The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown



There is a vast difference between looking and seeing.
 As i approach the final chapters of Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" I feel like i have taken through my own mind trips over the years with all the readings and discoveries that i have stumbled upon and deduced what they had meant and how they fit in and why they are out there calling out to me to make the effort to learn and understand the mysteries that is a part of my own personal journey into the realm less traveled. my exposure towards the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christianity and the various other religious routes some how has been spelled out for me in this novel, I am reading the novel for the second time as the first time I read it somehow I could not finish it for some odd reason, maybe I misplaced it somewhere and i cannot remember how long ago this was. Now having read it for the second time I am glad that this had happened as for some odd reason what I read now is so utterly clear to me all the connections that it makes for me like I am being led through a spiritual path of my own scattered pieces of jigsaw puzzle.
The MASONIC tEMPLE, (another fingering accident on the capitals), is not something new for me as I drove by, took my kids in the stroller and often sat at its steps often enough when I was living two blocks from the Golden Gate park in San Francisco. If I am not mistaken it sits somewhere on Persidio Drive in the park area and it is called the Masonic Rosicrucian Temple. I had always been attracted to it for some odd reason and made allot of effort to read on the subject over the years like it had some thing to tell me in connection to my self discovery journey. I have met a few gentlemen of distinction who wore the Masonic ring on their finger and one of them who I had the opportunity to work for was my former boss at H&H Ship Services on the San Francisco Waterfront which I believe today is no more there, The late. William Harris Senior was president of the San Francisco Yacth Club for sixteen years, just to tell who he was and in his office he had a picture of himself shaking former President Ronald Reagan's hand. Those who had known 'Big Foot' as we affectionately called him behind his back would testify of his powerful presence.My first encounter with Bill senior was when I was at his office to see his son 'Little foot' as we everyone called him about cleaning his yard in Piedmont, Auckland across the Bay. I might have l might have related this incident in my earlier entries of my Bog relating how i got my job at H&H Ship Service located at 20 China basin off Third Street in Downtown SF. He impressed me as a huge man with a thick cigar in his mouth and a half filled glass of whiskey sitting on his desk while he sat opening letters with a knife letter opener in his hand. It was seven in the morning the time I was told to meet his son at his office in the same building. He paid no attention to me like I was not even there and asked my purpose without looking up from what he was doing. I stood looking down his huge red neck from behind answering like a kid in the presence of a Headmaster, this was when I noticed the big ring on his finger that had some weird designs on it. I had no idea what i was looking at at the time but later on after working with the company for a few years I realized it was a Masonic ring.
I did not understand why I was drawn towards this Brotherhood of Free Masons but I found it fascinating after doing some reading on it over the years and seeing the Masonic temples wherever i traveled in the US. One can find Mason Avenue or street names all over the country and every time I passed by a Masonis temple or Lodge it would trigger my curiosity like a magnet. Then the Dan Brown novels started hitting the literary scene and later movie theaters and this further got me hooked.
I had mentioned of my experience of travelling throughout the South West of the United States through Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona and in one instance while staying with an elderly artist in his studio building in Central City, Colorado I was loaned to read a ' Book of Secrets' of which I was informed only 87 copies were printed and in it I found all the religious symbols of the ancient western world with ornately printed pictures and detailed descriptions of what they were. This was sometime in 1979 and it was from this large black hard cover book that I learned of the Hermetic Movement, the different Greek schools of thoughts like who were the Eclectics of which I had initially wanted to find out. The reason I had asked my elderly artist host about the Eclectics was because i had been called an eclectic in a dream I had while sleeping in my little alcove room on the first night I was in Central City.I had woken up from the dream and wrote the word down as Eklektik because i was not sure of the spelling and was still half asleep.In the dream someone was shouting at me," you are an eclectic!" and it was so loud and real that it woke me up. The next morning when I asked Angelo De Bennedetti what it meant and showed him what I wrote, he corrected my spelling and later that same day took me to a couple living a few miles down the mountain from Central City to a small town of Black Hawk where a couple lwho were potters had lived and it was they who had the book and loaned it for me to ready while I was staying with Angelo. That same evening with the couple, Angelo and I drove to Denver where they showed me Angelo's works painted on the ceiling of the Denver Hall of Justice where 62? figures of 'Law Givers lined the tall ceilling each larger than life and included were figures like Homer and Aristotle, Ghandi and and Madam Sun Yat Sen to J.F. Kennedy: it might still be there. That same evening they took me to a movie ' Pride and passion' if I am not mistaken of the life of  Vincent VanGogh played by Kirk Douglas in black and white.

