy source" is an absolute impossibility. It is not true that CERN scientists study antimatter "in their research for future energy sources." CERN research on antimatter is basically just studying the fundamental laws of physics.

Antimatter is no more "powerful" than regular matter. The energy released by a matter-antimatter annihilation is simply the combined energy of the two particles. An anti-particle -- say, an anti-proton -- contains no more energy than its opposite particle, a proton. Antimatter does not "ignite" when it comes into contact with "anything"; rather, every type of anti-particle annihilates on contact with its own corresponding particle of normal matter. Thus, anti-protons annihilate on contact with protons, positrons annihilate on contact with electrons, and so forth.

He floats the outrageous claim that the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist was "borrowed from the Aztecs," though the Aztec civilization came over a millennium later (not to mention the physical implausibility of trans-Atlantic cross-fertilization in the earliest days of Christianity).

If antimatter were a natural resource that could be "mined" and then annihilated with regular matter, it might be possible to use it as an energy source, just as we burn wood in order to harvest the solar energy stored in the wood. However, wood could not be an energy source if there were no sun and we had to grow trees under artificial light. The energy expended in order to light the trees would always far exceed the energy harvested by burning the wood. The process would lose energy, not create it.

That's the situation in a nutshell with antimatter. The only way to get antimatter is to create it ourselves, at an enormous expenditure of energy. Of necessity, far more energy is expended in creating antimatter than could ever be harvested in annihilating it, just as more energy always goes into growing a tree than could ever be harvested by burning it.

Thus, while it may be true that a droplet's worth of antimatter could power New York City for a month, the energy needed to create that droplet of antimatter in the first place would power New York for going on a billion years. Even if, per impossibile, the technology improved so that we could create antimatter with 100% perfect efficiency, we would still never get out more than we put in. For this reason, there is absolutely no prospect of creating antimatter as an "energy source."

It would also, not incidentally, take billions of years to create enough antimatter to power New York for a month -- or to blow up Vatican City. Most of the anti-particles created at CERN are immediately annihilated on contact with their normal-matter particles. It is true that small amounts of (electrically charged) antimatter can be captured in an electromagnetic trap. It is also true, as Brown claims in an opening FACT statement, that recent experiments at CERN, notably the 2002 ATHENA and ATRAP experiments, succeeded in creating millions of antihydrogen atoms at a time.

However, the technology to generate a gram of antimatter is completely beyond us, as is the technology to capture it. A gram of, say, anti-hydrogen would contain approximately 6.022 x 1023 atoms (a figure commonly known as Avogadro's number). That is so much larger than the mere millions of anti-hydrogen atoms CERN is currently capable of making that to create a gram of anti-hydrogen using this process would take billions of years. It is also far more than the amount of anti-hydrogen containable with present technology. For more, see CERN's own highly informative and entertaining Angels & Demons FAQ.

It isn't only with respect to the esoterica of antimatter that Brown gets science facts wrong. On Langdon's trans-Atlantic flight, he's told that people weigh thirty percent less when traveling at sixty thousand feet. In fact, the gravitational effect of rising to that altitude involves a change in weight of less than one percent.

Whatever the subject, Angels & Demons reliably botches it. The book and film versions both refer to cardinals who are considered likely successors to the Chair of Peter as preferiti ("favorites"), rather than the standard term papabile ("popeable" or pope material).

Brown mistranslates Novus Ordo Seclorum as "New Secular Order" (and ascribes it to the Illuminati) rather than "New Order for the Ages." He floats the outrageous claim that the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist was "borrowed from the Aztecs," though the Aztec civilization came over a millennium later (not to mention the physical implausibility of trans-Atlantic cross-fertilization in the earliest days of Christianity), and likewise misascribes to Buddhism the Hindu art of hatha yoga, which predates Buddhism.

He garbles Ionic and Doric columns, calling the Doric order the "Greek counterpart" of the Ionic, when in fact both are Greek. He calls the Swiss Guard "the sworn sentinels of Vatican City," a description that would better apply to the Vatican gendarmerie, as the Swiss Guard defend the person of the Holy Father, not the Vatican city state. (The movie gets this right; the book doesn't. The book refers to a Swiss Guard working undercover in St. Peter's Square. The only reason real Swiss Guards would be in St. Peter's Square would be if the pope were there or if they were off duty.)

An exhaustive list would be nearly impossible. It is hard to find an unproblematic page of Angels & Demons.

