Isaac Newton: A Widow's Son

I have just learned of yet another “widow’s son” and he’s a biggie: Isaac Newton.

Once again, it’s a product of my looking for something else, and finding it “hidden in plain sight.”

I had been reading an article about Millennial thinking, an excellent piece that puts it very much in perspective (i.e, a long history with surprises for us moderns). The article is here.

One of the references cited is a book, the published form of a lecture given in 1973 at Balliol College (at England’s Oxford University) by historian Frank E. Manuel. It is titled The Religion of Isaac Newton. It’s a hard book to obtain, but I got a copy through a university library.

Early on, Manuel mentions that Newton was what he termed a “posthumus” since his father had died about two months before he was born. According to Manuel, being a “posthumus” in Newton’s time was believed to bestow curative powers. It was a harbinger of good fortune.

Also, it turns out that Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 by the calendar of England at that time, the Julian calendar. A child born on Christmas was destined for greatness. This is another case where history gets revised and the evidence is left “hidden in plain sight,” because in some biographies they adjust it to January 4, 1643 to align with the Gregorian calendar. So, if you Google too quickly, you may overlook his Christmas birthday.

Manuel goes on to assert that a posthumus, or widow’s son, tends to grow up constantly searching for the father he never knew. In Newton’s case, the estranged feeling may have been exacerbated by a frosty relationship between Newton and his stepfather.

Newton may have even transferred his search for his human father, to a lifelong search for his Heavenly Father. Newton was a very devout Anglican, who hoped not only to parse out some of the greatest lines in the Book of Nature (which he did in a spectacular way), but also sought to interpret Scripture, solving such things as the true meaning of prophecies, and conforming Bible events perfectly with historical events. If you take the sum of all Newton’s works in math, optics, physics, as well as his religious works, according to Manuel, he was attempting the biggest intellectual hat-trick of all time, the perfect reconciliation of science and religion.

Manuel even hints that Newton considered himself almost divine, or at least, divinely inspired, although Newton’s brand of faith was a very repressed one, not given to such outbursts.

This explains why Newtown really did—as rumors suggest--delve into matters like alchemy, the Kabbalah, the Hermetic tradition, and so on. According to Manuel, he would study these fields, even when he did not always believe them, because he wanted to leave no stone unturned. Newton had great interest in Revelations and he developed his own theory of when the Millennium would arrive. He dearly wanted to know the exact dimensions and layout of the Temple of Solomon because he connected this to the new Jerusalem and other things mentioned in Revelations.

The full story of Isaac Newton is thus a rich tapestry, and worthy of much more study.

The Key Quest Continues

The greatest quest, of course, is to figure out what Dan Brown will make of the title, The Solomon Key. In Secrets of the Widow’s Son, I surely tried to exhaust all the possibilities of what this could mean.

But it’s like so many other things: the minute you think they’re settled, they are back in chaos. I now have a new, very plausible idea of what a “Solomon Key” might be.

It started when I went to a local book sale where most books are $1 or 50 cents. For that price, I was willing to try out a book called The Jewish Caravan, edited by L.W. Schwartz. It’s an interesting collection of Jewish writing from all ages. I opened it almost at random to read a passage written by Flavius Josephus.

I had read about Josephus, but had not read his own words. He was a native of Jerusalem who rose to prominence in the priestly class of Pharisees and was in a position of influence when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD, destroying the (second) Temple of Solomon.

I won’t go into the details, but I realized right away that there is nothing like reading Josephus himself rather than relying on second-hand accounts. So I began to Google in search of his actual works. I found some, but one Google led to another, until I got to this page:

http://www.ldolphin.org/destruct2.html

where, well down in the text, it says:

A Temple Legend

“Flavius Josephus also recorded a legend that sprung up about the Temple. While the Temple was on fire and there was tremendous looting, killing and rape many rushed to the Temple to die rather than become Roman slaves. When the flames leaped through the roof and the smoke had risen in thick columns one of the priests supposedly climbed to the top of the main tower. He had in his hand the key to the sanctuary. When he reached the top he cried out, ‘If you, Lord, no longer judge us to be worthy to administer Your house, take back the key until You deem us worthy again.’ As the legend goes, a hand appeared from heaven and took the key from the priest.”

Ohmygosh, ohmygosh!

This isn’t exactly “Solomon’s Key,” but it is a key to the inner sanctum of the Temple of Solomon, and it also represents the compact of the Jews with God. Could this be what Dan Brown was thinking of when he picked the title for his next book? Suppose, symbolically or even literally, that he is going to talk about the key to the Holy of Holies?

