« Whatever Happened to the Novel 'The Solomon Key'? »

DID DAN BROWN GET COLD FEET, AS MAUREEN DOWD SUGGESTS?

We have not read the new novel attributed to Dan Brown The Lost Symbol, and we may not anytime soon, being unwilling to spend the nearly $40 to reward this preppie heretic and his publisher. But we have read reviews of the novel, including one by Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, in which she suggests that Brown and his team of editors/ghostwriters/researchers with this work has in effect kissed up to the Masons. She tells us in her column, which can be accessed on the Cryptex.com website, that Brown has disclosed no secrets and written nothing unflattering which might make him a target of Freemason henchmen, if such people exist. The Cryptex site also runs a letter from Brown declining to appear before a Scottish Rite gathering (do they wear kilts?) in which he suggests that he has considered joining the spooky secret society for boys only. 

But none of that, including how the novel reads, is really what interests us. What we’re interested in is what happened to The Solomon Key, the novel so named which was supposed to have been published several years back … but apparently was scrapped. The title has obviously changed, but was the whole novel reworked along with the original title? And what was the Solomon key as it was to have been featured in the novel which was reportedly ready years ago? The only thing associated with the word or name Solomon that we get in The Lost Symbol are several characters whose last names are Solomon. So where is the key? What was the key? Are there any references to Solomon “keys,” or Solomonis Clavicula (a handbook on witchcraft), or Solomon’s temple in the new novel? (Freemasons are into Solomon’s temple, Masonic temples being replicas of it. And then there is all that Hiram Abiff stuff, he having been a king of Tyre, a merchant, a bearer of some great secret who was killed by three Ethiopians.)

Is there any reference in the novel to the circular talisman covered with runes which correspond to the Washington Monument and other ancient sites around the world which align themselves with the constellation Orion — as this South African guy Wayne Herschel predicted on his website KeyofSolomon.net? Herschel refers to this talisman as the Key of Solomon. But it appears that Herschel has mispredicted the focus of Brown’s new novel. Well, did he have it right with the previous novel, if there was a previous novel different than the one we have now? The title Solomon Key would seem to suggest that what we have in The Lost Symbol is a brand new novel. We’ve set email to Herschel with no success, but we’ll stay on this. 

Since the title The Solomon Key was scrapped … will we ever see a novel from Brown with that title? And if the novel was scrapped and then rewritten … why was it? So far we can’t find anyone who has any answers.