Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  A moment of panic. I had to be there to count with Lia. I should have been in the office, reachable. It was my fault: the Thing would be born dead, Lia would die with it, Salon would stuff them both.

  I entered the hospital on unsteady legs, asked directions of people who didn't know anything, twice ended up in the wrong ward. I shouted that they had to know where Lia was having the baby, and they told me to calm down, because here everybody was having a baby.

  Finally¡XI don't know how¡XI found myself in a room. Lia was pearly pale but smiling. Someone had lifted her hair and put it under a white cap. For the first time I saw Lia's forehead in all its splendor. Next to her was the Thing.

  "It's Giulio," she said.

  My Rebis. I, too, had made him, and not with chunks of dead bodies or arsenic soap. He was whole, all his fingers and toes were in the right place.

  I insisted on seeing all of him, his little cock, his big balls. Then I kissed Lia on her naked brow: "The credit is yours, darling; it all depends on the vessel."

  "Of course the credit is mine, you shit. I had to count all by myself.''

  "For me you are all that counts," I told her.

  81

  The subterranean people have reached the highest knowledge...If our mad humankind should begin a war against them, they would be able to explode the whole surface of our planet...

  ¡XFerdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 1924, v

  I stayed at home with Lia because, once she left the hospital and had to change the baby's diapers, she cried and said she would never be able to cope. Somebody explained to us that this was normal: the excitement over the victory of birth is followed by a feeling of helplessness in the face of the immensity of the job. During those days, while I loafed around the house, useless and not qualified, of course, for breast-feeding, I spent long hours reading everything I had been able to find concerning telluric currents.

  On my return, I sounded out Aglfe on them. He made a gesture of boredom. "Weak metaphors, referring to the secret of the serpent Kundalini. Chinese geomancy also sought in the earth the traces of the dragon. The telluric serpent simply stands for the occult serpent. The goddess reposes, coiled, and sleeps her eternal sleep. Kundalini throbs gently, binding heavy bodies to lighter bodies. Like a vortex or a whirlpool, like the first half of the syllable om."

  "But what secret cfoes the serpent refer to?" "To the telluric currents." "What are the telluric currents?"

  "A great cosmological metaphor, which refers to the serpent." To hell with Aglie, I said to myself, I know more than that.

  I read my notes to Belbo and Diotallevi, and we no longer had any doubt. At last we were in a position to supply the Templars with a decent secret. It was the most economical, the most elegant solution to the problem, and all the pieces of our millennial puzzle fit together.

  So: the Celts knew about the telluric currents: they had learned the secret from the Atlantides, when the survivors of the submerged continent emigrated, some to Egypt, some to Brittany.

  The Atlantides had learned it from those ancestors of ours who ventured forth from Avalon across the continent of Mu as far as the central desert of Australia¡Xwhen all the continents were a single land mass, the wondrous Pangaea. If only we could still read (as the Aborigines can, but they remain silent) the mysterious alphabet carved on the great boulder Ayers Rock, we would have the Answer. Ayers Rock is the antipode of the great (unknown) mountain that is the Pole, the true, occult Pole, not the one that any bourgeois explorer can reach. As usual, and this should be obvious to anyone whose eyes have not been blinded by the false light of Western science, the Pole that we see is not the real Pole, for the real Pole is the one that cannot be seen, except by some adepts, whose lips are sealed.

  The Celts, however, believed it was enough to discover the global configuration of the currents. That's why they erected megaliths. The menhirs had sensitive devices, like electric valves, planted at the points where the currents branched and changed direction. The leys marked the routes of currents already identified. The dolmens were chambers of accumulated energy, where the Druids, with geomantic tools, attempted to map, by extrapolation, the global design. The cromlechs and Stonehenge were micro-macrocosmic observatories from which they studied the pattern of the constellations in order to divine the pattern of the currents¡Xbecause, as the Tabula Smaragdina tells us, what is above is isomorphic to what is below.

  But there was more to the problem than that. The other branch of the Atlantidean emigration realized as much. The occult knowledge of the Egyptians passed from Hermes Trismegistus to Moses, who took care not to pass it on to his band of tatterdemalions, their craws still stuffed with manna; to them he offered the Ten Commandments, which was as much as they could comprehend. The higher truth is aristocratic; Moses encoded it in the Pentateuch. The cabalists understood this.

