Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (17 page)

"Clear how?"

"The last line says,
¡¥Three times six before the feast (of the) Great Whore.' This is
another numerological game, because the digits of 1944 add up to
eighteen. Eighteen is three times six. This further miraculous
numerical coincidence suggested another, very subtle, enigma to the
Templars. The year 1944 is the terminal date of the plan. But with
a view to another target: the year 2000! The Templars believed that
the second millennium would see the advent of their Jerusalem, an
earthly Jerusalem, the Anti-Jerusalem. They were persecuted as
heretics, and in their hatred of the Church they came to identify
with the Antichrist. They knew that throughout the occult tradition
666 was the number of the Beast, and the six hundred and
sixty-sixth year was the year of the Beast. Well, 666, the Year of
the Beast, is the year 2000, when the Templars' revenge will
triumph. The Anti-Jerusalem is the New Babylon, and this is why
1944 is the year of the triumph of La Grande Pute, the great whore
of Babylon mentioned in the Apocalypse. The reference to 666 was a
provocation, a bit of bravado from those fighting men. A gesture of
defiance from outsiders, as they would be called today. Great
story, don't you think?"

His eyes were moist as
he looked at us, and so were his lips and mustache. He stroked his
briefcase.

"All right," Belbo said.
"Let's assume that the message outlines the timing of a plan. But
what plan?"

"Now you're asking too
much. If I knew that, I wouldn't need to cast this bait. But one
thing I do know. Somewhere along the line something went wrong, and
the plan was not carried out. Otherwise, if I may say so, we'd know
it. And I can understand the reason: 1944 wasn't an easy year. Back
in 1344, the Templars had no way of predicting a disruptive world
war.''

"Excuse me for butting
in," Diotallevi said, "but if I understood correctly, when the
first seal is opened, the succession of keepers of that seal
doesn't end; it lives on until the breaking of the last seal, when
all the representatives of the order are to be present. In every
century, then¡Xor, strictly speaking, every hundred and twenty
years¡Xthere would always be six keepers for each place, or
thirty-six in all."

"Right," Ardenti
said.

"Thirty-six knights for
each of the six places makes two hundred and sixteen, the digits of
which add up to nine. And since there are six centuries, we can
multiply two hundred and sixteen by six, which gives us one
thousand two hundred and ninety-six, whose digits add up to
eighteen, or three times six, or 666."

Diotallevi would perhaps
have gone on to a numerological reconstruction of the history of
the world if Belbo hadn't stopped him with one of those looks
mothers give children when they are acting up. But the colonel
immediately recognized Diotallevi as an enlightened
mind.

"Splendid, Professor.
It's a revelation! By the way, did you know that nine was the
number of the knights who founded the Temple in
Jerusalem?"

"And the Great Name of
God, as expressed in the Tetragram-maton," Diotallevi said, "has
seventy-two letters¡Xand seven plus two makes nine. But that's not
all, if you'll allow me. The Pythagorean tradition, which cabala
preserves¡Xor perhaps inspired¡Xnotes that the sum of the odd
numbers from one to seven is sixteen, and the sum of the even
numbers from two to eight is twenty, and twenty plus sixteen makes
thirty-six."

"My God, Professor!" The
colonel was beside himself. "I knew it, I knew it! You've given me
the courage to go on. Now I know that I'm close to the
truth."

Had Diotallevi turned
arithmetic into a religion, or religion into arithmetic? Perhaps
both. Or maybe he was just an atheist flirting with the rapture of
some superior heaven. He could have become a fanatic of roulette
(and that would have been better); instead, he thought of himself
as an unbelieving rabbi.

I don't remember exactly
how it happened, but Belbo intervened and broke the spell with his
Piedmont-style good sense. More lines of the message remained for
the colonel to interpret, and we were all eager to hear. It was now
six o'clock. Six P.M., I thought: eighteen hours.

"All right," Belbo said.
"Thirty-six per century; step by step the knights prepare to
converge on the Stone. But what is this Stone?"

"Really, gentlemen! The
Stone is, of course, the Grail."

