Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (48 page)

"You can understand the
atmosphere in which the Wilhelms-bad meeting took place. With the
defection of an authority like de Maistre, Willermoz would be in
the minority; at most, a compromise could be reached. The Templar
rite was maintained; any conclusion about the origins of the order
was postponed; in short, the convent was a failure. That was the
moment the Scottish branch missed its opportunity; if things had
gone differently, the history of the following century might have
been different."

"And afterward?" I
asked. "Was nothing patched together again?"

"What was there to
patch¡Xto use your word?...._ Three years later, an evangelical
preacher who had joined the Illuminati of Bavaria, a certain Lanze,
died in a wood, struck by lightning. Instructions of the order were
found on him, the Bavarian government intervened, it was discovered
that Weishaupt was plotting against the state, and the order was
suppressed the following year. And further: Weishaupt's writings
were published, containing the alleged projects of the Illuminati,
and for a whole century they discredited all French and German
neo-Templarism...It's possible that Weishaupt's Illuminati were
really on the side of Jacobin Masonry and had infiltrated the
neo-Templar branch to destroy it. It was probably not by chance
that this evil breed had attracted Mirabeau, the tribune of the
Revolution, to its side. May I say something in
confidence?"

"Please."

"Men like me, interested
in joining together again die fragments of a lost Tradition, are
bewildered by an event like Wil-helmsbad. Some guessed and remained
silent; some knew and lied. And then it was too late: first the
revolutionary whirlwind, ! then the uproar of nineteenth-century
occultism...Look I at your list: a festival of bad faith and
credulity, petty spite, ! reciprocal excommunications, secrets that
circulated on every I tongue. The theater of occultism."

"Occultists seem fickle,
wouldn't you say?" Belbo remarked. "You must be able to distinguish
occultism from esotericism. Esotericism is the search for a
learning transmitted only through symbols, closed to the profane.
The occultism that spread in the nineteenth century was the tip of
the iceberg, the little that surfaced of the esoteric secret. The
Templars were initiates, and the proof of that is that when
subjected to torture, they died to save their secret. It is the
strength with which they concealed it that makes us sure of their
initiation, and that makes us yearn j to know what they knew. The
occultist is an exhibitionist. As P61adan said, an initiatory
secret revealed is of no use to anyone. Unfortunately, Peladan was
not an initiate, but an occultist. The nineteenth century was the
century of informers. Everybody rushed to publish the secrets of
magic, theurgy, cabala, tarot. And perhaps they believed in
it."

Aglie continued looking
over our list, with an occasional I snicker of commiseration.
"Elena Petrovna. A good woman, at j heart, but she never said a
thing that hadn't already been written ; everywhere...Guaita, a
drug-addict bibliomane. Papus: What a character!" Then he stopped
abruptly. "Tres....Where does I this come from? Which
manuscript?"

Good, I thought, he's
noticed the interpolation. I answered vaguely: "Well, we put
together the list from so many texts. Most of them have already
been returned. They were plain rubbish. Do you recall, Belbo, where
this Tres comes from?" "I don't think I do. Diotallevi?" "It was
days ago...Is it important?" "Not at all," Aglie said. "It's just
that I never heard of it before. You really can't tell me who
mentioned it?" We were terribly sorry, we didn't remember. Aglie
took his watch from his vest. "Heavens, I have another engagement.
You gentlemen will forgive me."

He left, and we stayed
on, talking.

"It's all clear now. The
English Templars put forth the Masonic proposal in order to make
all the initiates of Europe rally around the Baconian
plan."

"But the plan only
half-succeeds. The idea of the Baconians is so fascinating that it
produces results contrary to their expectations. The so-called
Scottish line sees the new conventicle as a way to re-establish the
succession, and it makes contact with the German
Templars."

