Angels, Demons, and Dan Brown

Dan Brown gets much credit for the research that goes into his books.

An Author's Note at the beginning of Angels & Demons claims "references to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations). They can still be seen today."

Not. Dan Brown is instead a fascinating study in the current popular mythology.


Page 31: "Outspoken scientists like Copernicus-- …Were murdered…. Murdered by the church…"

Copernicus remained a Catholic canon and priest in good standing throughout his scientific career. His books were published at the urging of prominent churchmen. He was not murdered.


Page 31 (and repeated often as a basic premise of the book): "Since the beginning of history, … a deep rift has existed between science and religion."

In fact, until recently--the last hundred and fifty years or so--no difference was seen between the two. As Arthur Koestler has shown, most significant scientists up to the present day have been devout.


Page 37: of Satanism: "The rumours of satanic … animal sacrifices …were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign…"

Animal sacrifice remains a part of satanism and shamanism today.


Page 39: "It seemed there was always close correlation between true believers and high body counts." (and a claim that religion led to "an ignorant future of senseless holy wars.")

The term "true believer," from a book of the 1950s, refers not to religious believers, but those who hold to a political ideology as if it were a religion: Fascists and Marxists.

There have been few real "religious wars." Consider the obvious high body counts of the last century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Rwanda. These were non- or even anti-religious, not religious, movements.

Even the IRA and the PLO--hence the current conflicts in Northern Ireland and Palestine--are explicitly secular and Marxist, not religious.


Page 46: "…half the schools in your country [the USA] are not allowed to teach evolution."

Evolution is taught in all US public schools.


Page 50: Hatha yoga is referred to as "The ancient Buddhist art of meditative stretching."

Hatha yoga is a Hindu, not a Buddhist, tradition.


Page 65: A Muslim is represented as thinking: "In his country women were possessions. Weak. Tools of pleasure. Chattel to be traded like livestock. And they understood their place."

As a description of the treatment of women in Muslim countries, this is absurd. Not to mention racist.


Page 110: Native Americans are represented as referring to God as "her," and as "Mother Earth."

While Native American religions commonly had an earth goddess, she was never the supreme being, only one god among many. The supreme being was male: the Great Spirit.


Page 111: The pyramid and all-seeing eye on the US dollar bill is Masonic.

This is no more than an interesting speculation.

The all-seeing eye in a triangle or pyramid, as a Christian symbol of God the Father, long predates Freemasonry.


Page 112: "Novus Ordo Seclorum … means New Secular Order…Secular as in nonreligious."

It does not mean secular as in nonreligious. It means something like "A New Order of the Ages."

Henry Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt are the source of the design of the Great Seal and the US dollar bill.

It was actually designed in 1782.


Page 158: "Church attendance is at an all-time low--down forty-six percent in the last decade."--according to an anonymous caller (The Assassin?) speaking to the Papal chamberlain.

This might be true of Italy specifically, but worldwide, attendance at Catholic churches is rising.


Page 165: "His Holiness once told me that a Pope is a man torn between two worlds … the real world and the divine."

To a Pope, the divine world is the real one.


p. 169: “Olivetti looked the camerlengo dead in the eye. ‘The prayer of St. Francis, signore. Do you recall it?’

…’God grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.’”

The “Prayer of St. Francis” is quite different: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…” This looks like a form of the Alcoholics Anonymous “Serenity Prayer,” by Niebuhr.


Page 174: Langdon assumes the murder of four cardinals will discredit the Catholic Church in the popular mind. "If the faith of a priest did not protect him from the evils of Satan, what hope was there for the rest of us?'

Brown overlooks the cult of martyrs and Jesus's crucifixion. If this logic held, Christianity would never have begun.


Page 177: Brown refers to "unpublished books of the Bible" held in the Secret Archives of the Vatican.

There are no unpublished books of the Bible. The Bible as we know it is those writings the Church chose as canonical. If a book is not included, it is necessarily not part of the Bible.


