professor matpat oh it's too horrific to look at oh you're right it's horrific to behold who tattoos themselves using a rune and a lotus i mean one is nordic the other is hindu clearly they're mixing their symbology don't you think you're missing something ah well spotted my boy i'd completely overlooked that ankh which is egyptian ah the misunderstanding of these cultural symbols is disgusting it's a severed hand oh huh so it is which explains the two crossed swords on the thumb symbolizing that whoever our killer is he means violence gee you think hello internet welcome
to film theory the show that uses tv shows to uncover the hidden lore of real life today's episode is sponsored by peacock in their new streaming series dan brown's the lost symbol which is the latest adventure for renowned fictional puzzle solver robert langdon if you're not familiar well it probably should be considering that he is the textbook definition of a theorist his adventure in 2003's the da vinci code was the thing that made it cool to find hidden clues in historic paintings and ultimately expose ancient religious conspiracies and if none of that is ringing a
bell for you well let me rewind and start giving you some context the da vinci code was a phenomenon it was the second highest selling book the year that it came out and it was everywhere anytime you saw someone reading a book nine times out of ten it was a dan brown novel and if they weren't reading a dan brown novel well they were reading about a little orphan wizard boy the da vinci code single-handedly revitalized the historical adventure genre suddenly getting everyone looking for hidden blades and chalices around their everyday lives so as you
would expect the follow-up book in the series the lost symbol became one of the most anticipated books of all time selling a million copies in a single day which is why it's exciting to see it finally get made into a series that's out now to catch you up our protagonist is robert langdon ivy league professor of symbology not an actual department by the way when a shadowy villain tries to unlock an ancient portal lost to time within the city an ancient portal i need you to find it then unlock it he blackmails robert into solving
a series of ancient puzzles that only an expert in historical symbols can piece together basically the whole show is like an escape room on steroids where your life is literally on the line it is a fascinating premise for a thriller that has robert confronting some of history's most sinister symbols touching everything from devil worship to governmental conspiracies but the truth is that each of these symbols has a very real history and once you understand the real-life lore behind these images it becomes apparent that these sinister symbols actually hold a very different secret and once you
know what that secret is you'll never see the world around you in the same way again in dan brown's lost symbol one of the first times that we actually see our villain we learn that his body is covered in tattoos and his forehead is emblazoned with the eye of providence now you're probably more familiar with this thing as the all-seeing eye that weirdo pyramid eye on the back of a dollar bill and yeah you can immediately understand why this thing would be prompting conspiracy theories for years a government using something literally called the all-seeing eye
as its national seal that's the sort of thing that conjures up images of big brother surveillance states constantly monitoring you from its cyclopsian triangle in the sky it also doesn't help here that the latin is novus ordo seclorum translated to new order of the ages that doesn't sound ominous at all but in reality the new order was just meant to signify that the united states of america was beginning a new era having just declared its independence from great britain and from the latin on top of the seal we know that there's more to the story
anyway koitis literally translated as favored undertakings but most widely understood to imply providence has favored our undertakings that's why this symbol has become widely known as the eye of providence or sometimes the all-seeing eye of god stemming from the religious belief that their successes were the result of god's blessing it's not the government that has its eye perched on top of a pyramid looking down at everyone it's god who is up above watching down and protecting us this symbolism with the eye of providence acting as the eye of god watching over and favoring those below
can be seen in religious paintings dating all the way back to the renaissance with probably the most famous example being the 1525 pantoremo painting cena in a mouse where we see the eye in a triangle reflecting the christian belief in god as a holy trinity or god in three persons and radiating light to symbolize god's divinity other famous religious buildings use it too like the kazan cathedral in saint petersburg or the manheim jesuit church in germany of course we've got to address the elephant in the room though there's a common belief that the presence of
an all-seeing eye on the back of the us dollar and other u.s icons is indicative of freemason influence in the founding of the united states but if we look at the actual chronology of the symbol's history the evidence suggests that the opposite is actually true by all indications and records that we have from the time the all-seeing eye didn't appear as a piece of freemason iconography until 1797 which is more than 20 years after it first appeared as a us icon in 1776. it's the freemasons who adopted the symbol after it was already used by
