Chapter 22 Chapter Twenty

Langdon and Sophie emerged from the shadows and tiptoed down the empty Grand Art Gallery to the emergency stairway. Langdon felt as though he was playing a mind game as he walked.The problem at hand is difficult: the Attorney General wants to charge me with murder. Langdon asked Sophie in a low voice, "Do you think the message on the ground was left by Fache?" Sophie said without looking back, "Impossible." Langdon was less sure than she was, adding, "It looks like he's intent on putting the blame on me. Perhaps he thought writing my name on the ground would help his case?"

"What about the Fibonacci sequence? And PS? And the symbolism of Da Vinci and the Goddess? That must have been left by my grandfather." Langdon knew she was right.The pentacle, the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci, the Goddess, and the Fibonacci sequence - the symbolism of these threads fit together perfectly.Iconologists would call this a coherent symbolic system.Everything fits together seamlessly. Sophie added: "My grandfather called me this afternoon. He said he had something important to tell me. I'm sure he left these messages in the Louvre when he died so that I could know something important. .He thinks you can help me figure out these important things."

Langdon frowned.O cruel devil!O lame saint!He wished, for Sophie's sake and his own, that he could decipher the meaning of the code.No doubt things had gone from bad to worse from the time he first saw the code.Fache would have made a worse impression that he had "fake jumped" out of the bathroom window.Perhaps, however, the chief of the French police department can get a taste of the humor of chasing and arresting a bar of soap. "We're not far from the landing," said Sophie. "Is the number in the cipher the key to deciphering the other lines of information? Is it possible?" Langdon had studied a series of Bacon's manuscripts, and some ciphers recorded there provided clues to deciphering other ciphers.

"I've been thinking about these numbers all night. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, nothing meaningful. From a purely mathematical point of view, they're in a random order. It's a bunch of gibberish. " "But they're part of the Fibonacci sequence. That wouldn't be a coincidence." "Of course not. Grandpa was going to use the Fibonacci sequence to give us hints—just as he wrote messages in English, imitating his The picture in the favorite artwork is the same as posing in the shape of a pentagram. It's just to get our attention."

"Do you know the meaning of the five-pointed star shape?" "Yes. I haven't had time to tell you that when I was a child, the pentacle had a special meaning between me and my grandfather. In the past, we used to play tarot cards, and my main cards were all pentagrams. I know that's because Grandpa cheated when he shuffle the cards, but the pentacle became a little joke between us." Langdon shivered.They play tarot?Pagan symbolism is implied in this medieval Italian deck of cards, and Langdon devotes an entire chapter to the tarot in his new manuscript.The Tarot deck consists of 22 cards, including "Pope", "Queen", "Star" and so on.Tarot cards were originally used to convey thoughts banned by the church, and now fortune-tellers have followed the mysterious qualities of Tarot cards.The tarot cards used the suit of the pentacle to symbolize the goddess, Langdon thought. If Saunière cheated on the deck to amuse his granddaughter, the pentagram would be a perfect choice.

They came to the emergency stairway, and Sophie opened the door cautiously.There were no sirens, only the door leading to the outside of the Louvre was connected to the siren net.Sophie led Langdon down the zigzag staircase to the first floor.They quickened their pace. Langdon asked, hurrying to keep up with Sophie, "When your grandfather talked about the pentagram, did he mention goddess worship or resentment against the Catholic Church?" Sophie shook her head. "I tend to analyze it more from a mathematical point of view—golden section, PHI, Fibonacci numbers and things like that."

Langdon was amazed. "Did your grandfather teach you about PHI?" "Of course, the golden ratio," she said a little shyly. "Actually, he joked that half of me fit the golden ratio...that's because of the way I spell my name." Langdon thought for a moment, then muttered, "so-PHI-e." Langdon thought about PHI again as he went downstairs.He began to realize that the trail Saunière left behind was more holistic than he had imagined. Leonardo da Vinci...the Fibonacci sequence...the pentacle. Incredibly, it's all tied together by an art-historical concept that Langdon often spends hours in lectures explaining this very basic concept. PHI

He suddenly had an illusion, as if he had returned to Harvard again, standing on the podium in the classroom to explain "symbols in art", and wrote his favorite number on the blackboard: 1.618. Langdon turned to the many eager students in the audience and asked, "Who can tell me what number this is?" A big math student in the back raised his hand: "That's PHI." He pronounced it "fei." "Well said, Stiller," Langdon said. "Everyone knows about PHI." Stiller added with a laugh: "Don't confuse it with PI (π). We math people like to say: PHI has one more H, but it's much better than PI!"