Page 224: The Pantheon "got its name from the original religion practiced there-Pantheism--the worship of all gods, specifically the pagan gods of Mother Earth."

The original religion practiced in the Pantheon was not pantheism, but polytheism.

Pantheism is not the worship of "all gods," but the belief that god is coterminous with the created universe--that "all is God" or "God is all."

The gods worshipped at the Pantheon were in no sense "of Mother Earth." Gaea was a minor deity, not even a member of the official pantheon. The creator God was Saturn, and the chief god was Zeus--both male.


Page 225: "Langdon had been amazed to learn that the dimensions of the Pantheon's main chamber were a tribute to Gaea--the goddess of the Earth. The proportions were so exact that a giant spherical globe could fit perfectly inside the building with less than a millimeter to spare."

Name me a globe that is not spherical.

This simply means the Pantheon's dimensions are those of a perfect sphere. This is a tribute to geometry as eternal truth. It has nothing to do with the Earth, generally understood by the ancients as the realm of imperfection, in contrast to the pure world of geometry and logic.


Page 239: Pagan gods are described as "Gods of Nature and Earth."

The pagan gods had nothing in particular to do with nature or the earth. The ancients held nature and the earth in no higher esteem than we do--rather less, in fact.

Langdon translates the inscription on the Pantheon to read "Marcus Agrippa, Consul for the third time, built this," and muses "So much for humility."

The Pantheon was actually built by Hadrian, who refused, out of modesty, to put his own name on any of his projects. He credited Marcus Agrippa, builder of an earlier version, instead.


Page 243: "According to the Bible, Christ was born in March."

There is no indication in the Bible of when Jesus was born. But the choice of December is not random; it fits with an earlier tradition of the time of the Annunciation--counting nine months forward.


Page 243: "The practice of 'god-eating'--that is, Holy Communion--was borrowed from the Aztecs."

Communion dates back to the first century AD. There was no significant contact between the Americas and Europe or Asia until 1492. Aztec civilization did not yet exist in the first century AD.

Ritually eating God was familiar wherever there was a god of grain or harvest: which is to say, throughout the ancient world.


p. 255: of Churchill: "Staunch Catholic, by the way."

There is no way Churshill was Catholic. I assume he was Church of England, but for a Catholic to have been British Prime Minister in the 1930s would have been a cause celebre. There were rumblings even recently over speculation that Tony Blair might convert.


P. 262: "the ancient myth of Daedalus, how the boy kept one hand one the wall as he moved through the Minotaur's labyrinth..."

Brown may be relying on some minor tradition, but in the most familiar version of the myth, Daedalus is the builder of the labyrinth. It is Theseus who solves the puzzle, by unravelling a thread.


p. 284: "Two pyramids, each with a shining elliptical medallion. They were about as un-Christian as sculpture could get."

As noted, the pyramid is an ancient symbol of God the Father. A church spire is a pyramid.


p. 290: a BBC reporter comments, on a big story, "I'll be taking the Pulitzer with me."

He would not be eligible. The Pulitzer is an American prize, for American reporting.


p. 290-1. The hero, Langdon, "scanned the rooftops for a church steeple or bell tower…. He knew, of course, that not all churches would have visible spires, especially smaller, out-of-the-way sanctuaries."

Like, say, St. Peter's Basilica, or St. John's Lateran.

Almost no churches in Rome have spires. Spires are Gothic; Rome's churches are Renaissance and Baroque.


p. 294: Referring to St. Peter's Square, the hero, Langdon, comments that it has no statues.

It is surrounded by statues of the saints. Large statues of Sts. Peter and Paul stand at the west side of the square.


p. 294: A Vatican guard explains "Most maps show St. Peter's Square as part of Vatican City, but because it's outside the walled city, Roman officials for centuries have claimed it as part of Rome."

Vatican City, and its legal boundary, has existed only since 1929--less than a century.


p. 295: Bernini's Respiro di Dio or West Pomente, at the base of the monolith in St. Peter's Square, is cited.

