Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  "Then the meaning of Shell is qelippot? We'd better not use it anymore. From now on, only Virgin's Milk..."

  "We'll check. It could be a trick of the Seven Sisters, lower emanations trying to control the process of creation...In any case, after expansion, behold the great divine release, the exhaust. The piston rises again to the upper neutral position and expels the formless matter, now combusted. Only if this process of purification succeeds can the new cycle begin. Which, if you think about it, is also the Neoplatonic mechanism of Exodus and Parodos, miraculous dialectic of the Way Up and the Way Down."

  "Quantum mortalia pectora ceacae noctis habent! And the sons of matter never realized it!"

  "They never saw the connection between the philosopher's stone and Firestone."

  "For tomorrow, I'll prepare a mystical interpretation of the phone book."

  "Ever ambitious, our Casaubon. Mind you, there you'll have to solve the unfathomable problem of the One and the Many. Better succeed slowly. Start, instead, with the washing machine."

  "That's too easy. The alchemistic transformation from black to whiter than white."

  67

  Da Rosa, nada digamos agora....

  ¡XSampayo Bruno, Os Cavalheiros do Amor, Lisbon, Guimaraes, 1960, p. 155

  When you assume an attitude of suspicion, you overlook no clue. After our fantasy on the power train and the Tree of the Sefirot, I was prepared to see symbols in every object I came upon.

  I had kept in touch with my Brazilian friends, and in Portugal just then, at Coimbra, a conference was being held on Lusitanian culture. More out of a wish to see me again than out of respect for my expertise, my Rio friends managed to have me invited. Lia didn't go with me; she was in her seventh month, and though her pregnancy had changed her slender figure only slightly, transforming her into a Flemish madonna, she preferred to stay home.

  I spent three merry evenings with my old comrades. As we were returning by bus to Lisbon, an argument developed about whether we should stop at Fatima or Tomar. Tomar was the castle to which the Portuguese Templars had withdrawn after the king and the pope saved them from trial and ruin by transforming them into the Order of the Knights of Christ. I couldn't miss a Templar castle, and luckily the rest of the party was not enthusiastic about Fatima.

  If I could have invented a Templar castle, it would have been Tomar. You reach it by ascending a fortified road that flanks the outer bastions, which have cruciform slits, and you breathe Crusader air from the first moment. The Knights of Christ prospered for centuries in that place. Tradition has it that both Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus belonged to that order, and in fact it devoted itself to the conquest of the seas¡Xmaking the fortune of Portugal. The knights' long and happy existence there had caused the castle to be rebuilt and extended through the centuries, so to its medieval part were joined Renaissance and Baroque wings. I was moved as I entered the church of the Templars, which had an octagonal rotunda reproducing that of the Holy Sepulcher, and I was surprised to see that the Templars' crosses had different forms, depending on their location. It was a problem I had encountered before, when I went through the confused iconography on the subject. Whereas the cross of the Knights of Malta had remained more or less the same, the Templar cross had been influenced by periods and local traditions. That's why Templar-hunters, finding any kind of cross in a place, immediately think they've discovered a trace of the knights.

  Our guide took us to see the Manueline window, the janela par excellence, a filigree, a collage of marine and submarine troves, seaweeds, shells, anchors, capstans, and chains, celebrating the knights' achievements on the oceans. The window was framed by two towers, which were decorated with carvings of the insigne of the Garter. What was the symbol of an English order doing in a Portuguese fortified monastery? The guide couldn't say; but a little later, on another side, the northeast, I believe, he showed us the insigne of the Golden Fleece. I couldn't help thinking of the subtle game of alliances that had united the Garter to the Golden Fleece, the Fleece to the Argonauts, the Argonauts to the Grail, and the Grail to the Templars. Remembering Colonel Ardenti's narrative and a few pages from the Diabolicals' manuscripts, I started when our guide showed us into a side room whose ceiling was gripped by keystones. They were rosettes, but on some of them was carved a bearded caprine face: Baphomet...

  We went down into a crypt. After seven steps, a bare stone floor led to the apse, where an altar could stand, or the chair of the grand master. You reached it by passing beneath seven keystones, each in the form of a rose, one larger than the next, with the last set over a well. The Cross and the Rose, in a Templar monastery, and in a room surely built before the Rosicrucian manifestoes...I put some questions to the guide. He smiled. "If you knew how many students of the occult sciences come here on pilgrimages....It's said that this was the initiation chamber."

