Mythology of the Deep State: The Novels of Dan Brown
In April 2003, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code hit bookstores. Judging by the modest sales of his previous novel, Angels and Demons, two years earlier, it’s unlikely that either Brown or his publisher anticipated the new book’s sensational success. But just a year later, on the first anniversary of the release, Doubleday announced it was “the bestselling adult novel of all time within a one-year period.” By then, nearly seven million copies were in print. Recent estimates place total sales above eighty million, putting The Da Vinci Code among the top ten bestsellers of all time and placing Brown in the company of Charles Dickens, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. J. K. Rowling is Brown’s only contemporary on the list.
The authors in this select cohort, most of whom wrote for younger readers, fall broadly into the category of mythmakers. Writers like Tolkien and Lewis self-consciously aimed to feed the imaginations of children with fantastical but morally serious narratives in a modern world where the authority of traditional myths—including the Bible—had waned. The Harry Potter books have performed a similar function for millennials.
The Da Vinci Code appeared the same year as the fifth Harry Potter installment and just edged it out in total sales, while coming in behind Rowling’s first Potter novel. The mark left by Rowling’s series on the collective imagination of today’s young adults is unparalleled by any other contemporary text; references to Hogwarts, Voldemort, Muggles, and so on abound in all sorts of contexts, and more recently Rowling’s views on transgender issues and feminism have become a controversial flashpoint.
The cultural legacy of Brown and his literary blockbuster is far less evident. To be sure, it gave rise to a mini-industry of spin-off products and imitations, but the themes of The Da Vinci Code, despite the initial polemics the novel provoked, have faded from public consciousness. Perhaps Brown’s target audience of adults was simply less impressionable than Rowling’s young readers. Nevertheless, given how many people read the book, saw the movie, and consumed related films and documentaries, it’s striking that The Da Vinci Code has left few noticeable traces in contemporary culture.
The simplest explanation for this disappearance is the evanescence of the era out of which the novel emerged, and which, somewhat obliquely, it typified. The novel exploded onto the scene in the years bookended by the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, each of which dealt different sorts of blows to the post–Cold War “end of history” consensus and the Pax Americana that underwrote it. Amid the escalating tumult of this period and its attendant disorientation, The Da Vinci Code looks in retrospect like an escapist romp, concerned as it is with obscure esoterica and ancient heresies. But there’s slightly more to it than that.
In politics, this period began with a strange combination of triumph and malaise. American global hegemony, without which Brown’s worldwide book sales could not have occurred, at once placed the nation’s institutions in a position of uncontested supremacy while depriving them of the ideological and civilizational clash that had been their animating impetus for decades. This was as much the case for the national security state as it was for publishing—both found themselves seeking a new cast of villains.
A broader survey of Brown’s career reveals a writer who discovered his formula for success after an initial attempt to engage far more directly with the political and cultural dilemmas of America at the turn of the millennium: the simultaneous ascendancy and paralysis of the U.S. security state after the demise of its animating nemesis; the broad onset of institutional decadence; the elusive enemies confronted by the New World Order, from religious terrorism to hackers and computer viruses; and the mortal threats posed to state secrecy in the information age.
A closer reading of The Da Vinci Code alongside Brown’s other novels suggests that its remarkable cultural resonance derived from its transmutation of this cluster of anxieties into quasi-mythical form. His original fictional project, on display in his debut, Digital Fortress, and its successor, Deception Point, was to repurpose the espionage techno-thriller—the genre perfected by Tom Clancy in the final decade of the Cold War—for the 1990s end of history moment, when the Soviet threat had vanished and the jihadist threat had not quite come into focus. Despite their literary mediocrity, these two books are remarkably prescient about the decades to come: they include unwitting anticipations of developments including Wikileaks, Bitcoin, and private space travel.
Brown’s ham-fisted narrative prophecies went unheeded by most of the public. It was only when he transposed his driving concern with secrecy and encryption onto far older historical themes—to the foundational modern conflict between science and religion and the origin of Christianity—that he hit his novelistic stride and wrote the book that would make his name and his fortune. That success then afforded him the opportunity to return to his earlier interest: the new threats faced by the American state in a globalized world shaped by technological acceleration. In the novels after The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s fictional avatar, Robert Langdon, investigates the first form taken by the American deep state—Freemasonry—as well as the threat of bioterrorism, and the terrors and possibilities of transhumanism.
The basic structure of all of Brown’s conspiratorial romps is to let readers in on a secret that, if revealed, has the potential to change everything—and then enlist them in ensuring its safe relegation to the realm of metaphor. Perhaps the widespread forgetfulness about the fictional material by which Brown introduced this structure of feeling to the collective imagination proceeds not from the obsolescence of his concerns but, on the contrary, from their banalization and the cynical exhaustion they increasingly elicit.
Revisionist Mythmaking
If Brown’s fiction has not, like his fellow all-time top bestsellers, infused the collective imagination with enduring new myths, it was not for lack of trying. The Da Vinci Code ambitiously revisits several of the foundational myths of the West—from the life of Christ to the legend of the Holy Grail—and advances a revisionist historical narrative drawn from age-old heresies and modern sources. His borrowings from one of the latter, the 1982 bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail, were the basis of an unsuccessful plagiarism lawsuit. (The suit failed in part because Holy Blood was itself derivative of prior material.)
Infamously, The Da Vinci Code’s protagonists determine, among other things, that Jesus was not actually celibate, and was married to Mary Magdalene; that the couple produced offspring; and that they have descendants living in secrecy in France. The secrecy is necessary due to the Catholic Church’s campaign to suppress the truth of Jesus’s bloodline, which has been protected by a series of clandestine organizations, notably the “Priory of Sion.” Finally, it turns out that the “holy grail” is not a chalice, but a pun: “san gréal” is really “sang réal,” the “holy blood” of Brown’s source text—that is, the bloodline descended from Jesus, and also the mortal remains of Mary Magdalene, whose body gave birth to it.