What you find when you get one of these revelations is, they turn your receptors on and then you begin to notice other things that you would have ignored. So, there I was, flipping cable channels a few nights later, when I stumbled across the last flickering 20 minutes of a movie called Pi. Later on, it came around again and I taped it. It is a 1998 film directed by Darren Aronofsky. It is notable for having been produced for only $60,000 and grossing $3 million at the box office.

Pi is a strange black-and-white arty film that portrays a paranoid computer geek, Max Cohen, whose homebuilt supercomputer, Euclid, is asked to investigate patterns in the irrational number pi. Pi can be calculated for thousands of digits beyond 3.14159 . . . and no one knows what will be found as larger, faster computers keep pushing the digits farther out.

The study of pi can lead to other things in math. Max gets interested in exactly the kind of thing a Da Vinci Code fan would be familiar with, such as the Golden Ratio, Phi, as well as the various geometrics of it, such as the famous spirals found in nature (e.g., a nautilus shell). Max even does some drawing that relates the spiral to the famous Vitruvian Man, as drawn by good ole’ Leonardo Da Vinci. (This is a little bogus, but just keep chanting the Dan Brown mantra: It’s A Work Of Fiction, After All.)

Well, Euclid melts down, but spits out a 216-digit sequence of numbers. Two groups dog Max, trying to tap his brain. One is a bunch of evil corporate people who see the code as a way to predict the stock market. The other is a sect of Hasidic Jews who believe the code is a sacred name of God. This comes from the fact that the Hebrew characters can also be taken as numbers, so that the Torah becomes a massive numeric code unto itself.

As the Rabbi explains when trying to get Max to give up the code, the Jews had a long tradition where, on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the high priest would enter the Holiest of Holies and intone just one word, the 216-digit code. If the priest was pure in heart and recited it correctly, he emerged. If not, he died on the spot. The Rabbi again relates the story of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, and the priest giving up the key to God as the Temple burned.

“We have been looking for that key ever since,” says the Rabbi. “It’s the key to the Messianic age. It can take us one step closer to the Garden of Eden.”

Remembering that Dan Brown has already established in Da Vinci Code the notion of a bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, personified currently by Sophie Neveu, then a key to the sacred DNA may be what is in the offing. But, ideas of that nature have been circulating for years in novels, so Dan Brown will have to tread carefully.

Or does anyone else care to give conjecture a try?

Hunt for One of These Jewels!

Along the path to a glimmer (after all, who knows when true enlightenment will really arrive?), I was introduced to some of the most complex little pieces of symbolism, personified by this image.

Actually, this is the gold/silver head of cane. I was first introduced to a real-life little fob, about 3/8 inches in diameter, made of brass and belonging to a friend. It had been handed down within his wife's family for about 100 years, but its true provenance had been lost. All that was known is that it was probably Masonic. They asked me to take a look and see what I could come up with.

Of course, it is completely Masonic and in fact, a piece of this kind is considered the "pinnacle" of Masonic jewelry. Here is a web page at one of the better Masonic websites, explaining this image and elsewhere on the page giving a diagram of a fob, very similar to the one that I looked at: Masonic Cane.

I think as a cane head, it woud be evident that it begs to be opened out. As a fob, the piece is very clever. It could seem to be a mere "charm." It looks like a tiny ornate globe and it is not evident how it opens, so that one of these could lay in a jewelbox for years and no one would know that it contains an entire little world of symbols.

As you can see, it opens to make a cross-shaped figure, and the interepretation given about the cane head is highly Christian. This illustrates a bit of a dichotomy among the Freemasons. In the Blue Lodges, no particular religion is favored and in fact, any religion is welcomed. For example, in the initiation of a Freemason, the book upon the altar can be the Bible, the Koran or the Torah, according to the initiate's religion. However, in some parts of Freemasonry, there are definite religious implications, most commonly, Christian.

I made a diagram of the fob I examined, and I will share it with a link here. Nearly half of its tiny symbols were not easily interpreted, and it differed in many respects from the fob mentioned above. So the diagram has a number of blanks. It could be a little brain-teaser to be solved by anyone interested. It's in PDF format: Masonic Ball

Anyway, if your family has one of these, treasure it, and if you see one at a yard sale, snap it up!

Why 'Shugarius'?

I think the prime directive here should be to have fun, especially since the study of history, as well as some of the other themes of Dan Brown, can get you into so many serious and moody topics. So I try not to take myself seriously, and I trust that you will help me with this. Esoterica buffs tend to become way too self-important, I think.