Langdon laughed, but the others were puzzled. Stiller sat down with a "boom". Langdon continued: "PHI, 1.618 has an extremely important place in art. Can anyone tell me why?" "Because it's so beautiful?" Stiller tried to save face. Everyone burst into laughter. Langdon said, "Actually, Stiller was right again. PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the world." The laughter stopped abruptly.Stiller was smug. Langdon put up pictures on the slide projector and explained that PHI originated from the Fibonacci sequence—this sequence is very famous not only because the sum of two adjacent items in the sequence is equal to the next item, but also because adjacent The quotient obtained by dividing the two items is approximately equal to 1.618, which is PHI.

Langdon went on to explain that from a mathematical point of view, the origin of PHI is quite mysterious, but what is even more puzzling is that it also plays an extremely important role in the constitution of nature.Plants, animals, and even humans have traits that are strikingly similar to this ratio. Langdon turned off the lights in the classroom and said, "It is obviously no coincidence that PHI is ubiquitous in nature, so the ancestors estimated that PHI was predetermined by the Creator. Early scientists called 1.618 the golden section." "Wait a minute," said a girl sitting in the front row, "I'm a biology student, and I've never seen the golden ratio in nature."

"No?" Langdon grinned. "Ever studied drones and females in a hive?" "Of course. There are always more females than drones." "Right. Did you know that if you counted the males and the females separately in any hive in the world, you'd get an identical ratio." "Really?" "Yes, it's PHI." The girl was dumbfounded. "This is impossible." "Possibly!" Langdon retorted.He smiled and released a slideshow of spiral shells. "Do you know this?" "Nautilus," the student replied. "A mollusk that regulates its buoyancy by sucking air into its shell." "Exactly. Can you guess the ratio of the diameter of each rib on its body to the diameter of the adjacent rib?" The girl looked at the concentric arcs on the spiral nautilus, but couldn't give a definite answer.Langdon nodded and said, "PHI. The golden ratio. 1.618." The girl showed a surprised expression. Langdon moved on to the next slide—a close-up of a sunflower. "The sunflower seeds are arranged in opposite arcs on the disk. Can you guess the ratio of the diameters between two adjacent circles?" "PHI?" someone said. "Guess right." Langdon began to quickly play the slideshow—the spiraling pine cone, the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, the divisions on an insect—all of which seemed to fit the golden ratio perfectly. "It's incredible!" someone exclaimed. "Yes, but what does that have to do with art?" said another. "Ah! Good question," Langdon said, showing another slideshow—Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting of a male nude, "The Vitruvian Man."The painting was drawn on a piece of parchment, which was slightly yellowed.The name of the painting is based on the name of the outstanding Roman architect Mark Vitruvius, who praised the golden section in his book "Architecture". "No one understood the delicate structure of the human body better than Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, da Vinci exhumed human corpses to measure the exact proportions of the human bone structure, and he declared that the proportions of the human body's structure conformed to the golden ratio First person." Everyone present cast suspicious glances at Langdon. "Don't believe me?" Langdon said. "The next time you shower, take a tape measure." Several of the soccer students snickered. "It's not just you guys who are starting to sit still," Langdon suggested. "All of you, boys and girls, try it. Measure your height and divide it by the distance from your navel to the ground. Guess what it is." "It can't be PHI!" a sports student said in a skeptical tone. "It's PHI," Langdon replied. "Exactly 1.618. Want to see another example? Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips and divide that by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips to get the PHI again. Divide the distance from your hips to the ground by your knees to You can get PHI from the distance on the ground. Look at the joints of fingers, toes, and spine, and you can get PHI from them. Friends, each of us is a creature that cannot do without the golden section.” Although the classroom The lights were off, but Langdon could tell everyone was in shock.A warm current came to his heart, which is why he loves teaching. "Friends, as you can see, the complex nature hides rules. When the ancients discovered PHI, they were sure that they had stumbled upon the proportions of God's creation, and because of this, they were full of admiration for nature. God's masterpieces can be found in the natural world, and until today there is a pagan organization - Mother Earth. Many of us also praise nature like pagans, but we don't realize it. For example, we A good example is the celebration of May Day. May Day is a celebration of spring, through which people celebrate the recovery of the earth and the gift of humanity. From the beginning, the mystical qualities of the golden ratio have been established. People can only Acting according to the