You had expressed a poor opinion of Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Do you have a better impression of his latest novel, The Lost Symbol?
As a lover of clowns, any new episode in the Dan Brown story fascinates me by just spelling out what was already contained in its beginning: "Once upon a time, a writer whose books had meagre sales met a beautiful lady alchemist. She transmuted his bricks into gold. They married and generated many dollars..."
Several years ago, the dream team of so-called documentalists, who scour the realms of esoteric literature for titbits to be moulded by Brown into a thriller, announced the conception of the new opus. While The Da Vinci Code seems to have been written very hastily, The Lost Symbol took a long time before delivery occurred. The style is, however, not much more refined.
There are the usual number codes to be deciphered, a flat plot, two-dimensional characters, very short chapters, and a monster of evil who is a master in the martial arts, a sadomasochist in search of power and his father. The real matter of the book consists of a survey of the whole range of esotericism.
The title of the book alludes to 'the lost word' in the Masonic legend of Hiram from the Book of Kings in the Bible. There Hiram is briefly mentioned as the architect of the Temple of Solomon. The Masonic legend is used in the ceremony of promotion to the third grade of Master (after those of apprentice and companion) in the Order.
Hiram is supposed to have been murdered by two apprentices who sought to wrest out of him the secret word by which a Master was recognised. Hiram became a martyr not to betray the secret. It is this hidden word that the heroes of Dan Brown search for in the cellars of Washington.
There also inevitably appear the Rosicrucians, who began in the 17th century as a Christian brotherhood who studied the neo-platonic writings attributed to Hermes and the Jewish Kabbala. Their emblem of a red rose on a red cross is also used in Masonic ritual.
The guardian of the secret in the novel is Peter Solomon, a very rich and intelligent Jew. But here Brown makes one of his many mistakes. A fellow member of Solomon's lodge is black. However, blacks are not admitted in the US Masonic lodges, which are those exclusively encountered in The Lost Symbol. A black lodge was formed by a former slave who fought for Independence.
Freemasonry developed early in the 18th century in the US with Benjamin Franklin a prominent leader of the Brotherhood. George Washington, the first President, was yet another, followed by 13 freemasons as Presidents. The last of them was Gerald Ford.
In recent years the number of freemasons in the US has fallen from over four million to less than a million. This is part of a global trend. In England, the numbers have fallen from a million to less than half a million. In France, the decline has left only about 130,000 members divided among several lodges, now also exceptionally including women.
Probably the main reason for this decline is the flourishing of many groups like the so-called New Age, which have adopted the style that had made freemasonry originally attractive.
There is the reaction against the drabness of materialism and attempts at recovering the ritual and symbolism of the Middle Ages, without the moral commitments that membership of the Church carries with it.
What is the attitude of the Catholic Church regarding freemasonry?
The code of the Order was set out in London in 1773 by two clerics. Its constitution, called after one of its editors, Anderson, proclaims belief in a god: The Great Architect of the Universe.
The religion implied in this creed, to which many freemasons, like those of the Grand Orient of France, have renounced, is Deism, i.e. the recognition of a vague transcendent principle in the world such as Voltaire believed in.
For this reason, freemasonry was condemned by Pope Clement XII in 1738, and this condemnation kept being periodically repeated, with Leo XIII calling it "A Satanic sect... launching insults and blasphemies against the Church". In the code of Canon Law issued in 1917, article 2,335 excommunicates all freemasons.
After Vatican II, Canon 1,374 of the 1983 revised code lifted the automatic excommunication. Shortly afterwards, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued a declaration that to be a member of any part of the Brotherhood was mortally sinful. That is still the official position today.
How relevant is freemasonry to Malta?
People of my age probably remember the late Professor Walter Ganado decrying the presence of Freemasons everywhere. Today historians have shown he was right when talking about the last years of the Knights and subsequently.
One of the most famous masons of all times was the Sicilian charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo, better known as Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1741-95). He claimed he was the son of Grand Master Pinto and a Princess of Trebizond who had been captured from a Turkish ship; he had then been sent to be educated in Arabia where he studied the Kabbala and other arcane matters, until in 1762, back in Malta, he worked in Pinto's alchemical laboratory at the Palace.
He died imprisoned by the Inquisition near Rome. Thomas Freller has written his biography, but I have always felt we should exploit it more.
Some time ago, Maltese freemasons lifted their usual veil of secrecy. See Wikipedia, The Sovereign Grand Lodge of Malta, for an account of its foundation in November 2004, with "Bro. Joseph Cordina as its first Grand Master".
However, somehow the heart and soul of freemasonry remain hidden - certainly from eyes as unpenetrating as Brown's.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.