"Like everybody else."
"Those were the days when, for a heretic, going to Mass was a torment. Might as well become Moslem. Anyway, that's the sort of people they were. And I'm telling you about them because, when the dualist heretics spread through Italy and Provence, they are called¡Xto indicate that they're like the Paulicians¡XPopelicans, Publicans, Populicans, who gallice etiam dicuntur ab aliquis popelicant!"
"So there they are."
"Yes, finally. The Paulicians continue into the ninth century, driving the Byzantine emperors crazy until Emperor Basil vows that if he gets his hands on their leader, Chrysocheir, who invaded the church of Saint John of God at Ephesus and watered his horse at the holy-water fonts..."
"A familiar nasty habit," Belbo said.
"...he'll shoot three arrows into his head. He sends the imperial army after Chrysocheir; they capture him, cut off his head, send it to the emperor, who places it on a table¡Xor a trumeau, on a little porphyry column¡Xand shoots three arrows, wham wham wham, into it, probably an arrow for each eye and the third for the mouth."
"Nice folks," Diotallevi said.
"They didn't do it to be mean," Belbo said. "It was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon: our Diotallevi doesn't understand theological fine points."
"To conclude: the Crusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them near Antioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics are fighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at the siege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philippopolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehar-douin tells us. Here's the connection with the Templars and the solution to our riddle. Legend has the Templars inspired by the Cathars, but it's really the other way around. The Templars, encountering the Paulician communities in the course of the Crusades, established mysterious relations with them, as they had before with the mystics and the Moslem heretics. Just follow the track of the Ordonation. It has to pass through the Balkans."
"Why?"
"Because, clearly, the sixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to the stone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslems venerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take off our shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don't know who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group of surviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connected with the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalem from Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, and there the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see how straightforward and economical the Plan becomes?"
"I must say I'm persuaded," Belbo said. "But where in the Balkans were the Popelicans waiting?"
"If you ask me, the natural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils, but the Templars of Provins couldn't have known that a few years later Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and remain under their dominion for five centuries."
"Which would suggest that the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany and Bulgaria. When was that to take place?"
"In 1824," Diotallevi said.
"Why's that?"
Diotallevi quickly sketched the following diagram:
PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCE GERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM
1344 1464 1584 1704 1824 1944
"In 1344 the first grand masters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribed places. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grand masters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixth master of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In 1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master. The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with the Paulicians fails, it must fail in 1824."
"Let's assume it fails," I said. "But I don't understand why such shrewd men, when they had four-sixths of the message in their hands, weren't able to reconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fell through, they didn't get in touch with the next group."
"Casaubon," Belbo said, "do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If they wanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years, they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knows where to find the master of the following group, but not where to find the others, and none of the later groups know where to find the masters of the preceding groups. If the Germans lose the Bulgarians, they'll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and the Jerusalemites won't know where anyone else is. As for reconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends on how the message has been divided. Certainly not~ in logical sequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message is incomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can't make any use of it."
"Just think," Diotallevi said. "If the Bulgarian meeting didn't take place, Europe today is the theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not finding one another, while each group knows that one small piece of information might be enough to make it master of the world. What's the name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe a Plot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battle to reconstruct a lost message. We don't see them, but, invisible, they act all around us."
The same idea then occurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and we quickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discovered that at least two expressions in the Provins message¡Xthe reference to thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and the hundred-and-twenty-year deadline¡Xalso appeared in the debate on the Rosicrucians.
"After all, they were Germans," I said. "I'll read the Rosi-crucian manifestoes."
"But you said the manifestoes were fake," Belbo said.
"So? What we're putting together is fake."
"True," he said. "I was forgetting that."
69
Elles deviennent le Diable: debiles, timorees, vaillantes a des heures exceptionnelles, sanglantes sans cesse, lacrymantes, caressantes, avec des bras qui ignorent les lois....Fi! Fi! Elles ne valent rien, elles sont faites d'un cote, d'un os courbe, d'une dissimulation rentree...Elles baisent le serpent...
¡XJules Bois, Le satanisme et la magie, Paris, Chailley, 1895,
He was forgetting that, yes. The following file, brief and dazed, surely belongs to this period.
FILENAME: Ennoia
You arrived at the house suddenly with your grass. I didn't want any, I won't allow any vegetable substance to interfere with the functioning of my brain (I'm lying, I smoke tobacco, drink distillations of grain). The few times, in the early sixties, when somebody forced me to share in the circulation of a joint, with that cheap slimy paper impregnated with saliva, and the last drag using a pin, I wanted to laugh.
But yesterday it was you offering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way of offering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the way nobody's danced for years, and¡Xthe shame of it¡Xwhile Mahler's Fourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creature were yeasting, with the sweet and wrinkled face of an old nanny goat, a serpent rising from the depths of my loins, and I worshiped you as a very old and universal aunt. Probably I went on holding my body close to yours, but I felt also that you were in flight, ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked doors, moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly, Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.