"Almost ingeniously bad"

Even for sheer popcorn entertainment value, while Angels & Demons offers a more engaging plotline than the turgid Da Vinci Code -- and makes for a more watchable film -- the sheer clunkiness of Brown's literary mechanics make the book a chore to wade through. It would not be an overstatement to say that Brown's writing is the worst prose style I have ever encountered in a popular edition, with the possible exception of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. (I have read worse writing in self-published and obscure works, as well as online.)

"Brown's writing is not just bad," writes Dr. Geoffrey K. Pullam, Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, in the first of a number of blog posts on Brown at Language Log. "[I]t is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives."

Among other things, Pullam calls out Brown's penchant for opening action scenes with clumsy "curriculum vitae details" in sentences like "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery" (the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code) and "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own" (the first sentence of Angels & Demons). Pullam delights in debunking Brown's literary non sequiturs: a voice "chillingly close" yet fifteen feet away; a "mountainous silhouette" with visible pupils and irises as well as skin and hair color.

Pullam's examples are from The Da Vinci Code; similar instances from Angels & Demons aren't hard to find. On the first page of chapter one of Angels & Demons, we read that "Langdon sat up in his empty bed"; two pages later, "Robert Langdon wandered barefoot through his deserted Massachusetts Victorian home … " But he's still in the bed on the first page, and obviously occupying his Massachusetts Victorian home; you can't sit up in an empty bed or wander through your deserted home, barefoot or otherwise.

This, of course, is Brown's inept way of letting us know that Langdon lives and sleeps alone -- which perhaps partly explains the author's embarrassing eagerness, two paragraphs later, to establish his hero's virility and attractiveness. "Although not overly handsome in a classical sense," we read, "the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite' appeal -- wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete."

The next paragraph goes on to tell us how Langdon's friends "had always viewed him as a bit of an enigma" -- a bohemian classicist who could be seen "lounging on the quad in blue jeans, discussing computer graphics or religious history" as well as "in his Harris tweed and paisley vest, photographed in the pages of upscale art magazines at museum openings where he had been asked to lecture."

Literarily, the problem with this preoccupation with Langdon's credentials as a fascinating, virile, maverick man of the world is that in this scene Langdon is -- as Brown has clearly if clumsily established -- alone in his home; there's no one else in the scene for Langdon to impress with his erudite appeal, or through whose eyes we might experience the Langdon effect. So either Langdon himself is sitting around meditating on his own personal mystique -- or else, if no one in the scene is thinking about it, we have the author transparently telling (rather than showing) what he wants us to know about his hero, which is to say, indulging his own authorial enthusiasm for his hero's mystique (with the implication that readers will be equally fascinated).

All of this would be embarrassing enough if Brown merely admired his hero -- but in fact it's pretty obvious that Brown views Langdon as a fictional version of himself. Five minutes into my first experience of Brown's writing, a few pages into The Da Vinci Code, having read about Langdon's "scholarly allure," his voice that female students described as "chocolate for the ears," and his general "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed … and Burberry turtleneck" look, I suddenly knew that if I flipped to the back dust jacket flap, I would find a picture of the author wearing precisely that tweed and turtleneck look. (Sure enough, there it was.)

Why is Brown so popular? What do fans see in Angels & Demons? Here, from Amazon.com, is the most highly rated positive user review of Angels & Demons -- not a user review chosen at random, but the positive review voted most helpful by other users:

"I don't mind suspending disbelief if a story is well written and ANGELS AND DEMONS fit nicely in that category. What makes Dan Browns's books spectacular (in my humble opinion) is the attention to detail and the research that he incorporates into his stories. I was fascinated by Brown's telling of the secrets of the Vatican and the Illuminati and the parts played by Galileo and Bernini."

Well written, attention to detail, research incorporated into the stories. What more is there to say?

Since you suggested it, I went to Dan Brown’s website and checked his responses to a set of (prescreened FAQs) about Angels and Demons. Within the context of his responses to the questions as compared to the issue that the DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons have raised, I find his explanations plausible and in keeping with the comments I have made.

In addition, I did some further research into the Illuminati and came across the information that I have appended to the end of the snippets of Dan Brown’s claims. When you take the substance of his responses to the FAQs about Angels and Demons with the appended information, his theories about the Illuminati are not as far-fetched as the author of the article we are discussing would have you believe. In fact, the majority of the article author’s complaints against Brown seem to me to be pretty petty ‘nits’ when taken as a whole.

