"This doesn't solve our problem," Diotallevi said.
"Of course not, and it doesn't solve it for the invisible thirty-six either. Because if you don't have the right map, forget it. Let's take the case of a map oriented in the standard way, with east in the direction of the apse and west toward the nave, since that's how churches are built. Now let's say, at random, that on that fatal dawn the Pendulum is near the boundary of the southeast quadrant. If it were a clock, we'd say that the hour hand is at five-twenty-five. All right? Now look."
I went to dig out a history of cartography.
"Here. Exhibit number 1: a twelfth-century map. It follows the T-structured maps: Asia is at the top with the Earthly Paradise; to the left, Europe; to the right, Africa; and here, beyond Africa, they Ve also put the Antipodes. Exhibit number 2: a map inspired by the Somnium Scipionis of Macrobius, and it survives in various versions into the sixteenth century. Africa's a bit narrow, but that's all right. Now look: orient the two maps in the same way, and you see that on the first map five-twenty-five corresponds to Arabia, and on the second map to New Zealand, since that's where the second map has the Antipodes. You may know everything about the Pendulum, but if you don't know what map to use, you're lost. So the message contained instructions, elaborately coded, on where to find the right map, which may have been specially drawn for the occasion. The message told where to look, in what manuscript, in what library, abbey, castle. It's even possible that Dee or Bacon or someone else reconstructed the message. Who knows? The message said the map was at X, but in the meantime, with everything that was going on in Europe, the abbey that housed the map burned down, or the map was stolen, hidden God knows where. Maybe someone has the map but doesn't know the use of it, or knows it's valuable but doesn't know why, and he's going around the world looking for a buyer. Imagine all the confusion of offers, false trails, messages that say other things but are understood to refer to the map, and messages that indeed refer to the map but are read as if hinting at, say, the production of gold. No doubt some people attempt to reconstruct the map purely on the basis of conjectures."
"What sorts of conjectures?"
[...]
"Well, for example, micro-macrocosmic correspondences. Here's another map. You know where it comes from? It appears in the second treatise of the Utriusque Cosmi Historia of Robert Fludd. Fludd is the Rosicrucians' man in London, don't forget. Now what does our man do, our Robertus de Fluctibus, as he liked to style himself? He offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole, naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map specially conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It's obvious, undeniable; I can't imagine why somebody hasn't already seen¡X"
"The fact is, the Diabolicals are very, very slow," Belbo said.
"The fact is, we are the only worthy heirs of the Templars. But, to continue. You recognize the design. It's a mobile rotula, like the ones Trithemius used for his coded messages. This isn't a map, then; it's a design for a machine to produce variations of maps, until the right map is found! And Fludd says as much in the caption: This is the sketch for an instrumentum, it still needs work."
"But wasn't Fludd the one who persisted in denying the rotation of the earth? How could he think of the Pendulum?''
"We're dealing with initiates. An initiate denies what he knows, denies knowing it, to conceal it."
"This," Belbo said, "would explain why Dee paid so much attention to those royal cartographers. It was not to discover the ¡¥true' form of the earth, but to reconstruct, among all the mistaken maps, the one right map, the one of use to him."
"Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."
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The chief occupation of this Assembly¡Xand, in my opinion, the most useful¡Xshould be to work on natural history following the plans of Verulam.
¡XChristian Huygens, Letter to Colbert, Oeuvres Completes, La Haye, 1888-1950, vi, pp. 95-96
The vicissitudes of the six groups were not confined to the search for the map. In the first two pieces of the message, those in the hands of the Portuguese and the English, the Templars probably referred to a pendulum, but ideas about pendulums were still hazy. It's one thing to swing some lead on a length of cord and quite another to construct a mechanism precise enough to be hit by a ray of the sun at an exact time and place. This is why the Templars calculated for six centuries. The Baconian wing set immediately to work, and tried to draw to its side all the initiates, whom it made desperate eiforts to reach.
It is no coincidence that Salomon de Caus, the Rosicrucians' man, writes for Richelieu a treatise on solar clocks. And afterward, from Galileo on, there is furious research devoted to pendulums. The pretext is to figure out how to use them for determining longitudes, but in 1681, when Huygens discovers that a pendulum accurate in Paris is slow in Cayenne, he immediately realizes that this discrepancy is due to the variation in centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the earth. And after he publishes his Horologium Oscillatorium, in which he elaborates on Galileo's intuitions about the pendulum, who summons him to Paris? Colbert, the same man who summons to Paris Salomon de Caus to work on the tunnels beneath the city!
In 1661, when the Accademia del Cimento foreshadows the conclusions of Foucault, Leopold of Tuscany dissolves it in the space of five years, and immediately afterward receives from Rome, as a secret reward, a cardinal's hat.
But there is more. In the centuries that follow, the hunt for the Pendulum continues. In 1742 (a year before the first documented appearance of the Comte de Saint-Germain!), a certain Mairan presents a paper on pendulums at the Academic Royale des Sciences. In 1756 (the year the Templar Strict Observance originates in Germany!), a certain Bouguer writes Sur la direction qu ¡¥affectent tous les fits a plomb.
