The Secret of Secrets
59 pages • 1-hour read
Dan BrownThe Secret of Secrets
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of death, graphic violence, emotional abuse, and physical abuse.
Solomon’s Book Manuscript
The conflict at the heart of The Secret of Secrets is the CIA’s attempt to prevent Katherine Solomon from publishing her work on nonlocal consciousness. When Solomon’s manuscript is deleted from the secure Random House server on which it was stored, print copies of the manuscript become essential tools in this conflict. As a result, these printed manuscripts appear across the novel as a recurring motif related to the novel’s theme of The Dangers and Limits of Technology. Jonas Faukman’s copy of the manuscript is so valuable that In-Q-Tel agents kidnap him to destroy it. The fact that he uses a key hidden in a mug on the top shelf of his crowded office bookshelf to lock the printed copy in his bottom desk drawer suggests that he knows the printed manuscript is valuable even before he learns the digital copy was stolen.
Faukman’s belief in the importance of hiding away important manuscripts is reinforced when In-Q-Tel agents tell him Solomon is on the run with a printed copy of the manuscript. Faukman leaves Solomon a desperate message urging her to “lock it up somewhere safe” reminding her that “it’s our only remaining copy!” (215). Faukman’s insistence on the physical security of the printed copy reflects his belief that print offers a security unmatched by any form of technology. Ultimately, a printed copy of the manuscript survives, allowing Solomon to publish her research.
Halos
In the opening chapter of The Secret of Secrets, Langdon helps Solomon introduce her lecture on nonlocal consciousness by discussing an important religious symbol, the halo. Conversations about halos appear throughout the novel, and the halo acts as a symbol of the importance of symbology, the fictional academic field Langdon teaches at Harvard. Langdon introduces the halo as “one universal symbol that appears in the artwork of every religion in history” (13), defining it as a disk of light emanating from the head of individuals who possess divine enlightenment. Although halos are most prominent in Christian art, Langdon emphasizes the universality of the symbol, showing that the ancient Egyptian god Ra was depicted with a halo, and that “a nimbus halo appeared over the Buddha and the Hindu deities” (140). He repeats this argument later, identifying examples from Mithraism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism of halos crowning enlightened individuals. This wide variety of examples is designed to suggest the universality of specific symbols across cultures, and thus the importance and necessity of Langdon’s fictional field of study.
Solomon is able to beat Langdon in his own field by showing that he has misread this seemingly simple symbol. Solomon argues that rather than depicting enlightenment emanating from the heads of individuals, halos “represent beams of consciousness…flowing in” (280, ellipses in original). Langdon admits that he had never considered them in this way, and Solomon’s work adds a new dimension to the way he, and likely readers, understand this common symbol.
The Golem
For most of The Secret of Secrets, Brown misleads readers into believing the villain of the novel is the Golem, a man with a mud clay mask on a killing spree in Prague. Eventually, it is revealed that the Golem is an alternate identity of Sasha Vesna, the primary victim of project Threshold. The Golem takes his name from a 16th-century myth about an influential rabbi named Judah Loew who created a golem from the mud on the banks of the Vltava River to protect the Jewish people. Throughout the novel, Brown distinguishes between the novel’s character of the Golem and the legendary golem through the use of capital letters and diacritics.
The Golem and the golem share a singular goal: to protect the vulnerable. In the original legend, “the golem patrolled the streets of the Jewish Ghetto, protecting those in danger, killing evildoers, and ensuring the safety of the community” (54). The fact that the Golem repeatedly refers to himself as Vesna’s protector suggests that, like his namesake, his primary goal is “protecting the weak” (178). Although the Golem came into being in a moment of intense abuse of Vesna in Russia, he explicitly connects his existence to the Prague myth, explaining that “he, like the original golem, had materialized with clarity and without preamble into this realm” (303). The use of this specific myth ties the fields of medicine, science, and religion together in a complex exploration of The Nature of Human Consciousness.
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