Transcription
Professor Matpat: Oh, it's too horrific to look at.
Oh, you're right; it's horrific to behold. Who tattoos themselves using a rune and a lotus? I mean, one is Nordic, the other is Hindu. Clearly, they're mixing their symbology, don't you think?
You're missing something.
Ah, well spotted, my boy. I'd completely overlooked that ankh, which is Egyptian.
Ah, the misunderstanding of these cultural symbols is disgusting. It's a severed hand.
Oh, huh, so it is. Which explains the two crossed swords on the thumb, symbolizing that whoever our killer is, he means violence. Gee, you think?
Hello, internet. Welcome to Film Theory, the show that uses TV shows to uncover the hidden lore of real life. Today's episode is sponsored by Peacock and their new streaming series, Dan Brown's *The Lost Symbol*, which is the latest adventure for renowned fictional puzzle solver Robert Langdon. If you're not familiar, well, it probably should be considering that he is the textbook definition of a theorist. His adventure in 2003's *The Da Vinci Code* was the thing that made it cool to find hidden clues in historic paintings and ultimately expose ancient religious conspiracies. And if none of that is ringing a bell for you, well, let me rewind and start giving you some context.
*The Da Vinci Code* was a phenomenon. It was the second highest-selling book the year that it came out, and it was everywhere. Anytime you saw someone reading a book, nine times out of ten it was a Dan Brown novel. And if they weren't reading a Dan Brown novel, well, they were reading about a little orphan wizard boy. *The Da Vinci Code* single-handedly revitalized the historical adventure genre, suddenly getting everyone looking for hidden blades and chalices around their everyday lives. So, as you would expect, the follow-up book in the series, *The Lost Symbol*, became one of the most anticipated books of all time, selling a million copies in a single day. Which is why it's exciting to see it finally get made into a series that's out now.
To catch you up, our protagonist is Robert Langdon, Ivy League professor of symbology—not an actual department, by the way. When a shadowy villain tries to unlock an ancient portal lost to time within the city—an ancient portal, I need you to find it, then unlock it—he blackmails Robert into solving a series of ancient puzzles that only an expert in historical symbols can piece together. Basically, the whole show is like an escape room on steroids where your life is literally on the line. It is a fascinating premise for a thriller that has Robert confronting some of history's most sinister symbols, touching everything from devil worship to governmental conspiracies. But the truth is that each of these symbols has a very real history, and once you understand the real-life lore behind these images, it becomes apparent that these sinister symbols actually hold a very different secret. And once you know what that secret is, you'll never see the world around you in the same way again.
In Dan Brown's *Lost Symbol*, one of the first times that we actually see our villain, we learn that his body is covered in tattoos, and his forehead is emblazoned with the Eye of Providence. Now, you're probably more familiar with this thing as the all-seeing eye—that weirdo pyramid eye on the back of a dollar bill. And yeah, you can immediately understand why this thing would be prompting conspiracy theories for years: a government using something literally called the all-seeing eye as its national seal. That's the sort of thing that conjures up images of Big Brother surveillance states constantly monitoring you from its cyclopsian triangle in the sky. It also doesn't help here that the Latin is *Novus Ordo Seclorum*, translated to "New Order of the Ages." That doesn't sound ominous at all. But in reality, the new order was just meant to signify that the United States of America was beginning a new era, having just declared its independence from Great Britain. And from the Latin on top of the seal, we know that there's more to the story. Anyway, *Koitis*, literally translated as "favored undertakings," but most widely understood to imply "Providence has favored our undertakings." That's why this symbol has become widely known as the Eye of Providence, or sometimes the all-seeing eye of God, stemming from the religious belief that their successes were the result of God's blessing. It's not the government that has its eye perched on top of a pyramid looking down at everyone; it's God who is up above watching down and protecting us.
This symbolism, with the Eye of Providence acting as the eye of God watching over and favoring those below, can be seen in religious paintings dating all the way back to the Renaissance, with probably the most famous example being the 1525 Pantòremo painting *Cena in Emmaus*, where we see the eye in a triangle reflecting the Christian belief in God as a holy trinity, or God in three persons, and radiating light to symbolize God's divinity. Other famous religious buildings use it too, like the Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg or the Mannheim Jesuit Church in Germany.