The means by which the protagonists—Harvard professor of “religious symbology” Robert Langdon and French police cryptographer Sophie Neveu—uncover these truths is, as the book’s title implies, code-breaking. The “san gréal”/“sang réal” pun is just one example of the sorts of ciphers they stumble upon: generally, these amount to simple wordplay, such as anagrams. It turns out that just beneath the surface of the canonical artworks and historical documents of the West is a subtext set out in a cryptic code and only accessible to the members of a spiritual elite—the Priory of Sion—of which Leonardo da Vinci was just one illustrious member. Part of what the novel offers its readers is a narrative initiation into this age-old gnostic fantasy of enlightenment.
In broad strokes, this is The Da Vinci Code, reduced to the propositional content revealed in the course of the narrative. It might be reasonable to object to such an approach to the novel, which is after all a work of fiction—if Brown himself did not invite it. He prefaces the novel with an enumeration of supposed “facts,” the first of which is: “[t]he Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization.” (It isn’t; more on this later.) In interviews, Brown claimed the historical content of his novel was all, or at least 99 percent, true. Many of his readers took it this way.
It’s not all that surprising that Brown found such a receptive audience. In a period of religious disaffection, he was offering up a new Christian founding myth that looked more palatable to a culture steeped in sex-positive feminism. In it, the all-male, celibate Catholic priesthood and the Church’s stigmatization of sex were an inversion of what had existed previously: a harmonious earth-mother cult in which the sexes had equal status and coitus was elevated to the status of the sacred in the rite of hieros gamos.
Not only did Brown tap into a broad, inchoate spiritual malaise, The Da Vinci Code’s release was fortuitously timed. It appeared in the wake of widespread coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals. During the year prior to the novel’s release, the Boston Globe had run a major investigative series on the subject and the New York Times had dedicated numerous articles to the exposé. The notion that the Vatican might have even more deeply buried sex-related secrets not only accorded with people’s emerging suspicions, but also resonated with the notion that priestly celibacy concealed ritualized eroticism. One of the novel’s Catholic villains, the monk Silas, is driven to sadomasochistic perversity by the Church’s repressive disciplinary regime.
Brown also appealed to the same ambient hostility to organized religion that would feed into the New Atheism publishing craze. The first New Atheist manifesto, Sam Harris’s bestseller The End of Faith, appeared the year after The Da Vinci Code, followed by Letter to a Christian Nation, which according to Harris, aimed to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity.” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, the other New Atheist “Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse,” published their own jeremiads in quick succession. But before any of these appeared, Dan Brown had shown there was a fortune to be made in the post-9/11 era denouncing religious complicity in historical crimes and political backwardness.
Brown denied in interviews that his novel was anti-religious, or even anti-Catholic. And indeed, if the novel offers a brief for anything, it is not militant atheism or even agnosticism but a tepid stew of “spiritual but not religious” notions. Such beliefs have been consistently appealing to the expanding demographic of “nones,” who despite the New Atheists’ best hopes, often swap out Christianity not for scientific materialism but for other mythopoetic worldviews like the woozy reverence for “the sacred feminine” Brown cribbed from new age feminists. Far from dismissing Jesus as merely human in the manner of two centuries of secular “historical Jesus” scholarship, Brown—via his mouthpiece, Langdon—recasts him for post-patriarchy as the sacred embodiment of the male principle, the yin to Mary Magdalene’s yang in a framework of cosmic balance.
In the years after the novel’s release, those persuaded by such claims debated their plausibility with Christians, and religious organizations published refutations of Brown’s historical and theological claims. Yet those who regarded The Da Vinci Code as offering up a more egalitarian, science-friendly take on Christianity failed to note that its central conceit—an unbroken bloodline of descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, continuing down to the present—is as scientifically preposterous as the virgin birth, as well as deeply reactionary in its implications.
A couple with descendants who themselves have descendants would produce an exponentially immense number of offspring over the course of two thousand years. If Jesus did have living heirs, they would comprise a large portion of the world’s population. This little-remarked fact, however, is related to another plausible source of the novel’s appeal. Its release came just a few years after the first direct-to-consumer ancestry DNA tests went on the market, offering a new means of apprehending our biological continuity with ancient ancestors: a commercial and scientific avenue of mystical communion with the past. But the strange origin of The Da Vinci Code’s main narrative thread shows that this contemporary fantasy resonates with older ones.
Apocalypse Averted
At the time of its release, The Da Vinci Code seemed aligned with the progressive side of the culture war. After all, it portrayed male-dominated institutions in a sinister light—Opus Dei, for instance, played a villainous role; Brown’s characters denounce patriarchy and the suppression of women’s historical contributions in passages heavily cribbed from feminist theologians; and they attempt to reimagine the founding narrative of Christianity in more gender-inclusive terms. Its themes were a good fit with liberal fears about encroaching theocracy during George W. Bush’s presidency, and anticipated the broader reemergence of pop feminism that culminated in the subsequent decade.
But the deeper ideological valences of the novel are more ambiguous. For one thing, the Jesus bloodline narrative that Brown drew upon has its roots in a political project that was reactionary in the oldest sense of the term: it emerged out of an arcane fantasy of restoring the French monarchy. To the extent that it ever existed, the “Priory of Sion,” claimed by Brown to be a real organization, was a tiny fringe sect started in 1956. Its founder was Pierre Plantard, an ultranationalist, collaborationist, and anti-Semite who under the Vichy regime had offered his services directly to Marshall Pétain, claiming that he could help expose a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy against France.
Following the war, Plantard rechanneled his enthusiasm into an elaborate literary hoax. After founding the Priory, which he envisioned as something like a modern chivalric order, Plantard collaborated with the writer Philippe de Chérisey on forging a collection of parchments that would attest to the supposed long history of the organization. The forgeries were then planted in the Biblothèque nationale, where Plantard’s sometime collaborator Gérard de Sède “discovered” them and republished them in his 1967 book L’or de Rennes.
