Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  "Fool," Dee said to him.

  Spenser was pale. He said, with some effort: "We can cast sortie bait. I am finishing a poem. An allegory about the queen of the fairies. What if I put in a knight of the Red Cross? The real Templars will recognize themselves, will understand that we know, will get in touch with us..."

  "I know you," Dee said. "Before you finish your poem and people find out about it, a lustrum will pass, maybe more. Still, the bait idea isn't bad."

  "Why not communicate with them through your angels, Doctor?" I asked.

  "Fool," he said to me. "Haven't you read Trithemius? The angels of the addressee intervene only to clarify a message if one is received. My angels are not couriers on horseback. The French are lost. But I have a plan. I know' how to find some of the German line. I must go to Prague."

  We heard a noise, a heavy damask curtain was raised, we glimpsed a diaphanous hand, then She appeared, the Haughty Virgin.

  "Your Majesty," we said, kneeling.

  "Dee," she said. "I know everything. Do not think my ancestors saved the knights in order to grant them dominion over the world. I demand, you hear me, I demand that the secret be the property of the Crown only."

  "Your Majesty, I want the secret at all costs, and I want it for the Crown. But I must find the other possessors; it is the shortest way. When they have foolishly confided in me what they know, it will not be hard to eliminate them. Whether with a dagger or with arsenic water."

  On the face of the Virgin Queen a ghastly smile appeared. "Very well then, my good Dee," she said. "I do not ask much, only Total Power. For you, if you succeed, the garter. For you, William"¡Xand she addressed the little parasite with lewd sweetness¡X"another garter, and another golden fleece. Follow me."

  I murmured into William's ear: "I perforce am thine, and all that is in me..." William rewarded me with a look of unctuous gratitude and followed the queen, disappearing beyond the curtain. Je tiens la

  * * *

  I was with Dr. Dee in the Golden City. We went along narrow and evil-smelling passageways not far from the cemetery of the Jews, and Dee told me to be careful. "If the news of the failed encounter has spread," he said, "the other groups will even now be acting on their own. I fear the Jews; the Jerusalemites have too many agents here in Prague..."

  It was evening. The snow glistened, bluish. At the dark entrance to the Jewish quarter clustered the little stands of the Christmas market, and in their midst, decked in red cloth, was the obscene stage of a puppet theater lit by smoky torches. We passed beneath an arch of dressed stone, near a bronze fountain from whose grille long icicles hung, and there another passage opened. On old doors, gilded lion's heads sank their teeth into bronze rings. A slight shudder ran along the walls, inexplicable sounds came from the low roofs, rattlings from the drainpipes. The houses betrayed a ghostly life of their own, a hidden life...An old usurer, wrapped in a worn coat, brushed us in passing, and I thought I heard him murmur, "Beware Athanasius Per-nath..." Dee murmured back, "I fear quite another Athanasius..." And suddenly we were in the Alley of the Goldsmiths.

  There, in the gloom of another alley¡Xand the ears I no longer have, at this memory, quiver under my worn cap¡Xa giant loomed up before us, a horrible gray creature with a dull expression, his body sheathed in bronze verdigris, leaning on a gnarled and knobby stick of white wood. The apparition gave off an intense odor of sandalwood. Mortal horror magically coalesced in that being that confronted me, yet I could not take my eyes off the nebulous globe that sat atop his shoulders, and in it discerned, barely, the rapacious face of an Egyptian ibis, and behind that face, more faces, incubi of my imagination and my memory. The outlines of the ghost, in the darkness of that alley, dilated, contracted, as in a slow, nonliving respiration....And¡Xoh, horror!¡X instead of feet, I saw, as I stared at him, on the snow two shapeless stumps whose flesh, gray and bloodless, was rolled up, as if in concentric swellings.

  My voracious memories....

