Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  A chemical trick, I thought, but then I reflected: we were at an altitude of about six hundred meters, and it was possible that this was an actual cloud. Foretold by the rite? Summoned? Or was it just that the celebrants knew that on that hilltop, under favorable conditions, those erratic banks of vapor formed just above the ground?

  It was difficult to resist the fascination of the scene. The celebrants' tunics blended with the white of the cloud, and their forms entered and emerged from that milky obscurity as if it had spawned them.

  There was a moment when the cloud filled the entire center of the little meadow. Some wisps, rising, separating, almost hid the moon, but the clearing was still bright at its edges. We saw a Druidess come from the cloud and run toward the wood, crying out, her arms in front of her. I thought she had discovered us and was hurling curses. But she stopped within a few meters of us, changed direction, and began running in a circle around the cloud, disappearing in the whiteness to the left, only to reappear after a few minutes from the right. Again she was very close to us, and I could see her face.

  She was a sibyl with a great, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which opened like a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and one skewed canine. The eyes were shifty, hawklike, piercing. I heard, or thought I heard¡Xor think now that I remember hearing, but I may be superimposing other memories¡Xa series of Gaelic words mixed with evocations in a kind of Latin, something on the order of "O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!" Suddenly the fog lifted, disappeared, the clearing became bright again, and I saw that it had been invaded by a troop of pigs, their short necks encircled by garlands of green apples. The Druidess who had blown the trumpet, still atop the dolmen, now brandished a knife.

  "We go now," Aglie said sharply. "It's over."

  I realized, as I heard him, that the cloud was above us and around us, and I could barely make out my companions.

  "What do you mean, over?" Garamond said. "Looks to me like the real stuff is just beginning!"

  "What you were permitted to see is over. Now it is not permitted. We must respect the rite. Come."

  He reentered the wood, was promptly swallowed up by the mist that enfolded us. We shivered as we moved, slipping 01 dead leaves, panting, in disarray, like a fleeing army, and regrouped at the road. We could be in Milan in less than two hours. Before getting back into Garamond's car, Aglie said goodbye to us: "You must forgive me for interrupting the show for you. I wanted you to learn something, to see the people for whom you are now working. But it was not possible to stay. When I was informed of this event, I had to promise I wouldn't disturb the ceremony. Our continued presence would have had a negative effect on what follows."

  "And the pigs? What happens to them?" Belbo asked.

  "What I could tell you, I have told you."

  63

  ¡¥What does the fish remind you of?" ¡¥Other fish."

  ¡¥And what do other fish remind you of?" ¡¥Other fish."

  ¡XJoseph Heller, Catch-22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii

  I came back from Piedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgot the desires that had grazed me.

  Still, our expedition left other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time I wasn't troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter by chapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals, but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any more than I had been able to in Rio. How was this Reaumur cylindrical stove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, or from this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterus for the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if they had installed the Deutsches Museum in the Piedmont castle I had visited the week before.

  It was becoming harder for me to keep apart the world of magic and what today we call the world of facts. Men I had studied in school as bearers of mathematical and physical enlightenment now turned up amid the murk of superstition, for I discovered they had worked with one foot in cabala and the other in the laboratory. Or was I rereading all history through the eyes of our Diabolicals? But then I would find texts above all suspicion that told me how in the time of positivism physicists barely out of the university dabbled in stances and astrological cena-cles, and how Newton had arrived at the law of gravity because he believed in the existence of occult forces, which recalled his investigations into Rosicrucian cosmology.

  I had always thought that doubting was a scientific duty, but now I came to distrust the very masters who had taught me to doubt.

  I said to myself: I'm like Amparo; I don't believe in it, yet I surrender to it. Yes, I caught myself marveling over the fact that the height of the Great Pyramid really was one-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun, and that you really could draw striking parallels between Celtic and Amerind mythologies. And I began to question everything around me: the houses, die shop signs, the clouds in the sky, and the engravings in the library, asking them to tell me not their superficial story but another, deeper story, which they surely were hiding¡Xbut finally would reveal thanks to the principle of mystic resemblances.