Plantard’s central claim was that the Priory of Sion had existed for a millennium, and its function was to protect the living descendants of the original Merovingian line of France—of which he claimed to be one. The secret society’s ultimate plan was to install a “Great Monarch” who would be drawn from among the living Merovingians.
In Plantard’s account, the line of the Merovingian kings and their descendants stretched back to the Israelite tribe of Benjamin (a surprising claim, one might think, for an anti-Semitic French ultranationalist, but Plantard evidently saw no problem). It was in the 1982 novel Holy Blood, Holy Grail that this narrative was overlaid with that of a Jesus bloodline: the Merovingians, the authors of that book asserted, intermarried with the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, creating a link between the French monarchy and the ancient kings of Israel from whom Jesus was descended. If the Jesus bloodline narrative makes little sense in terms of modern genetics, it makes more sense within this fantastical royal genealogy, intended to establish a claim to legitimacy.
Plantard’s collaborators, Philippe de Chérisey and Gérard de Sède, did not share his eccentric neo-monarchist politics: both had a background in surrealism and avant-garde literature, and viewed the enterprise more as a playful attempt to plant a new myth in the collective imagination—a project resembling what we now call memetic warfare. By planting the forged documents in the national archive and publicizing them, the hoaxers believed they could remake the past through a sheer act of imaginative will, thus proving that it was not as fixed as the historians claim.
While Chérisey later admitted that the Priory dossiers were fraudulent, this did not prevent others—notably, Brown and the authors of Holy Blood, which began as a BBC documentary based on Sède’s book—from continuing to assert the reality of the Priory and the authenticity of the dossiers. As a result, a not inconsiderable portion of humanity takes the “Jesus bloodline,” a narrative originally conjured up by the mind of a forgotten fringe intellectual and then disseminated by way of avowed fraud, as at minimum a plausible hypothesis. A new past with new facts has, in effect, been conjured up from fiction.
The Da Vinci Code’s mythmaking ambition, then, turns out to be inherited from the earlier authors who invented the history of the Priory of Sion and the Jesus bloodline. While their motives varied, they were all attempting to bridge a series of profound historical fissures. The original version developed by Plantard forms part of a larger fantasy of a return to origins that reverses the French Revolution and returns modern France to its true, ancient hierarchical order. The addition of the Jesus bloodline element goes even further, making Christianity, at its origin, another Mediterranean fertility cult, undoing the primordial rupture that separates monotheism from paganism.
Yet there is also an important respect in which Brown’s project diverges from its predecessors, which is made evident in the plot’s final twist. The novel’s ultimate antagonist turns out to be not Opus Dei or the Vatican, but the scholar Leigh Teabing (his name an anagrammatic fusion of those of two coauthors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail), initially introduced as Langdon’s friend and the foremost expert on the grail, the Priory of Sion, and related lore. It turns out that Teabing’s interest was not merely scholarly: he hoped to bring the Priory out of hiding, force it into a final confrontation with the Church over its lies, and usher in a new dispensation. He frames this scheme in apocalyptic terms: “the millennium passed without any revelation . . . nothing happened as we entered the End of Days.” The Priory, he has concluded, has lost its nerve.
To accelerate the desired revelation, Teabing has impersonated a Catholic prelate and prevailed upon the fanatical Silas to carry out a series of murders. The first victim was Sophie’s grandfather Jacques Saunière (his name taken from a major figure in Gérard de Sède’s L’or de Rennes), curator of the Louvre and presumed grand master of the Priory. Later, our heroes encounter a real representative of the Priory who dismisses Teabing’s eschatology: “The End of Days is a legend of paranoid minds,” she states. Moreover, “the Priory has always maintained that the Grail should never be unveiled” since “[i]t is the mystery and wonderment that serve our souls.” In the end, Langdon determines the location of Mary Magdalene’s remains, but opts to keep silent about it.
All of this marks a turning away from the fantasies of Plantard and his French collaborators as well as the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors. The former believed that their avant-garde hoax could change the course of history; the latter compared themselves to the Watergate journalists, exposing Christianity’s greatest cover-up. In contrast, Langdon, and Brown with him, end up endorsing the cover-up and asking readers to go along with them. It may be the case that Mary Magdalene is the grail and has a final resting place in the Louvre, but what matters is the “mystery and wonderment” her legend provokes—better appreciated when it remains veiled in secrecy. Despite the controversy Brown managed to provoke among Catholics, it was actually his archvillain, the disgraced Teabing, who wanted to pick a fight with them. This is another sense in which Brown was not wrong when he said his novel was not anti-Christian. The Priory’s incendiary teachings are reduced to charming gnostic esoterica by the novel’s end.
The Da Vinci Code, then, is a narrative of apocalypse averted. Those who read it primarily as an exposé of the Church, and perhaps followed it with Holy Blood, Holy Grail and other anti-Vatican theorizing, did not read to the end. But the majority of its tens of millions of readers, we may assume, did, and this is one reason the novel’s narrative content made so little lasting impact on the audiences who devoured it. In the end, we may conclude, the Holy Grail, the Priory, and so on are MacGuffins that provide a pretext for, among other things, action sequences and some mystical sermonizing.
Nonetheless, The Da Vinci Code’s overriding concern with the relationship between secrecy and institutional continuity—presented as the central factor in the history of both the Priory and the Church—not only allows us to situate it in the cultural ambience of its moment of publication, but also to connect it to the present. The questions it tacitly poses have driven a wide array of the debates that continue to roil the twenty-first century, from Wikileaks to the 1619 Project. What should become of the long-disavowed truths of powerful institutions? Should they be revealed, or should they remain under lock and key? Brown’s novels consistently begin by asserting the former, but eventually assure us of the advisability of the latter. Moreover, the fictional interrogation of the perfidy of the Vatican, for which Brown is best known, turns out to have important implications far closer to home.
