In Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln’s Da holy blood and the holy grail, a great, or rather disproportinate fuss is made of the fact that Poussin’s painting Da Shepherds has a tomb with the Latin inscription Et in Arcadia ego (it’s not even a proper sentence, see!!) on it and that this inscription is an anagram of I tego arcana Dei: Behold! I conceal the secrets of God. Scary stuff.
What other secrets are hidden in these words, I thought to myself about 10 years ago. I then proceeded to derive English anagrams from the letters of the phrase Et in Arcadia ego. In the true spirit of Baigent et al.’s book, I lost the paper on which I recorded these arcana. While clearing some old papers this weekend, however, I found the document, which had gone brown with age, notwithstanding that it is a brown envelope. Below are the results, in which conspiracy theorists will find a large amount of wisdom about the CIA. No coincidence I would suggest.
- Die in a goat race
- O, I date a Grecian
- Eradication age
- I decorate again
- I enrage CIA toad
- I dare to in a cage
- Iago cried at an E
- A nice area to dig
- I ate a rice gonad
- A CIA orange diet
- A CIA agent or die
- CIA are eatin’ God
- I create a God, Ian
See Da Shepherds site referred to above for more background or, better still, read the original and best Da holy blood and the holy grail. I believe Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code covers much of the same ground (I’m the one who hasn’t read it) but it must surely be less entertaining as Baigent et al. actually purport to be uncovering the truth.
Any further contributions are of course welcome; threats to shut down this site on the grounds that it reveals secrets that should not be revealed are not.