  "The golem!" Dee cried, raising both arms to heaven. His black coat with broad sleeves fell to the ground, as if to create a cingulum, an umbilical cord between the aerial position of the hands and the surface, or the depths, of the earth. "Jezebel, Malkuth, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!" he said. And suddenly the golem dissolved like a sand castle struck by a gust of wind. We were blinded by the particles of its clay body, which tore through the air like atoms, until finally at our feet was a little pile of ashes. Dee bent down, searched in the ashes with his bony fingers, and drew out a scroll, which he hid in his bosom.

  From the shadows then rose an old rabbi, with a greasy hat that greatly resembled my cap. "Dr. Dee, I presume," he said.

  "Here Comes Everybody," Dee replied humbly. "Rabbi Allevi, what a pleasant surprise..."

  The man said, "Did you happen to see a creature roaming these parts?"

  "A creature?" Dee said, feigning amazement. "What sort of creature?"

  "Come off it, Dee," Rabbi Allevi said. "It was my golem."

  "Your golem? I know nothing about a golem."

  "Take care, Dr. Dee!" Rabbi Allevi said, livid. "You're playing a dangerous game, you're out of your league."

  "I don't know what you're talking about, Rabbi Allevi," said Dee. "We're here to make a few ounces of gold for the emperor. We're not a couple of cheap necromancers."

  "Give me back the scroll, at least," Rabbi Allevi begged.

  "What scroll?" Dee asked, with diabolical ingenuousness.

  "Curse you, Dr. Dee," said the rabbi. "And verily I say unto thee, thou shall not see the dawn of the new century." And he went off into the night, murmuring strange words without consonants. Oh, Language Diabolical and Holy.

  Dee was huddled against the damp wall of the alley, his face ashen, his hair bristling on his head. "I know Rabbi Allevi," he said. "I will die on August 5, 1608, of the Gregorian calendar. So now, Kelley, you must help me to carry out my plan. You are the one who will have to bring it to fulfillment. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy. Remember," he said. But I would remember in any case, and William with me. And against me.

  * * *

  He said no more. The pale fog that rubs its back against the panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its back against the panes, licked with its tongue the street corners. We were now in another alley; whitish vapors came from the grilles at ground level, and through them you could glimpse squalid dens with tilting walls, defined by gradations of misty gray. I saw, as he came groping down a stairway (the steps oddly orthogonal), the figure of an old man in a worn frock coat and a top hat. And Dee saw him. "Caligari!" he exclaimed. "He's here, too, in the house of Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante! We have to get moving."

  Quickening our steps, we arrived at the door of a hovel in a poorly lit alley, sinister and Semitic.

  We knocked, and the door opened as if by magic. We entered a spacious room: there were seven-branched candelabra, tetragrams in relief, Stars of David like monstrances. Old violins, the color of the veneer on certain old paintings, were piled in the entrance on a refectory table of anamorphic irregularity. A great crocodile hung, mummified, from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the dim glow of a single torch, or of many, or of none. In the rear, before a kind of curtain or canopy under which stood a tabernacle, kneeling in prayer, ceaselessly and blasphemously murmuring the seventy-two names of God, was an old man. I knew, by a sudden stroke of nous, that this was Heinrich Khunrath.

  "Come to the point, Dee," he said, turning and breaking off his prayer. "What do you want?" He resembled a stuffed armadillo, an ageless iguana.

  "Khunrath," Dee said, "the third encounter did not take place."

  Khunrath exploded in a horrible curse: "Lapis exillis! Now what?"

  "Khunrath," Dee said, "you could throw out some bait; you could put me in touch with the German line."

  "Let me see," Khunrath said. "I could ask Maier, who is in touch with many people at the court. But you will tell me the secret of Virgin's Milk, the Most Secret Oven of the Philosoph
ers."

  Dee smiled. Oh the divine smile of that Sophos! He concentrated then as if in prayer, and said in a low voice: "When you wish to translate into water or Virgin's Milk a sublimate of Mercury, place the Thing duly pulverized over the lamina between the little weights and the goblet. Do not cover it but see that the hot air strikes the naked matter, administer it to the fire of three coals, and keep it alive for eight solar days, then remove it and pound it well on marble until it is a fine paste. This done, put it inside a glass alembic and distill it in a Balneum Mariae over a cauldron of water set in such a way that it does not touch the water below by the space of two fingers but remains suspended in air, and at the same time light the fire beneath the Balneum. Then, and only then, though the Silver does not touch the water, finding itself in this warm and moist womb, will it change to liquid."

