On a busy European street, the killer serpentined through a crowd. He was a powerful man. Dark and potent. Deceptively agile. His muscles still felt hard from the thrill of his meeting.
He blinked and boggled in disbelief. He read the sentence again and again, confirming his worst fears. It was a palindrome, the symbol of the Ancient Discordian Cult. One-word palindromes like "wow" and "radar" could be found throughout history, showing how pervasive the secret society's influence was. Discordian writings about how to bring about the end of the world made references to the idea of writing a palindrome longer than one word, but scientists had long dismissed such a thing as impossible. But here, etched in horrible crimson, for the eighth time today, was exactly that frightening, unimaginable thing. His heart raced. He felt even more certain that this all had to be connected with the mysterious theft of three tons of weapons-grade buckminsterfullerine. He also knew he had to get to Panama, and fast.
Hey, I'm glad you responded, because I wanted to bring this passage to your attention:
Although accounts of the Illuminati emblem were legendary in modern symbology, no academic had ever actually seen it. Ancient documents described the symbol as an ambigram—ambi meaning "both"—signifying it was legible both ways. And although ambigrams were common in symbology—swastikas, yin yang, Jewish stars, simple crosses—the idea that a word could be crafted into an ambigram seemed utterly impossible. Modern symbologists had tried for years to forge the word "Illuminati" into a perfectly symmetrical style, but they had failed miserably. Most academics had now decided the symbol’s existence was a myth.
This is the graphic used in the book (designed by John Langdon):
Yeah. I enjoy John Langdon's work, and have a first edition copy of Wordplay right next to my battered old copy of Scott Kim's Inversions on my shelf. Not that I'm complaining about these $50 checks, but why couldn't he have had the same last name as a character created by an equally popular but competent writer?
Just to illuminate how wacky Brown's mythos is: If no one had ever crafted a word into an ambigram, the word "ambigram" wouldn't exist, because in real life it was coined as a term for exactly that. People certainly wouldn't be using it to describe any simple symmetrical shape like circles and crosses.
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*runs screaming from the room, certain the end of the world is nigh*
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Able was I ere I saw Elba.
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Egad a base tone denotes a bad age.
"Watch," said I.
"Beloved," I said. "Watch me scare you though."
Said she, "Able am I, son."
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If you read a Marlboro pack upside down, is says "'orrible Jew". heh.
well, sort of.
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Just to illuminate how wacky Brown's mythos is: If no one had ever crafted a word into an ambigram, the word "ambigram" wouldn't exist, because in real life it was coined as a term for exactly that. People certainly wouldn't be using it to describe any simple symmetrical shape like circles and crosses.