Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  "The Comte de Saint-Germain!" I said. "Well, well!"

  "You know him?"¡¥

  "If I said yes, you wouldn't believe me. Forget it. Now here, gentlemen, is a four-hundred-page monstrosity decrying the errors of modern science. The atom, a Jewish lie. The error of Einstein and the mystical secret of energy. The illusion of Galileo and the immaterial nature of the moon and the sun."

  "In that line," Diotallevi said, "what I liked most is this review of Fortian sciences."

  "What are they?"

  "Named after Charles Hoy Fort, who gathered an immense collection of inexplicable bits of news. A rain of frogs in Birmingham, footprints of a fabulous animal in Devon, mysterious steps and sucker marks on the ridges of some mountains, irregularities in the precession of the equinoxes, inscriptions on meteorites, black snow, rains of blood, winged creatures at an altitude of eight thousand meters above Palermo, luminous wheels in the sea, fossils of giants, a shower of dead leaves in France, precipitations of living matter in Sumatra, and, naturally, all the signs marked on Machu Picchu and other peaks in South America that bear witness to the landing of powerful spacecraft in prehistoric times. We are not alone in the universe."

  "Not bad," Belbo said. "But what particularly intrigues me are these five hundred pages on the pyramids. Did you know that the pyramid of Cheops sits right on the thirtieth parallel, which is the one that crosses the greatest stretch of land above sea level? That the geometric ratios found in the pyramid of Cheops are the same ones found at Pedra Pintada in Amazonia? That Egypt possessed two plumed serpents, one on the throne of Tutankhamen and the other on the pyramid of Saqqara, and the latter serpent points to Quetzalcoatl?"

  "What does Quetzalcoatl have to do with Amazonia, if he's part of the Mexican pantheon?" I asked.

  "Well, maybe I missed a connection. But for that matter, how do you explain the fact that the statues of Easter Island are megaliths exactly like the Celtic ones? Or that a Polynesian god called Ya is clearly the Yod of the Jews, as is the ancient Hungarian Io-v', the great and good god? Or that an ancient Mexican manuscript shows the earth as a square surrounded by sea, and in its center is a pyramid that has on its base the inscription Aztlan, which is close to Atlas and Atlantis? Why are pyramids found on both sides of the Atlantic?''

  "Because it's easier to build pyramids than spheres. Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon."

  "I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment," Diotallevi said.

  "Let me continue. The cult of Ra doesn't appear in Egyptian religion before the New Empire, and therefore it comes from the Celts. Remember Saint Nicholas and his sleigh? In prehistoric Egypt the ship of the Sun was a sleigh. Since there was no snow in Egypt, the sleigh's origin must have been Nordic..."

  I couldn't let that pass: "Before the invention of the wheel, sleighs were used also on sand."

  "Don't interrupt. The book says that first you identify the analogies and then you find the reasons. And it says that, in the end, the reasons are scientific. The Egyptians knew electricity. Without electricity they wouldn't have been able to do what they did. A German engineer placed in charge of the sewers of Baghdad discovered electric batteries still operating that dated back to the Sassanids. In the excavations of Babylon, accumulators were found that had been made four thousand years ago. And, finally, the Ark of the Covenant (which contained the Tables of the Law, Aaron's rod, and a pot of manna from the desert) was a kind of electric strongbox capable of producing discharges on the order of five hundred volts."

  "I saw that in a movie."

  "So what? Where do you think scriptwriters get their ideas? The ark was made of acacia wood sheathed in gold inside and out¡Xthe same principle as electric condensers, two conductors separated by an insulator. It was encircled by a garland, also of gold, and set in a dry region where the magnetic field reached five hundred to six hundred volts per vertical meter. It's said that Porsena used electricity to free his realm from the presence of a frightful animal called Volt."

  "Which is why Alessandro Volta chose that exotic pseudonym. Before, his name was simply Szmrszlyn Khraznapahwsh-kij."

  "Be serious. Also, besides the manuscripts, I have letters that offer revelations on the connections between Joan of Arc and the Sibylline Books, between Lilith the Talmudic demon and the hermaphroditic Great Mother, between the genetic code and the Martian alphabet, between the secret intelligence of plants, cosmology, psychoanalysis, and Marx and Nietzsche in the perspective of a new angelology, between the Golden Number and the Grand Canyon, Kant and occultism, the Eleusian mysteries and jazz, Cagliostro and atomic energy, homosexuality and gno-sis, the golem and the class struggle. In conclusion, a letter promising a work in eight volumes on the Grail and the Sacred Heart."

