THE HERMETIC CODE-CHAPTER 2

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/11/2006 (6899 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg scholar Frank Albo has uncovered one of the province’s greatest secrets — a secret that’s been hidden in Manitoba for more than 80 years.

The facts and people in this mystery are real; the events have been brought to life by writers Carolin Vesely and Buzz Currie.

In this, the second chapter of a special two-week series, Frank takes Carolin on a remarkable journey.

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Chapter 2

I guess I should tell you how I entered the picture. Blame my boss.

My name is Carolin Vesely and I work at the Winnipeg Free Press.

The legislature isn’t my usual haunt — I’m a feature writer, not a political reporter.

But within minutes of meeting Frank Albo, I knew I was on to a good story.

What I didn’t know at the time, however, was that I’d be going down the rabbit hole with Frank to unravel a mystery that, like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, has shady characters, secret societies and peculiar subplots — if not a sinister theme.

Unlike Brown’s novel, however, this story is true.

Just last summer, about two years after his cryptic conversation with the Smoking Man, Frank was sitting in the Palm Room lounge in the Fort Garry Hotel, which is owned by his sister and brother-in-law. It’s one of those pieces of Canadiana you find in every major city — brown stone structure, copper roof oxidized to a milky green, railway station nearby. Quebec has the Chateau Frontenac; Ottawa the Chateau Laurier.

The Fort Garry was built in 1913, just as construction was starting on the Legislative Building.

Winnipeg was the biggest little city on Earth, and the sky was the limit.

Like the legislature, the hotel fronts Broadway, a tree-lined boulevard that is downtown Winnipeg’s most beautiful street. The Palm Room, behind the lobby, has a high, vaulted ceiling as though it were a smaller version of the legislature’s rotunda. Sitting in the lounge with Frank that evening was a newcomer to Winnipeg, Andy Ritchie, newly minted publisher of the Free Press.

Ritchie had just taken Frank’s “unofficial” legislative tour. He was entranced.

“Bloody hell,” he said, “it’s Manitoba’s Da Vinci Code.”

In Dan Brown’s potboiler, published in 2003, the central character is a Harvard professor of symbology who encounters bloody pentagrams while following a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, apparent to the trained eye, but ingeniously disguised by the artist.

The sacred geometry and magic iconography of the legislature were the match of Brown’s theological scavenger hunt. “We’ve got to tell this story,” said Ritchie.

Frank hesitated. He was still smarting from his brush, two years earlier, with an American radio journalist who’d turned out to be a conspiracy theorist. Plus, he’d inadvertently become the source for Canadian journalists looking for comments on the pre-release hype surrounding The Da Vinci Code movie and boycotts of the film by Catholic churches.

But it was Frank’s dream that others should know the legislature as he did; that its magic should be as much a part of the tour guides’ presentations as the marine fossils in its Tyndall stone blocks. “All right,” Frank finally said. “Let’s do it. But Andy…”

“Yes?”

“Leave out the self-flagellating albino assassin, OK?”

And that’s where I came in.

A couple of days later, my head was swimming following a run through the Winnipeg Free Press’s files on the building, Frank’s published papers and Marilyn Baker’s book, Symbol in Stone. I stood on the south side of Broadway, north of the front entrance to the legislature, ready to greet Frank Albo.

The legislature sits about a kilometre west of the point where the Assiniboine River empties into the Red River, part of the system that drains much of North America into Hudson Bay.

Its best-known feature loomed over me: the statue of a naked young man, posed as a runner, facing due north.

His left foot rests on the tip of the dome, his right kicks out behind him. He leans slightly forward, creating an illusion of motion. His left arm cradles a sheaf of wheat, more important to the province’s economy in 1919, when the statue was raised, than it is now. In his right hand, he holds high a torch.

The statue is cast in bronze and plated with 21.5-karat gold. There’s a steel bar running through the roof of the dome and into his left leg, bracing him against the sometimes fierce prairie wind. You know him as the Golden Boy.

But you’ll soon discover, as I did, that he’s not who he appears to be.

His real name is Hermes. HER-meeze.

Frank Albo shook my hand on the steps outside the legislature’s main entrance.

There should be a law against a man having eyelashes that long, I thought as I introduced myself.

Frank was 34 when I met him, but he could pass for 24. He’s the father of two kids, ages 9 and 5, and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, but looked more like a globe-trotting backpacker with his drawstring cotton pants, Guatemalan shirt and cloth bookbag strung across his chest.

“Right here’s a good place to start,” he said, “because this is where it all began four years ago. I was driving past here, on my way home. I was an undergrad at the U of W, taking a course called Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, it was the last course I needed for my degree.”

“Degree in what? I asked.”

“Religion and anthropology,” Frank said. “And I had to do this paper on ancient magic in modern culture.”

I drew a blank. “Is there such a thing?” I said.

“That’s what I asked myself,” Frank said. “I had nothing. And then I glanced up — over there, just to the right of the pediment.”

The pediment. That’s the peaked roof over the front entrance; I knew that much. What’s that to the right of it? Wow, I never noticed it before. Looks like…

“A sphinx?” I said. “Body of a lion, head of a man, right?”

“Right,” said Frank. “There’s one on the other side, too. One faces east and one west. Ancient Egypt is the motherland of magic, and these sphinxes are facing the rising and setting sun. So I pulled into the circular drive over there and jumped out of the car.”

“Where it says ‘No Parking?’ ” I teased.

Frank grinned. “Yep,” he said. “The premier has pretty much given me the run of the place, so security is used to me hanging around. Just stick this pass on your dashboard. And hang this one around your neck.”

I grabbed the pass and slipped the one on the lanyard over my head as I headed back to my car. I got in and parked.

Yeah, I’d heard how Gary Doer had called Frank “Canada’s Dan Brown.” Still, I looked around guiltily as we passed the statue of Queen Victoria and climbed the front steps.

“Now, the romantic image of Egypt was very much in vogue among architects when this building was designed, just before the First World War,” Frank said as we walked into the building. “So, the sphinxes on their own aren’t all that significant. It was those two beasts there that told me I had my paper.”

He pointed to the bronze bison on the Grand Staircase. “Seeing the sphinx was… curious. But this was an ‘aha’ moment.”

“But the bison is the symbol of Manitoba, isn’t it?” I said. “They’re magnificent all right, but where’s the magic?”

“These bison are meant to represent the sacred bulls which guard temple entrances in the ancient Near East,” Frank said. “They’re very clearly the protective beasts in the room where you’d expect to find protection.”

I interrupted. “Did you say temple?”

“Yes,” said Frank. “Temple. The bison were my first clue that this building was built on the lines of a tmple — that that’s what it really is, in fact.”

“So Manitoba hired a man to build them a seat of government and ended up, unbeknownst to them, with a pagan temple?” I asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Frank nodded. “It is,” he said. “I know it’s hard to believe. But wait until you see what else is in here.”

I looked around the room, trying to see it in a new light.

Over the south doorway, I saw a chillingly familiar icon. Her hairdo of snakes gave her away: It was Medusa, the Gorgon sister whose stare would turn a man to stone.

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