The guard describes it as "the image of a billowing gust of wind."

Who has seen the wind? What does it look like?


p. 337: "Though brilliantly rendered, the statue [Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa] depicted St. Theresa on her back in the throes of a toe-curling orgasm."

How does one know, by looking, that someone is experiencing an orgasm? According to St. Theresa's own testimony, what she felt was intense pain.

The statue shows St. Theresa seated, leaning backward.


p. 338: "St. Theresa was a nun sainted after she claimed an angel had paid her a blissful visit in her sleep."

And Albert Einstein was a patent clerk.

St. Theresa was a doctor of the church--that is, one of the church's most important theologians--and founder of the Carmelite order.

Nobody is made a saint during their lifetime.


p. 338, speaking of the same statue: "Even the type of angel Bernini had selected seemed significant. It's a seraphim, Langdon realized. Seraphim literally means 'the fiery one.'"

Seraphim is plural; the singular is seraph or saraph. Brown also uses "Illuminati," elsewhere, as a singular.

There is no iconographic reason to assume the angel in Bernini's statue is a seraph.


p. 341: the chamberlain, a Catholic priest, refers to the late pope as "Supreme father."

This would be blasphemy to a Catholic. The supreme father is God.


p. 355: "The church (Santa Maria della Vittoria) is on Piazza Barberini."

It is on Piazza San Bernardo.

Note the preface: "references to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations)."


p. 363: "Langdon realized that despite the encroachment of modern buildings, the piazza (Barberini) still looked remarkably elliptical."

Piazza Barberini is triangular. Piazza San Bernardo is a square.


p. 398: Brown has the arrow of the angel in the “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” pointing west.

It points north.


p. 399: "What figure would Bernini have carved as a glorification of water. Neptune and Apollo? Unfortunately that statue was in London's Victoria & Albert Museum."

Bernini carved perhaps a dozen fountains throughout Rome. All of them were glorifications of water. Trevi Fountain seems pretty obvious, with Neptune guiding his chariot over the waves, flanked by tritons and sea horses.


p. 402: "A flawless tribute to water, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World--The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata."

The Rio Plata is in South America, between Uruguay and Argentina.


p. 424: "The lone dove is the pagan symbol for the Angel of Peace."

Angels are a Semitic concept; there are no pagan angels. The dove representing peace is a specifically Christian image: the Holy Spirit as "the comforter."


p. 473: "no crucifixion … could possibly match the scope and drama of this very moment."

A bit over the top for a book on the Catholic Church. Bigger than the crucifixion?


p. 484: "Each of us is a God, Buddha had said."

Buddha said nothing like this. His main metaphysical doctrine was "Anatta": literally, "there is no self." Which seems the polar opposite of this assertion.


p. 488: "The early Christians had believed in the resurrection of the flesh."

All Christians believe in this, or are supposed to. It's in the Apostles' Creed.


p. 519: "by Holy Law the camerlengo is ineligible for election to the papacy. He is not a cardinal."

There is no such requirement. Not all popes have been cardinals.


p. 534: "for centuries…science has picked away at religion…condemning religion as the opiate of the masses."

This is from Marx, who was a political philosopher, not a scientist.


p. 535: The papal chamberlain says "Headlines carried science's miracles every day. How long had it been for religion? Centuries?"

More like minutes or seconds. According to the Catholic Church, miracles are common and happening all the time. It is necessary to document miracles for canonization.


p. 558-9: "Although an unlikely candidate, Mortati was chosen by an unprecedented unanimous vote by the College of Cardinals."

The actual vote totals in papal elections are never revealed. Even if they had been in this instance, there is no way anyone could know if this was unprecedented.


All this is just what I caught in a cursory reading, without research. Some distortions might perhaps be necessary to fit the plot. But a lot of this is certainly unnecessary and speaks of ignorance and sloppy research. Consider too: this book must have gone through editing. Imagine how many more mistakes the editors must have caught.