Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (51 page)

The chief occupation of
this Assembly¡Xand, in my opinion, the most useful¡Xshould be to
work on natural history following the plans of Verulam.

¡XChristian Huygens,
Letter to Colbert, Oeuvres Completes, La Haye, 1888-1950, vi, pp.
95-96

The vicissitudes of the
six groups were not confined to the search for the map. In the
first two pieces of the message, those in the hands of the
Portuguese and the English, the Templars probably referred to a
pendulum, but ideas about pendulums were still hazy. It's one thing
to swing some lead on a length of cord and quite another to
construct a mechanism precise enough to be hit by a ray of the sun
at an exact time and place. This is why the Templars calculated for
six centuries. The Baconian wing set immediately to work, and tried
to draw to its side all the initiates, whom it made desperate
eiforts to reach.

It is no coincidence
that Salomon de Caus, the Rosicrucians' man, writes for Richelieu a
treatise on solar clocks. And afterward, from Galileo on, there is
furious research devoted to pendulums. The pretext is to figure out
how to use them for determining longitudes, but in 1681, when
Huygens discovers that a pendulum accurate in Paris is slow in
Cayenne, he immediately realizes that this discrepancy is due to
the variation in centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the
earth. And after he publishes his Horologium Oscillatorium, in
which he elaborates on Galileo's intuitions about the pendulum, who
summons him to Paris? Colbert, the same man who summons to Paris
Salomon de Caus to work on the tunnels beneath the city!

In 1661, when the
Accademia del Cimento foreshadows the conclusions of Foucault,
Leopold of Tuscany dissolves it in the space of five years, and
immediately afterward receives from Rome, as a secret reward, a
cardinal's hat.

But there is more. In
the centuries that follow, the hunt for the Pendulum continues. In
1742 (a year before the first documented appearance of the Comte de
Saint-Germain!), a certain Mairan presents a paper on pendulums at
the Academic Royale des Sciences. In 1756 (the year the Templar
Strict Observance originates in Germany!), a certain Bouguer writes
Sur la direction qu ¡¥affectent tous les fits a plomb.

I found phantasmagorical
titles, like that by Jean Baptiste Biot in 1821: Recueil
d'observations geodesiques, astronomiqu.es et physiques, executees
par ordre du Bureau des Longitudes de France, en Espagne, en
France, en Angleterre et en Ecosse, pour determiner la variation de
la pesanteur et des degres terrestres sur le prolongement du
meridien de Paris. In France, Spain, England, and Scotland! And
referring to the meridian of Saint-Martin! And what about Sir
Edward Sabine, who in 1823 publishes An Account of Experiments to
Determine the Figure of the Earth by Means of the Pendulum
Vibrating Seconds in Different Latitudes? And the mysterious Graf
Feodor Petrovich Litke, who in 1836 publishes the results of his
research into the behavior of the pendulum in the course of a
voyage around the world? This under the auspices of the Imperial
Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The Russians,
too?

And what if in the
meantime a group, no doubt of Baconian descent, decides to discover
the secret of the currents without map or pendulum, relying instead
on the source, the respiration of the Serpent? Salon's hunch was
right, for it was more or less at the time of Foucault that the
industrial world, creature of the Baconian camp, began digging
underground systems in the heart of the great cities of
Europe.

"It's true," Belbo said,
"the nineteenth century is obsessed with the underground¡XJean
Valjean, Fantomas and Javert, Rocambole, all that coming and going
in sewers and tunnels. My God, now that I think of it, all of Verne
is an occult revelation of the mysteries of the underground! The
voyage to the center of the earth, twenty thousand leagues under
the sea, the caverns of the Mysterious Island, the immense
underground realm of the Black Indies! If we drew a diagram of his
extraordinary travels, we would be sure to obtain, finally, a
sketch of the coils of the Serpent, a chart of the leys drawn for
each continent. Verne explores the network of the telluric currents
from above and below.''

I collaborated. "What's
the name of the hero of the Black Indies? John Garral. Close to
Grail."

"We're not ivory-tower
eggheads; we're men with our feet on the ground. Verne gives even
more explicit signals. Robur le Conque"rant, R.C., Rosy Cross. And
Robur read backward is Rubor, the red of the rose."

Phileas Fogg. A name
that is also a signature: Eos, in Greek, has the sense of the
global (it is therefore the equivalent of pan, of poly,) and
Phileas is the same as Polyphile. As for Fogg, it is the English
for brouillard....and no doubt Verne belonged to "Le Brouillard."
He was even kind enough to indicate the relationship between this
society and the Rose + Cross, because what, enfin, is our noble
traveler Phi-leas Fogg if not a Rose + Cross?....And further,
doesn't he belong to the Reform Club, whose initials, R.C.,
designate the reforming Rose + Cross? And this Reform Club stands
in Pall Mall, suggesting once again the Dream of
Polyphile.

