Afternoon Tea With Professor Langdon

I think perhaps I may have discovered something the other day.

Nothing of any value, and of no academic significance whatsoever.

I believe I must share some of my interests with the author Dan Brown, and I think the other day I may have stumbled upon the reason why his hero in The Da Vinci Code is called Langton.

I may of course be wrong, but as a writer myself, clearly of a different level of success as Dan Brown, I can't help but think I may have some access to the way in which a writer's imagination may work, when it comes to the choice of important things like names.

What's in a name? And the answer of course is absolutely nothing, except that in fiction, a character's name must just feel right.

Just think for a moment about anything you may have read recently, and the chances are that the names of the characters in any story just feel right for that character.

And so my discovery may simply illuminate the fact that I have been treading a similar pathway in my researches.

I have recently been reading a little known book by an author that sadly died over the last few years.

Aged 95, he certainly deserved to have more success from his writing than appears to be the case.

He was by training a psychologist, a profession which he left quite consciously, even though it may well have provided a more lucrative career than the one that he followed.

The book that I was reading is entitled Cities Of Dreams, and it is a fascinating work which I suspect might have been read by Dan Brown at some point, since it would have provided some very useful research for his genre of fiction.

In simple terms, it is a book that explores the ways in which so much of the knowledge that we accept as Orthodoxy may well have been quite mistakenly be deemed so, and he puts forward some rather interesting ideas that encourage us to rethink so many of the things that we take far granted.

Published originally in 1989, one of the most controversial ideas that he explores is that we have been quite significantly affected by the way in which Neanderthal culture, quite different to the culture of Cro-Magnon man, provided a startlingly different perception of the world.

Principle to this is the idea that they were far more interested in the Moon as a sacred symbol than Cro-Magnon man.

In some respects, this chimes quite neatly with the title of the book purported to have been written by Professor Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, The Sacred Feminine.

Just as a for instance, it is well known that the 28 day cycle of the Moon from new moon to full moon is exactly in general terms the length of the menstrual cycle for the majority of women.

The author of the book, Stan Gooch, provides some compelling evidence for his theories, and most recently, in chapter 6, he has mentioned a rather interesting book title, The Myths Of All Races. By S.R. Langdon.

I can't help but feel that this particular author may have been used as the namesake of the Professor of Symbology in Dan Brown's books, it almost seems too good not to be true.

The kind of material this book contains seems to be just the kind of research that Prof Langdon himself might have undertaken, and where it has been quoted in Cities Of Dreams, it would be quite believable for the author of this work of anthropology, to be the same character as figures in several of Dan Brown's output.

Stan Gooch has written a fascinating book, which challenges so many of the things that we absolutely accept as the basis for our common cultural heritage as human beings.

It is from this book that I have begun to suspect that I myself may indeed exhibit some of the traits that may demonstrate the truth of the idea that we do indeed share genetic material with this subspecies of Homo Sapiens.

I was quite surprised recently to hear in an episode of QI on BBC one, that it is generally accepted these days that we do indeed share some of our genetic makeup with Neanderthal genes. Just a few years ago, I seem to recall that this was not accepted, something which Stan Gooch proposed way back in 1989.

The Internet provides some very interesting reading about the life of Stan Gooch, and he certainly seems to have had a significant following of people concerned for his welfare, especially in his later years.

It seems he never made much money from his somewhat unorthodox views as to the origins of mankind, and the role we may have played in the destruction of the culture of a subspecies of humanity that we may well have considered subordinate in intelligence to ourselves.

But the title of his book, Cities Of Dreams, says a great deal about the nature of his views, he proposed that rather than a material culture such as the one we have created, Neanderthal culture existed in the realm of thought and ritual, nevertheless rich albeit vastly different from that which we accept as the norm.

I will continue to read my copy of Cities Of Dreams, hoping to discover more of what Dan Brown has so carefully crafted into something spectacularly unorthodox and yet compelling. Much of which may contain grains of truth.

Although I suspect that not so many of the injected conspiracy theories that powerfully provide plots for the books and the resulting movies, as an insight into the subtleties of what makes us human. And how we have seen ourselves over the course of thousands of years of history and pre-history.