The Middle Ages awaited
the hero of the Graal and expected that the head of the Holy Roman
Empire would become an image and a manifestation of that "King of
the World."...The invisible Emperor was to become also the visible
one, and the Middle Ages would be "middle" in the sense of
"central"...the invisible, inviolable center, the sovereign who
must reawaken, the same hero, avenging and restoring. These are not
fantasies of a dead, romantic past, but, rather, the simple truth
for those who, today, alone can legitimately call themselves
alive.

¡XJulius Evola, Il
mistero del Graal, Rome, Edizioni Mediterranee, 1983, Chapter 23
and epilogue

"You mean the Grail also
comes into this?" Belbo asked.

"Naturally. And I'm not
the only one who says so. You are educated men; there is no need
for me to go into the legend of the Grail. The Knights of the Round
Table, the mystical quest for this miraculous object, which some
believe was the chalice in which the blood of Jesus was collected.
The Grail taken to France by Joseph of Arimathea. Others say it is
a stone that possesses mysterious powers. The Grail is often
depicted as a dazzling light. It's a symbol representing power, a
source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals wounds, blinds,
strikes down...Some have thought of it as the philosopher's stone
of the alchemists, but even if that's so, what was the
philosopher's stone if not a symbol of some cosmic energy? The
literature on the subject is endless, but you can easily
distinguish signs that are irrefutable. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's
Parzival the Grail is said to be kept in a Templar castle! Was
Eschenbach an initiate? A foolhardy writer who revealed too much?
But there is more. This Grail kept by the Templars is described as
a stone fallen from the heavens: lapis exillis. It's not clear
whether the expression means ¡¥stone from heaven' (ex coelis) or
¡¥stone from exile.' But in either case, it is something that comes
from far away, and some suggest that it could have been a
meteorite. As far as we're concerned, however, it is definitely a
stone. Whatever the Grail may have been, for the Templars it was
the symbol of the objective, or end of the plan."

"Excuse me," I said,
"but the document indicates that the knights' sixth meeting would
be held near or above a stone. It doesn't tell them to find the
stone."

"Another subtle
ambiguity, another luminous mystical analogy! Yes, indeed: the
sixth meeting is to be held near a stone, and we shall soon see
where; but at that stone, where the transmission of the plan is
fulfilled and the six seals opened, the knights will learn where to
find the Stone! It's like the pun in the New Testament: Thou art
Peter and upon this rock...On the stone you shall find the
Stone."

"It's all quite
obvious," Belbo said. "Please go on. Casau-bon, stop interrupting.
We're all eager to hear the rest."

"Well then," the colonel
said, "the reference to the Grail made me think for a long time
that the treasure was a huge deposit of radioactive material,
perhaps of extraterrestrial origin. Consider, for example, the
mysterious wound in the legend of King Amfortas. The account makes
him sound like a radiologist who has been dangerously exposed. He
is not to be touched. Why not? Imagine how excited the Templars
must have been when they reached the shores of the Dead Sea, whose
waters, as you gentlemen surely know, are so dense that on them you
float like a cork. It is a sea with curative powers. They could
have discovered a deposit of radium or uranium in Palestine, a
deposit they weren't in a position to exploit then and
there.

"The relationship
between the Grail, the Templars, and the Cathars was investigated
scientifically by a valiant German officer. I'm referring to Otto
Rahn, an SS Obersturmbannruhrer who devoted his life to rigorous,
scholarly study of the European and Aryan nature of the Grail. I
won't go into why and how he lost his life in 1939, but some insist
that...Well, how can I forget what happened to Ingolf ? In any
case, Rahn demonstrated a link between the Golden Fleece of the
Argonauts and the Grail. It's obvious that there's a connection
between the Grail, the philosopher's stone, and the enormous power
source that Hitler's followers were seeking on the eve of the war
and pursued to their last breath. In one version of the Argonauts'
story, remember, they see a cup¡Xa cup, mind you¡Xfloating over the
Mountain of the World with the Tree of Light. When the Argonauts
find the Golden Fleece, their ship is magically borne into the
Milky Way, in the austral sky, where the luminous nature of God
eternal is made manifest by the Southern Cross, the Triangle, and
the Altar. The triangle symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the cross the
divine Sacrifice of love, and the altar is the Table of the Supper,
on which stood the Cup of the Resurrection. The Celtic and Aryan
origin of all these symbols is obvious."