  Entering by chance a room not yet restored, which contained a few pieces of dusty furniture, I found the floor cluttered with great cardboard boxes. Rummaging at random, I uncovered some fragments of volumes in Hebrew, presumably from the seventeenth century. What were the Jews doing in Tomar? The guide told me that the knights had maintained friendly relations with the local Jewish community. He had me look out the window and showed me a little garden designed like an elegant French maze¡Xthe work, he told me, of an eighteenth-century Jewish architect: Samuel Schwarz.

  The second appointment in Jerusalem....And the first at the Castle? Wasn't that how the message of Provins went? By God, the Castle of the Ordonation mentioned in Ingolf's document was not the Monsalvat of chivalric novels, the Avalon of the Hyperboreal. No. What castle would the Templars of Provins, more used to directing commandaries than to reading romances of the Round Table, have chosen for their first meeting place? Why, Tomar, the castle of the Knights of Christ, a place where survivors of the order enjoyed complete freedom, unchanged guarantees, and where they could be in contact with the agents of the second group!

  I left Tomar and Portugal with my mind ablaze. No longer was I laughing at the'message Ardenti had shown us. The Templars, when they became a secret order, worked out a Plan that was to last six hundred years and conclude in our century. The Templars were serious men. If they talked about a castle, they meant a real castle. The Plan began at Tomar. And what would the ideal route have been, the sequence of the other five meetings? Places where the Templars could count on friendship, protection, complicity. The colonel spoke of Stonehenge, Avalon, Agarttha...Nonsense. The message had to be completely re-studied.

  Of course¡XI reminded myself on my way home¡Xthe idea is not to discover the Templars' secret, but to construct it.

  Belbo seemed disturbed at the thought of going back to the document left by the colonel, and he found it only after digging reluctantly in a lower drawer. But, I saw, he had kept it. Together we reread the Provins message, after so many years.

  It began with the message coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisibles separez en six bandes. And then:

  a la....Saint Jean

  36 p charrete de fein

  6...entiers avec saiel

  p....les blancs mantiax

  r...5...chevaliers de Pruins pour la....j. nc.

  6 foil 6 en 6 places

  chascune foiz 20 a...720 a...

  iceste est I ¡¥ordonation

  al donjon li premiers

  it li secunz joste iceus qui....pans

  it al refuge

  it a Nostre Dame de I'altre part de I'iau

  it a I ¡¥ostel des popelicans

  it a la pierre

  3 foiz 6 avant la feste....la Grant Pute.

  "Thirty-six years after the hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealed messages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsed knights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twenty years each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, this is the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate the bread, then at the Refuge, then at Our
Lady Beyond the River, then at the House of the Pope-licans, then at the Stone. You see, in 1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, in fact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we must ask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you are an escaping Templar, where would you go to form the second group?''

  "H'm...If it's true that those in the wain fled to Scotland....But why should they have gone to Scotland in particular to eat the bread?"

  I was becoming a master of chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland. Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice. Saint John's Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about Saint John's Fire in Frazer's Golden Bough.

  I telephoned Lia. "Do me a favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about Saint John's Fire."

  Lia was terrific at this sort of thing. She found the chapter at once. "What do you want to know? It's a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all European countries. It's celebrated at the moment when the sun is at its peak. Saint John was added to make the thing Christian..."

  "Do they eat bread in Scotland?"

  "Let me see...I don't think so...Ah, here it is: they don't eat bread for Saint John, but on the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires, originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in the Scottish highlands..."

  "We've got it! What kind?"

  "They knead a cake of flour and oats and toast it on embers...Then a rite follows that recalls ancient human sacrifices...The bread's called bannock cakes..."

  "What? Spell it!" She did, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morgan le Fay, and other endearments.

  I tried to remember my thesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge in Scotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped the king win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them up as the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of Scotland.

  I took a big English dictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok in Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind of cake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or other grain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn as the French Templars would have done when they sent news from Scotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get something like the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread. Those who ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of the bread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time had spread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal to England. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti's from Pole to Palestine.

  68

  Let your garments be white...If it is dark, set many lights burning...Now begin combining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them until your heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the letters and to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heart is warm, when you see that through the combination of the letters you grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with the aid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence of the divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundity of your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higher angels, as if they were human beings beside you.

  ¡XAbulafia, Sefer Haie Olam

  "It makes sense," Belbo said. "And in that ease, where would the Refuge be?"

  "The six groups settle in six places, but only one place is called the Refuge. Odd. This must mean that in the other places, like Portugal and Britain, the Templars can live undisturbed, although under another name, whereas in the Refuge they are completely hidden. I would say it is where the Templars of Paris went after they left the Temple. To me it seems economical for the route to go to England from France, but why not assume that the Templars took an even more economical course and set up a refuge in a secret and protected place in Paris itself? Being sound politicians, they reasoned that in two hundred years the situation would change and they would be able to act in the light of day, or almost."