As a journalist, I do try to be absolutely accurate and to reveal my sources (with very rare exceptions), and I hope this comes through, even in the midst of some frivolity at times.

Anyway, one of the great fun-loving people who is linked to our work is Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminatus Chronicles and particularly, a book of that series titled "The Widow's Son." This was published originally back in 1985 and has just been re-published due to the interest that has arisen in the Illuminati (surely due to Dan Brown) and the allusions to the Widow's Son, which I weave into the title of my book.

Robert A. Wilson is a guy who knows how to have fun. He has one heck of an imagination, and he has been thumbing his nose at the establishment for many decades. In our earlier book related to Dan Brown's Angels & Demons (Secrets of Angels & Demons), we were fortunate to have an interview with Wilson titled, "I didn't go looking for the Illuminati; they came looking for me." I found this interview simply hilarious.

In the interview, Wilson tells how, back in the 1960s, there was a witch-hunt of a kind conducted by Jim Garrison, district attorney of New Orleans, who had formed an ever-broadening theory of conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison began to investigate lots of people, including some Berkeley radicals who had invented themselves as the "Bavarian Illuminati" and gave themselves fictitious titles. The idea was to "send Garrison on a snark hunt." Wilson was in the thick of it.

Wilson and his "Illuminati" friends did a great job spreading word of themselves through the "counter-culture," and soon Garrison's investigators found too many leads to pursue. The Illuminati were popping up everywhere, and seemed to be involved in a worldwide conspiracy touching everything and everyone! Wilson continued to do his research and writing in all areas of magic, occult, conspiracies, physics and a mix of almost everything else you can think of. But he specifically does not take himself too seriously and in that, he is a hero of mine.

In researching my book, I had been reading about all of the great magicians, monks, scryers, alchemists and philosophers (in other words, all the early physicians) and it occurred to me I did not yet have a dignified title--like, for instance, Johann von Trittenheim, who became known as Trithemius. I will explain why Trithemius is a hero of mine some other time. But, in honor of Trithemius and Robert A. Wilson both, please call me Shugarius. (Not yet "Doctor" Shugarius, but I have hopes--I am still working on a PhD in KnowItAllogy.)

This will be the last "No Comment Allowed" post for a while. It was just to get a few preliminaries out of the way.

Follow Me To Get Lost in Good Company

The motivation for this blog is to enhance your experience if you have bought the book, Secrets of the Widow's Son.

Or perhaps you have visited the website for the book, www.secretsofthewidowsson.com. Secrets of the Widow's Son is published by Sterling Publishing Co. I am the author.

It is here that you will be able to learn of things that could not make it into the book--and there will be a lot, I can already assure you! I am confident that I will never run out of things to learn as I continue to chase all the themes and puzzles which keep arising in my quest for knowledge.

My book is a "Prequel to the Sequel" dealing with the upcoming Dan Brown novel, said to be titled The Solomon Key. No one knows exactly when Dan Brown will release his sequel to The Da Vinci Code, but I will say my hunch, at this moment in time, is February 2006. Which gives you plenty of time to read Secrets of the Widow's Son and get ready for a great experience when Dan Brown leads you on a new adventure, this time in Washington, DC, involving the Freemasons.

Secrets of the Widow's Son is on sale now at BN.com as well as the Barnes & Noble or B. Dalton bookstores, not to mention Amazon.com and many other retail sources.

Before I actually post anything newsworthy (assuming I will), I really must thank all the people who made the book possible, including my associates Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer, plus their families, as well as my own family (who have learned to put up with an awful lot). The many people at Sterling Books who helped were just outstanding, and treated me with great kindness and respect.

Two days ago, I was honored to be part of a book signing at the fabulous hall that is set aside for this purpose on the third floor of the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. The very attentive crowd filled the room and gave us a warm reception as Dan and I related some of the ideas behind SOWS (as I will necessarily have to abbreviate the book).

It was a stellar evening for me and my family. We were given a grand ride down and back in a Lincoln. The display of SOWS was right by the front entrance, and I saw my name up in broadbills, alongside the likes of Gloria Estefan or Barbara Ehrenreich, to name just a couple of authors with books out around now. Later on, we went to dinner at a restaurant nearby, and at the booth next to our raucous table were a demure party including Lauren Bacall and Arthur Schlesinger. What a thrill!

But enough small talk, shameless name-dropping, etc. My next post will get down to business, I promise.