"To Aglie, what happened
made no sense. But it's obvious¡X to us, now. The various national
groups entered the lists, one against the other. I wouldn't be
surprised if Martfnez Pasqualis was an agent of the Tomar group.
The English rejected the Scottish; then there were the French,
obviously divided into two groups, pro-English and pro-German.
Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of
different groups-God knows where the Paulicians and the
Jerusalemites were¡X met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece
of the secret from the others."

"Masonry was like Rick's
in Casablanca," Belbo said. "Which turns upside down the common
view that it is a secret society."

"No, no, it's a free
port, a Macao. A facade. The secret is elsewhere."

"Poor
Masons."

Progress demands its
victims. But you must admit we are uncovering an immanent
rationality of history."

"The rationality of
history is the result of a good recombining of the Torah,"
Diotallevi said. "And that's what we're doing, and blessed be the
name of the Most High."

"All right," Belbo said.
"Now the Baconians have Saint-Martin-des-Champs, while the
Franco-Roman neo-Templar line is breaking down into a hundred
sects...And we still haven't decided what this secret is all
about."

"That's up to you two,"
Diotallevi said.

"Us two? All three of us
are in this. If we don't come out honorably, we'll all look
silly."

"Silly to
whom?"

"Why, to history. Before
the tribunal of Truth."

"Quid est veritas?"
Belbo asked.

"Us," I said.

This herb is called
Devilbane by the Philosophers. It has been demonstrated that only
its seed can expel devils and their hallucinations...When given to
a young woman who was tormented by a devil during the night, this
herb made him flee.

¡XJohannes de
Rupescissa, Tractatus de Quinta Essentia, 11

During the next few
days, I neglected the Plan. Lia's pregnancy was coming to term, and
whenever possible I stayed with her. I was anxious, but she calmed
me, saying the time had not yet come. She was taking a course in
painless childbirth, and I was trying to follow her exercises. Lia
had rejected science's offer to tell us the baby's sex in advance.
She wanted to be surprised. Accepting this eccentricity on her
part, I touched her belly and did not ask myself what would come
out. We called it the Thing.

I asked how I could take
part in the birth. "It's mine, too, this Thing," I said. "I don't
want to be one of those movie fathers, pacing up and down the
corridor, chain-smoking."

"Pow, there's only so
much you can do. The moment comes when it's all up to me. Besides,
you don't smoke. Surely you're not going to start smoking just for
this occasion."

"What'll I do,
then?"

"You'll take part before
and afterward. Afterward, if it's a boy, you'll teach him, guide
him, give him a fine old Oedipus complex in the usual way, with a
smile you'll play out the ritual parricide when the time comes¡Xno
fuss¡Xand at some point you'll show him your squalid office, the
card files, the page proofs of the wonderful adventure of metals,
and you'll say to him, ¡¥My son, one day all this will be yours.'
"

"And if it's a
girl?"

"You'll say to her, ¡¥My
daughter, one day all this will be your no-good husband's.'
"

"And what do I do
before?"

"During labor, between
one wave of pain and the next, you have to count, because as the
interval grows shorter, the moment approaches. We'll count
together, and you'll set the rhythm for me, like rowers in a
galley. It'll be as if you, too, were coaxing the Thing out from
its dark lair. Poor little Thing....Feel it. Now it's so cozy there
in the dark, sucking up humors like an octopus, all free, and
then¡Xwham¡Xit pops out into the daylight, blinks, and says, Where
the hell am I?"

"Poor little Thing. And
it hasn't even met Signer Garamond. Come on, let's rehearse the
counting part."

We counted in the
darkness, holding hands. I daydreamed. The Thing, with its birth,
would give reality and meaning to all the old wives' tales of the
Diabolicals. Poor Diabolicals, who spent their nights enacting
chemical weddings with the hope that eighteen-karat gold would
result and wondering if the philosopher's stone was really the
lapis exillis, a wretched terra-cotta grail¡Xand my grail was in
Lia's belly.

"Yes," Lia said, running
her hand over her swelling, taut vessel, "here is where your good
primal matter is steeping.

