DC Masons Brace For Dan Brown Fans

WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) -- Rome, Paris and now Washington.

The new page turner out today from the blockbuster author of the Da Vinci Code is set here in the Capitol.

Fans are already seeking out the temples of the mysterious Free Masons, who play a prominent role.

Monumental and enigmatic by day, Dan Brown suggests the Scottish Rite House of the Temple on 16th Street hides even greater secrets by night. The Lost Symbol opens in the Temple Room, where a new Masonic initiate drinks blood red wine from a human skull.

"It's a great read, but it is after all, a work of fiction," says historian Arturo de Hoyas, who seems to be one of those guys who revels in squeezing the drama out of a story.

"You don't really drink wine out of human skulls?" 9NEWS NOW asked him.

"Ha, ha, ha," he laughed, "we're really not that interesting."

Most people think of the Masons as deeply secretive and mysterious. And there is a hidden passageway in the Temple... no bodies up there. In reality, many of the Mason's secret rituals are published in a 1000 page tome by the Grand Historian.

Brown's previous books have been huge best sellers -- sending tourists flocking to the Louvre and the Vatican. His latest has readers plopped down in bookstores devouring it.

Joe Crociata says it's already excited visitors to the Mason's Naval Lodge on Capitol Hill. Countless secrets have been whispered in a room decorated with occult Egyptian symbols, but perhaps not the secret Brown's fans are searching for.

"Do you have the wisdom that will unleash infinite power?"

"Not that I have seen," says Crociata. "If we have, it hasn't been disclosed to me over the last 28 years."

But if you're searching for the secret to being a better man, the Mason's say come on by.

The Masons were a little worried that they'd come off as bad guys in Brown's book, but the author ended up going out of his way to present them as essentially benign and misunderstood.