Secrets of The Lost Symbol
The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind "The Da Vinci Code" Sequel
by
Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer

CONTRIBUTORS

Amir Aczel is a mathematician and historian of science known for his fourteen non-technical books, including several New York Times and international best sellers. Among his best known works are Fermat's Last Theorem and The Jesuit and the Skull.

Karen Armstrong is a world-bestselling author who writes and comments frequently on the search for a religion adapted to modern times. Her latest book is The Case for God.

William Arntz is producer, writer, and director of the award-winning documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know." The film explores the inner-connectedness of all things, from quantum physics to New Age thinking.

Lou Aronica is a contributing editor to Secrets of the Lost Symbol. His career spans from being head of several publishing houses where he acquired notable best-sellers to writing successful fiction and nonfiction himself. His latest book is The Element (written with Sir Ken Robinson), which is a New York Times bestseller.

Diane Apostolos-Capadonna, a professor of religious art and cultural history at Georgetown University's Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, has been called the closest thing the academic world has to a real "symbologist." She is also author of the Encyclopedia of Women in Religious Art (1996) and the Dictionary of Christian Art (1994), among other works.

Michael Barkun has written widely on conspiracy theories, terrorism, and millennial and apocalyptic movements. A professor of political science at Syracuse University, he has also served as a consultant to the FBI. He is author of A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary American Society, among other works.

Paul Berger is a journalist and author who is the blogger for an a contributing editor to Secrets of the Lost Symbol. He has been a member of the "Secrets" team for four of its books and was also a contributing editor for All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make - And Spend - Their Fortunes.

Steven Bullock is a specialist in American social and cultural history. His best selling book, Revolutionary Brotherhood, is recognized as the classic work about Freemasonry and its connection to the Colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Founding Fathers. A prize-winning author, he has published Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840.

Art de Hoyos is a 33° Mason, holder of the Grand Cross of the Court of Honor in the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Masonry (based at the House of the Temple in Washington, DC), and the leading historian of the Masonic Movement in the U.S. Arturo de Hoyos is Grand Archivist and Grand Historian of The Supreme Council, 33° (Mother Council of the World. He is the author of The Scottish Rite Ritual Monitor and Guide, and Is It True What They Say About Freemasonry?

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, zoologist, Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biologist and theorist and a popular science author. He is also a prominent and uncompromising critic of religion, creationism and a wide variety of pseudoscience. His current book is The Greatest Show on Earth.

Hannah de Keijzer is a writer, researcher, dancer, paper artist, and massage therapist living in Philadelphia. While at Swarthmore College she pursued her interests in cognitive science and religion. Hannah is also a published poet.

Elonka Dunin is an expert on the CIA's Kryptos sculpture and author of The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. She led the team that cracked the ciphers on The Cyrillic Projector, and maintains popular cryptography-related websites at elonka.com. She is a game developer at Simutronics (play.net), working on the massively multiplayer games and is co-founder and chairperson of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games Group.

Heather Ewing is a former curator and architectural historian at the Smithsonian Institution, and the author of the life of its namesake, The Lost World of James Smithson.

Jack Fruchtman, professor of political science at Towson University, is the author of Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and his Visionary Friends, which traces the extraordinary influence Enlightenment thinking in all areas - science, politics, and the mystery traditions - had on Franklin and the other Founding Fathers.

Warren Getler is an investigative journalist, former financial reporter, and author of Rebel Gold. He specializes in the 'unseen' episodes of American history - including the conspiracy movements surrounding the Masons.

Deirdre Good is a professor of the New Testament at the General Theological Seminary in New York. She reads Greek, Coptic, Latin, Hebrew, and some Aramaic and has a special interest in Greek translations of ancient Hebrew texts.

Ron Hogan is the founding curator of Beatrice.com, one of the Internet's first literary web sites, and the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane: American Films of the 1970s. The ideas in his article in Secrets of the Lost Symbol were first developed in posts to the publishing industry news blog GalleyCat.

Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation. A widely known voice for esoteric and occult ideas, Horowitz has written for U.S. News and World Report, Parabola, the Religion News Service, and the popular weblog BoingBoing.

Eamon Javers is a White House correspondent for Politico. Earlier in his career he was a Washington correspondent for Business Week and an on-air reporter for CNBC.

George Johnson is winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award and writes about science for The New York Times and other publications. In addition to several books on science (including Miss Leavitt's Stars) he has also written Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics.

Irwin Kula is author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, which won a number of awards. Life Rabbi Kula has inspired millions by using Jewish wisdom to speak to all aspects of modern life. Newsweek ranked him in the Top 10 of its "Top 50 Rabbis in America" for his ability to convey Jewish wisdom to modern life. Kula is president of Clal, a leadership-training institute, think tank, and resource center in New York City.

Mark Koltko-Rivera is a scholar of humanistic psychology - the area of the field that is most receptive to the noetic science that Dan Brown depicts in The Lost Symbol. His articles on psychological worldviews and the psychology of self-transcendence have won a number of awards. He is a 32nd degree Mason and has also entered the Masonic version of the Knights Templar. He is author of Discovering The Lost Symbol: Magic, Masons, Noetic Science, and the Idea That We Can Become Gods.

Thomas Levenson is Director of the Graduate Program Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. He is a winner of the Peabody Award and his articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, The Sciences. Levensons's book Origins won the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins. Other books include Newton and the Counterfeiter and Einstein in Berlin.

Lynne McTaggart is an award-winning journalist and author of five books, including the best-sellers The Intention Experiment and The Field. She is also the architect of the Intention Experiment, a web-based "global laboratory" that tests the power of group intention to change the world.

David Plotz is Slate's online magazine's editor. Plotz has written for The New York Times Magazine and other leading publications and an author whose latest book is: Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. He has won the National Press Club's Hume Award for Political Reporting, the Online Journalism Award, and the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Writing. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a three-time Online Journalism Award finalist.

Ingrid Rowland is a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, based in Rome. An expert on the history of ideas, she is author, among other books, of From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance.

Jim Sanborn is the Washington, D.C.-based sculptor behind Kryptos. He has created artwork for locations such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Central Intelligence Agency, and major US museums. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history and sociology from Randolph-Macon College, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute in 1971. He is noted for his science-based installations that illuminate hidden forces.

Marilyn Mandala Schlitz serves as the CEO and President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and has pioneered clinical and field-based research in the area of human consciousness, transformation, and healing. Her books include Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life and Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind Body Medicine. She is also Senior Scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center.

Jeff Sharlet is a Pulitzer-prize winning writer and investigative journalist who stirred up the Washington DC establishment with his book, The Family, about an "invisible" network of politically ambitious fundamentalists who, among other activities, organize prayer meetings for members of Congress.

Dave Shugarts, a special contributing editor to Secrets of the Lost Symbol, is an investigative reporter and core member of the "Secrets" team. He is also author of Secrets of the Widow's Son. Written in 2005 in anticipation of what might be in the next Dan Brown novel, the book has been widely recognized for its remarkable accurate predictions.

Mark Tabbart is director of collections at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. A leading Masonic historian and former curator at the movement's National Heritage Museum, he wrote the definitive American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. A highly visible teacher, NASA consultant, and media expert, he served as host for NOVA's Origins and NOVA ScienceNow mini-series. Tyson's professional research interests are broad, but include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. President George W. Bush appointed him to two commissions: one on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry (2001) and the other on the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy (2004). Tyson's latest books are Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, which was a New York Times bestseller, and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet.

James Wasserman is a lifelong student of religion and spiritual development. In 1976, he joined Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), having explored Aleister Crowley's system of Scientific Illuminism. He has played a key role in numerous seminal publications of the Crowley corpus, and is responsible for creating the benchmark edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Other books include The Secrets of Masonic Washington and The Mystery Traditions: Secret Symbols and Sacred Art.