"Those people you saw at
the castle, what did they think happened in the vessel?"

"Oh, they thought that
melancholy was grumbling in it, sul-ftirous earth, black lead, oil
of Saturn, a Styx of purifications, distillations, pulverizations,
ablutions, b'quefactions, submersions, terra foetida, stinking
sepulcher..."

"What are they,
impotent? Don't they know that in the vessel our Thing ripens, all
white and pink and beautiful?"

"They know, but for them
your dear little belly is also a metaphor, full of
secrets..."

"There are no secrets,
Pow. We know exactly how the Thing is formed, its little nerves and
muscles, its little eyes and spleens and pancreases..."

"Oh my God, more than
one spleen? What is it, Rosemary's baby?"

"I was speaking in
general. But of course we'll have to be ready to love it even if it
has two heads."

"Of course! I'll teach
it to play duets: trumpet and clarinet...No, then it would need
four hands, and that's too many. But, come to think about it, he'd
make a great pianist. A concerto for two left hands? Nothing to it!
Brr....But then, my Diabolicals also know that on that day, in the
hospital, there will be born the Great Work, the White, the Rebis,
the androgyne..."

"That's all we need.
Listen. We'll call him Giulio, or her Giulia, after my grandfather.
What do you say?"

"I like it.
Good."

If I had only stopped
there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all
the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum
secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life
contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of
all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets,
on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were
nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still
dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the
Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia,
and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go
ask that old fool de Maistre.

But no. We, the
sardonic, insisted on playing games with the Diabolicals, on
showing them that if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent
the most cosmic of all.

Serves you right, I said
to myself that other evening. Now here you are, waiting for what
will happen under Foucault's Pendulum.

Surely this monstrous
hybrid comes not from a mother's womb but from an Ephialtes, an
Incubus, or some other horrendous demon, as though spawned in a
putrid and venomous fungus, son of Fauns and Nymphs, more devil
than man.

¡XAthanasius Kircher,
Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, Jansson, 1665, II, pp.
279-280

That day, I wanted to
stay home¡XI had a presentiment¡Xbut Lia told me to stop acting the
prince consort and go to work. "There's time, Pow; it won't be born
yet. I have to go out, too. Run along."

I had almost reached my
office when Signer Salon's door opened. The old man appeared in his
yellow apron. I couldn't avoid greeting him, and he asked me to
come inside. I had never seen his laboratory.

It must have been an
apartment once, but Salon had had all the dividing walls
demolished, and what I saw was a cave, vast, hazy. For some obscure
architectural reason, this wing of the building had a mansard roof,
and the light entered obliquely. I don't know whether the glass
panes were dirty or frosted, or if Salon had installed shades to
keep out the direct sun, or if it was the heap of objects on all
sides proclaiming a fear of spaces left empty, but the light in the
cave was late dusk. The room was divided by old pharmacy shelves in
which arches opened to passages, junctions, perspectives. The
dominant color was brown: the objects, the shelves, the tables, the
diffuse blend of daylight and the patchy illumination from old
lamps. My first impression was of having entered an instrument
maker's atelier, abandoned from the time of Stradivarius, with
years of accumulated dust on the striated bellies of the
lutes.

Then, as my eyes
gradually adjusted, I saw that I was in a petrified zoo. A bear cub
with glassy eyes climbed an artificial bough; a dazed and hieratic
owl stood beside me; on the table in front of me was a weasel¡Xor
marten or skunk; I couldn't tell. Behind it was a prehistoric
animal, feline, its bones showing. It might have been a puma, a
leopard, or a very big dog. Part of the skeleton had already been
covered with straw and paste, and it was all supported by an iron
armature.