Finally, Brown’s claims about Copernicus cannot be completely dismissed. If we believe that the Alumbrados could have been the forerunners of the Illuminati, then it is not out of the realm of possibility that Copernicus might have been a member. Due to the lack of complete biographical records from the time, Copernicus’ life is not completely documented and there is much speculation about his later life. What is not in doubt is his theory of heliocentricity in which he postulated that the earth revolved around the sun. However, that view was in conflict with those of the Catholic Church which held just the opposite – that the sun revolved around the earth. From early days, the Catholic Church held control over most knowledge by controlling who could learn to read and write. Those who wanted to learn these skills had to become members of the clergy in order to learn to read and write, so it is not impossible that the church might have wanted Copernicus murdered for his controversial theory. Again, the historical records about Copernicus’ death appear to be incomplete and the records of Georg Rheticus’, his primary biographer from the period, have not survived today. So, while Copernicus’ death cannot be fully attributed to the Catholic Church, neither can it be dismissed because the historical record id unclear. In one document on Copernicus that I saw, the Church had a mixed opinion on his theories, in others there was either no mention of the Church’s position or the mention was sketchy and inconclusive, at best.

Bottom line, a lot depends on what you want to believe. Because a great deal of the information that Brown based his novels on stems from documentary evidence that may be considered sketchy at best or inconclusive, IMO, and it is impossible to categorically state that Brown’s “historical records” are false and easily debunked. Based on the historical accounts I have seen, the basis of the story remains in the plausible category. It could have happened the way that he claims. By the same token, the historical records he used to base his novels on may be fatally flawed – we simply can’t say for certain.

Finally, going back to the original writer’s “debunking” of Angels and Demons, I found, as stated before, much of it to be petty nits, not worthy of the ink or bandwidth. Misspelling the name of the Vatican Museum doesn’t make the story wrong. Whether Brown was above ground or “partially covered” (as the article’s author acknowledges) in the passetto does not, in and of itself, push the limits of the story’s credibility. It is still a good story with an interesting storyline that is based on “facts” which are true in some accounts from the period and not true in other accounts because many of the records from that time period have either been lost or are inconclusive.

(From Brown’s website) -

Q: Angels & Demons was inspired in a bizarre location. Can you tell us what happened?
A: I was beneath Vatican City touring a tunnel called il passetto—a concealed passageway used by the early Popes to escape in event of enemy attack. According to the scholar giving the tour, one of the Vatican’s most feared ancient enemies was a secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati—the “enlightened ones”—a cult of early scientists who had vowed revenge against the Vatican for crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus. I was fascinated by images of this cloaked, anti-religious brotherhood lurking in the catacombs of Rome. Then, when the scholar added that many modern historians believe the Illuminati is still active today and is one of most powerful unseen forces in global politics, I knew I was hooked...I had to write an Illuminati thriller.

~ snip ~

Q: Your novel begins inside the real-life Swiss scientific research facility called CERN. Can you tell us more about CERN?
A: CERN—Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—is the world’s largest scientific research facility. It is located in Geneva Switzerland and employs over 3,000 of the world’s top scientists. CERN houses an underground particle accelerator that is over fourteen miles long and stretches all the way into France. In addition, CERN (much to Americans’ surprise!) is the birthplace of the Worldwide Web, whose strange inception I talk about in the novel. CERN’s most incredible claim to fame, however, is that they were the first to manufacture something called antimatter...the most volatile substance known to man.

Q: Antimatter plays a startling role in Angels & Demons and sounds utterly terrifying. Is antimatter for real?
A: Absolutely. Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5% efficient.) Antimatter is 100,000 times more powerful than rocket fuel. A single gram contains the energy of a 20 kiloton atomic bomb—the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In addition to being highly explosive, antimatter is extremely unstable and ignites when it comes in contact with anything...even air. It can only be stored by suspending it in an electromagnetic field inside a vacuum canister. If the field fails and the antimatter falls, the result is a “perfect” matter/antimatter conversion, which physicists aptly call “annihilation.” CERN is now regularly producing small quantities of antimatter in their research for future energy sources. Antimatter holds tremendous promise; it creates no pollution or radiation, and a single droplet could power New York City for a full day. With fossils fuels dwindling, the promise of harnessing antimatter could be an enormous leap for the future of this planet. Of course, mastering antimatter technology brings with it a chilling dilemma.
Will this powerful new technology save the world, or will it be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made?

