Decades ago, I made it my task to work through the Commedia, one
canto at a time in the pelican translation with extensive annotation. I progressed one canto per day to its
conclusion. It is a superb entre into
the middle ages and its life ways and thought patterns. It provides deep background for everything
else about the era.
Dan Brown is mining that cultural stream wonderfully and cannot
help but imbibe the kabalistic aura of the age.
This makes his story telling authentic to the sources.
Secret societies had this cult of initiation throughout history
made more and more dramatic and spiritual the closer you approached the
center. It was the genius of Jesus to
eschew such dogma completely that powered Christianity forward, yet the cultism
continued to linger in the background and it is little wonder that the Templars
came to a bad end.
The
Real Mystery Surrounding Dante and the Inferno
By
Jonathan Black
Dan Brown has written a massive world-wide
bestseller by creating a fictional mystery around Dante. The real-life mystery
is much more intriguing.
Jonathan Black, who writes as Mark Booth in the United States, is the renowned author of The Secret History of the World. His new book The Sacred History was published in the UK in August 2013 and is released in the US in February 2014. He is also the author of The Secret History of Dante: Unearthing the Mysteries of the Inferno.
We are privileged to host this original article by Jonathan which looks at the strange parallels surrounding the fictional character Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's new novel Inferno, and the real-life mysteries surrounding Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages. Is there a hidden layer of meaning in Dan Brown's novel that the critics have missed?
Like Inferno,
Dante's poem the Commedia was
‘event publishing’. It lit up the collective imagination of the Middle Ages,
and Dante's account of falling in love with Beatrice on a May day holiday in
Florence many hundreds of years ago is still one of the most famous scenes in
all literature.
After that first meeting Dante only ever had
fleeting glimpses of her, but Beatrice began to appear to him instead in
visions, sending him off on a quest that would lead him to Hell and back.
Similarly chapter one of Inferno sees Robert
Langdon having a vision of a woman who tells him ‘Seek and ye shall find’. Like
Dante he is propelled onto a quest by his vision. He knows that people are
willing to be extremely ruthless in order to further their aims, but for the
moment he doesn't know exactly what is at stake. Military powers, secret
societies and evil geniuses emerge from the shadows, and both these somewhat
otherworldly and scholarly writers, Dante and Langdon, find out that people who
want to kill them.
Sometime after his meeting with Beatrice a
somewhat mysterious and ambiguous older man would come into Dante's life. As I
show in The Secret history of
Dante Brunetto Latini became his mentor, helping him to make sense
of his visions. Similarly we know from Dan Brown's previous book that Robert
Langdon had a mentor, Peter Solomon, a 33 degree Freemason who had helped teach
him how to read esoteric symbolism.
As a result of this mentoring, Robert Langdon
is, as all Dan Brown fans know, a world expert on Symbology. He is master of a discipline that enables him to read
not only ancient symbols but also the signs of the times, to work out what is
really going on beneath the surface and to play a decisive part in the battle
between good and evil.
It is a little known fact that Dante's mentor
was a Templar, a member of a tertiary order of the Templars. Like the tertiary
order of the Franciscans, for example, it enabled lay people join
and do the work of the order in society at large rather than being a closed
community. Latini was probably initiated into the order during his time in
exile in Paris, and there is evidence to show that later, when he was able to
return to his native Florence, he initiated his pupil. Certainly Dante shows
great fellow feeling for the Knights Templar in the Commedia. Recent research into the
records of property ownership in Italy in the Middle Ages show that the
Templars owned a house in Florence in the time of Dante.
It is appropriate that Dante’s mentor was a
Templar and Langdon’s a high degree Freemason, and I show in The Sacred History, Freeemasonry preserves many Templar symbols
and traditions.