Angelo DiBenedetto – Artist extraordinaire

He was temperamental, once knocking Jack Kerouac down because the author insulted an opera singer. Angelo DiBenedetto was gifted, outspoken and opinionated, and always listed as one of America’s foremost artists in the 20th century. When he lived in the interior of Haiti for 19 months, he was initiated into the voodoo cult. His chosen home, far from the collectors and galleries and museums that bought his creations, was a tiny Victorian town with one gravel road reaching it.

This son of Italian immigrants was published in Life Magazine to critical acclaim in his 20s, but his second painting for Life was banned in three counties in Massachusetts. Born in New Jersey in 1913, Angelo earned an art degree with honors from the Cooper Union Art School and a scholarship to Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.
In 1976, the Colorado Judicial Department held a contest to choose an artist to paint a huge mural for the ceiling of the breezeway of the new Colorado Judicial Building. From the 22 finalists, they chose Angelo. He had studied mural painting at Harvard University and later in Mexico with Diego Rivera and had painted many murals in the two countries. But this was the largest mural in America at 300 feet long and 10 feet high, a whopping 3,000 square feet. The 74 panels created for the mural each weighed 100 pounds and were made of cement asbestos, an inert material that wouldn’t attack the paint. (The asbestos probably contributed, along with his lifelong smoking habit, to his death from cancer in 1992.)

He hired six other artists as assistants and two years later, the murals were dedicated on Oct. 12, 1978. Sixty historical figures, representing justice and human rights through all ages, were chosen by Angelo; they included both genders and all races and cultures.

Other honors accorded Angelo:

Shows at the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Biennial Exhibit in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pa., the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
• Exhibits in more than 100 museums in the U.S. and Europe.• More than 20 one-man gallery shows.
• Inclusion in every list of “foremost American artists” in the last half of the 20th century. Artists declared “He must be included in any list of those who set the direction of art in the mid-20th century in America.”
• Guest lecturer at the University of Colorado at Denver, the University of Denver and Colorado College.
• Two honorary degrees bestowed by the University of Colorado.
Circles dominated DiBenedetto’s late art, including this simplistic piece, Orange on Orange #4
Always an agitator for individual rights, Angelo was the leader in promoting royalties for artists when their works sold again at inflated prices. He was the first, in 1946, to include a contract with his sales that specified royalties in the event of resale or reproduction.
But this “foremost American artist” chose to live in a remote town, far from the center of the art world in the northeast U.S. Always intensely patriotic, Angelo had volunteered for World War II. The Army tapped his training as a cartographer and sent him first to Ethiopia on a secret assignment and eventually to Buckley Field in Denver. The course of his life changed when he first saw Central City.
Angelo said Central City “looked like an empty little Swiss town.” He promptly fell in love with the town, which at that time had one gravel road to it, and moved there in 1946 with his then-wife and small daughter. The huge, run-down Sauer-McShane warehouse on Spring Street intrigued him. The three-story stone warehouse, built in 1886, contained 10,000 square feet of space. He purchased it with his discharge pay and spent six years shoveling out the mud and boulders that had rolled in from the hillside. He leased out the first floor and lived on the upper two floors, reveling in the high ceilings and huge open space. His studio/living area was so cavernous that once he created a retrospective of his art more than 30 years for an NBC television special inside his house. One of his proudest creations was his kitchen table, made from a large packing box. Visitors were encouraged to carve their autographs on the table and scores of famous visitors, such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Helen Hayes and Mae West did
Article by Linda Jones
I spent a week with this extraordinary man and through him I found my calling  as an Ecclectic artist and I did not realize back then that I was living in the shadow of a great American artist of his time! We talked every morning at the breakfast table and during lunch and dinners. He had a huge pot of chicken soup cooked for us to last a week and for breakfast it was the same cereal from a huge gunny sack accompanied by black coffee and a single banana; things one cannot forget. I remember one morning telling him how the small painted statue of the Goddess Kuan Yin sitting on a shelve in his kitchen seemed to glow when I looked at it and he smiled saying nothing. He had two dogs one huge golden retriever named Rufus.Today as i looked back upon the journey that took me three months all over the South West the memory of Angelo came to me like an old encounter which had opened the door towards my spiritual journey as an artist.