"The Great Dane of a
rich lady with a soft heart," Salon said with a snicker, "who wants
to remember it as it was in the days of their conjugal life. You
see? You skin the animal, on the inside of the skin you smear
arsenic soap, then you soak and bleach the bones...Look at that
shelf and you'll see a great collection of spinal columns and rib
cages. A lovely ossuary, don't you think? You connect the bones
with wire, reconstruct the skeleton, mount it on an armature. To
stuif it, I use hay, papier-mache, or plaster. Finally you fit the
skin back on. I repair the damage done by death and corruption.
This owl¡Xdoesn't it seem alive to you?"

From then on, every live
owl would seem dead to me, consigned by Salon to a sclerotic
eternity. I regarded the face of that embalmer of animal pharaohs,
his bushy eyebrows, his gray cheeks, and I could not decide whether
he was a living being or a masterpiece of his own art.

The better to look at
him, I took a step backward, and felt something graze my nape. I
turned with a shudder and saw I had set a pendulum in
motion.

A great disemboweled
bird swayed, following the movement of the lance that pierced it.
The weapon had entered the head, and through the open breast you
could see it pass where the heart and gizzard had once been, then
branch out to form an upside-down trident. One, thicker prong went
through the now-emptied belly and pointed toward the ground like a
sword, while the two other prongs entered the feet and emerged
symmetrically from the talons. The bird swung, and the three points
cast their shadow on the floor, a mystic sign.

"A fine specimen of the
golden eagle," Salon said. "But I still have a few days' work to do
on it. I was just choosing the eyes." He showed me a box full of
glass corneas and pupils, as if the executioner of Saint Lucy had
collected the trophies of his entire career. "It's not always easy,
as it is with insects, where all you need is a box and a pin. This,
for example, has to be treated with formalin."

I smelled its morgue
odor. "It must be an enthralling job," I said. And meanwhile I was
thinking of the living creature that throbbed in Lia's belly. A
chilling thought seized' me. If the Thing dies, I said to myself, I
want to bury it. I want it to feed the worms underground and enrich
the earth. That's the only way I'll feel it's still
alive...

Salon was still talking.
He took a strange specimen from one of the shelves. It was about
thirty centimeters long. A dragon, a reptile with black membranous
wings, a cock's crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny
sawlike teeth. "Handsome, isn't he? My own composition. I used a
salamander, a bat, snake's scales...A subterranean dragon. I was
inspired by this..."

He showed me, on another
table, a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with
leather ties. "It cost me a fortune. I'm not a bibliophile, but
this was something I had to have. It's the Mundus Subterraneus of
Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665. Here's the dragon.
Identical, don't you think? It lives in the caves of volcanoes,
that good Jesuit said, and he knew everything about the known, the
unknown, and the nonexistent..."

"You think always of the
underground world," I said, recalling our conversation in Munich
and the words I had overheard through the Ear of
Dionysius.

He opened the volume to
another page, to an image of the globe, which looked like an
anatomical organ, swollen and black, covered by a spider web of
luminescent, serpentine veins. "If Kircher was right, there are
more paths in the heart of the earth than there are on the surface.
Whatever takes place in nature derives from the heat and steam
below..."

I thought of the Black
Work, of Lia's belly, of the Thing that was struggling to break out
of its sweet volcano.

"...and whatever takes
place in the world of men is planned below."

"Does Padre Kircher say
that, too?"

"No. He concerns himself
only with nature...But it is odd that the second part of this book
is on alchemy and the alchemists, and that precisely here, you see,
there is an attack on the Rosicrucians. Why attack the Rosicrucians
in a book on the underground world? Our Jesuit knew a thing or two;
he knew that the last Templars had taken refuge in the underground
kingdom ofAgarttha..."

"And they're still
there, it seems," I ventured.

"They're still there,"
Salon said. "Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us,
right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who
directed the excavations?"

"Expert engineers, I'd
say."

"Yes, cover your eyes
with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish
such books....How many Jews are there among your
authors?"

"We don't ask our
authors to fill out racial forms," I replied stiffly.

"You mustn't think me an
anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends...I have in mind a certain
kind of Jew...."

"What kind?"

"I know what
kind..."