Q: In the novel, you talk about the bizarre “pyramid and all-seeing-eye” on back of U.S. currency. What do these symbols have to do with the United States?
A: Absolutely nothing, which is what makes their presence on our currency so remarkable. The pyramid is actually an Egyptian occult symbol representing a convergence upward toward the ultimate source of Illumination...in this case, an all-seeing eye known as the trinacria. The eye inside the triangle is a pagan symbol adopted by the Illuminati to signify the brotherhood’s ability to infiltrate and watch all things. In addition, the triangle (Greek Delta) is the scientific symbol for change. Many historians feel the Great Seal’s “shining delta” is symbolic of the Illuminati’s desire to bring about “enlightened change” from the myth of religion to the truth of science. Also supporting the theory that the Great Seal is tied to the Illuminati is the unsettling fact that the seal’s inscription “Novus Ordo Seculorum” is a clear call to the secular or non-religious...which stands in startling contrast to In God We Trust.

Q: How could all this Illuminati symbology end up on the most powerful currency in the world?
A: The occult symbology on the back of the U.S. one dollar bill is a source of great consternation for modern symbologists. The design (originally by Charles Thomson) was presented to the U.S. treasury in the 1940s when the Illuminati brotherhood was widely accepted to have spread from Europe into American and infiltrated the brotherhood of the Freemasons. At that time, many Masons were upper echelon government officials. Vice President Henry Wallace was one of them, and most academics now believe the design for the Great Seal was lobbied for by Wallace. Whether he made his decisions as a covert Illuminatus or innocently under their influence, nobody will ever know, but it was Wallace who convinced President Roosevelt to use the design. Of course, conspiracy theorists enjoy pointing out that Franklin D. Roosevelt was also a high-ranking Mason.

Q: Both Digital Fortress and Angels & Demons deal with secretive topics—covert spy agencies, conspiracy theories, classified technologies. How do you get your information?
A: I am constantly amazed how much “secret” information is readily available out there if one knows where to dig. The Freedom of Information Act, of course, is a great resource, primarily because it can lead to specific individuals who are knowledgeable in a given field and sometimes are willing to talk about it. In many cases, understandably, these contacts prefer to remain nameless, but sometimes depending on what they’ve told you, they like being acknowledged in the book. Occasionally, research is simply a matter of finding the proper printed resource. For example, the detailed description in Angels & Demons depicting the intimate ritual of Vatican conclave—the threaded necklace of ballots...the mixing of chemicals...the burning of the ballots—much of that was from a book published on Harvard University Press by a Jesuit scholar who had interviewed more than a hundred cardinals, which is obviously something I never would have had the time or connections to do.

Q: The plot of Angels and Demons is described as “a revenge 400 years in the making.” Can you explain what this means?
A: Sure. It is historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600’s. The early Illuminati—those of Galileo’s day—were expelled from Rome by the Vatican and hunted mercilessly. The Illuminati fled and went into hiding in Bavaria where they began mixing with other refugee groups fleeing the Catholic purges—mystics, alchemists, scientists, occultists, Muslims, Jews. From this mixing pot, a new Illuminati emerged. A darker Illuminati. A deeply anti-Christian Illuminati. They grew very powerful, infiltrating power structures, employing mysterious rites, retaining deadly secrecy, and vowing someday to rise again and take revenge on the Catholic Church. Angels & Demons is a thriller about the Illuminati’s long-awaited resurgence and vengeance against their oppressors... but most of all, it is a story about Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who gets caught in the middle.

~ snip ~

Q: You describe some pretty bizarre CERN experiments in the novel. Are these experiments for real?
A: Entirely. And the results are absolutely staggering. In the last few years scientists have found themselves face to face with facts that force them to rethink the world in which we live. Their discoveries have implications not only on the physical realm but the philosophical and spiritual as well. The heroine of Angels & Demons is actually one of these CERN scientists-a brilliant marine biologist whose a specialist is “Entanglement Science.” Entanglement science is the study of the interconnectivity of all things. Many of the marine experiments she runs in the novel are real-life experiments that have been run in the last few years. And as anyone who has read Angels & Demons can attest, the results are unnerving. There are those who believe science will someday prove God exists. Either way, scientists are certainly starting to tackle some of life’s most profound spiritual questions. Of course, these sacred questions have always been the domain of the clergy. And a new battle is raging over who will be providing answers to life’s deepest mysteries... science or religion?