  "Master," said Khunrath, sinking to his knees and kissing the bony, diaphanous hand of Dr. Dee. "Master, so I will do. And you will have what you wish. Remember these words: the Rose and the Cross. You will hear talk of them."

  Dee wrapped himself in his cloaklike coat, and only his eyes, glistening and malign, could be seen. "Come, Kelley," he said. "This man is now ours. And you, Khunrath, keep the golem well away from us until our return to London. And then, let all Prague burn as a sole pyre."

  He started to go off. Crawling, Khunrath seized him by the hem of his coat. "One day, perhaps, a man will come to you. He will want to write about you. Be his friend."

  "Give me the Power," Dee said with an unspeakable expression on his fieshless face, "and his fortune is assured."

  We went out. Over the Atlantic a low-pressure air mass was advancing in an easterly direction toward Russia.

  "Let's go to Moscow," I said to him.

  "No," he said. "We're returning to London."

  "To Moscow, to Moscow," I murmured crazily. You knew very well, Kelley, that you would never go there. The Tower awaited you.

  * * *

  Back in London, Dee said, "They're trying to reach the solution before we do. Kelley, you must write something for William....something diabolically insinuating about them."

  Belly of the demon, I did it, but William ruined the text, shifting everything from Prague to Venice. Dee flew into a rage. But the pale, shifty William felt protected by his royal concubine. And still he wasn't satisfied. As I handed over to him, one by one, his finest sonnets, he asked me, with shameless eyes, about Her, about You, my Dark Lady. How horrible to hear your name on that mummer's lips! (I didn't know that he, his soul damned to duplicity and to the vicarious, was seeking her for Bacon.) "Enough," I said to him. "I'm tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for yourself."

  "I can't," he answered with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. "He won't let me."

  "Who? Dee?"

  "No, Verulam. Don't you know he's now the one in charge? He's forcing me to write works that later he'll claim as his own. You understand, Kelley? I'm the true Bacon, and posterity will never know. Oh, parasite! How I hate that firebrand of hell!"

  "Bacon's a pig, but he has talent," I said. "Why doesn't he write his own stuff?"

  He didn't have the time. We realized this only years later, when Germany was invaded by the Rosy Cross madness. Then, from scattered references, certain phrases, putting two and two together, I saw that the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes was really he. He wrote under the pseudonym of Johann Valentin Andreae!

  Now, in the darkness of this cell where I languish, more clearheaded than Don Isidro Parodi, I know for whom Andreae was writing. I was told by Soapes, my companion in imprisonment, a former Portuguese Templar. Andreae was writing a novel of chivalry for a Spaniard, who was languishing meanwhile in another prison. I don't know why, but this project served the infamous Bacon, who wanted to go down in history as the secret author of the adventures of the knight of La Man-cha. Bacon asked Andreae to pen for him, in secret, a novel whose hidden author he would then pretend to be, enjoying in the shadows (but why? why?) another man's triumph.

  But I digress. I am cold in this dungeon and my thumb hurts. I am writing, in the dim light of a dying lamp, the last works that will pass under William's name.

  Dr. Dee died, murmuring, "Light, more light!" and asking for a toothpick. Then he said, "Qualis Artifex Pereo!" It was Bacon who had him killed. Before the queen died, for years unhinged of mind and heart, Verulam managed to seduce her. Her features then were changed; she was reduced to the condition of a skeleton. Her food was limited to a little white roll and some soup of chicory greens. At her side she kept a sword, and in moments of wrath she would thrust it violently into the curtains and arras that covered the walls of her refuge. (And what if there were someone behind there, listening? How now! A rat? Good idea, old Kelley, must make note of it.) With the poor woman in this condition, it was easy for Bacon to make her believe he was William, her bastard¡Xpresenting himself at her knees, she being now blind, covered in a sheep's skin. The Golden Fleece! They said he was aiming at the throne, but I knew he was after something quite different, control of the Plan. That was when he became Viscount St. Albans. His position strengthened, he eliminated Dee.