Recently there has also been a move to demystify
the Templars and portray them as a sort of club for gentlemen farmers, concerned
to protect tourists in the Holy Land as if it were their civic duty, like
members of a Rotary club. In reality they were far stranger than they are
often portrayed - even by many conspiracy theorists. In fact the more I've
looked into the Templars the more I've come to the conclusion that the least
helpful frame of reference you can use when trying to understand them is modern
down-to-earth common sense…
The Knights Templar, after all, were not just
prepared to risk dying as martyrs, they wanted to do so. The Rule of the
Templars is not much read - perhaps even by some people who have written whole
books about them! - but it has survived to this day and it is very strange
indeed. The Knights Templar were allowed to hunt only lions, were forbidden
to kiss any woman including their mothers - and were expressly forbidden, too,
to wear pointy shoes! They believed it was their duty to commit what they
called 'malicide', the killing
of evil people (a Christian equivalent to jihad). When they were not actually fighting they spent most of
their day praying and performing other ceremonial rites and practises.
Revealing any of these practises to outsiders would attract the most drastic
sanctions, which could include the culprit being starved to death.
Initiation into any religious order has always
involved some form of symbolic dying and being born again. As I show in The Secret History of Dante, there
is a great deal of evidence to show that in the ancient world and on into the
Middle Ages initiation involved extremely elaborate underground ceremonies
which aimed to induce an altered state of consciousness. In this altered
state and in long smoke-filled corridors and chambers the candidate really
believed he was descending into Hell before being led up again into a new life.
These ceremonies took place in facsimiles of hell – and of these one has been
excavated in Baia in Italy.
It is probable, then, that in Dante's account of
his journey underground in the Inferno he
was writing a literal description of something he had actually experienced,
describing passageways of brick and stone quite as real as the secret
passageway that leads Robert Langdon from the Boboli Gardens over the Ponte
Vecchio and into the Palazzo Vecchio.
Langdon ‘s mentor Peter Solomon would have taken
part in Freemasonic initiation ceremonies which preserve traditions running
back to the ancient and medieval versions. Are these Freemasonic versions as
powerful and life-changing as the ceremonies that Dante and his mentor had
experienced? Some have cast doubt on this, but a friend of mine, an initiate of
more than one other secret society, who was initiated to the 33rd degree in
Washington in the 1990s, told me that he was surprised at just how spiritual
experience this turned out to be.
Like his mentor Dante would be driven into exile
and as a result he lived for a while in Paris. Verses in the Commedia (‘Upwards my hands,
together clasped, I raised, scanning the glowing flames and remembering the
burning bodies I have seen’) suggest
Dante was there to witness the execution of the Grand Master of the
Templars.
To write openly in favour of the Templars to
risk being burnt alive, but in the Commedia where
Dante describes the ranks of the elect wearing white robes crowned with the
lily of martyrdom, he is clearly alluding to the Templars. He reserves special
places in Hell for the pope and Philip the Fair, the king of France who
conspired to condemn and destroy the Templars – which Dante saw as a cosmic
crime on a level with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the poem Dante’s
guide to the highest levels of heaven is Bernard of Clairvaux, the great
spiritual power behind the Templars and the man who wrote their Rule.
But to understand fully what the Templars and
Dante - and also as we shall see Robert Langdon, following in their footsteps -
were fighting against, the evil forces that pursue them and which they must
ultimately confront and defeat in order to save the world, I think we have to
ask what is was the Templars actually thought they were doing in Jerusalem? And
in order to that we need to crack what I think may properly be called the Dante
code.
Dante scholars everywhere acknowledge that
the Commedia is
written according to an exceptionally complex Kabbalistic numerical
‘Symbology’. This discipline was widely regarded as the most advanced thinking
of the day, and intellectual, spiritual and political leaders wanted to know
about it, just as today people feel the need to understand quantum mechanics or
evolutionary biology. Philip the Fair and Jacques de Moloy independently sought
audiences with Ramon Lull, a renowned magus and expert on Kabbalistic number
symbolism.