  "Just think," I said, "everything was already written, an open book, in the measurements of the Temple of Solomon, and the keepers of the secret were the Rosicrucians, who formed the Great White Fraternity¡Xthe Essenes, in other words, who, as is well known, let Jesus in on their secrets. And there you have the real reason why Jesus was crucified..."

  "Of course, the Passion of Christ is an allegory, prefiguring the trial of the Templars."

  "Right. And Joseph of Arimathea takes, or takes back, the secret of Jesus to the land of the Celts. But obviously the secret is still incomplete; the Christian Druids know only a fragment of it, and that is the esoteric meaning of the Grail: there is something missing, but we don't know what. The secret¡Xwhat the Temple already said in full¡Xis suspected only by a small group of rabbis who remained in Palestine. They entrust it to the occult Moslem sects, to the Sufis, the Ismailis, the Motak-allimun. And from them the Templars learn it."

  "At last, the Templars! I was beginning to worry," Belbo said.

  We were shaping the Plan, which, like soft clay, obeyed our thumbs, our narrative desires. The Templars had discovered the secret during those sleepless nights, embracing their saddle mates in the desert, where the implacable simoom was blowing. They had wrested it, bit by bit, from those who knew the powers of cosmic focus in the Black Stone of Mecca, the heritage of the Babylonian magi¡Xfor it was clear now that the Tower of Babel had been simply an attempt, however hasty and deservedly a failure because of the pride of its architects, to build the most powerful menhir of all. But the Babylonians got their calculations wrong. As Father Kircher has demonstrated, had the tower reached its peak, its excessive weight would have made the earth's axis rotate ninety degrees and maybe more, and our poor globe, instead of having an ithyphallic crown pointing upward, would have found itself with a sterile appendix, a limp mentula, a monkey tail flopping downward, a Shekhinah lost in the dizzying abyss of an antarctic Malkhut, a flaccid hieroglyph for penguins.

  "So, in a word, what's the secret discovered by the Templars?"

  "Don't rush me. We're getting there. It took seven days to make the world. And now we'll give it a try."

  82

  The earth is a magnetic body; in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago.

  ¡XH. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, New York, Boulton, 1877, I, p. xxiii

  We gave it a try, and we succeeded.

  The earth is a great magnet, and the force and direction of its currents are influenced by the celestial spheres, the cycle of the seasons, the precession of the equinoxes, the cosmic cycles. Thus the pattern of the currents changes. But it must change like hair, which, though it grows everywhere on the top and sides of the skull, nevertheless spirals out from a point toward the back, where it rebels most against the comb. When that point has been identified, when the most powerful station has been established there, it will be possible to control, direct, command all the telluric currents of the planet. The Templars realized that the secret lay not only in possessing the global map of the currents, but also in knowing the critical point, the Omphalos, the
Umbilicus Telluris, the Navel of the World, the Source of the Command.

  All alchemistic talk¡Xthe chthonic descent of the Black Work, the electric charge of the White¡Xis only a metaphor, a metaphor clear to the initiated, for this age-old auscultation whose final result will be the Red: global knowledge, brilliant dominion over the planetary system of currents. The secret, the real secret, of alchemy and Templars is the search for the Wellspring of that internal rhythm, as sweet, awesome, and regular as the throbbing of the serpent Kundalini, still unknown in many of its aspects, yet surely as precise as a clock, for it is the rhythm of the one true Stone that fell in exile from heaven, the Great Mother Earth.

  This was what Philip the Fair wanted to know. Hence the inquisitors' sly insistence on the mysterious kiss in posteriori parte spine dorsi. They wanted the secret of Kundalini; who cares about sodomy.

  "It's perfect," Diotallevi said. "But then, when you know how to direct the telluric currents, what do you do with them? Make beer?"

