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From The Gulliver Code

If you're a fan or even a critic of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, you'll be interested to know that the book has some fascinating correlations with Gulliver's Travels and Jonathan Swift's other writings.

While The Da Vinci Code has fictional characters, Gulliver's Travels is about REAL people.

Many events and characters in The Da Vinci Code directly relate to Swift's life and work:

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Page references from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003 (First edition, April 2003)

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98. "The mystical teachings of the Kabbala drew heavily on anagrams." The Romans referred to anagrams as ars magna - the great art. French Kings had their own royal anagrammatists.
-- Most of the names in Gulliver's Travels are encoded anagrams.

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113. The Priory of Sion - Sir Isaac Newton is portrayed as a Grand Master of the Priory.
-- Swift's great friend Dr. John Arbuthnot, memoralized in the Travels as the head Houyhnhmn, was a prominent Fellow of the Royal Society, whose president was Newton. The Royal Society is heavily satirized in Gulliver, Part III, and Newton appears in anagram. Arbuthnot was also an early leader of the English Freemasons, and Swift and Pope were members of a London lodge.

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245. The significance of the Letter M
-- In Swift's Academy of Lagado, "they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Thus N, shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; L, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party".

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283. The Château Villette, home of Sir Leigh Teabling

-- This chateau outside Paris was at one time the residence of the family of French naval commander the Marquis de Villette-Mursay. His widow Marie Claire Deschamps de Marcilly was the second wife of Swift's good friend Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, Queen Anne's prime minister, featured in Gulliver's Travels as the King of Brobdingnag. Marie Claire de Villette was close to the French throne. In fact, she was a favourite niece of the de facto Queen of France. Her aunt was the Marquise de Maintenon, who was secretly married to King Louis XIV, as his second wife. While serving as royal consort, Mme. de Maintenon was never recognized as Queen. Nevertheless she served as gatekeeper to King Louis. Even Catherine the Great of Russia was unable to get an interview with Louis XIV without Mme. de Maintenon's blessing. Lord Bolingbroke married the Marquise de Villette in 1720 and lived with her in exile. Lady Bolingbroke's English was not good, and she told Swift she would have to wait for the translation of Gulliver's Travels in order to read it. When it came out in French, she was delighted, and wrote Swift that Gulliver was very well received in France.

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318-319. Sir Leigh Teabing uses a variation of the Hebrew Atbash Cypher to crack Saunière's clue, "A headstone praised by Templars is the key."

Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher: ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

When the name of the idol "Baphomet" is applied to this code, it generates the Greek word Sophia that is translated in English as "Wisdom."

-- Gulliver's word machine uses a simplified 20-letter alphabet:
Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher: ABCDEFGHILMNOPRSTUXY
where "J" is "I", "K" is "C", "Q" is "C", "V" is "U", "W" is "UU", "Z" is "S"

When the name "Relplum Scalcath" - a "freak of nature" - is applied to this code, it generates the name "Sir Isaac Newton."

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Other Interesting Correlations:

1) The Knights of the Templar play a key role in the novel. Swift was descended from templars, being probably the illegitimate son of diplomat Sir William Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. The Temple family had its origins in a Knight Templar in Leicester, England in the 1100s, near the date of the founding of the order. Swift's autobiographical poem, The Yahoo's Overthrow, contains the cryptic lines,

That he came from the Temple, his morals do show,

But where his great law is, few mortals yet know.

Swift was certainly aware of the Templar origins of the Masonic Order, and was himself a Freemason, along with John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope.

2) The Da Vinci Code's Sophie Neveu is a cryptographer, trained at Royal Holloway, which offers a course in the history of cryptography.

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Errors of Fact/Contention:

Swift's friend Alexander Pope is portrayed as giving the eulogy at Isaac Newton's funeral in Westminster Abbey. This is not true. Newton was an Arian and refused the last rites, so he never had a proper funeral. Also, Pope was a Roman Catholic.

But Pope had a great deal to do with the creation and construction of Newton's massive monument, as well as Shakespeare's memorial, both of which contain cryptic, some say masonic, coded messages.

Most historians have concluded that the Priory of Sion is an elaborate hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, a pretender to the French throne. But some suggest that the Priory are behind this, and have invented the hoax story to put people off the scent. We may never know for certain.

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