  Lia saved me, at least temporarily.

  I told her everything¡Xor almost¡Xabout the trip to Piedmont, and evening after evening I came home with curious new bits of information to add to my file of cross references. She said, "Eat. You're thin as a rail." One evening, she sat beside me at the desk. With her hair parted in the middle of her brow, she could now look straight into my eyes. She had her hands in her lap: a housewifely pose. I had never seen her sit like that before, her legs wide, skirt taut from knee to knee. An inelegant position, I thought. But then I saw her face: radiant, slightly flushed. I listened to her¡Xthough I didn't yet know why¡Xwith respect.

  "Pow," she said, "I don't like what's happening to you with this Manutius business. First you collected facts the way people collect seashells. Now it's as if you were marking down lottery numbers."

  "I just enjoy myself more, with the Diabolicals."

  "It's not enjoyment; it's passion. There's a difference. Be careful: they'll make you sick."

  "Now, don't exaggerate. They're the sick ones, not I. You don't go crazy because you work in an asylum."

  "That remains to be seen."

  "You know, I've always been suspicious of analogies. But now I find myself at a great feast of analogies, a Coney Island, a Moscow May Day, a Jubilee Year of analogies, and I'm beginning to wonder if by any chance there isn't a reason."

  "I've seen your files, Pow," Lia said to me, "because I have to keep them in order. Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a good look." And she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet nurse, solid and healthy¡Xshe so slim and supple¡Xwith a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority.

  "Pow, archetypes don't exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there's a little man, a date, a baobab.

  "And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn't stink as much, because it's better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above¡Xyou really have to be in an attic¡Xwhile you often hurt yourself falling. That's why up is angelic and down devilish.

  "But because what I said before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down and inside ar
e beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the spirit of Mercury and Manichean-ism have nothing to do with it. Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you're a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if you touch it, gives you a blister this big; therefore, if you think of something preserved for millennia, like wisdom, you have to think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you then want to know why wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it's because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would rise and there wouldn't be rain."

  "Yes, Mama."

  "Yes indeed, my child. The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with. The easiest way to return from where you've been without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus. Furthermore, if you have to make a ceremony to invoke the sun, it's best to move in a circle, because if you go in a straight line, you move away from home, which means the ceremony will have to be kept short. The circle is the most convenient arrangement for any rite, even the fire-eaters in the marketplace know this, because in a circle everybody can see the one who's in the center, whereas if a whole tribe formed a straight line, like a squad of soldiers, the people at the ends wouldn't see. And that's why the circle and rotary motion and cyclic return are fundamental to every cult and every rite."

  "Yes, Mama."

  "We move on to the magic numbers your authors are so fond of. You are one and not two, your cock is one and my cunt is one, and we have one nose and one heart; so you see how many important things come in ones. But we have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, my breasts, your balls, legs, arms, buttocks. Three is the most magical of all, because our body doesn't know that number; we don't have three of anything, and it should be a very mysterious number that we attribute to God, wherever we live. But if you think about it, I have one cunt and you have one cock¡Xshut up and don't joke¡Xand if we put these two together, a new thing is made, and we become three. So you don't have to be a university professor or use a computer to discover that all cultures on earth have ternary structures, trinities.

  "But two arms and two legs make four, and four is a beautiful -number when you consider that animals have four legs and little children go on all fours, as the Sphinx knew. We hardly have to discuss five, the fingers of the hand and then with both hands you get that other sacred number, ten. There have to be ten commandments because, if there were twelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up his fingers, and comes to the last two, he'd have to borrow a hand from the sacristan.

  "Now, if you take the body and count all the things that grow from the trunk, arms, legs, head, and cock, you get six; but for women it's seven. For this reason, it seems to me that among your authors six is never taken seriously, except as the double of three, because it's familiar to the males, who don't have any seven. So when the males rule, they prefer to see seven as the mysterious sacred number, forgetting about women's tits, but what the hell.

  "Eight....eight....give me a minute...If arms and legs don't count as one apiece but two, because of elbows and knees, you have eight parts that move; add the torso and you have nine, add the head and you have ten. Just sticking with the body, you can get all the numbers you want. The orifices, for example."