A WASP Failson
The plots of The Da Vinci Code as well as its immediate predecessor, Angels and Demons, revolve around secrets allegedly buried in the deepest recesses of the oldest continuously existing institution in the West, the Catholic Church. But before Brown ever turned his attention to the Vatican, he wrote two books about secretive institutions of more recent origin but more far-reaching power in our time: the institutions that make up the American “deep state”—that is, the so-called alphabet agencies charged not with the care of our eternal souls, but with the security of the American nation, and by extension, the world over which America exercised unipolar dominance from 1989 until quite recently.
In The Da Vinci Code, Brown sets the Catholic Church’s nonhereditary mode of succession, necessary for a hierarchy composed entirely of celibate males, against the hereditary succession of the Jesus bloodline under the guardianship of the Priory of Sion. He explored a similar contrast between biological and non-biological succession in his previous novel, Angels and Demons, in which the sitting pope secretly has a child via in vitro fertilization—a modern immaculate conception that also symbolizes the Church’s reconciliation with science. In both instances, the Church’s institutional continuity outside of biological reproduction is presented as perverse and unnatural—a backwards prejudice that must be overcome in order for it to advance into modernity. This critique is nothing new: Protestant reformers made similar claims.
America began as a Protestant nation, and the nation’s ruling class, by contrast with the Vatican’s non-biological lineage, long drew from the ranks of a hereditary elite that constituted the nation’s de facto aristocracy—the WASPs—and from the schools that the WASPs established in the colonial era and dominated until recently: that is, the preparatory academies and Ivy League universities of the northeastern United States. In more recent years, of course, this traditional American elite has declined massively in stature, even as the educational institutions it built have become even more important to the maintenance of the nation’s ruling class. In this class, it is educational pedigree, rather than parental lineage, that now determines membership—although by some accounts, what has lately emerged is a hybrid form of elite, a “hereditary meritocracy.”
Dan Brown was born and raised about as close to the center of the old WASP heartland as he could have been: on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Phillips Exeter is one of the oldest prep schools in America, founded a few years into the nation’s independence by John Phillips, a descendant of the first Puritan settlers in New England. It has long served as a feeder school for Harvard, Yale, and Amherst (where Brown went to college), among other venerable institutions, and is the alma mater of a wide array of the nation’s most illustrious men. Given this, it is not at all surprising that Dan Brown looked askance at the Catholic Church, or that his first two novels took place in the U.S. intelligence agencies, or that the protagonist of his subsequent five novels was a Harvard professor: all of these literary choices reflect his personal origins.
From its colonial beginnings, Brown’s native milieu of New England Protestantism conceived itself in opposition to Roman Catholicism, which would furnish the settings and storylines of several of his novels. Yet the themes he pursued in that exotic realm—clandestinity, ritual, exclusivity, and the perpetuation of an elite caste—had plenty of resonances with the settings of his childhood, as he has noted: “New England has a long tradition of elite private clubs, fraternities, and secret societies.” He “grew up surrounded by the clandestine clubs of Ivy League universities, the Masonic lodges of our Founding Fathers, and the hidden hallways of early government power.”
Brown has also made clear in interviews that his parentage and upbringing left a decisive mark on his novels. His father, Richard, taught mathematics at Exeter, and wrote a bestselling textbook on precalculus. Supposedly, he was also recruited by the NSA for his mathematical prowess, but declined the job. It was due to his father’s influence, Brown has stated, that puzzles, ciphers, and codes were incorporated into family fun, and thereby became the common thread through all of his fiction. Meanwhile, his mother Connie, a church organist and music teacher, seems to have sparked Brown’s interest in religion. He was raised in the traditional faith of the WASP culture that surrounded him from his earliest youth, Episcopalianism.
Brown’s coming of age coincided with the declining status of the WASP elites among whom he was raised, along with the rise of a new, more ancestrally diverse ruling class, albeit one still clustered around the same locations and institutions. During the nearly sixty years of Brown’s life, institutions like Exeter, Amherst, and the Ivy League have shifted their mission away from serving as acculturation environments for the hereditary caste that long presided over them, and toward the cultivation of a new multicultural, global, meritocratic overclass (which has itself become semi-hereditary and self-perpetuating in the meantime). In recent years, the ideological effects of this shift have reached as far as the deep state itself.
Brown’s birth year, 1964, saw the publication of E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. This classic sociological study of Baltzell’s own class—he was an Episcopalian from Philadelphia who attended St. Paul’s, New Hampshire’s most renowned boarding school next to Phillips Exeter—harshly critiqued its insularity and prejudice. He predicted WASP decline in the face of competition from the talented elite aspirants it had long attempted to exclude, Jews in particular, a prognosis that was largely borne out in subsequent decades. Ironically, Baltzell’s book popularized the term “WASP” just as this caste was beginning to lose its grip on the dominant institutions of American society.
The generation of progressive WASPs who rose up into leadership positions in the same period attempted to reinvigorate the traditional American ruling class by opening up its formative institutions to those who had been kept out. For instance, Kingman Brewster, the Boston Brahmin descendant who became president of Yale in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, oversaw the opening of admissions policies to diversify the student body, an example universally followed—despite the controversy around his sympathetic attitude to the insurrectionary counterculture of the period. Brewster exemplified the final period of WASP dominance, during which, in effect, it magnanimously ushered itself out of power by installing meritocratic achievement and elite credentialing in place of heredity as the determinant of who would occupy the commanding heights of power and influence in the United States.
Dan Brown lived through the revolution that would transform the institutions in which he came of age, Exeter and Amherst, which now advertises itself as one of the most diverse liberal arts colleges in the nation. By the standards of the new meritocratic regime, Brown was not a success. He reportedly received middling grades at the school where he was a faculty brat, and one can assume his admission to Amherst owed more to his insider status than his academic achievement. In other words, he was a figure who would have done fine for himself in the era of WASP hegemony, perhaps gaining a comfortable foothold on the basis of his gentleman’s C.