  * * *

  The queen is dead, long live the king...Now, I was an embarrassing witness. He led me into an ambush one night when at last the Dark Lady could be mine and was dancing in my arms with abandon under the influence of a grass capable of producing visions, she, the eternal Sophia, with her wrinkled face like an old nanny goat's...He entered with a handful of armed men, made me cover my eyes with a cloth. I guessed at once: vitriol! And how he laughed. And she! How you laughed, Pinball Lady¡X and gilded honor shamefully misplaced and maiden virtue rudely strum-peted¡Xwhile he touched her with his greedy hands and you called him Simon¡Xand kissed his sinister scar....

  "To the Tower, to the Tower." Verulam laughed. Since then, here I lie, with this human wraith who says he is Soapes, and the jailers know me only as Seven Seas Jim. I have studied thoroughly, and with ardent zeal, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and, unfortunately, also theology. Here I am, poor madman, and I know as much as I did before.

  * * *

  Through a slit of a window I witnessed the royal wedding, the knights with red crosses cantering to the sound of a trumpet. I should have been there playing the trumpet, for Cecilia, but once again the prize had been taken from me. It was William playing. I was writing in the shadows, for him.

  "I'll tell you how to avenge yourself," Soapes whispered, and that day he revealed to me what he truly is: a Bonapartist abbe buried in this dungeon for centuries.

  "Will you get out?" I asked him.

  "If...." he began to reply, but then was silent. Striking his spoon on the wall, in a mysterious alphabet that, he confided in me, he had received from Trithemius, he began transmitting messages to the prisoner in the next cell. The count of Monsalvat.

  * * *

  Years have gone by. Soapes never stops striking the wall. Now I know for whom and to what end. His name is Noffo Dei. This Dei (through what mysterious cabala do Dei and Dee sound so alike?), prompted by Soapes, has denounced Bacon. What he said, I do-jpot know, but a few days ago Verulam was imprisoned. Accused of sodomy, because, they said (I tremble at the thought that it might be true), you, the Dark Lady, Black Virgin of Druids and of Templars, are none other....none other than the eternal androgyne created by the knowing hands of....of....? Now, now I know...of your lover, the Comte de Saint-Germain! But who is Saint-Germain if not Bacon himself? (Soapes knows all sorts of things, this obscure Templar of many lives...)

  * * *

  Verulam has been released from prison, has regained through his magic arts the favor of the monarch. Now, William tells me, he spends his nights along the Thames, in Pilad's Pub, playing that strange machine invented for him by an Italian from Nola whom he then had burned at the stake in Rome. It is an astral device, which devours small mad spheres that race through infinite worlds in a sparkle of angelic light. Verulam gives obscene blow
s of triumphant bestiality with his groin against the frame, miming the events of the celestial orbs in the domain of the decans in order to understand the ultimate secrets of the Great Establishment and the secret of the New Atlantis itself, which he calls Gottlieb's, parodying the sacred language of the manifestoes attributed to Andreae...Ah! I cry, now lucidly aware, but too late and in vain, as my heart beats conspicuously beneath the laces of my corset: this is why he took away my trumpet, amulet, talisman, cosmic bond that could command demons. What will he be plotting in the House of Solomon? It's late, I repeat to myself, by now he has been given too much power.

  * * *

  They say Bacon is dead. Soapes assures me it is not true. No one has seen the body. He is living under a false name with the landgrave of Hesse; he is now initiated into the supreme mysteries and hence immortal, ready to continue his grim battle for the triumph of the Plan¡Xin his name and under his control.

  After this alleged death, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, which the bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in Sonnet III, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: "To what it works in, like the dyer's hand..."

  "I never wrote that," I told him. And it was true...It's obvious: Bacon inserted those words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in dyes...I believe that in the future he will try to make people believe he wrote William's works himself. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!

  * * *

  Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long? I feel weary, sick. William is expecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at the Globe.