rules of nature, and art is an attempt by people to imitate the beauty of the Creator's creation, so this term we will see many examples of the golden section in art works." For the next half hour, Langdon showed the students slideshows of works by Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, and many other artists who designed and created their Always consciously and strictly follow the golden ratio.Langdon reveals the golden ratio used in the architectural design of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, and even the United Nations building in New York, and points out that PHI has also been used in Mozart's sonatas, Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" and Baba. In the creation of musicians such as Tork, Debussy and Schubert.Langdon also tells us that even Stradivari used the golden section to determine the exact location of the f-shaped hole when building his famous violin. Langdon walked to the blackboard and said, "Let's get back to symbols." He drew a five-pointed star made of five straight lines on the blackboard. "This is the most symbolic figure you will study this semester. The pentagram - the ancients called it the pentagram - is considered sacred and magical in many cultures. Can anyone tell me why? " Stiller—the math major—raised his hand again. "Because if you draw a five-pointed star, then those few line segments will automatically cut themselves into several segments according to the ratio of the golden section." Langdon nodded at the lad, proud of him. "Good answer. The ratio of the line segments in the pentagram all conform to the golden ratio, which makes it the prime representative of the golden section. It is for this reason that the pentacle has always been used as a symbol of beauty and perfection, and is associated with the goddess and The divine femininity connects." The girls in the class are all smiling. "Attention everyone, we've only touched a little bit about Leonardo da Vinci today, and we'll have more to say about him during the semester. Leonardo did worship the goddess in an ancient way. Tomorrow, I will tell you about his fresco, The Last Supper, which will be the most astonishing masterpiece you will ever see dedicated to the Divine Feminine." "Are you kidding me?" someone said, "I think The Last Supper is about Jesus!" Langdon winked and said, "There are some symbols hidden in places you would never expect." "Come on," Sophie whispered. "What's wrong? We're almost there. Hurry up!" Langdon looked up, returning to reality from that distant imagination. He stopped on the stairs, motionless, suddenly aware. "Ah, cruel devil!" "O lame saint"! Sophie looked back at Langdon. It couldn't be that simple, Langdon thought. But he sure should be like that. Standing in the Louvre, recalling the pictures about PHI and Da Vinci repeatedly, Langdon suddenly and unexpectedly cracked Saunière's code. "O cruel devil!" he murmured, "oh lame saint! Here is the simplest code!" Sophie stopped in her tracks and looked at Langdon puzzled. password?She had spent the night thinking about the writing on the floor and hadn't found any codes, let alone simple ones. "You said it yourself." Langdon's voice trembled with excitement. "The terms of the Fibonacci sequence only make sense if they are in order." Sophie didn't understand.Fibonacci sequence?She was sure that her grandfather had written this sequence only to allow the code-breaking department to participate in tonight's detection work, and had no other intentions.Does grandfather have other intentions?She reached into her pocket and took out the printout of the message left by her grandfather, and looked at it again: 13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5 O cruel devil! O lame saint! What happened to these numbers? "This scrambled Fibonacci sequence is a clue," Langdon said, taking the typescript. "These numbers are clues to decipher other messages. He scrambled the sequence of numbers in order to allow us to use the same method to decipher the text part of the message. The text in the message is just some letters whose order has been scrambled." Sophie understood Langdon's meaning immediately, because the explanation was ridiculously simple. "You think the message is...an anagram?" she said, staring at Langdon. "Like the regramming word puzzles in newspapers?" Langdon could read Sophie's suspicion in her expression, but he could totally understand it.Few people know about anagrams—a well-worn modern game with a history tied to a sacred system of symbols.The mystical keystone of Jewish occultism has a lot to do with anagrams—reordering the letters in Hebrew words to derive new meanings.The kings of Renaissance France were so convinced of the magical powers of anagrams that they appointed royal anagrammers to analyze words in important documents to make better decisions.In fact, the Romans' work on anagrams was called "Dashuban", which means "great art". Langdon looked up at Sophie, intently. "Your grandfather's information is about to be deciphered by us, and he left us many clues to decipher." Langdon stopped talking, took out a pen from his jacket pocket, and rearranged the letters in each row: O, Draconian devil! (Ah, cruel devil!) Oh, Lame Saint! (Oh lame saint!) which happens to be spelled verbatim as: Leonardo da Vinci! (Leonardo da Vinci!) The Mona Lisa! (Mona Lisa!)