  "Paris it is. And the fourth place?"

  "The colonel was thinking of Chartres, but if we make Paris the third place, we can't put down Chartres as the fourth, because obviously the Plan has to involve all the centers of Europe. Besides, we're leaving the mystical trail to work out a political trail. The pattern appears to be a sine wave, so we should go to the north of Germany. ¡¥Beyond the water,' that is, beyond the Rhine, there's a city¡Xnot a church¡Xof Our Lady. Near Danzig, there's a city of the Virgin¡Xin other words, Marienburg."

  "Why meet at Marienburg?"

  "Because it was the seat of the Teutonic Knights! Relations between the Templars and the Teutonics hadn't been poisoned like those between the Templars and the Hospitalers, who had waited like vultures for the suppression of the Temple in order to seize its wealth. The Teutonics were created in Palestine by German emperors as a counterbalance to the Templars, but they were soon called north to stem the invasion of Prussian barbarians. They succeeded so well that in the space of two centuries they became a state that spread out over all the Baltic lands. They moved between Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia. They founded KQnigsberg. They were defeated only once, by Alek-sandr Nevski in Estonia. About the time the Templars were arrested in Paris, the Teutonics established the capital of their realm at Marienburg. If there was any spiritual-knighthood plan of world conquest, the Templars and the Teutonics had divided the spheres of influence between them."

  "You know what?" Belbo said. "I'm with you. Now the fifth group. Where are these Popelicans?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "You disappoint me, Casaubon. Maybe we should ask Abu-lafia."

  "No. Abulafia can only connect facts, not create them. The Popelicans are a fact, not a connection, and facts are the province of Sam Spade. Give me a few days."

  "I'll give you two weeks," Belbo said. "If, within two weeks, you don't hand the Popelicans over to me, you'll buy me a bottle of twelve-year-old Ballantine's."

  Beyond my means. A week later I delivered the Popelicans to my greedy partners.

  "It's all clear. Now follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to Byzantium, when various movements of Manichean inspiration have already spread throughout the Mediterranean. We begin with the Archontics, founded in Armenia by Peter of Capharbarucha¡Xand you have to admit that's a pretty grand name. Anti-Semitic, the Archontics identify the Devil with Sabaoth, the god of the Jews, who lives in the seventh heaven. To reach the Great Mother of Light in the eighth heaven, it is necessary to reject both Sabaoth and baptism. All right?"

  "Consider them rejected," Belbo said.

  "But the Archontics are still nice kids at heart. In the fifth century the Massalians come along, and actually they survive until the eleventh century, in Thrace. The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they have dealings with the infernal powers, and in fact some texts call them Borborites, from borboros, filth, because of the unspeakable things they do."

  "What do they do?"

  "The usual unspeakable things. Men and women hold in the palm of their hand, and raise to heaven, their own ignominy, namely, sperm or menstruum, then eat it, calling it the Body of Christ. And if by chance a woman is made pregnant, at the opportune moment they stick a hand into her womb, pull out the embryo, throw it into a mortar, mix in some honey and pepper, and gobble it up."

  "How revolting, honey and pepper!" Diotallevi said.

  "So those are the Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latter-day Gnostics, therefore dualists, who worshiped the Great Mother Barbelo, and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics, or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect, the Rotary Club of the whole business. But maybe the Stratiotics were only the Hylics of the Mithraists."

  "Sounds a bit confused
," Belbo said.

  "Naturally. None of these people left records. The only things we know about them come to us from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. I'm just trying to show you what a mess the Middle East was at the time. And to set the stage for the Paulicians. These are the followers of a certain Paul, joined by some iconoclasts expelled from Albania. From the eighth century on, the Paulicians grow rapidly, the sect becomes a community, the community a force, a political power, and the emperors of Byzantium, beginning to get worried, send the imperial armies against them. The Paulicians extend as far as the confines of the Arab world; they spread toward the Euphrates, and northward as far as the Black Sea. They establish colonies more or less everywhere, and we find them as late as the seventeenth century, when they are converted by the Jesuits, and some communities still exist today in the Balkans or thereabouts. Now, what do the Paulicians believe in? In God, One and Three, except that the Demiurge defiantly created the world, with the unfortunate results visible to all. The Paulicians reject the Old Testament, refuse the sacraments, despise the Cross, and don't honor the Virgin, because Christ was incarnated directly in heaven and passed through Mary as through a pipe. The Bogo-mils, who are partly derived from them, say that Christ went in one ear of Mary and came out the other, without her even noticing. The Paulicians are also accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing children's blood in their bread and the Eucharistic wine."