Dan Brown's latest book The Lost Symbol, is full of all sorts of references - religious, scientific, artistic, historical, architectural and on and on. If you're like me, you'll want to learn more about many of them, so I've started collecting maps, photos, videos, audio-clips, and other links to expand on some of the details in the book.

I've divided all this information up into multiple pages, organized chapter by chapter - you should read the chapter in the book first and then delve deeper into the items I present for that chapter -- in many cases you won't want to even see the titles of the links. You might want to skip some altogether, or dig even deeper into others...

Before you even start the book, though, there are some overall items you'll want to learn a bit (or a lot) about:

Washington DC

The US capital, Washington DC plays a role in The Lost Symbol. Here is some introductory information if you're not already familiar the city and its history:

• general Wikipedia entry
• Official Tourism Site of Washington, DC

The Freemasons

Even before the book came out, the Freemasons were expecting to be "the bad guys" in the novel. Here are some links to help you learn a bit about this mysterious (or not so mysterious?) brotherhood with "a system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols":

• general Freemasons Wikipedia entry
• general Wikipedia entry for Anti-Masonry
• Freemasons for Dummies blog by the author of many books, include 'Deciphering The Lost Symbol' (Nov 2009)
• The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (1734) published in the US by Benjamin Franklin in 1734 includes a history of the Masons, rules of conduct, even 5 songs to be sung at meetings! (click on the Download button towards the top left to access the 50 page PDF)
• Project Gutenberg version of The Mysteries of Free Masonry, by William Morgan

Noetic Science

• general Wikipedia Noetics entry and more specifically, the article on the Institute of Noetic Sciences
• Official Institute of Noetic Sciences home page and their online games
• Huffington Post article by Cassandra Vieten
  Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences

If you've started reading the book, the following chapter by chapter guides will help:

• Prologue and chapter 2 (no links for chapter 1)

Chapters 3, 4, and 5)

• (more links to follow over time...)

I'm not the only one putting together this sort of information - the book is so full of references! Here are few other sites collecting links:

• "The Lost Symbol" picture guide at the Things We Love to Hate blog
• Follow in Robert Langdon's Footsteps: Washington D.C. Places from The Lost Symbol