  "Come on," I said. "Haven't you grasped the significance of this discovery? In the Telluric Navel you place the most powerful valve, which enables you to foresee rain and drought, to release hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, to split continents, sink islands (no doubt Atlantis disappeared in some such reckless experiment), raise mountain chains....You realize the atomic bomb is nothing in comparison? Besides which, it also hurts the one who drops it. From your control tower you telephone, for example, the president of the United States, and you say to him: By tomorrow morning I want a dodecadillion dollars¡Xor the independence of Latin America, or the state of Hawaii, or the destruction of your stockpile of nuclear weapons¡Xor else the San Andreas Fault will crack definitively and Las Vegas will become a floating casino..."

  "But Las Vegas is in Nevada."

  "Doesn't matter. When you control the telluric currents, you can snip off Nevada, too, and Colorado. Then you telephone the Supreme Soviet and you say: Comrades, by Monday I want all the caviar of the Volga, and I want Siberia as my frozen-food locker; otherwise I'll suck the Urals under, I'll make the Caspian overflow, I'll cut loose Lithuania and Estonia and sink them in the Philippine Trench."

  "Yes," Diotallevi said. "The power would be immense. The earth could be rewritten like the Torah. Japan lands in the gulf of Panama."

  "Panic on Wall Street."

  "Forget about Star Wars. Forget about transforming base metal into gold. You aim the right current, stir up the bowels of the earth, and make them do in ten seconds what it used to take them billions of years to do, and the whole Ruhr becomes a diamond mine. Eliphas Le"vi said the knowledge of the universe's tides and currents holds the secret of human omnipotence."

  "That must be so," Belbo said. "It's like transforming the whole world into an orgone box. It's obvious. Reich was definitely a Templar."

  "Everyone was, except us. Thank God weVe caught on. Now we're a step ahead of them."

  But what stopped the Templars, once they knew the secret? The problem was how to exploit it. Between knowing and know-how there was a gap. So, instructed by the diabolical Saint Bernard, the Templars replaced the menhirs, poor Celtic valves, with Gothic cathedrals, far more sensitive and powerful, their subterranean crypts containing black virgins, in direct contact with the radioactive strata; and they covered Europe with a network of receiver-transmitter stations communicating to one another the power and the direction, the flow and the tension, of the telluric currents.

  "I say they located the silver mines in the New World, caused eruptions of silver there, and then, controlling the Gulf Stream, shifted that precious metal to the Portuguese coast. Tomar was the distribution center; the Foret d'Orient, the chief storehouse. This was the origin of their wealth. But this was peanuts. They realized that to exploit their secret fully they would have to wait for a technological advance that would take at least six hundred years."

  Thus the Templars organized the Plan in such a way that only their successors, at the moment when they would be able to make proper use of what they knew, would learn the location of the Umbilicus Telluris. But how did the Templars distribute the pieces of the revelation to the thirty-six scattered throughout the world? How could a straightforward message have that many parts? And why would they need such a complicated message just to say that the Umbilicus was, for example, in Baden-Baden, or Tralee, or Chattanooga?

  A map? But a map would be marked with an X at the point of the Umbilicus. Whoever held the piece with the X would know everything and not need the other pieces. No; it had to be more involved. We racked our brains for several days, until Belbo decided to resort to Abulafia. And the reply was:

  Guillaume Postel dies in 1581.

  Bacon is Viscount St. Albans.

  In the Conservatoire is Poucault's Pendulum.

  The time had come to find a function for the Pendulum.

  I was able, in few days, to suggest a rather elegant solution. A Diabolical had submitted to us a text on the hermetic secret of cathedrals. According to this author, the builders of Chartres one day left a plumb line hanging from the keystone of a vault, and from that had easily deduced the rotation of the earth. Hence the motive for the trial of Galileo, Diotallevi remarked: the Church had caught a whiff of Templar about him. No, Belbo said; the cardinals who condemned Galileo were Templar adepts infiltrating Rome. They wanted to shut up that damned Tuscan quickly, that traitor Templar who in his vanity was about to spill the beans four hundred years before the date of the Plan's fulfillment.

  This explained why beneath the Pendulum those master masons had drawn a labyrinth, a stylized image of the system of subterranean currents. We sought an illustration of the labyrinth of Chartres: a solar clock, a compass card, a vein system, a sleepy sinusoidal trail of the Serpent. A global chart of the telluric tides.

