Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons

Dan Brown’s most recent success, The Da Vinci Code, has garnered widespread attention. Before Brown’s better known book found success, another novel of his, Angels and Demons, laid out the pattern of things to come. Both stories follow the exploits of the character Robert Langdon, who is a Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University. While the Da Vinci Code has Langdon solving the murder of a curator at the Louvre, it quickly turns into a mystery full of cryptic messages hidden in da Vinci’s works. In Angels and Demons Langdon has to stop the Illuminati from destroying the Vatican with a powerful antimatter explosive. Both books are obviously fictional works, but the fascination for organizations like the Illuminati, Masons, and the Knights Templar is widespread.

It’s important to realise when sitting down to watch Dan Burstein’s Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons that we’re talking about a fictional book here. Talking about factual history versus something that an author wrote to help further an interesting story is a little senseless, but if you take it with a grain of salt the documentary is interesting. If you haven’t read Brown’s book, then chances are good that you will be lost, because much of the material here references events and ideas that Brown crafted. In Angels and Demons, Brown offers up the idea that Baroque Bernini and Galileo conspired together to create the Illuminati. This notion gets picked apart by various “experts”, but it all comes off as kind of corny because it’s not as if Brown wrote a history novel claiming all of these events to be truth, but I digress. In this section of the documentary, the information is interesting, and it really fleshes out some of the concepts that Brown created. While much of what is discussed seems to be done so in an attempt to discredit the novel, it is pieced together in an entertaining and informative manner. The second half of the DVD is committed to Freemasonry and freely talks about stuff in reference to Brown’s novels. The focus of this section basically enters on the Illuminati again and how they could have infiltrated the Freemasons. The feature goes on to discuss about the role Masons may have had in the foundation of America, and some of the other conspiracies surrounding the organization’s history. I found it interesting how they also brought up the Vatican Bank scandal, since I have never really learnt much about that prior to. If you’ve ever had an interest in conspiracy theories or any of Brown’s stories, you can’t go wrong by checking out Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons. There may be some element of truth to the topics that are discussed here, but what is going to be believed is strictly up to the viewer.
Enjoy!

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