The colonel seemed
caught in the same heroic ecstasy that had impelled his
Obersturmunddrang, or whatever the hell that German was, to the
supreme sacrifice. Someone had to bring him down to
earth.

"Where is all this
leading?" I asked.

"Signer Casaubon, can't
you see it for yourself? The Grail has been called the Luciferian
Stone, which points to the figure of Baphomet. The Grail is a power
source, the Templars were the guardians of an energy secret, and
they drew up their plan accordingly. Where would the unknown
commanderies be established? Where, gentleman?" And the colonel
looked at us with a conspiratorial air, as if we were all in the
plot together. "I had a trail to follow, erroneous but useful. In
1797, Charles Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, an author who must have
overheard some secrets, wrote a book entitled Le tombeau de Jacques
Malay ou le secret des conspirateurs a ceux qui veulent tout
savoir. By an interesting coincidence, his work turned up in
Ingolf's little library. He claims that Molay, before his death,
set up four secret lodges: in Paris, Scotland, Stockholm, and
Naples. These four lodges were to exterminate all monarchs and
destroy the power of die pope. Gassicourt was an eccentric, of
course, but I used his idea as a starting point from which to
determine where the Templars might have located their secret
centers. I wouldn't have been able to understand the enigmas of the
message if I hadn't had some guiding idea. But I did have such an
idea. It was my conviction, based oh abundant evidence, that the
Templar spirit was of Celtic, druidic origin; it was the spirit of
Nordic Arian-ism, traditionally associated with the island of
Avalon, seat of the legendary civilization of the far north. As you
surely know, various authors have identified Avalon as the Garden
of the Hes-perides or as Ultima Thule, or as the Colchis of the
Golden Fleece. It's hardly an accident that history's greatest
chivalric order was la Toison d'Or, the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Which makes it clear what the word ¡¥castle' in the message really
means: it refers to the hyperboreal, the northernmost castle, where
the Templars kept the Grail, probably the mythical
Monsalvat."

He paused, wanting us to
hang on his every word. We hung.

"Now let's go back to
the second command in the message: The guardians of the seal are to
go to a place associated with bread. This instruction is completely
clear: the Grail is the chalice that contained Christ's blood, the
bread is Christ's body, the place where the bread was eaten is the
place of the Last Supper, Jerusalem. It seems impossible that the
Templars wouldn't have maintained a secret base there, even after
the Saracen recon-quest. I must admit that at first I was troubled
by this Jewish element in a plan so deeply imbued widi Aryan
mythology. But then I realized: we are the ones who continue to
regard Jesus as deriving from the Judaic religion, because that's
what the Church of Rome has always taught us. But the Templars knew
that Jesus was actually a Celtic myth. The whole gospel story is a
hermetic allegory: resurrection after dissolution in the bowels of
the earth, and all that. Christ is simply the elixir of the
alchemists. For that matter, everyone knows that the Trinity is an
Aryan concept anyway, and that's why the whole rule of the
Templars, drawn up by the Druid Saint Bernard, is riddled with the
numbers."

The colonel took another
sip of water. He was hoarse. "And now we come to the third stage:
the refuge. It's Tibet."

"Why Tiber?"

"Because, in the first
place, Eschenbach tells us the Templars left Europe and took the
Grail to India. Cradle of the Aryan race. The refuge is Agarttha.
You gentlemen must have heard talk of Agarttha, seat of the King of
the World, the underground city from which the Masters of the World
control and direct the developments of human history. The Templars
established one of their secret centers there, at the very source
of their spirituality. You must be aware of the connection between
the realm of Agarttha and the Synarchy..."

"Frankly,
no."

