View source for The Secret Symbol: The Original Masonic Documents Behind Dan Brown's Latest Bestseller by Peter Blackstock

{{infobox1 
|title= The Secret Symbol: The Original Masonic Documents Behind Dan Brown's Latest Bestseller
|author= Peter Blackstock  
|reviewer= John Lloyd
|genre=Spirituality and Religion 
|summary= A good collection of Masonic scripts, which are interesting enough - what is far more interesting is what the book does not tell us.
|rating=3 
|buy= Maybe
|borrow= Maybe
|pages=256 
|publisher= Profile Books
|date= October 2009
|isbn=978-1846683732  
|sort=Secret Symbol: The Original Masonic Documents Behind Dan Brown's Latest Bestseller
|cover=1846683734
|aznuk=1846683734
|aznus=1846683734
}}

Pop Quiz.  What links Scott of the Antarctic, Jim Davidson, Churchill, and Rabbie Burns?  Where and when might you come a cropper trying to spell Boaz, but starting with the B?  And what has three stages - unless it's thirty-three, or even ten by the York system?
 
Your answers are, they are or were all Masons.  Boaz is a code word in the first advancement into the Masonic Lodge, and the stages or degrees are what a Mason might progress through.  However, I feel like putting a huge ALLEGEDLY by the side of all of the above.  There is, for obvious reason, a huge shroud of intrigue and fallacy around the Freemasons, and I have to say I don't know which side I stand.  I heard a bigwig policeman on the radio the other week state most assuredly he saw no place for them in the force, but I'm thinking he's got the wrong idea, and his priorities wrong.  I might have to stand corrected, if the truth ever got out.
 
This, however, is a collection of scripts that show that sometimes the truth does come out, but it does not make considering the Masons much easier.
 
With the barest of introductions, and with not much reference to Dan Brown's latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol, he edits together several texts from the last couple of centuries, which document the Masonic beliefs and procedures.  They are all thought to come from the Mason's mouth, as it were, despite a lot of it being revealed by people who had taken three oaths of secrecy, at pain of their death if they spilled the beans.
 
It's surprising, when we see the rituals of initiation as displayed here, how secretive they are, as they seem to rely on the most obvious of patterns.  A level one man is introduced with one gavel-rap, level two with two, and so on.  The alleged handshakes are obvious in their tiny differences.
 
There is slight repetition in the scripts as our editor gives them, but for once this is actually beneficial - it affirms in our minds that what we are reading is true.  But despite the history of George Washington - and hence to some extent USA history - being Masonic, and despite Benjamin Franklin portraying the Masonic tenets in his writings, this book has a large flaw.
 
You cannot study Masons, it seems to me, without the outsider's point of view.  Whether it is a policeman, or Fortean cult examiner, deeming them irreligious, or a sinful clique of brothers out only for themselves (or, indeed, in Peter Blackstock's best phrasing, ''a bureaucratic, hierarchical organisation rather like the Rotary Club or a parish council, crossed with an amateur dramatics society with a strong interest in religious performances, with something of the masculine atmosphere of a working man's club thrown in''), we need the other side of things.
 
Of course, we are not likely to have somebody come along and deny the contents here - a Mason would hardly appear and say 'it's not like this' for want of having to then say what it IS like.  But this book needed a devil's advocate to cast aspersions on these texts, say what other observers generally think is wrong with the brotherhood, etc.
 
This is fine as an introduction to what we believe Freemasons to believe, and is a competent (if sometimes a tad dry in its source material) primer for those interested courtesy of Dan Brown.  However I am here in my ignorance, assuming Brown features the Masons due to their alleged, implied evil, and this book goes nowhere - despite, or, indeed because of, some unsatisfactory mentions of the Illuminati - to show us why people think that.
 
I must thank Profile Books' kind people for my review copy.

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