Was it not you I sought all along? I am here, always waiting for you. Did I lose you, each time, because I didn't recognize you? Did I lose you, each time, because I did recognize you but was afraid? Lose you because each time, recognizing you, I knew I had to lose you?
But where did you end up last night? I woke this morning with a headache.
70
Let us remember well, however, the secret references,to a period of 120 years that brother A...., the successor of D and last of the second line of succession¡Xwho lived among many of us¡Xaddressed to us,
we of the third line of succession...
¡XFama Fratemitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1614
First thing, I read through the two manifestoes of the Rosicrucians, the Fama and the Confessio. I also took a look at the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz by Johann Valentin Andreae, because Andreae was the presumed author of the manifestoes.
The two manifestoes appeared in Germany between 1614 and 1615, thus about thirty years after the 1584 meeting between the French and English Templars and almost a century before the French were to meet with the Germans.
I read, not to believe what the manifestoes said, but to look beyond them, as if the words meant something else. To help them mean something else, I knew I should skip some passages and attach more importance to some statements than to others. But this was exactly what the Diabolicals and their masters were teaching us. If you move in the refined time of revelation, do not follow the fussy, philistine chains of logic and their monotonous sequentiality.
Taken literally, these two texts were a pile of absurdities, riddles, contradictions. Therefore they could not be saying what they seemed to be saying, and were neither a call to profound spiritual reformation nor the story of poor Christian Rosen-creutz. They were a coded message to be read by superimposing them on a grid, a grid that left certain spaces free while covering others. Like the coded message of Provins, where only the initial letters counted. Having no grid, I had to assume the existence of one. I had to read with mistrust.
The manifestoes spoke of the Plan of Provins¡Xthere could be no doubt about that. In the grave of C. R. (allegory of the Grange-aux-Dimes, the night of June 23, 1344) a treasure had been placed for posterity to discover, a treasure "hidden....for one hundred and twenty years." It was not money; that much was clear. Not only was there a polemic against the unrestrained greed of the alchemists, but the text said openly that what had been promised was a great historical change. And if the reader failed to understand that, the second manifesto said that there could be no ignoring an offer that concerned the miranda sextae aetatis (the wonders of the sixth and final appointment!), and it repeated: "If only it had pleased God to bring down to us the light of his sixth Candelabrum...if only we could read everything in a single book and, reading it, understand and remember....How pleasant it would be if through song (the message read aloud!) we could transform rocks (lapis exillis!) into pearls and precious stones..." And there was further talk of arcane secrets, and of a government that was to be established in Europe, and of a "great work" to be achieved...
It was said that C. R. had gone to Spain (or Portugal?) and had shown the learned there "whence to draw the true indicia of future centuries," but in vain. Why in vain? Was it because a group of German Templars at the beginning of the seventeenth century made public a very closely guarded secret, forced to come out into the open on account of a halt in the process of the transmission of the message?
The manifestoes undeniably tried to reconstruct the phases of the Plan as Diotallevi had summarized them. The first brother whose death was mentioned was Brother I. O., who had "come to the end" in England. So someone had arrived triumphantly at the first appointment. And a second line of succession was mentioned, and a third. Thus far all was apparently in order: the second line, the English one, met the third line, the French one, in 1584. Those writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century spoke only of what had happened to the first three groups. In the Chemical Wedding, written by Andreae in his youth, hence before the manifestoes (even if they appeared as early as 1614), three majestic temples were mentioned, the three places that must already have been known.
Yet, reading, I realized that while the two manifestoes did indeed speak later in the same terms as the Chemical Wedding, it was as if something upsetting had happened meanwhile.
For example, why such insistence on the fact that the time had come, the moment had come, though the enemy had employed all his tricks to keep the occasion from materializing? What occasion? It was said that C. R.'s final goal was Jerusalem, but he hadn't been able to reach Jerusalem. Why not? The Arabs were praised because they exchanged messages, but in Germany the learned didn't know how to assist one another. What did that mean? And there was a reference to "a larger group that wants the pasture all for itself." Evidently some party, pursuing its private interests, was trying to upset the Plan, and evidently there had in fact been a serious setback.
The Fama said that at the beginning someone had worked out a magic writing (why of course, the message of Provins), but that the Clock of God struck every minute "whereas ours is unable to strike even the hours." Who had missed the strokes of the divine clock, who had failed to arrive at a certain place at the right moment? There was a reference to an original group of brothers who could have revealed a secret philosophy but had decided, instead, to disperse throughout the world.
The manifestoes breathed uneasiness, uncertainty, bewilderment. The brothers of the first lines of succession had each arranged to be replaced "by a worthy successor," but "they decided to keep secret....the place of their burial and even today we do not know where they are buried."