Q: You’ve written novels about a classified intelligence agency and an ultra-secretive brotherhood. Are secrets something that interest you?
A: Secrets interest us all, I think. For me, writing about clandestine material keeps me engaged in the project. Because a novel can take upwards of a year to write, I need to be constantly learning as I write, or I lose interest. Researching and writing about secretive topics helps remind me how fun it is to “spy” into unseen worlds, and it motivates me to try to give the reader that same experience. Lots of people wrote me after Digital Fortress amazed that the National Security Agency is for real. I’ve already started getting similar mail from Angels & Demons—people shocked to learn about the Illuminati brotherhood, antimatter technology, or the inner workings of the Vatican election. My goal is always to make the character’s and plot be so engaging that readers don’t realize how much they are learning along the way.

Q: Angels & Demons reveals a lot of inside information about the Vatican... much of it unflattering. Do you fear any repercussions?
A: I imagine some controversy is unavoidable, yes, although it’s important to remember that Angels & Demons is primarily a thriller—a chase and a love story. It’s certainly not an anti-Catholic book. It’s not even a religious book. Much of the novel’s action takes place deep inside the arcane world of the Vatican, and yes, some of the factual information revealed there is startling, but I think most people understand that an organization as old and powerful as the Vatican could not possibly have risen to power without acquiring a few skeletons in their closets. I think the reason Angels & Demons is raising eyebrows right now is that it opens some Vatican closets most people don’t even know exist. The final message of the novel, though, without a doubt, is a positive one.
~ snip ~

Append (From a different website) –

“Illuminati, Greek illumination, name given to those who submitted to Christian baptism. Those who were baptized were called “illuminati” or “illuminated ones” by the Ante-Nicene clergy, on the assumption that those who were instructed for baptism in the Apostolic faith had an enlightened understanding.

The Alumbrados, a mystical 16th-century Spanish sect, were among the societies that subsequently adopted the name illuminati. Later, the title of illuminati was used by a secret society founded by Adam Weishaupt that aimed to combat religious thinking and encourage rationalism.”

When creating this web site, we were under the belief that no one with any degree of education would believe there was a secret organization plotting for some 200+ years to control the world - and that the Masons were somehow a part of it. Boy, were we wrong!

Whenever conspiracy theory is spouted, the mysterious “Illuminati” (along with the Bilderburgers, The Trilateral Commission, the Council of Foreign Relations, and others) are most often named as being responsible. Ironically, however, while many, many people can name those ostensibly belonging to the other conspiracy groups, the “Illuminati” is always left hanging as some secret, shadowy entity which no one can quite describe.

Interestingly too, no one can quite identify what specific acts can be attributed to them - and no one in 225 years seems to have left the organization to reveal its secrets.
It is well established that by the end of the eighteenth century, the Illuminati had been effectively disbanded. Because of Freemasonry’s inadvertent involvement and misuse by its founder, Adam Weishaupt, the legends of its continued existence (and influence) persist into the twentieth century. (Weishaupt founded the organization and then tried to get the Freemasons involved. He achieved a very limited success in a couple of lodges but was soon seen as a ‘user’ and his group removed - not unlike the ‘fake Masonry’ of today, actually!)
In the 1950s and 1960s, members of the John Birch Society made much of this ‘shadow’ organization, using it as an effective substitute for their anti-Semitism. Perhaps some of the confusion regarding the organization is due to the fact that over time, the word illuminati came to be used more expansively for many enthusiasts of Enlightenment, including but not limited to the followers of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Nevertheless, the Illuminati’s connection with Freemasonry was date-specific (the late 1700s) and place-specific (what is now Germany); it had NO involvement in Freemasonry elsewhere despite fanciful claims. Even the oft-mentioned ‘Proofs of A Conspiracy’ written in 1797 by a Scottish professor (and the root cause of so much furor in the United States as a result of one Boston Minister’s fanciful claims made based on that book) notes that the Illuminati’s brand of Freemasonry was NOT the same Freemasonry as found in England and from which all other legitimate Masonic lodges today can trace their ancestry.

The Illuminati Freemason Conspiracy
From Public Eye and Political Research Associates:
The Freemasons began as members of craft guilds who united into lodges in England in the early 1700’s. They stressed religious tolerance, the equality of their male peers, and the themes of classic liberalism and the Enlightenment. Today they are a worldwide fraternal order that still educates its members about philosophical ideas, and engages in harmless rituals, but also offers networking for business and political leaders, and carries out charitable activities.