Prior to the astonishing success of his fourth novel, Brown seemed to be what is now called a “failson.” He turned to writing only after unsuccessfully pursuing a musical career in Los Angeles and coauthoring a self-help book with his wife, Blythe, under a pseudonym. Eventually, his recompense came not from the old boys’ networks to which he was linked by upbringing (though these may have helped him gain an initial foothold in publishing), but from that more vulgar domain of American life: the market.
In his second major work, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Baltzell contrasted the literary and cultural high-mindedness of the former city’s elite with the commercialism of the latter’s. Despite growing up a stone’s throw from Boston, around which much of the canon of respectable American literature emerged, Brown’s eventual literary career unfolded in the low-prestige but lucrative domain of commercial fiction. On the other hand, many of his plots have unfolded in the secluded precincts long dominated by WASPs: Ivy League universities and the administrative recesses of the American state. Even the European locales of the Langdon novels are largely those of the Grand Tour that Anglo elites once undertook on the continent to expose themselves to the great works of Western civilization, including those of Da Vinci.
In all of these ways, Brown is an emblematic figure of his time and place. Born and bred in the institutions of the old American ruling class just as it lost its hold on them, adrift in the vulgar marketplace of mass culture, he settled on a winning literary formula when he transmuted some of the traditional concerns of the class around which he was raised—secrecy, exclusivity, heredity, and succession—into a new mythology that mystified the paroxysms of power in the waning years of the American century. Brown was writing in an era when America’s elite had become opaque to itself, unable to recognize or represent itself in the way it had when its status was largely hereditary. In his most successful work, he projected this problem onto a fantasy of academic gnosticism, concealing the operations of power while pretending to unmask them, in a way that anticipated and fed into a new conspiratorial folklore that would flourish online.
Arcana, Secretum, Mysterium
In his 1997 debut, Digital Fortress, Brown introduced the first of the secretive institutions that would take center stage in all of his writing: the National Security Agency, which had supposedly once offered employment to his father. This was a decade and a half before the Snowden revelations brought the agency to the center of public consciousness—for a few news cycles, anyway. The NSA has its origins in the Cipher Bureau, which was created to intercept and decrypt enemy military communiqués during World War I. The Cipher Bureau was one of the original instantiations of the deep state: an outgrowth of the executive branch exempt from congressional authorization and oversight. After the war, it evolved into the Black Chamber, a cryptanalytic enterprise focused mostly on decrypting the diplomatic cables of rival nations.
Well before Snowden’s revelations, controversy swirled around the NSA and its precursor organizations—unsurprisingly, given the basic tension between overt American ideals of transparency, accountability, and democracy and the operations of a clandestine agency charged with surveilling civilians. The Black Chamber, the existence of which was concealed behind a front organization, was shut down in 1929 by Henry Stimson, Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state—as it happens, a WASP graduate of Phillips Andover and Yale—who thought its activities unseemly. Those of his caste, of course, would later reconcile themselves to the tangle of intelligence agencies that emerged during World War II, including the NSA’s immediate forerunner, the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). But in the 1970s, Idaho senator Frank Church, who had himself been surveilled by the NSA, convened a committee that attempted to bring the agency’s spying under congressional control, leading to the passage of FISA.
The emergence of new modes of electronic communication, encryption, and surveillance (as well as the launching of the War on Terror after 9/11) would severely compromise these regulatory initiatives—a reality made evident to the public during the Snowden affair. The plot of Brown’s Digital Fortress channels the emergent anxieties of both the public and the state amid the rise of the civilian internet—the same concerns that would come to a head in the period when news was dominated by Wikileaks and Snowden. The novel’s plot revolves around a showdown between the NSA and its former crack cryptographer, Ensei Tankado, a figure who uncannily anticipates both Julian Assange and the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. A deep-state defector who has been privy to the sheer scale of electronic surveillance in the nascent digital era, Tankado sets out to secure privacy for the masses by way of “digital fortress,” a public-key encryption system that will enable citizens to secure their communications from the all-seeing eye of the state.
What has driven Tankado to this subversive effort is the NSA’s development of a supercomputer, translatr, that can break through the cryptographic firewalls of banks, corporations, and foreign governments, not to mention any faint encryption efforts of the average citizen, thus rendering essentially all information transparent to the gaze of the American state. While Brown’s novel treats Tankado’s concerns sympathetically, it also emphasizes the necessity of the NSA’s guardianship. “This organization was founded for one purpose,” says his protagonist, the attractive young NSA cryptographer Susan Fletcher, “to protect the security of this nation. . . . I think most citizens would gladly sacrifice some privacy to know that the bad guys can’t maneuver unchecked.” She goes on: “There’s a lot of good out there—but there’s also a lot of bad mixed in. Someone has to have access to all of it and separate the right from wrong . . . there is a frail gate separating democracy from anarchy. The NSA guards that gate.” Ultimately, Brown seems to be telling us, the dangers of a world in which average people can keep secrets from the government—the world desired by Tankado and by his real-world successors like Assange and Nakamoto—is far more dangerous than the NSA’s digital panopticon.
Brown’s second deep-state thriller, Deception Point (2001), portrays the operations of an even more secretive alphabet agency: the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which primarily provides satellite intelligence to other agencies. The NRO was founded in 1960, but its existence, while tacitly acknowledged, was not officially declassified until thirty-two years later, after the Cold War wound down. Brown’s novel entangles the NRO in a representative post–Cold War intrigue. His protagonist, NRO agent Rachel Sexton, becomes embroiled in an interagency conspiracy centered on a scientific hoax that bears an odd resemblance to Plantard’s scheme involving the forged dossiers of the Priory. A supposed meteor containing evidence of extraterrestrial life has been detected by an NRO satellite; in fact, it is a fraud, apparently placed there to improve NASA’s reputation and protect its funding from neoliberal austerity and privatization efforts.