"All the better. There
are secrets that kill. But let's not digress. In any case, you know
that Agarttha was founded six thousand years ago, at the beginning
of the Kali Yuga era, in which we are still living. The task of the
knightly orders has always been to maintain contact with Agarttha,
the active link between the wisdom of the East and the wisdom of
the West. And now it's clear where the fourth meeting is to take
place, in another druidic sanctuary, in a city of the Virgin: the
cathedral of Chartres. From Provins, Chartres lies across the chief
river of the Ile-de-France, the Seine."

We were completely lost.
"Wait a minute," I said. "What does Chartres have to do with your
Celts and Druids?"

"Where do you think the
idea of the Virgin came from? The first virgins mentioned in Europe
were the black virgins of the Celts. Once, as a young man, Saint
Bernard was in the church of Saint Voirles, kneeling before the
black virgin there, and she squeezed from her breast three drops of
milk, which fell on the lips of the future founder of the Templars.
That was why the romances of the Grail arose: to create a cover for
the Crusades, which were meant to find the Grail. The Benedictines
are the heirs of the Druids. Everybody knows that."

"And where are these
black virgins now?"

"They were destroyed by
forces who wanted to corrupt the Nordic and Celtic traditions and
transform them into a Mediterranean religion by inventing the myth
of Mary of Nazareth. Or else those virgins were disguised,
distorted, like so many other black madonnas still displayed to the
fanaticism of the masses.

But if you examine the
images in the cathedrals as carefully as the great Fulcanelli did,
you will find that this story is told quite clearly, and the ties
between the Celtic virgins and the alchemist tradition, Templar in
origin, are equally clear. The black virgin symbolizes the prime
matter that seekers employ in their quest for the philosopher's
stone, which, as we have seen, is simply the Grail. Where do you
mink Mahomet, another great Druid initiate, got the inspiration for
the Black Stone of Mecca? Someone walled up the crypt in Chartres
that leads to the underground site where the original pagan statue
still stands, but if you look carefully, you can still make out a
black virgin, Notre-Dame-du-Pilier, carved by an Odinian canon. In
her right hand she holds the magic cylinder of the high priestesses
of Odin, in her left the magic calendar that once depicted¡XI say,
¡¥once,' because these sculptures unfortunately were vandalized by
orthodox canons¡Xthe sacred animals of Odinism: the dog, the eagle,
the lion, the white bear, and the werewolf. At the same time, none
of the scholars of Gothic esoterica has overlooked in Chartres a
statue of a woman holding the chalice, the Grail. Ah, gentlemen, if
only it were possible not just to read Chartres cathedral according
to the tourist guides¡XRoman, Catholic, and Apostolic¡Xbut to see
it, really see it, with the eyes of Tradition! Then the true story
told by that rock of Erik at Avalon would be known."

"Which brings us to the
Popelicans. Who were they?"

"The Cathars.
¡¥Popelican'¡Xor ¡¥Popelicant'¡Xwas one of the names given to
heretics. The Cathars of Provence had been destroyed, and I am not
so naive as to imagine a meeting in the ruins of Montsegur, but the
sect itself didn't die. There's a whole geography of hidden
Catharism, which produced Dante as well as the dolce stil nuovo
poets and the Fedeli d'Amore sect. The fifth meeting place is
therefore somewhere in northern Italy or southern
France."

"And the
last?"

"Ah, what is the most
ancient, the most sacred, the most enduring of Celtic stones, the
sanctuary of the sun-god, most favored observation point from which
finally the reunited descendants of the Templars of Provins, having
reached the end of their plan, can look upon the secrets hidden
till then by the seven seals and at last discover how to exploit
the immense power granted by their possession of the Holy Grail?
Why, it's in England! The magic circle of Stonehenge! Where
else?"

"O basta la," Belbo
said. Only another child of Piedmont could have understood the
spirit in which this expression of polite amazement was uttered. No
equivalent in any other language or dialect (dis done, are you
kidding?) can convey the apathy, the fatalism with which it
expresses the firm conviction that the person to whom it is
addressed is, irreparably, the product of a bumbling
creator.