the us so the eye of providence yeah maybe not as sinister as it first seems now creepy triangle eye is one of the easier symbols to decode because its uses are fairly recent after all the united states is less than 250 years old things get a lot trickier when you turn to more universal symbols which is where robert langdon's expertise as a symbologist really comes into play take for instance the circumpunct or circled dot another icon the villain believes to be the key to finding this sought after ancient portal as such in the show it's
yet another ominous mysterious thing but as far as symbols go it's pretty mundane it's a symbol that's appeared across many different cultures used time and time again to represent the sun an egyptian hieroglyphs it's a symbol of the sun god ra in ancient china it was used in chinese oracle script the precursor to modern chinese symbols as a symbol again for the sun sometimes symbolizing a day and in the study of alchemy it was used as the alchemical symbol for the sun corresponding to gold little did you suspect that as you are doodling in your
notebooks at school that you're actually paying honor to raw the whole time and while the parallels to the sun might be its most common usage it's not the only one for instance it's yet another important symbol for the freemasons in 1868 manual detailing practices for freemason members describe the symbol like this quote the point represents an individual brother the circle is the boundary line beyond which he is never to suffer his prejudices or passions to betray him wait so it's a symbol reminding members of the freemasons to behave themselves like don't indulge in your vices
that is not only not scary it's kind of lame maybe our lost symbol villain didn't get the memo because i definitely say that murdering and kidnapping are the sorts of things that this symbol is actively warning against gotta read your newsletters bud the fact that the circumpunkt is such a simple and universal symbol is a big part of why there are so many different meanings attached to it the more common and easy to draw a symbol is the more likely it's going to be independently created and adopted by a culture for whatever interpretation is most
useful to them that being said symbols don't have to be that simple to become widely used take for example the triskelion which the villain in dan brown's the lost symbol uses as his personal calling card often leaving it near his victims throughout the series it's actually one of the first symbols that we see in the show appearing etched on the floor of a prison cell of course he didn't come up with the design himself the use of the triskelion or tri-scales symbol dates all the way back to the bronze age it can be found on
pottery produced during the greek period of antiquity and be honest classic versions are even creepier than the one in the show because they feature three legs circulating around a central point examples of this can be found as far back as 2000 bc and on money minted around the 4th century bc interestingly the symbol doesn't seem to have a consistent or specific meaning throughout history despite all that we know about ancient greece this one is left surprisingly unclear one interpretation is that it's connected to hecate the triple goddess considering it often appears alongside other of her
symbols like three crescent moons three ears of corn three grains of corn etc over in sicily the appearance of the triskelion symbol on currency was probably due to the greek name for the island trinocria meaning having three headlands fun fact by the way a variant of the symbol also appears on the modern day flag of sicily probably the most nightmare-inducing flag you could ask for so we've just reviewed three symbols often associated with sinister connotations but in reality looking at their real histories all three have meanings that are perfectly mundane surely one of these symbols
from the series has to be frightening right well look no further than the leviathan cross a double cross set over an infinity sign this thing is everywhere on the show robert finds it on an old alchemy table it's pressed into the seal of a letter in his mentor's safe the villain has a tattoo of it on his arm in the real world it's a symbol that was used by anton levay the founder of the church of satan which at face value seems about as sinister as you can get considering that they're a religious organization who
chose their founding symbol to be the biblical figure described as the literal prince of darkness look further back though and you see it's just as mundane as the rest the church of satan didn't exist prior to 1966 and before anton levay decided to appropriate this symbol as a satanist cross it had a history dating back hundreds of years that had nothing to do with the satanist movement back in its earliest usage the leviathan cross was used in the study of alchemy aka ye oldie chemistry back in the 16th century they believed that there were three
prime elements those being salt the material body mercury corresponding to spirit or life and sulfur representing soul and the principle of combustibility the leviathan cross was used to represent sulfur which is probably why in the show robert langdon first encounters it in a piece of old alchemical equipment and that's it's basically the equivalent of the big old s representing sulfur on the periodic table so then what happened well despite it not having any satanic associations the founder of the church of satan anton levade took it and transformed it for his use when he founded the