As in Brown’s later novels, his early techno-thrillers afford readers an inside view from within the deepest recesses of power, only to ultimately enlist us in the cover-up. The state’s secrets—the extent of surveillance of electronic communications, interagency intrigue involving fraud and murder—must be confined, in the end, to the small elite entrusted with its oversight; just as, in The Da Vinci Code, we are initiated in the secrets of the Priory only to be told that the truth about Mary Magdalene should remain shrouded in mystery. It is also here that the demographic overhauling of the American ruling class during Brown’s lifetime makes an appearance in his fiction: just as his later work traffics in pop feminism, the change his spy novels enact is the elevation of his girlboss heroines within the security state and the disgrace or death of their older male supervisors, who are represented as decadent and sexually depraved.
The oldest accounts of secrecy furnish a useful vocabulary for the scenarios explored across all of Brown’s fiction. Ancient and early modern political theory distinguishes between two modes of secrecy: arcana imperii and secretum, which correspond roughly to Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” and “known unknowns.” Arcana are secrets whose existence is known only at the highest echelons of power: think, for instance, of the NRO before its declassification. It was not simply that the agency knew things the public did not; the public did not even know that the NRO’s secrets existed in the first place. Similarly, in Digital Fortress, the NSA does not simply fear that its secrets will be divulged; it fears that the existence of the technology by which it obtains those secrets—the supercomputer translatr—will be made public. Secretum, in contrast, is a secret of whose existence all are aware. For instance, I know that everyone I know has email and bank passwords, I know that social media sites keep a trove of data on me, and I know that the U.S. president possesses nuclear codes—I simply do not know what these are.
In periods of asymmetric power relations, arcana is the prevalent mode of secrecy. In the early decades of the U.S. deep state, its operations were opaque to most of those in the government, and even the existence of major agencies was not a matter of public knowledge. The Church Committee, by making much of this public, attempted to force a transition from arcana to secretum—not demanding that the public have access to state secrets, but simply that we have transparency about the existence and means of gathering those secrets. Under more horizontal arrangements of power, in theory, we should be aware of who is keeping secrets, even if we remain ignorant of their content. Historically, technologies of encryption are associated with the most hierarchical social institution, the military. One of the effects of the democratization of the civilian internet is to render the military’s password-guarded secrets more vulnerable, while simultaneously rendering the average user vulnerable to breaches in privacy but also allowing them to enter the same game of encryption that the state had largely monopolized in previous eras.
In Digital Fortress, we begin in the mode of arcana. Translatr renders all information transparent to the gaze of the state, yet its effectiveness relies, as with Bentham’s panopticon, on this gaze being invisible to the public. It embodies both the imperceptibility and the omniscience of the state; the secret remains secret because the public is ignorant of its existence. In contrast, Tankado wants to create a democratized world of secretum in which this hierarchy is overturned: the state and its operations are visible, while the average citizen’s activities are invisible to it. Through his protagonist, Brown emphasizes the dangers of such a world, in which terrorists, drug traffickers, and hackers—the spectral enemies of U.S. power who were gradually rising up to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the Soviet Union—would operate without state interference.
The same two-step of revelation and concealment structures all of Brown’s narratives. Just as the world has passed, in the digital age, from the dominance of arcana to the universality of secretum—each of us attempting to keep track of more passwords than an intelligence officer might have half a century ago—Brown’s novels lead readers through a cognitive progression from “unknown unknown” to “known unknown,” only to conclude by reasserting the necessity of asymmetric secrecy. Just as only the Priory must know the secret of the grail, only the American state must know of the existence of its most sophisticated cryptographic instruments. In both Deception Point and Angels and Demons, a powerful figure (in the NRO and the Vatican, respectively) is immolated just prior to being exposed as the perpetrator of an elaborate hoax—but the heroes agree that the secret must be kept from the public.
In his mid-period novels, particularly The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol, Brown goes a step further, implicitly reasserting a further ancient category of secrecy: mysterium. This term refers not to mundane matters of the modern state, but to mystical truths about God, nature, and the cosmos that are in some sense unfathomable to mortals. In the political theology of the Middle Ages, however, such truths could impinge directly on the operations of power. Consider the historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous study The King’s Two Bodies, which traced the idea that the sovereign possessed an immortal mystical body that exceeded his natural body. This “mystery of the state” was a theological paradox that also undergirded temporal power.
Brown’s revision of the grail myth in The Da Vinci Code may seem quite distant from the secrets that preoccupied his earlier protagonists, but this evolution reveals a process of mystification. In Digital Fortress and Deception Point, the machinations of the deep state must, in the end, be kept from the public—they must be restored, to the extent possible, to the realm of arcana. Much the same is true in Angels and Demons: the violent intrigue that has marked a papal succession is suppressed, with Langdon’s endorsement. In The Da Vinci Code, this operation is taken a step further in that the nature of the buried secret has shifted. It is now a properly mystical body—that of Mary Magdalene—which like Kantorowicz’s second body of the king, also persists in the perpetuation of a bloodline. The reversion of secrecy to mysterium as a pretext for increasingly uncanny modes of elite succession becomes the constant theme of Brown’s subsequent fiction.
Decadent Elites, Dwindling Bloodlines
In The Lost Symbol, the follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, Brown sends Langdon back across the Atlantic and into the D.C. corridors of power where his earlier novels took place. There, the Harvard professor confirms a suspicion he has previously harbored: that the U.S. government is, and has always been, run by a secret cabal of Freemasons. Toward the end, however, with the help of a female Japanese American CIA agent, he must prevent the release of a video that will expose this truth to the public, showing many high officials participating in secret rituals. “If this video were released,” Brown writes, “Landgon knew it would become an Internet sensation overnight. The anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists would feed on this like sharks . . . even though the ritual was innocuous and purely symbolic.”
