If you liked the Da Vinci Code, you will love this book also. It has a great conspiracy, this time concerning the Illuminati, lots of artistic and historical detail, and also features Robert Langdon, the intrepid art historian from Cambridge.Summoned to Switzerland by a strange fax he receives in the middle of the night from the director of CERN, Langdon learns of the murder of Leonardo Vetra, one of CERN's brilliant scientists, who had been working with his daughter, Victoria, on a way to harness anti-matter. Antimatter has astonishing characteristics; a tiny sample about the size of a grain of sand is hypothesized to hold "as much energy as about two hundred metric tons of rocket fuel." They have succeeded in suspending the violent substance in a vacuum. They learn to their horror that a vial of it has been stolen and hidden in the Vatican; it will explode when the battery pack keeping the material suspended runs out. There seems to be a conspiracy of Illuminati supporters to destroy the church. The pope has just died (killed as we later learn - I'll try not to give away too much), and the cardinals have all been called together to elect a new pope.
The Illuminati were supposedly a group of science-minded rationalists who abhorred the church's spiritual basis for reality, hence their desire to obliterate the church. (If I told you what was really going on, it would ruin the suspense, of course.) Supposedly, Italy's most enlightened men of the sixteenth century, physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians banded together to share their concerns about the inaccuracies of the church's teachings. "They feared that the church's monopoly on 'truth' threatened academic enlightenment around the world. They founded the world's first scientific think tank, calling themselves `the enlightened ones,' " i.e., the Illuminati. Hunted by the church, they were forced to maintain extreme secrecy, but they spread the word through codes and messages and met regularly at a secret location called the Church of Illumination. Lucifer, in Latin, means bringer of light or illuminator.
There is some interesting history of iconography. U.S. currency is supposedly covered with Illuminati symbola. The pyramid on the back of a dollar bill is an occult symbol representing "a convergence upward, toward the ultimate source of Illumination. The eye above it, also emblazoned on Masonic lodges around the world - the Masons were thought to be offshoots of the Illuminati - represented the Illuminati's ability to infiltrate and watch all things. "The shining triangle represents enlightenment and is also the Greek letter delta, which is the mathematical symbol for change." The U.S. Great Seal is thus a call for enlightened, all-seeing change and the wording under the pyramid, Novus Ordo Seculorum, means new secular order. Take all this with liberal doses of salt.
Other pieces of delicious trivia include Pope Pius's emasculation of the male form in statues. In 1857, he decided that the accurate representation of the male form "might incite lust inside the Vatican. So he got a chisel and mallet and hacked off the genitalia of every single male statue inside Vatican City. He defaced works by Michelangelo, Bramante, and Bernini [who plays a very important role in this tale]. Plaster fig leaves were used to patch the damage. Hundreds of sculptures had been emasculated. Langdon had often wondered if there was a huge crate of stone penises someplace."
Langdon explains how the church pictured "satanic cults as devil-worshiping fiends. . .yet Satanists historically were educated men who stood as adversaries to the church," called Shaitan, an Islamic term meaning adversary. "The rumors of satanic black-magic animal sacrifices and the pentagram ritual were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign against their adversaries. Over time, opponents of the church, wanting to emulate the Illuminati, began believing the lies and acting them out. Thus, modern Satanism was born."
Langdon uses his knowledge of art history to locate the lair where the assassin who has been hired to kill off the four most likely candidates to the papacy is hiding, and has squirreled away the love interest (typical).
Taken with a tablespoon of salt, the story goes down delectably. For those wishing to wander down the path to paranoia, see
Http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NOW/index.htm. Rationalists would find the Mason history more illuminating at http://www.masonicinfo.com