The idea of a widespread freemason conspiracy originated in the late 1700’s and flourished in the US in the 1800’s. Persons who embrace this theory often point to purported Masonic symbols such as the pyramid and the eye on the back of the dollar bill as evidence of the conspiracy. Allegations of a freemason conspiracy trace back to British author John Robison who wrote the 1798 book Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, collected from good authorities. Robison influenced French author Abbé Augustin Barruel, whose first two volumes of his eventual four volume study, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, beat Robison’s book to the printer. Both Robison and Barruel discuss the attempt by Bavarian intellectual Adam Weishaupt to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment through his secretive society, the Order of the Illuminati.

Weishaupt was appointed a professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany around 1772 and elevated to the post of professor of Canon Law in 1773 or 1775 (sources conflict), the first secularist to hold that position previously held by clergy. Weishaupt began planning a group to challenge authoritarian Catholic actions in 1775, the group (under a different name) was announced on May 1, 1776. This group evolved into the Illuminati. The Enlightenment rationalist ideas of the Illuminati were, in fact, brought into Masonic lodges where they played a role in a factional fight against occultist philosophy. The Illuminati was suppressed in a series of edicts between 1784 and 1787, and Weishaupt himself was banished in 1785.

Weishaupt, his Illuminati society, the Freemasons, and other secret societies are portrayed by Robison and Barruel as bent on despotic world domination through a secret conspiracy using front groups to spread their influence.
Barruel claimed the conspirators “had sworn hatred to the altar and the throne, had sworn to crush the God of the Christians, and utterly to extirpate the Kings of the Earth.” For Barruel the grand plot hinges on how Illuminati “adepts of revolutionary Equality and Liberty had buried themselves in the Lodges of Masonry” where they caused the French revolution, and then ordered “all the adepts in their public prints to cry up the revolution and its principles.” Soon, every nation had its “apostle of Equality, Liberty, and Sovereignty of the People.”

Robison, a professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, argued that the Illuminati evolved out of Freemasonry, and called the Illuminati philosophy “Cosmo-politism.” According to Robison: “Their first and immediate aim is to get the possession of riches, power, and influence, without industry; and, to accomplish this, they want to abolish Christianity; and then dissolute manners and universal profligacy will procure them the adherents of all the wicked, and enable them to overturn all the civil governments of Europe; after which they will think of farther conquests, and extend their operations to the other quarters of the globe, till they have reduced mankind to the state of one indistinguishable chaotic mass.”

Robert Alan Goldberg, in his book Enemies Within, summarizes the basic themes of the books by Barruel and Robison:

“Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, these monarchists had created a counterhistory in defense of the aristocracy. Winning the hearts and minds of present and future readers would assuage some of the pain of recent defeat and mobilize defenses. The Revolution, they argued, was not rooted in poverty and despotism. Rather than a rising of the masses, it was the work of Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati, a secret society that plotted to destroy all civil and religious authority and abolish marriage, the family, and private property. It was the Illuminati who schemed to turn contented peasants ‘from Religion to Atheism, from decency to dissoluteness, from loyalty to rebellion.’ “

The major immediate political effect of allegations of an Illuminati Freemason conspiracy in Europe was to mobilize support for national oligarchies traditionally supported by the Catholic Church hierarchy. Across Europe authoritarian governing elites were coming under attack by reformist and revolutionary movements demanding increased political rights under secular laws. The ideas of the Enlightenment were incorporated by the leaders of both the French and American revolutions, and in a sense, these Enlightenment notions were indeed subversive to the established social order, although they were hardly a secret conspiracy. The special status of the Catholic Church in European nation-states was actually threatened by the ideas being discussed by the Illuminati and the rationalist wing of the Freemasons.

Several common conspiracist themes emerge from these two books. The Enlightenment themes of equality and liberty are designed to destroy respect for property and the natural social hierarchy. Orthodox Christianity is to be destroyed and replaced with universalism, deism...or worse. Persons with a cosmopolitan outlook—encouraging free-thinking and international cooperation—are to be suspect as disloyal subversive traitors out to undermine national sovereignty and promote anarchy.

Shortly after the Barruel book was published, conspiracy theories about the Illuminati Freemasons were mixed with antisemitism in Europe. This confluence took place much later in the US.

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