¡XMichel Lamy, Jules
Verne, initie et initiateur, Paris, Payot, 1984, pp.
237-238

The reconstruction took
us days and days. We would interrupt our work to confide in one
another the latest connection. We read everything we could lay our
hands on¡Xencyclopedias, newspapers, cartoon strips, publishers'
catalogs¡Xand read it squinting, seeking possible shortcuts. At
every bookstall we stopped and rummaged; we sniffed newsstands,
stole abundantly from the manuscripts of our Diabolicals, rushed
triumphantly into the office, slamming the latest find on a desk.
As I recall those weeks, everything seems to have taken place at a
frenzied pace, as in a Keystone Kops film, all jerks and jumps,
with doors opening and closing at supersonic speed, cream pies
flying, dashes up flights of steps, up and down, back and forth,
old cars crashing, shelves collapsing in grocery stores amid
avalanches of cans, bottles, soft cheeses, spurting siphons,
exploding flour sacks. Yet the intermissions, the idle moments¡Xthe
rest of life going on around us¡XI remember as a story in slow
motion, the Plan taking gradual shape with the discipline of
gymnastics, or like the slow rotation of the discus thrower, the
cautious sway of the shot-putter, the long tempos of golf, the
senseless waits of baseball. But whatever the rhythm was, luck
rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found
connections¡Xalways, everywhere, and between everything. The world
exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything
pointed to everything else, everything explained everything
else...

I said nothing about it
to Lia, to avoid irritating her, and I even neglected Giulio. I
would wake up in the middle of the night with the realization, for
example, that Ren6 des Cartes could make R.C. and that he had been
overenergetic in seeking and then denying having found the
Rosicrucians. Why all that obsession with Method? Because it was
through Method that you arrived at the solution to the mystery that
was fascinating all the initiates of Europe...And who had
celebrated the enchantment of Gothic? Rene de Chateaubriand. And
who, in Bacon's time, wrote Steps to the Temple! Richard Crashaw.
And what about Ranieri de' Calzabigi, Ren6 Char, Raymond Chandler?
And Rick of Casablanca?

This science, which was
not lost, at least as far as its practice was concerned, was taught
to the cathedral builders by the monks of Ci-teaux...They were
known, in the last century, as Compagnons du Tour de France. It was
to them that Eiffel turned to build his tower.

¡XL. Charpentier, Les
mysteres de la cathedrale de Chartres, Paris, Laffont, 1966, pp.
55-56

Now we had the entire
modern age filled with industrious moles tunneling through the
earth, spying on the planet from below. But there had to be
something else, another venture the Baconians had set in motion,
whose results, whose stages were before everyone's eyes, though no
one had noticed them...The ground had been punctured and the deep
strata tested, but the Celts and the Templars had not confined
themselves to digging wells; they had planted their stations and
aimed them straight to the heavens, to communicate from megalith to
megalith, and to catch the influences of the stars.

The idea came to Belbo
during a night of insomnia. He leaned out the window and saw in the
distance, above the roofs of Milan, the lights of the steel tower
of the Italian Radio, the great city antenna. A moderate, prudent
Babel. And he understood.

"The Eiffel Tower," he
said to us the next morning. "Why didn't we think of it before? The
metal megalith, the menhir of the last Celts, the hollow spire
taller than all Gothic spires. What need did Paris have of this
useless monument? It's the celestial probe, the antenna that
collects information from every hermetic valve stuck into the
planet's crust: the statues of Easter Island; Machu Picchu; the
Statue of Liberty, conceived first by the initiate Lafayette; the
obelisk of Luxor; the highest tower of Tomar; the Colossus of
Rhodes, which still transmits from the depths of a harbor that no
one can find; the temples of the Brahman jungle; the turrets of the
Great Wall; the top of Ayers Rock; the spires of Strasbourg, which
so delighted the initiate Goethe; the faces of Mount Rushmore¡Xhow
much the initiate Hitchcock understood!¡Xand the TV antenna of the
Empire State Building. And tell me to what empire this creation of
American initiates refers if not the empire of Rudolf of Prague!
The Eiffel Tower picks up signals from underground and compares
them with what comes from the sky. And who is it who gave us the
first, terrifying movie image of the Tour Eiffel? Rene Clair, in
Paris qui dort. Rene Clair, R.C."

The entire history of
science had to be reread. Even the space race became
comprehensible, with those crazy satellites that did nothing but
photograph the crust of the globe to localize invisible tensions,
submarine tides, currents of warmer air. And speak among
themselves, speak to the Tower, to Stonehenge....

It is a remarkable
coincidence that the 1623 Folio, known by the name of Shakespeare,
contains exactly thirty-six plays...