What did this really refer to? What sepulcher was without an address? It was becoming obvious to me that the manifestoes were written because some information had been lost. An appeal was being made to anyone who happened to possess that information: He should come forward.
The end of the Fama was unequivocal: "Again we ask all the learned of Europe...to consider with kindly disposition our offer...to let us know their reflections...Because even if for the present we have not revealed our names....anyone who sends us his name will be able to confer with us personally, or¡X if some impediment exists¡Xin writing."
This was exactly what the colonel had intended to do by publishing his story: force someone to emerge from his silence.
There had been a gap, a hiatus, an unraveling. In the tomb of C. R., there was written not only post 120 annos patebo, to recall the schedule of the appointments, but also Nequaquam vacuum; not "The void does not exist," but "The void should not exist." A void had been created, and it had to be filled!
Once again I asked myself: Why were these things being said in Germany, where, if anything, the fourth line should simply wait with saintly patience for its own turn to come? The Germans couldn't complain¡Xin 1614¡Xof a failed appointment in Marienburg, because the Marienburg appointment would not take place until 1704.
Only one conclusion was possible: the Germans were complaining because the preceding appointment had not taken place.
This was the key! The Germans (the fourth line) were lamenting the fact that the English (the second line) had failed to reach the French (the third line). Of course. In the text you could find allegories that were almost childishly transparent: the tomb of C. R. is opened and in it are found the signatures of the brothers of the first and second circles, but not of the third. The Portuguese and the English are there, but where are the French?
In other words, the English had missed the French. Yet the English, according to what we had established, were the only ones who had any idea where to find the French, just as the French were the only ones who had any idea where to find the Germans. So, even if the French found the Germans in 1704, they would have shown up minus two-thirds of what they were supposed to deliver.
The Rosicrucians came out into the open, accepting the known risks, because that was the only way to save the Plan.
71
We do not even know with certainty if the Brothers of the second line possessed the same knowledge as those of the first, or if they were given all the secrets.
¡XFama Fraternitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1614
I told Belbo and Diotallevi. They agreed that the secret meaning of the manifestoes should be clear even to a Diabolical.
"Now it's all clear," Diotallevi said. "We were stuck on the notion that the Plan had been blocked at the passage from the Germans to the Paul
icians, while in fact it had been blocked in 1584, at the passage from England to France."
"But why?" Belbo asked. "What reason can there be that the English were unable to keep their appointment with the French in 1584? The English knew where the Refuge was."
Seeking truth, he turned to Abulafia. As a test, he asked for two random entries. The output was:
Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancee
Thirty days hath September April June and November
"Now, let's see," Belbo said. "Minnie has an appointment with Mickey, but by mistake she makes it for the thirty-first of September, and Mickey..."
"Hold it, everybody!" I said. "Minnie could have made a mistake only if her date with Mickey was for October 5, 1582!"
"Why?"
"The Gregorian reform of the calendar! Why, it's obvious. In 1582 the Gregorian reform went into effect, correcting the Julian calendar; and to make things come out even, ten days in the month of October were abolished, the fifth to the fourteenth!"
"But the appointment in France is for 1584, Saint John's Eve, June 23."
"That's right. But as I recall, the reform didn't go into effect immediately everywhere." I consulted the perpetual calendar we had on the shelf. "Here we are. The reform was promulgated in 1582, and the days between October 5 and October 14 were abolished, but this applied only to the pope. France adopted the new calendar in 1583 and abolished the tenth to the nineteenth of December. In Germany there was a schism: the Catholic regions adopted the reform in 1584, with Bohemia, but the Protestant regions adopted it in 1775, almost two hundred years later, and Bulgaria¡Xand this is a fact to bear in mind¡Xadopted it only in 1917! Now, let's look at England...It adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. That's to be expected: in their hatred of the papists, the Anglicans also held out for two centuries. So you see what happened. France abolished ten days at the end of 1583, and by June 1584 the French were all accustomed to it. But when it was June 23, 1584, in France, in England it was still June 13, and ask youself whether a good Englishman, Templar though he may have been, would have taken this into account. They drive on the left even today, and ignored the decimal system for ages...So, then, the English show up at the Refuge on what for them is June 23, except that for the French it's already July 3. We can assume the appointment wasn't to take place with fanfares; it would be a furtive meeting at a certain corner at a certain hour. The French go to the place on June 23; they wait a day, two days, three, seven, and then they leave, thinking that something has happened. Maybe they give up in despair on the very eve of July 3. The English arrive on the third and find nobody there. Maybe they also wait a week, and nobody shows. The two grand masters have missed each other." "Sublime," Belbo said. "That's what happened. But why is it the German Rosicrucians who go public, and not the English?"
Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Page 41