  "All right, let's assume the Templars used the Pendulum to indicate the Umbilicus. Instead of the labyrinth, which is, after all, an abstract scheme, on the floor you put a map of the world. The point marked by the tip of the Pendulum at a given hour is the point that marks the Umbilicus. But which Pendulum?"

  "The place is beyond discussion: Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the Refuge."

  "Yes," Belbo replied, "but let's suppose that at the stroke of midnight the Pendulum swings from Copenhagen to Capetown. Where is the Umbilicus? In Denmark or in South Africa?"

  "A good observation," I said. "But our Diabolical tells us also that in Chartres there is a fissure in a stained-glass window of the choir, and at a given hour of the day a sunbeam enters through the crack and always hits the same place, always the same stone of the floor. I don't remember what conclusion he draws from this, but in any event it's a great secret. So here's the mechanism: in the choir of Saint-Martin there is a window that has an uncolored spot near the juncture of two lead cames. It was carefully calculated, and probably for six hundred years someone has always taken care to keep it as it is. At sunrise on a given day of the year..."

  "...which can only be the dawn of June 24, Saint John's day, feast of the summer solstice..."

  "...yes, on that day and at that hour, the first pure ray of sun that comes through the windows strikes the floor beneath the Pendulum, and the Pendulum's intersection of the ray at that instant is the precise point on the map where the Umbilicus is to be found!"

  "Perfect," Belbo said. "But suppose it's overcast?"

  "They wait until the following year."

  "I'm sorry, but..." Belbo said. "The last meeting is to be in Jerusalem. Shouldn't the Pendulum be hanging from the top of the dome of the Mosque of Omar?"

  "No," I said. "At certain places on the globe the Pendulum completes its circle in thirty-six hours; at the North Pole it takes twenty-four hours; at the Equator the cycle doesn't vary with the season. So the location matters. If the Templars made their discovery at Saint-Martin, their calculation is valid only in Paris; in Palestine, the Pendulum would mark a different curve."

  "And how do we know they made the discovery at Saint-Martin?" />
  "The fact that they chose Saint-Martin as their Refuge, that from the prior of Saint Albans, to Postel, to the Convention they kept it under their control, that after Foucault's first experiments they installed the Pendulum there. Too many clues."

  "But still, the last meeting is in Jerusalem."

  "So? In Jerusalem they'll put the message together, and that's not a matter of a few minutes. Then they'll prepare for a year, and the following June 23 all six groups will meet in Paris, to learn finally where the Umbilicus is, and then they'll set to work to conquer the world."

  "But," Belbo insisted, "there's still something I can't figure out. Although there's this final revelation about the Umbilicus, all thirty-six must have known that before. The Pendulum had been used in cathedrals; so it wasn't a secret. What would have prevented Bacon or Postel, or even Foucault¡Xwho must have been a Templar himself, seeing all the fuss he made over the Pendulum¡Xfrom just putting a map of the world on the floor and orienting it by the cardinal points? We're oif the track."

  "No, we're not off the track," I said. "The message reveals something that none of them could know: what map to use!"

  83

  A map is not the territory.

  ¡XAlfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58

  "You're familiar with the situation of cartography at the time of the Templars," I said. "In that century there were Arab maps that, among other things, put Africa at the top and Europe at the bottom; navigators' maps, fairly accurate, all things considered; and maps mat by then were already three or four hundred years old but were still accepted in some schools. Mind you, to reveal the location of the Umbilicus they didn't need an accurate map, in today's sense. It had to be simply a map possessing this virtue: once oriented, it would show the Umbilicus at the point where the arc of the Pendulum is struck by the first ray of sun on June 24. Now listen carefully. Let's suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the Umbilicus is in Jerusalem. Even with our modern maps, the position of Jerusalem depends on the projection used. And God knows what kind of map the Templars had. But it doesn't matter. It's not the Pendulum that's calibrated according to the map; it's the map that's calibrated according to the Pendulum. You follow me? It could be the craziest map in the world, as long as, when placed beneath the Pendulum at the crack of dawn on the twenty-fourth of June, it shows the one and only spot that is Jerusalem."