church in 1966. some have speculated that the association with sulfur connects it to the fire and brimstone often associated with hell in the underworld or you know maybe you just thought it looked cool and in a way i think that's actually one of the most important and fascinating themes of this show which is something that we're told in the opening minutes of the series when do benign symbols become malignant everything is about the corruption of symbols robert goes on to show his university a series of examples of corrupted symbols the most famous being the swastika
what was historically a symbol of good luck used by eastern religions like hinduism buddhism and jainism became corrupted by the nazi party in fact in a bit of morbid historical irony it was actually used during world war one as a personal symbol of a jewish german fighter pilot named fritz beckhard who went on to find himself in prison decades later during the holocaust versions of the symbol were also used by the finnish air force and the latvian air force during the same time period the point is that what makes a symbol scary or evil isn't
the symbol itself but the associations that become attached to the symbol and often symbols are appropriated to mean the exact opposite of what they originally meant case in point consider the cross of saint peter in christian tradition this symbol is based on the martyr peter the apostle the story goes that when peter one of jesus's followers was sentenced to be executed by crucifixion he requested that he be executed upside down seeing himself as being unworthy of being executed in the same way as jesus but what began as a symbol based on a story about the
humility of a devout follower in more recent years has been adopted by some groups as an anti-christian symbol since the inverted cross is seen by some as being the opposite of the christian crucifix we see this all over pop culture these days with popular horror franchises just picking up that ball and running with it online this sort of thing happens all the time robert langdon even mentions it in one of the show's opening scenes what was relevant then is relevant now the difference is that now people can push symbols out to millions with the click
of a button it might seem a bit silly to compare modern internet memes to ancient symbols found in egyptian hieroglyphs or patterns carved into ancient artifacts but robert is absolutely right to make the comparison internet memes are symbols and like any other symbol their meaning is defined by the culture around them and the way that they're used among the most infamous examples of these is pepe the frog a character who originated in a 2005 webcomic you've probably seen this character's face if you've ever been on twitch where it's been featured in emotes like feels bad
man pepe hands pepe laugh among others he was funny he was sad but he was a benign webcomic and then this once innocent cartoon frog became popular with online hate groups to the point that in 2016 the anti-defamation league classified pepe the frog as a hate symbol stating quote while the majority of uses of pepe the frog have been and continue to be non-bigoted there is nonetheless a subset of pepe memes centered on racist anti-semitic and other bigoted themes it actually led to the original comics creator matt furry to launch a hashtag save pepe campaign
to fight back against hate groups and reclaim the symbol which became the subject of a 2020 documentary titled feels good man while this might seem like a new phenomenon it's really just an accelerated version of an old phenomenon that different groups always try to claim symbols as their own and thereby change their meaning the only difference is that culture now evolves at such an absurdly fast pace due to the internet ancient symbols are really the memes of the past but it's important to remember that symbols ultimately have no power of their own they only have
whatever meaning we as people choose to associate with them and this is what we see in dan brown's the lost symbol when robert langdon finds a severed hand with weird symbols tattooed onto each of his fingers it's not the symbols that are scary it's the fact that it's on a severed hand left by the kind of person who isn't above the idea of mutilating and kidnapping victims likewise that tri-stallion by itself isn't scary it's the dead body next to it that you have to be worried about symbols are at their most powerful when you don't
understand them when you're scared of them when they carry some sort of mysterious meaning but by looking into their history and understanding their origin you defuse them of their power and you're finally able to see them for what they truly are probably some basic doodles that you accidentally made in your sketchbook back when you're in elementary school but hey that's just a theory a film theory and thank you once again to peacock in their new series dan brown's the lost symbol for sponsoring this episode for more symbols and more historical mysteries make sure you go
check out the show right now over on peacock it is streaming as we speak you are a connoisseur of good quality entertainment i guarantee for you it is good quality entertainment so go check it out right now peacock streaming for free