As before, revelation is contemplated and ultimately rejected. A source of appeal of Brown’s novels, again, is that they accord the reader the status of an initiate, privy to secrets that are explicitly said to be too dangerous for general release. We, as readers of Dan Brown novels, may learn the truth about Freemasonry, the Priory, the Church, the NSA, and so on, even as the heroes conclude they must be kept from the rest of the public. In Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol, this initiatory status includes witnessing secret rituals. But even as we are told these rituals must be kept from the public, we are also assured that they are not as sinister as they seem—that, as above, they are “innocuous and purely symbolic.”
It is surprising that this dimension of Brown’s work—the revelation that ruling elites participate in obscure rituals that might be disturbing to the general public—has not been rediscovered in recent years. This notion has been a standard element of conspiratorial investigation for decades—think of Alex Jones’s infiltration, over twenty years ago, of Bohemian Grove, the private campground in California where billionaires and politicians gather annually and engage in a pantomime of human sacrifice. Pizzagate and then QAnon have given theories like these an unprecedented popular foothold. But before these conspiracy fandoms began to promulgate their own elaborate narratives, Brown’s novels fed the popular imagination with similar notions—yet always insisted, in the end, that the elite’s dark secrets should be kept secret.
The description of hieros gamos—the central rite of the Priory of Sion—in The Da Vinci Code, Brown has said, was explicitly based on the scenes of a ritualized orgy from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in which a sinister elite sex cult turns out to be complicit in human trafficking and murder. In the wake of revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s empire of abuse and exploitation, some have suggested that Kubrick’s film was an oblique portrait of sinister realities of power he became aware of through his Hollywood connections. Such claims are speculative, of course, but at a minimum, there is a resemblance between what the film depicts—which anticipates the baroque demonology that later emerged from the Pizzagate and QAnon online subcultures—and the reality of Epstein’s operation.
All of this makes Brown’s laudatory account of the Priory and the Freemasons as consortia of benevolent guardians of innocuous mysteries look disturbingly propagandistic in retrospect. Certain narrative details make matters worse. Early on in The Da Vinci Code, we learn that Sophie had been estranged from her grandfather, the murdered Louvre curator Saunière, since her youth, because of a traumatic experience: arriving home from school at an unexpected time, she accidentally witnessed his participation in the Eyes Wide Shut–style hieros gamos ritual. Only with Langdon’s guidance does she come to see the true benignity of the bizarre rite.
In The Lost Symbol, Saunière has an exact American counterpart in Langdon’s friend and mentor Peter Solomon, the director of the Smithsonian and a thirty-third-degree Freemason. Like his murdered French double, Solomon has become estranged from a child he raised: his son Zachary, who has morphed into a sadomasochistic assassin reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code’s Silas, Opus Dei’s hitman. Seemingly disturbed in part by his father’s secretive life, a disguised Zachary kidnaps and mutilates Peter as an act of ritualized revenge.
Brown paints both Saunière and Solomon as benevolent avuncular figures, but the linkage in both novels between powerful men, secret rituals, and estranged children—and in the second novel, a psychologically disturbed child—is at least highly suggestive of abuse, especially given that Brown’s Langdon novels were published across two decades bookended by the Catholic Church scandals and the Epstein revelations. What is even more remarkable, given the reputation Brown managed to gain as a feminist, is his reverent attitude toward certain powerful men. In his first two novels, the elderly potentates of the deep state fall victim to me-too style scandals and humiliations and are overthrown by younger female challengers. In contrast, in the middle-period novels, the éminences grises of institutional authority are treated as beneficent patriarchs, and the children alienated by their odd, ritualized behavior are dismissed or villainized.
Brown may be a literary populist who spurned the recondite precincts of his upbringing for the hurly-burly of the culture industry, but much of his work can be read as an apology for a new, enlightened elite that should defeat or supplant an oppressive, moribund one. In the first two novels, the young female upstarts in the deep state, and the young male academics they link up with romantically, fill this role. In the later novels, Langdon repeatedly couples with women who are scions of a secret, enlightened counter-elite: Sophie, Peter Solomon’s daughter Katherine, and in Angels and Demons, Vittoria Vetra, a physicist at CERN whose father is both a Catholic priest and a scientist—emblematic of the more enlightened future awaiting the Church.
Implicit in these pairings is an elite breeding program of sorts: an exogamous marriage of humanistic learning (embodied by Langdon) and science (embodied by his love interests, all three of them scientists). And yet, despite Brown’s repeated endorsement of hereditary elites, like the Priory, over nonhereditary ones, like the Catholic priesthood, Langdon always begins each new novel a childless bachelor once again—and whereas Brown’s first four novels all end with implied or overt sexual intercourse, beginning with The Lost Symbol Langdon’s relationships with the female leads remain chaste. Unlike the one begot by Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Langdon’s bloodline looks unlikely to extend beyond him—an inadvertent reflection, perhaps, of the dwindling of the old Ivy League demographic to which he and his creator belong.
In Brown’s novels of the 2010s, the themes of heredity and succession return in somewhat different ways that reflect the newer ideological fads of the overclass. Both Inferno (2013) and Origin (2017) feature billionaire entrepreneurs with intellectual agendas infused with ideas lately popular in the Silicon Valley tech world, in particular rationalism and transhumanism.
In Inferno, Langdon must try to make sense of the ciphered clues left by the recently deceased biotech CEO Bertrand Zobrist, who has seeded an engineered virus that, it is feared, could decimate humanity in order to fend off the threat of overpopulation. In the end, it turns out that the virus operates in a less devastating but equally effective way to achieve this end, rendering a third of those it infects infertile. This is ultimately portrayed as a reasonable intervention, and in any case, a fait accompli that must be accepted, since by the time Langdon finds the site where Zobrist has deposited the virus, it has already leaked out into the population. If Brown’s earlier novels might be read by the conspiratorially minded as propaganda on behalf of elite cabals of pedophiles, it would not be hard to read Inferno—which repeatedly invokes the notion that the Renaissance was made possible by the mass die-off of the Black Death—as propaganda on behalf of depopulation, frequently cited by figures like Alex Jones as a goal of the “globalists.”