Of course, we've got to address the elephant in the room, though. There's a common belief that the presence of an all-seeing eye on the back of the US dollar and other U.S. icons is indicative of Freemason influence in the founding of the United States. But if we look at the actual chronology of the symbol's history, the evidence suggests that the opposite is actually true. By all indications and records that we have from the time, the all-seeing eye didn't appear as a piece of Freemason iconography until 1797, which is more than 20 years after it first appeared as a U.S. icon in 1776. It's the Freemasons who adopted the symbol after it was already used by the U.S. So the Eye of Providence—yeah, maybe not as sinister as it first seems.
Now, creepy triangle eye is one of the easier symbols to decode because its uses are fairly recent; after all, the United States is less than 250 years old. Things get a lot trickier when you turn to more universal symbols, which is where Robert Langdon's expertise as a symbologist really comes into play. Take, for instance, the circumpunct, or circled dot—another icon the villain believes to be the key to finding this sought-after ancient portal. As such, in the show, it's yet another ominous, mysterious thing. But as far as symbols go, it's pretty mundane. It's a symbol that's appeared across many different cultures, used time and time again to represent the sun. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, it's a symbol of the sun god Ra. In ancient China, it was used in Chinese oracle script, the precursor to modern Chinese symbols, as a symbol again for the sun, sometimes symbolizing a day. And in the study of alchemy, it was used as the alchemical symbol for the sun, corresponding to gold. Little did you suspect that as you are doodling in your notebooks at school that you're actually paying honor to Ra the whole time.
And while the parallels to the sun might be its most common usage, it's not the only one. For instance, it's yet another important symbol for the Freemasons. An 1868 manual detailing practices for Freemason members describes the symbol like this: "Quote: The point represents an individual brother; the circle is the boundary line beyond which he is never to suffer his prejudices or passions to betray him." Wait, so it's a symbol reminding members of the Freemasons to behave themselves—like, don't indulge in your vices. That is not only not scary, it's kind of lame. Maybe our *Lost Symbol* villain didn't get the memo, because I definitely say that murdering and kidnapping are the sorts of things that this symbol is actively warning against. Gotta read your newsletters, bud.
The fact that the circumpunct is such a simple and universal symbol is a big part of why there are so many different meanings attached to it. The more common and easy to draw a symbol is, the more likely it's going to be independently created and adopted by a culture for whatever interpretation is most useful to them. That being said, symbols don't have to be that simple to become widely used. Take, for example, the triskelion, which the villain in Dan Brown's *The Lost Symbol* uses as his personal calling card, often leaving it near his victims throughout the series. It's actually one of the first symbols that we see in the show, appearing etched on the floor of a prison cell. Of course, he didn't come up with the design himself. The use of the triskelion, or tri-scales symbol, dates all the way back to the Bronze Age. It can be found on pottery produced during the Greek period of antiquity. And be honest, classic versions are even creepier than the one in the show because they feature three legs circulating around a central point. Examples of this can be found as far back as 2000 BC and on money minted around the 4th century BC. Interestingly, the symbol doesn't seem to have a consistent or specific meaning throughout history. Despite all that we know about ancient Greece, this one is left surprisingly unclear. One interpretation is that it's connected to Hecate, the triple goddess, considering it often appears alongside other of her symbols, like three crescent moons, three ears of corn, three grains of corn, etc. Over in Sicily, the appearance of the triskelion symbol on currency was probably due to the Greek name for the island, Trinacria, meaning "having three headlands." Fun fact, by the way, a variant of the symbol also appears on the modern-day flag of Sicily—probably the most nightmare-inducing flag you could ask for.