¡XW. F. C. Wigston,
Francis Bacon versus Phantom Captain Shakespeare: The Rosicrucian
Mask, London, Kegan Paul, 1891, p. 353

When we traded the
results of our fantasies, it seemed to us¡X and rightly¡Xthat we
had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so
extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing
them, we would have been ashamed. We consoled ourselves with the
realization¡Xunspoken, now, respecting the etiquette of irony¡Xthat
we were parodying the logic of our Diabolicals. But during the long
intervals in which each of us collected evidence to produce at the
plenary meetings, and with the clear conscience of those who
accumulate material for a medley of burlesques, our brains grew
accustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything with
everything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit. I
believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any
difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe
and developing the habit of believing.

It's the old story of
spies: they infiltrate the secret service of the enemy, they
develop the habit of thinking like the enemy, and if they survive,
it's because they Ve succeeded. And before long, predictably, they
go over to the other side, because it has become theirs. Or take
those who live alone with a dog. They speak to him all day long;
first they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dog
understands them, he's shy, he's jealous, he's hypersensitive; next
they're teasing him, making scenes, until they're sure he's become
just like them, human, and they're proud of it, but the fact is
that they have become just like him: they have become
canine.

Perhaps because I was in
daily contact with Lia, and with the baby, I was, of the three, the
least affected by the game. I was convinced I was its master; I
felt as if I were again playing the agogo during the rite in
Brazil: you stay on the side of those who control the emotions and
not with those who are controlled by them. About Diotallevi, I
didn't know then; I know now. He was training himself viscerally to
think like a Diabolical. As for Belbo, he was identifying at a more
conscious level. I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming
corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly
losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the
similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real. We were
losing that mysterious and bright and most beautiful ability to say
that Si-gnor A has grown bestial¡Xwithout thinking for a moment
that he now has fur and fangs. The sick man, however, thinking
"bestial," immediately sees Signer A on all fours, barking or
grunting.

In Diotallevi's case¡Xas
we would have realized if we hadn't been so excited ourselves¡Xit
began when he returned at the end of the summer. He seemed thinner,
but it wasn't the healthy thinness of someone who has spent a few
weeks hiking in the mountains. His delicate albino skin now had a
yellowish cast. Perhaps we thought, if we noticed at all, that he
had spent his vacation poring over rabbinic scrolls. But our minds
were on other things.

In the days that
followed, we were able to account also for the camps opposed to the
Baconian.

For example, current
Masonic studies believe that the Illu-minati of Bavaria, who
advocated the destruction of nations and the destabilization of the
state, inspired not only the anarchism of Bakunin but also Marxism
itself. Puerile. The Illuminati were provocateurs; they were
Baconians who had infiltrated the Teutonics. Marx and Engels had
something quite different in mind when they began their Manifesto
of 1848 with the eloquent sentence "A specter is haunting Europe."
Why this Gothic metaphor? The Communist Manifesto is alluding
sarcastically to the secret hunt for the Plan, which has agitated
the continent for centuries. The Manifesto suggests an alternative
both to the Baconians and to the neo-Templars. Marx, a Jew, perhaps
initially the spokesman for the rabbis of Gerona or Safed, tries to
involve the entire Chosen People in the search. But then the
project possesses him, and he identifies the Shekhinah¡Xthe exiled
people in the Kingdom¡Xwith the proletariat, and thus, betraying
the expectations of those who taught him, he turns all Messianic
Judaism on its head. Templars of the world, unite! The map to the
workers! Splendid! What better historical justification for
Communism?

"Yes," Belbo said, "but
the Baconians also run into trouble along the way; don't think they
don't. Some of them set out for the superhighway of science and end
up in a blind alley. At the end of the dynasty, the Einsteins and
die Fermis, after hunting for the secret in the heart of the
microcosm, stumble upon the wrong invention: instead of telluric
energy¡Xclean, natural, sapiential¡Xthey discover atomic
energy¡Xtechnological, unnatural, polluted..."

"Space-time: the error
of the West," Diotallevi said.

"It's the loss of the
Center. Vaccine and penicillin as caricatures of the Elixir of
Eternal Life," I added.

"Or like that other
Templar, Freud," Belbo said, "who instead of probing the labyrinths
of the physical underground, probed those of the psychic
underground, as if everything about them hadn't already been said,
and better, by the alchemists."

"But you're the one,"
Diotallevi objected, "who is trying to publish the books of Dr.
Wagner. For me, psychoanalysis is for neurotics."

"Yes, and the penis is
nothing but a phallic symbol," I concluded. "Come, gentlemen, let's
not digress. And let's not waste time. We still don't know where to
put the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites."

But before we were able
to answer this question, we came upon another group, one that, not
part of the thirty-six invisibles, had nevertheless entered the
game at quite an early stage, somewhat upsetting its designs,
causing confusion: the Jesuits.