(CCO licence by pixabay.com, author ArtsyBee)
The fictional person Professor Robert Langdon, created by best-selling author Dan Brown, has fast becoming famous like other great characters of crime literature. Although he seems to be a category of his own he is deeply involved into crime solving like the amateur detective Miss Marple by Agatha Christie. Maybe Langdon can be viewed as some kind of crossbreed between Miss Marple and the adventurous chracter of Indiana Jones, created by George Lucas.
Langdon is created to be a Professor at the private research Universitas Havardiana (Harvard University) where no such field explicitly exists in reality. But of course there are related fields of studies like semiotics, semantics, iconology which cover an intersection between studies of Divinity and Humanity.
Dan Brown seem to suggest that such intersection would be a field of great interest, when at least his character Prof. Langdon is well-known to an interested public in his books. This specific setting crossing humanity and divinity is best suited for his thrillers since striving men have created so many wars and nearly unthinkable horrors in the pursuit of their longing to be more than mere mortal humans. Some say since the creation of life is the domain of women, men tend to choose the destruction of life for theirs.
But the truth path for human has to lie somewhere in the middle, since no human really creates life and no-one is really able to destroy life itself. And there is some kind of longing for an order and culture for and by humans in respect of life and getting better in using the span of life we are capable of more wisely, happy and for the benefit of all.
As we see the understanding of terms like "the benefit of all" could mean or how they could be applied to real societies create part of the struggles we face in designing our collective systems and frameworks. Therefore the reduction of these struggles into positions of good and evil and their representation in counterparts is one way great stories have been created. But they lack the connection to true everyday life and stay in the realm of myth and fairy tale.
Dan Brown is creating stories which are more complex. He does not only tell the old story of good and evil, but he also tells a story of striving for understanding and civilization which is a path of cultivation. At the same time he gives us insights in tradition of wisdom, science and technology which often appear to open up possibilities hard to handle for the individuals who explored them and hard to digest and integrate by common minds.
To protect uninformed and unprepared minds to deal with such knowledge or in lack of a specific language for such knowledge, struggles or experiences mankind chose to create not only a system of symbols for day to day proceeding and usage open to all but sacred, hidden or encrypted information, instruction and reports only for the initiated knowing the necessary context and who are capable of exercising the necessary care and protection.
The symbologist Robert Langdon is therefore more a historian, deciphering accessible symbols of influential historically created meaning. He functions as a bridge between the modern mind and old realization which have been lost to society due to the small group of individuals who dealt with them in the past.
Since Dan Brown has created Robert Langdon's special knowledge as key to solving modern manifestations of evil, he might suggest that we should not abandon old wisdom and their systems of instruction as we as society too often do, but to spend more time of learning about and how to use them. At least this is what he achieved with his thrillers.
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