Zobrist’s counterpart in Origin is Edmond Kirsch, a tech founder and TED Talk–style thought leader who seems to be an amalgam of Elon Musk, Sam Harris, and Yuval Noah Harari. Through this character, Brown returns to the theme of his first Langdon novel, Angels and Demons: the conflict between religion and science and the possibility of their reconciliation. He also revisits a theory explored in Deception Point, that of “panspermia,” which proposes an extraterrestrial origin for organic life. In the earlier novel, recall, the meteor attesting to this revelation proves to be a hoax. In Origin, it is proven by a computer simulation that also demonstrates the inevitability and desirability of the transhumanist future of a human merger with machines.
Taking these two storylines together, a broader message emerges: biological reproduction is doomed, whether because Langdon and so many other denizens of the advanced nations can’t or won’t have children, or because of Zobrist’s depopulation scheme, itself not too different in its effect from the real hormonal impact of many industrial substances. Ultimately, though, this is a desirable outcome, because the correction of overpopulation will enable a new Renaissance, and moreover, the perpetuation of the human line will be assured by integration with technology. But just as only a chosen remnant of the Priory of Sion survived through the ages, this succession must be entrusted to an enlightened few who consistently make up Brown’s cast of characters.
The Age of the Password
It becomes clear over the course of Dan Brown’s career that he has pioneered a mode of conspiracy theory that, far from encouraging suspicion about the clandestine activities of elites, ultimately promotes trust in them—provided they are among the enlightened few. His fiction may initially seem, like other imaginative products of the conspiracy genre, to challenge entrenched power structures—notably, readers of The Da Vinci Code took it as a j’accuse directed at the Catholic Church—but in the end, it tends to do just the opposite.
The defense of enlightened elites is the most consistent feature of his writing, from his first novels, in which his heroes speak eloquently of the deep state’s vocation while ensuring that its custodianship is passed on to a more able and diverse new generation; to his mid-period novels, in which revelations about the secret corridors of power of Rome and D.C. alike finally lead to a reaffirmation of their benevolent oversight by a clandestine cadre of gnostic initiates who engage in outré but benign eroticized rituals; to his final novels, in which he embraces the role of popularizer of transhumanist ideology, which has lately gained broad currency in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley (and as it happens, also appealed immensely to Jeffrey Epstein).
Brown’s first novel, Digital Fortress, and his most recent one, Origin, both culminate in a successful attempt to guess the password of a genius computer scientist (Tankado and Kirsch, respectively). But in both cases, the password would not meet the security standards of any basic web platform. In the first novel, it turns out—absurdly, given that it protects the program devised by the greatest cryptographer the world has known to undermine the operations of the NSA—to be the number “3.” The best-guarded secretum is in fact easily accessible on the basis of guesswork. This points to another reassuring takeaway of Brown’s work. In a bewildering world where information is sewn up in opaque codes and complex ciphers, the most important secrets prove accessible to the curious layman. In other words, even as the novels’ characters argue for the continued need for secrecy and concealment, they assure us both that what is hidden is, in any case, merely symbolic, and also that accessing hidden mysteries is not so difficult after all.
Dan Brown made his name as a novelist just as the rise of the civilian internet placed average people in a radically new relationship to secrecy. On one hand, we found ourselves placing increasingly vast troves of information about ourselves onto public communication networks; on the other, we became accustomed to the daily use of cryptographic tools of a sophistication that our parents would likely never have encountered in their lifetimes. Yet our notions of secrecy have remained naïve, as revealed by our persistent choice of easily guessable passwords—a bad habit that, in Brown’s novelistic universe, extends even to the masters of encryption.
The apparent democratization of this new era of secretum—one in which we all have secrets whose existence is known to others, but also powerful means of shielding them—is belied by the reality that most of us are in an asymmetric position in relation to states and intelligence agencies like the NSA, on one hand, and a small hacker elite, on the other. Dan Brown engaged forthrightly with these issues in his first two novels, ultimately seeming to conclude that trusting the NSA is the only way to keep safe in the age of info-viruses. In his far more popular later work, he turned time and again to the mystification of secretum into mysterium, a form of secrecy more spiritual than informational—and as such a convenient ideological justification of top-down control.
Along with J. K. Rowling—also a chronicler, as it happens, of secretive hereditary elites—Dan Brown was one of the last figures of the global mass culture that crescendoed in the closing decades of the twentieth century but has since fractured into a proliferation of competing channels and platforms. What put an end to global mass culture is the emergence of the age of the password that Brown chronicles, directly and then obliquely. In this new age, the dominance of a few media channels faces competition with a dizzying array of small to medium-sized ones, as well as interactive, password-protected realms in which communities may form around shared media consumption but also distinct apprehensions of reality. In this digitally balkanized world, we become adepts of our own gnostic secret societies, hewing fervently to truths that others may find bizarre or scandalous—just as we may regard their media habits as mindless consumption of propaganda.
Reports suggest Brown will release a sixth Robert Langdon novel in the coming years, but because global mass culture is moribund, it is unlikely to reach a comparably vast readership. There are other reasons, too, which have to do with the themes his work explored and seeded in the culture. There is less demand to read about Langdon when you can be Langdon by, for instance, deciphering “Q drops,” or writing Facebook posts that definitively prove Donald Trump is a Russian asset. Brown, in his Harvard professor avatar, offered the public a respectable model of the gonzo hermeneutics now practiced by internet users. His real successors are not novelists who have imitated him, but average people who have responded to the bewilderment of our information landscape by emulating his characters. But they will find, like his readers, that at the end of their initiation into arcane knowledge, they remain shut out of the precincts of power.