‘Errors and omissions’

    
The 2009 Annual Report of the Masonic Service Association of North America has just(!) been released. In it is a four-page accounting of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, offering different aspects of the novel – the author’s comments, factual inaccuracies in the book, and even Brown’s letter to the Mother Supreme Council.

Addressing the errors found in The Lost Symbol, the MSANA report cites and reprints an excerpt from the November-December 2009 issue of Scottish Rite Journal. That’s all well and good, but The Masonic Society, supposedly acting in conjunction with the MSANA and the George Washington Masonic Memorial, exerted not insignificant effort to launch a website that gently corrected the book’s various factual inaccuracies and examples of literary license that misrepresented things Masonic.

If you look to the left of your screen, you will see beneath the Previous Posts index the rectangular red button linking The Magpie Mason to this informational website. Go ahead and click on it, because it is still active eight months after the novel’s release, and in fact was updated only three days ago to reflect information about the upcoming paperback release and other timely information.

How did this happen? For starters, poor Chris Hodapp had to read that crappy book on the day of its release. Then, armed with knowledge of what it contains, he was able to author the webpage... that still gets hundreds of hits per day.

The site also features links to all the grand lodges, you know, in case any curious man wanted to contact the fraternity and inquire into membership? It also has a recommended reading list. It is an impressive resource, especially when you consider that no one else in Masonry bothered to create anything that might help the fraternity appear to be relevant during the explosion of mass popularity surrounding this novel.

But apparently it did not merit mention in the MSANA’s report. Thanks guys.