An Illustrated Guide to The Lost Symbol by John Weber & Patrick Huyghe & Michael Bober

Author:John Weber & Patrick Huyghe & Michael Bober
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence is one of four historical paintings by the artist placed in the Capitol Rotunda in the 1820s. Trumbull was a Revolutionary War officer and knew many of the signers, painting most of them from life.

to every other one. So I remember it absolutely. Washington said, “As a result of our revolution, we have disengaged ourselves from involvement in the chaos of Europe.” His last word was that we not engage in foreign alliances. Well, we held on to his words until the First World War. And then we canceled the Declaration of Independence and rejoined the British conquest of the planet. And so we are now on one side of the pyramid. We’ve moved from one to two. We are politically, historically, now a member of one side of an argument. We do not represent that principle of the eye up there. And all of our concerns have to do with economics and politics and not with the voice and sound of reason.

MOYERS: The voice of reason —is that the philosophical way suggested by these mythological symbols?

CAMPBELL: That’s right. Here you have the important transition that took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of Pythagoras and Confucius and Lao-tzu, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is the awakening of man’s reason. No longer is he informed and governed by the animal powers. No longer is he guided by the analogy of the planted earth, no longer by the courses of the planets—but by reason.

MOYERS: The way of—

CAMPBELL: —the way of man. And of course what destroys reason is passion. The principle passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down. And that’s why we’re on this side instead of the top of the pyramid.

MOYERS: That’s why our founders opposed religious intolerance —

CAMPBELL: That was out entirely. And that’s why they rejected the idea of the Fall, too. All men are competent to know the mind of God. There is no revelation special to any people.

MOYERS: I can see how, from your years of scholarship and deep immersion in these mythological symbols, you would read the Great Seal that way. But wouldn’t it have been surprising to most of those men who were deists, as you say, to discover these mythological connotations about their effort to build a new country?

CAMPBELL: Well, why did they use them?

MOYERS: Aren’t a lot of these Masonic symbols?

CAMPBELL: They are Masonic signs, and the meaning of the Pythagorean tet-rakis has been known for centuries. The information would have been found in Thomas Jefferson’s library. These were, after all, learned men. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a world of learned gentlemen. We haven’t had men of that quality in politics very much. It’s an enormous good fortune for our nation that that cluster of gentlemen had the power and were in a position to influence events at the time.

MOYERS: What explains the relationship between these symbols and the Masons, and the fact that so many

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