So we've just reviewed three symbols often associated with sinister connotations, but in reality, looking at their real histories, all three have meanings that are perfectly mundane. Surely one of these symbols from the series has to be frightening, right? Well, look no further than the Leviathan Cross—a double cross set over an infinity sign. This thing is everywhere on the show. Robert finds it on an old alchemy table; it's pressed into the seal of a letter in his mentor's safe; the villain has a tattoo of it on his arm. In the real world, it's a symbol that was used by Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, which at face value seems about as sinister as you can get, considering that they're a religious organization who chose their founding symbol to be the biblical figure described as the literal prince of darkness. Look further back, though, and you see it's just as mundane as the rest. The Church of Satan didn't exist prior to 1966, and before Anton LaVey decided to appropriate this symbol as a Satanist cross, it had a history dating back hundreds of years that had nothing to do with the Satanist movement. Back in its earliest usage, the Leviathan Cross was used in the study of alchemy—aka ye oldie chemistry. Back in the 16th century, they believed that there were three prime elements: those being salt, the material body; mercury, corresponding to spirit or life; and sulfur, representing soul and the principle of combustibility. The Leviathan Cross was used to represent sulfur, which is probably why in the show Robert Langdon first encounters it in a piece of old alchemical equipment. And that's it—it's basically the equivalent of the big old S representing sulfur on the periodic table. So then what happened? Well, despite it not having any satanic associations, the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, took it and transformed it for his use when he founded the church in 1966. Some have speculated that the association with sulfur connects it to the fire and brimstone often associated with hell in the underworld, or, you know, maybe you just thought it looked cool. And in a way, I think that's actually one of the most important and fascinating themes of this show, which is something that we're told in the opening minutes of the series: When do benign symbols become malignant? Everything is about the corruption of symbols. Robert goes on to show his university a series of examples of corrupted symbols, the most famous being the swastika. What was historically a symbol of good luck used by Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism became corrupted by the Nazi party. In fact, in a bit of morbid historical irony, it was actually used during World War I as a personal symbol of a Jewish German fighter pilot named Fritz Beckhard, who went on to find himself in prison decades later during the Holocaust. Versions of the symbol were also used by the Finnish Air Force and the Latvian Air Force during the same time period. The point is that what makes a symbol scary or evil isn't the symbol itself, but the associations that become attached to the symbol. And often symbols are appropriated to mean the exact opposite of what they originally meant.
Case in point: consider the Cross of Saint Peter. In Christian tradition, this symbol is based on the martyr Peter the Apostle. The story goes that when Peter, one of Jesus's followers, was sentenced to be executed by crucifixion, he requested that he be executed upside down, seeing himself as being unworthy of being executed in the same way as Jesus. But what began as a symbol based on a story about the humility of a devout follower, in more recent years, has been adopted by some groups as an anti-Christian symbol, since the inverted cross is seen by some as being the opposite of the Christian crucifix. We see this all over pop culture these days, with popular horror franchises just picking up that ball and running with it. Online, this sort of thing happens all the time. Robert Langdon even mentions it in one of the show's opening scenes: What was relevant then is relevant now. The difference is that now people can push symbols out to millions with the click of a button.
It might seem a bit silly to compare modern internet memes to ancient symbols found in Egyptian hieroglyphs or patterns carved into ancient artifacts, but Robert is absolutely right to make the comparison. Internet memes are symbols, and like any other symbol, their meaning is defined by the culture around them and the way that they're used. Among the most infamous examples of these is Pepe the Frog, a character who originated in a 2005 webcomic. You've probably seen this character's face if you've ever been on Twitch, where it's been featured in emotes like Feels Bad Man, Pepe Hands, Pepe Laugh, among others. He was funny; he was sad; but he was a benign webcomic. And then this once-innocent cartoon frog became popular with online hate groups to the point that in 2016, the Anti-Defamation League classified Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol, stating, "Quote: While the majority of uses of Pepe the Frog have been and continue to be non-bigoted, there is nonetheless a subset of Pepe memes centered on racist, anti-Semitic, and other bigoted themes." It actually led to the original comic's creator, Matt Furie, to launch a #SavePepe campaign to fight back against hate groups and reclaim the symbol, which became the subject of a 2020 documentary titled *Feels Good Man*. While this might seem like a new phenomenon, it's really just an accelerated version of an old phenomenon—that different groups always try to claim symbols as their own and thereby change their meaning. The only difference is that culture now evolves at such an absurdly fast pace due to the internet. Ancient symbols are really the memes of the past. But it's important to remember that symbols ultimately have no power of their own; they only have whatever meaning we as people choose to associate with them. And this is what we see in Dan Brown's *The Lost Symbol*. When Robert Langdon finds a severed hand with weird symbols tattooed onto each of his fingers, it's not the symbols that are scary; it's the fact that it's on a severed hand, left by the kind of person who isn't above the idea of mutilating and kidnapping victims. Likewise, that triskelion by itself isn't scary; it's the dead body next to it that you have to be worried about. Symbols are at their most powerful when you don't understand them, when you're scared of them, when they carry some sort of mysterious meaning. But by looking into their history and understanding their origin, you defuse them of their power, and you're finally able to see them for what they truly are—probably some basic doodles that you accidentally made in your sketchbook back when you're in elementary school.
But hey, that's just a theory, a Film Theory. And thank you once again to Peacock and their new series, Dan Brown's *The Lost Symbol*, for sponsoring this episode. For more symbols and more historical mysteries, make sure you go check out the show right now over on Peacock. It is streaming as we speak. You are a connoisseur of good quality entertainment; I guarantee for you it is good quality entertainment. So go check it out right now—Peacock streaming for free.