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Somebody out there has probably already pointed out that the publication date of The Da Vinci Code–March 18, 2003–came just two days before the American invasion of Iraq. That isn’t a conspiracy; it’s just a coincidence. But it does, as fans of The Da Vinci Code say, make you think.

Consider: Dan Brown’s novel proposed an alternative history of Christianity, wherein a bitter schism took place shortly after Jesus’ death between the mean patriarchal faction that concealed Jesus’ marriage and the nice faction of startlingly liberal first-wave feminists. In other words, The Da Vinci Code recast the history of Christianity into something that looks a lot more like the history of … Islam, wherein a bitter early schism took place between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites. Could the book’s passionate following in predominantly Christian America express a repressed longing for a sexier, darker, more exciting history–like the Muslims have? Who cares about the Diet of Worms? Wouldn’t it be cool if Jesus got his Grail on?

Probably not. But that’s the name of the game in the Browniverse: coincidences aren’t just chance, and things aren’t just things; they mean something. Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, is after all a professor of symbology (a branch of human inquiry that–it cannot be stated often enough–doesn’t exist, at Harvard or anywhere else). Beneath his learned, oddly asexual caress, objects come to life and become symbols. A V isn’t just a V–it’s a chalice, a symbol of the eternal feminine. Noise becomes signal. Chaos becomes order.

Unlike the first two Langdon novels, which dealt with the Christian church, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday; 509 pages) deals with the Freemasons (whose motto, “Ordo ab chao”–order out of chaos–could be his own). In the opening pages, Langdon is summoned–he’s always getting summoned–to Washington by a call that he thinks is from his old mentor Peter Solomon, head of the Smithsonian. Langdon believes he’s to give a speech at a fundraiser. But when he shows up, there’s no fundraiser and no speech, just Solomon’s severed hand, grotesquely tattooed, stuck on a spike in the Capitol rotunda. Oh, snap.

At this point, Brown’s signature touches are already in place. Langdon is present and accounted for: Mickey Mouse watch, check; tweed jacket, check; freakish memory, check; crippling claustrophobia, check. We’ve also been introduced to a lonely, violent fanatic with weird skin. His name is Mal’akh, not Silas, and instead of being an albino, he’s covered in tattoos–but same difference.

It’s easy to run Brown down because his writing isn’t exactly deft. The unfortunate sentence “His massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny” should itself be forcibly tattooed on Brown’s massive sex organ. His scholarship reads like the work of a man who believes Wikipedia. In particular, the book suffers from an ill-advised fling with something called noetic science, which is based on the idea that human consciousness can affect the physical world, thereby providing “the link between modern science and ancient mysticism.”

But the general feel, if not all the specifics, of Brown’s cultural history is entirely correct. He loves showing us places where our carefully tended cultural boundaries–between Christian and pagan, sacred and secular, ancient and modern–turn out to be messy. Langdon is correct in pointing out that the Capitol “was designed as a tribute to one of Rome’s most venerated mystical shrines,” the Temple of Vesta, and that it prominently features a painting of George Washington dressed as Zeus. That stuff is deeply weird and not at all trivial. Power is power, and it flows from religious vessels to political ones with disturbing ease. (“That hardly fits with the Christian underpinnings of this country,” harrumphs a bystander. Well, right.)

The plot of The Lost Symbol churns forward with a brutalist energy that makes character but a flesh appendage on its iron machine. Langdon must ransack the Capitol for his missing friend, the one who lost the hand, and for a hidden Masonic pyramid, which is the key to the mystical wisdom that will turn man into god–something Mal’akh, the tattooed nut job, has a keen interest in. Langdon is joined by Solomon’s sister, another of Brown’s interchangeable, “attractive, dark-haired” brainy-hotty heroines, who happens to be a noetic scientist.

Brown continues his zero-sexual-tension policy in The Lost Symbol. Will we never learn what symbols adorn Langdon’s sex organ? Instead, Langdon directs his energies toward decoding exotic symbological specimens with an inexhaustible sense of wonderment. (No! It can’t be! Oh, but it can, Professor Langdon.) If the book has a human heart, it’s the struggle between Langdon’s native academic skepticism and the ever mounting evidence that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in his symbology. “You, like many educated people, live trapped between worlds,” a wise priest (he’s also a Mason!) tells him. “Your heart yearns to believe … but your intellect refuses to permit it.” Langdon should get together with Agent Mulder from The X-Files.

But Brown has another agenda in The Lost Symbol, which is to place Washington among the great world capitals of gothic mystery, alongside Paris and London and Rome–or, for that matter, Baghdad. What he did for Christianity in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, he is now trying to do for America: reclaim its richness, its darkness, its weirdness. It’s probably a quixotic effort, but it’s a touchingly valiant one. We’re not just overweight tourists in T-shirts and fanny packs, he seems to be saying. Our history is as sick and strange as anybody’s! There’s signal in the noise, order in the chaos! You just need a degree from a nonexistent Harvard department to see it.

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