  "What's its thesis? That the Grail is an allegory of the Sacred Heart or that the Sacred Heart is an allegory of the Grail?''

  "He wants it both ways, I think. In short, gentlemen, I don't know what course to follow. We should sound out Signor Gar-amond."

  So we sounded him out. He said that, as a matter of principle, nothing should be thrown out, and we should give everyone a hearing.

  "But most of this stuff," I argued, "repeats things you can find on any station newsstand. Even published authors copy from one another, and cite one another as authorities, and all base their proofs on a sentence of lamblicus, so to speak."

  "Well," Garamond said, "would you try to sell readers something they knew nothing about? The Isis Unveiled books must deal with the exact same subjects as all the others. They confirm one another; therefore they're true. Never trust originality."

  "Very well," Belbo said, "but we can't tell what's obvious and what isn't. We need a consultant."

  "What sort of consultant?"

  "I don't know. He must be less credulous than a Diabolical, but he must know their world. And then tell us what direction we should take in Hermetics. A serious student of Renaissance Hermeticism..."

  "And the first time you hand him the Grail and the Sacred Heart," Diotallevi said, "he storms out, slamming the door."

  "Not necessarily."

  "I know someone who would be just right," I said. "He's certainly erudite; he takes these things fairly seriously, but with elegance, even irony, I'd say. I met him in Brazil, but he should be in Milan now. I must have his phone number somewhere."

  "Contact him," Garamond said. "Tentatively. It depends on the cost. And try also to make use of him for the wonderful adventure of metals."

  Aglie seemed happy to hear from me again. He inquired after the charming Amparo, and when I hinted that was over, he apologized and made some tactful remarks about how a young person could always begin, with ease, a new chapter in his life. I mentioned an editorial project. He showed interest, said he would be glad to meet us, and set a time, at his house.

  From the birth of Project Hermes until that day, I had enjoyed myself heedlessly at the expense of many people. Now, They were preparing to present the bill. I was as much of a bee as the ones we wanted to attract; and, like them, I was being quickly lured to a flower, though I didn't yet know what that flower was.

  46

  During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish...Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it.

  ¡XFrom a ritual of Aleister Crowley

  Aglifc lived in the Piazzale Susa area: a little secluded street, a turn-of-the-century building, soberly art nouveau. An elderly butler in a striped jacket opened the door and led us into a small sitting room, where he asked us to wait for the count.

  "So he's a count," Belbo whispered.

  "Didn't I tell you? He's Saint-Germain redivivus."

  "He can't be redivivus if he's never died," Diotallevi said. "Sure he's not Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew?"

  "According to some, the Comte de Saint-Germain had also been Ahasuerus."

  "You see?"
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  Aglte came in, impeccable as always. He shook our hands and apologized: a tiresome meeting, quite unforeseen, forced him to remain in his study for another ten minutes or so. He told the butler to bring coffee and begged us to make ourselves at home. Then he went out, drawing aside a heavy curtain of old leather. It wasn't a door, and as we were having our coffee, we heard agitated voices coming from the next room. At first we spoke loudly among ourselves, in order not to listen; then Belbo remarked that perhaps we were disturbing the others. In a moment of silence, we heard a voice, and a sentence that aroused our curiosity.

  Diotallevi got up and went over, as if he wanted to admire a seventeenth-century print on the wall by the curtain. It showed a mountain cave, to which some pilgrims were climbing by way of seven steps. Soon all three of us were pretending to study the print.

  The man we had heard was surely Bramanti, and the sentence was: "See here, I don't send devils to people's houses!"

  That day we realized Bramanti had not only a tapir's face but also a tapir's voice.

  The other voice belonged to a stranger: a thick French accent and a shrill, almost hysterical tone. From time to time Aglie's voice, soft and conciliatory, intervened.

  "Come, gentlemen," he was saying now, "you have appealed to my verdict, and I am honored, but you must therefore listen to me. Allow me, first of all, to say that you, dear Pierre, were imprudent, at the very least, in writing that letter..."