According to the Kabbalist art of gematria Hebrew letters have
numerical values, so that certain numbers have words encoded within them. Some
significant numbers such as 666, famously the Mark of the Beast, have clusters
of words contained in them. The Crusading pope Innocent III predicted that a
great showdown would take place between the forces of good and the forces of
evil in the year 1332, this being 666 x 2. Richard the Lionheart consulted the
famous Calabrian monk and prophet Joachim of Fiore, who used number symbolism
to justify his prediction that a novus
ordo was about to dawn, a Third Age in the history of the world.
Then people would learn to live free of all bodily necessities and attain such
a level of perfection that they would be able to wield supernatural powers. He
also prophesied that the forces of evil would try to prevent this development
and retard the evolution of humanity. The armies of Satan would arise in
special forms (ordines speciales)
and would be opposed by the knights of Jerusalem (milites Hiersuslem).
Dan Brown is no slouch when it comes to playing
with number codes, and Dante himself flaunts his use of this number symbolism
in the Purgatory section of the Commedia,
chapter 33, verse 43, where he uses the number 515 to refer to a mysterious
messianic Messenger.
The Symbology of 515 is complex and abstruse.
515 is a significant number in Jewish mysticism; God made his promise to Sarah
in the 515th verse of the Talmud, and Moses prayed to enter the Promised Land
515 times. In Christian mystical tradition 515 people witnessed the risen
Christ. In terms of gematria we
may read 515 as the number of the Virgin and also of her conceiving. 515 is the
number of prayer and of promise about to be fulfilled.
Additional layers of meaning have been
suggested. In the Tarot cards, which first surfaced in Italy in the fourteenth
century, card number 5 in the Major Arcana is the Hierophant, who is depicted
wearing the eight-layered crown of the pope. Card number 15 of the Minor Arcana
is the Devil. By linking these two cards together is Dante also again referring
to the conspiracy between the pope and the King Philip he elsewhere describes
as a devilish figure?
There is one other level of meaning which ties
all these ideas together and takes us straight to the heart of the matter. 515
refers to two passages in the Bible – Ezekiel 5.15 and Revelation 5.1-5 – both
of which are key parts of the prophecies concerning the rise of the Antichrist
and the battle which will be fought for the Temple in Jerusalem. This battle
must be won by the armies of God if the Antichrist is to be defeated and the
new heavenly Jerusalem is to descend, marking the beginning of heaven on earth.
In the time of the Knights Templar and
Dante all history was sacred
history. The site of the Jerusalem Temple was the place where Adam and
Eve had lived, where Abraham had decided to sacrifice Isaac, where Solomon had
built the Holy of Holies to house God and where the great events in the life of
Jesus had taken place. Medieval maps show Jerusalem as the centre of the world.
It was the place where all the great events of history had taken place. Whoever
controlled Jerusalem could control the future.
This then was the cosmic mission of the Knights
Templar. The real reason the Knights Templar devoted their lives to controlling
Jerusalem was because they believed that it was destined to be the site of a
decisive battle that would soon be fought there between the forces of good and
the forces of evil led by the Antichrist. They believed that during the battle
they would die as martyrs, but that their martyrdom would pave the way for
victory and for heaven on earth. There they would come into their own.
And what does all this have to do with Robert
Langdon and Inferno? The tradition of thinking about the Antichrist and
prophesying his arrival did not die out with Middle Ages. Intense speculation
and prophecy has continued into modern times in a traction that runs through
writers such as the Russians Dostoyevsky and his friend Soloviev and the
Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner. I don't want to risk publishing a spoiler, but
suffice to say here that the picture of the Antichrist that emerges in this
tradition is of a man who is a scientist of remarkable gifts, who claims his
discoveries will be of great benefit to humankind.
Dan Brown is a great story teller, but the
reason why his book sales break records may also be to do with the way that his
stories, unwittingly or deliberately - bring to the surface powerful streams of
secret mystical philosophy. The hidden reality of underground initiation
ceremonies is like a subliminal message in novels of Dan Brown, and prophecies
and archetypes of the Antichrist help give them mythic power.
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