  "The orifices?"

  "Yes. How many holes does the body have?"

  I counted. "Eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, ass: eight."

  "You see? Another reason eight is a beautiful number. But I have nine! And with that ninth I bring you into the world, therefore nine is holier than eight! Or, if you like, take the anatomy of your menhir, which your authors are always talking about. Standing up during the day, lying down at night¡Xyour thing, too. No, don't tell me what it does at night. The fact is that erect it works and prone it rests. So the vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: if you worship a vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, you can all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone, only those in the front row can see it, and the others start pushing, me too, me too, which is not a fitting sight for a magical ceremony..."

  "But rivers..."

  "Rivers are worshiped not because they're horizontal, but because there's water in them, and you don't need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body...Anyway, that's how we're put together, all of us, and that's why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they're shown an alchemist's oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist's oven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror."

  "You always tell me the truth. You see my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want to discover all the secret archetypes of the body." That evening we inaugurated the expression "discovering archetypes" to indicate our moments of greatest intimacy.

  I was half-asleep when Lia touched my shoulder. "I almost forgot," she said. "I'm pregnant."

  I should have listened to Lia. She spoke with the wisdom of life and birth. Venturing into the underground passages of Agart-tha, into the pyramid of Isis Unveiled, we had entered Gevurah, the Sefirah of fear, the moment in which wrath manifests itself in the world. I had let myself be seduced by the thought of Sophia. Moses Cordovero says that the Female is to the left, and all her attributes point to Gevurah....unless the Male, using these attributes, adorns his Bride, and causes her to move to the right, toward good. Every desire must remain within its limits. Otherwise Gevurah becomes Judgment, the dark appearance, the universe of demons.

  To discipline desire....This I had done in the tenda de um-banda. I had played the agogd, I had taken an active part in the spectacle, and I had escaped the trance. I had done the same with Lia: I had regulated desite out of homage to the Bride, and I had been rewarded in the depths of my loins; my seed had been blessed.

  But I was not to persevere. I was to be seduced by the beauty of Tiferet.

  TIFERET

  64

  To dream of living in a new and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead live elsewhere, nor is it known where.

  ¡XGerolamo Cardano, Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, p. 58

  While Gevurah is the Sefirah of awe and evil, Tiferet is the Sefirah of beauty and harmony. As Diotallevi said: It is the light of understanding, the tree of life; it is pleasure, hale appearance. It is the concord of Law and Freedom.

  And that year was for us the year of pleasure, of the joyful subversion of the great text of the universe, in which we celebrated the nuptials of Tradition and the Electronic Machine. We created, and we delighted in our creation. It was the year in which we invented the Plan.

  For me at least, it was truly a happy year. Lia's pregnancy proceeded tranquilly, and between Garamond and my agency I was beginning to make a comfortable living. I kept my office in the old factory building, but we remodeled Lia's apartment.

  The wonderful adventure of metals was now in the hands of the compositors and proofreaders. That was when Signor Garamond had his bra
instorm: "An illustrated history of magic and the hermetic sciences. With the material that comes in from the Diabolicals, with the expertise you three have acquired, with the advice of that incredible man Aglie, we can put together a big volume, four hundred pages, dazzling full-color plates, in less than a year. Reusing some of the graphics from the history of metals."

  "But the subject matter is so different," I said. "What can I do with a photograph of a cyclotron?''

  "What can you do with it? Imagination, Casaubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they're called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It's magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermes. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old Abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don't you see? The real magician isn't the bleary-eyed guy who doesn't understand a thing; it's the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us! Hint that at Mount Pal-omar they know more than they're letting on..."

  To encourage me, he gave me a raise, almost perceptible. I concentrated on the miniatures of the Liber Solis of Trismosin, the Mutus Liber of Pseudo-Lullus; I filled folders with pentacles, sefirotic trees, decans, talismans; I combed the loneliest rooms of libraries; I bought dozens of volumes from booksellers who in the old days had peddled the cultural revolution.