  "It's an extremely simple matter, Monsieur le Comte," the French voice replied. "This Signer Bramanti, he writes an article, in a publication we all respect, in which he indulges himself in some fairly strong irony about certain Luciferans, who, he says, make hosts fly though they don't even believe in the Real Presence, and they transmute silver, and so forth and so on. Bon, everyone knows that the only recognized Eglise Luciferienne is the one where I am the humble tauroboliaste and psychopompe, and it is also well known that my church does not indulge itself in vulgar Satanism and does not make ratatouille with hosts¡Xthings worthy of chan-oine Docre at Saint-Sulpice. In my letter I said that we are not vieux jeu Satanists, worshipers of the Grand Tenancierdu Mal, and that we do not have to ape the Church of Rome, with all those pyxes and those¡Xcomment dit-on?¡Xchasubles...We are, au con-traire, Palladians, as all the world knows, and, for us, Luciferre is the principe of good. If anything, it is Adonai who is the principe of evil, because He created this world, whereas Luciferre tried to oppose..."

  "All right," Bramanti said angrily. "I admit I may have been careless, but this doesn't entitle him to threaten me with sorcery!"

  "Mais voyons! It was a metaphor! You are the one who, in return, caused me to have the envoutement!"

  "Oh, of course, my brothers and I have time to waste, sending little devils around! We practice Dogma and the Ritual of High Magic: we are not witch doctors!"

  "Monsieur le Comte, I appeal to you. Signer Bramanti is notoriously in touch with the abbe Boutroux, and you well know that this priest is said to have the crucifix tattooed on the sole of his foot so that he may tread on Our Lord, or, rather, on his...Bon, I meet seven days ago this supposed abbe at the Du San-greal Bookshop, you know; he smiles at me, very slimy, as is his custom, and he says to me, ¡¥Well, we'll be hearing from each other one of these evenings.' What does it mean, one of these evenings? It means that, two evenings after, the visits begin. I am going to bed and I feel chocs strike my face, fluid chocs, you know; those emanations are easily recognized."

  "You probably rubbed the soles of your slippers on the carpet. ¡¥¡¥

  "Yes, yes, then why were the bibelots flying? Why did one of my alembiques strike my head, and my plaster Baphomet, it falls to the floor, and that a memento of my late father, and on the wall three writings appear in red, ordures I cannot repeat, hein? You know well that no more than a year ago the late Monsieur Gros accused that abbe1 there of making the cataplasms with fecal matter, forgive the expression, and the abbe condemned him to death, and two weeks later the poor Monsieur Gros, he dies mysteriously. This Boutroux handles poisons, the jury d'honneur summoned by the Martinists of Lyon said so..."

  "Slander," Bramanti growled.

  "Ah, that then! A trial in matters of this sort is always circumstantial..."

  "Yes, but nobody at the trial mentioned the fact that Monsieur Gros was an alcoholic in the last stages of cirrhosis."

  "Do not be enfantine! Sorcelery proceeds by natural ways; if one has a cirrhosis, they strike one in the cirrhosis. That is the ABC of black magic..."

  "Then all those who die of cirrhosis have the good Boutroux to blame. Don't make me laugh!"

  "Then tell me, please, what passed in Lyon in those two weeks...Deconsecrated chapel, host with Tetragramma-ton, your Boutroux with a great red robe with the cross upside down, and Madame Olcott, his personal voyante, among other things, with the trident that appears on her brow and the empty chalices that fill with blood by themselves, and the abbe who crached in the mouth of the faithful...Is that true or is it not?"

  "You've been reading too much Huysmans, my friend!" Bramanti laughed. "It was a cultural event, a pageant, like the celebrations of the school of Wicca and the Druid colleges!"

  "Ouais, the carnival of Venise..."

  We heard a scuffle, as if Bramanti was attempting to strike his adversary and Aglie was restraining him. "You see? You see?" the Frenchman said in a falsetto. "But guard yourself, Bramanti, and ask your friend Boutroux what happened to himl You don't know yet, but he's in the hospital. Ask him who broke his figure! Even if I do not practice that goety of yours, I know a little of it myself, and when I realized that my house was inhabited, I drew on the parquet the circle of defense, and since I do not believe, but your diablotines do, I removed the Carmelite scapular and made the contresign, the envoutement retourne, ah oui. Your abb6 passed a mauvais moment!"

  "You see? You see?" Bramanti was panting. "He's the one casting spells!"

  "Gentlemen, that's enough," Aglie said politely but firmly. "Now listen to me. You know how highly I value, on a cognitive level, these reexaminations of obsolete rituals, and for me the Luciferine Church and the Order of Satan are equally to be respected above and beyond their demonological differences. You know my skepticism in this matter. But, in the end, we all belong to the same spiritual knighthood, and I urge you to show a minimum of solidarity. After all, gentlemen, to involve the Prince of Darkness in a personal spat! How very childish! Come, come, these are occultists' tales. You are behaving like vulgar Freemasons. To be frank, yes, Boutroux is a dissident, and perhaps, my dear Bramanti, you might suggest to him that he sell to some junk dealer all that paraphernalia of his, like the props for a production of Boito's Mefistofele..."

  "Ha, c'est bien dit, ca," the Frenchman snickered. "C'est de la brocanterie..."

  "Let's try to see this in perspective. There has been a debate on what we will call liturgical formalisms, tempers have flared, but we mustn't make mountains out of molehills. Mind you, my dear Pierre, I am not for one moment denying the presence in your house of alien entities; it's the most natural thing in the world, but with a little common sense it could all be explained as a poltergeist."

  "Yes, I wouldn't exclude that possibility," Bramanti said. "The astral conjuncture at this time..."

  "Well then! Come, shake hands, and a fraternal embrace."

  We heard murmurs of reciprocal apologies. "You know yourself," Bramanti was saying, "sometimes to identify one who is truly awaiting initiation, it is necessary to indulge in a bit of folklore. Even those merchants of the Great Orient, who believe in nothing, have a ceremony."

  "Bien entendu, le rituel, ah ca..."

  "But these are no longer the days of Crowley. Is that clear?" Aglie said. "I must leave you now. I have other guests."

  We quickly went back to the sofa and waited for Aglie with composure and nonchalance.

  47

  Our exalted task then is to find order in these seven measures, a pattern that is distinct and will keep always t
he sense alert and the memory clear...This exalted and incomparable configuration not only performs the function of preserving entrusted things, words, and arts...but in addition it gives us true knowledge...

  ¡XGiulio Camillo Delminio, L'idea del Theatre, Florence, Torrentino, 1550, Introduction

  A few minutes later, Agile came in. "Do forgive me, dear friends, I had to deal with a dispute that was regrettable, to say the least. As my friend Casaubon knows, I consider myself a student of the history of religions, and for this reason people not infrequently come to me for illumination, relying perhaps more on my common sense than on my learning. It's odd how, among the adepts of sapiential studies, eccentric personalities are sometimes found...I don't mean the usual seekers after transcendental consolation, I don't mean the melancholy spirits, but men of profound knowledge and great intellectual refinement who nevertheless indulge in nocturnal fantasies and lose the ability to distinguish between traditional truth and the archipelago of the prodigious. The people with whom I spoke just now were arguing about childish conjectures. Alas, it happens in the best families, as they say. But do come into my little study, please, where we can converse in more comfortable surroundings."

  He raised the leather curtain and showed us into the next room. "Little study" is not how I would have described it; it was spacious, with walls of exquisite antique shelving crammed with handsomely bound books all of venerable age. What impressed me more than the books were some small glass cases filled with objects hard to identify¡Xthey looked like stones. And there were little animals, whether stuffed, mummified, or delicately reproduced I couldn't say. Everything was bathed in a diffuse crepuscular light that came from a large double-mullioned window at the end, with leaded diamond panes of transparent amber. The light from the window blended with that of a great lamp on a dark mahogany table covered with papers. It was one of those lamps sometimes found on reading tables in old libraries, with a dome of green glass that could cast a white oval on the page while leaving the surroundings in an opalescent penumbra. This play of two sources of light, both unnatural, somehow enlivened the polychrome of the ceiling. The ceiling was vaulted, supported on all four sides by a decorative fiction: little brick-red columns with tiny gilded capitals. The many trompe 1'oeil images, divided into seven areas, enhanced the effect of depth, and the whole room had the feeling of a mortuary chapel, impalpably sinful, melancholy, sensual.