I found phantasmagorical titles, like that by Jean Baptiste Biot in 1821: Recueil d'observations geodesiques, astronomiqu.es et physiques, executees par ordre du Bureau des Longitudes de France, en Espagne, en France, en Angleterre et en Ecosse, pour determiner la variation de la pesanteur et des degres terrestres sur le prolongement du meridien de Paris. In France, Spain, England, and Scotland! And referring to the meridian of Saint-Martin! And what about Sir Edward Sabine, who in 1823 publishes An Account of Experiments to Determine the Figure of the Earth by Means of the Pendulum Vibrating Seconds in Different Latitudes? And the mysterious Graf Feodor Petrovich Litke, who in 1836 publishes the results of his research into the behavior of the pendulum in the course of a voyage around the world? This under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The Russians, too?
And what if in the meantime a group, no doubt of Baconian descent, decides to discover the secret of the currents without map or pendulum, relying instead on the source, the respiration of the Serpent? Salon's hunch was right, for it was more or less at the time of Foucault that the industrial world, creature of the Baconian camp, began digging underground systems in the heart of the great cities of Europe.
"It's true," Belbo said, "the nineteenth century is obsessed with the underground¡XJean Valjean, Fantomas and Javert, Rocambole, all that coming and going in sewers and tunnels. My God, now that I think of it, all of Verne is an occult revelation of the mysteries of the underground! The voyage to the center of the earth, twenty thousand leagues under the sea, the caverns of the Mysterious Island, the immense underground realm of the Black Indies! If we drew a diagram of his extraordinary travels, we would be sure to obtain, finally, a sketch of the coils of the Serpent, a chart of the leys drawn for each continent. Verne explores the network of the telluric currents from above and below.''
I collaborated. "What's the name of the hero of the Black Indies? John Garral. Close to Grail."
"We're not ivory-tower eggheads; we're men with our feet on the ground. Verne gives even more explicit
signals. Robur le Conque"rant, R.C., Rosy Cross. And Robur read backward is Rubor, the red of the rose."
85
Phileas Fogg. A name that is also a signature: Eos, in Greek, has the sense of the global (it is therefore the equivalent of pan, of poly,) and Phileas is the same as Polyphile. As for Fogg, it is the English for brouillard....and no doubt Verne belonged to "Le Brouillard." He was even kind enough to indicate the relationship between this society and the Rose + Cross, because what, enfin, is our noble traveler Phi-leas Fogg if not a Rose + Cross?....And further, doesn't he belong to the Reform Club, whose initials, R.C., designate the reforming Rose + Cross? And this Reform Club stands in Pall Mall, suggesting once again the Dream of Polyphile.
¡XMichel Lamy, Jules Verne, initie et initiateur, Paris, Payot, 1984, pp. 237-238
The reconstruction took us days and days. We would interrupt our work to confide in one another the latest connection. We read everything we could lay our hands on¡Xencyclopedias, newspapers, cartoon strips, publishers' catalogs¡Xand read it squinting, seeking possible shortcuts. At every bookstall we stopped and rummaged; we sniffed newsstands, stole abundantly from the manuscripts of our Diabolicals, rushed triumphantly into the office, slamming the latest find on a desk. As I recall those weeks, everything seems to have taken place at a frenzied pace, as in a Keystone Kops film, all jerks and jumps, with doors opening and closing at supersonic speed, cream pies flying, dashes up flights of steps, up and down, back and forth, old cars crashing, shelves collapsing in grocery stores amid avalanches of cans, bottles, soft cheeses, spurting siphons, exploding flour sacks. Yet the intermissions, the idle moments¡Xthe rest of life going on around us¡XI remember as a story in slow motion, the Plan taking gradual shape with the discipline of gymnastics, or like the slow rotation of the discus thrower, the cautious sway of the shot-putter, the long tempos of golf, the senseless waits of baseball. But whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections¡Xalways, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else...
I said nothing about it to Lia, to avoid irritating her, and I even neglected Giulio. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the realization, for example, that Ren6 des Cartes could make R.C. and that he had been overenergetic in seeking and then denying having found the Rosicrucians. Why all that obsession with Method? Because it was through Method that you arrived at the solution to the mystery that was fascinating all the initiates of Europe...And who had celebrated the enchantment of Gothic? Rene de Chateaubriand. And who, in Bacon's time, wrote Steps to the Temple! Richard Crashaw. And what about Ranieri de' Calzabigi, Ren6 Char, Raymond Chandler? And Rick of Casablanca?
86
This science, which was not lost, at least as far as its practice was concerned, was taught to the cathedral builders by the monks of Ci-teaux...They were known, in the last century, as Compagnons du Tour de France. It was to them that Eiffel turned to build his tower.
¡XL. Charpentier, Les mysteres de la cathedrale de Chartres, Paris, Laffont, 1966, pp. 55-56
Now we had the entire modern age filled with industrious moles tunneling through the earth, spying on the planet from below. But there had to be something else, another venture the Baconians had set in motion, whose results, whose stages were before everyone's eyes, though no one had noticed them...The ground had been punctured and the deep strata tested, but the Celts and the Templars had not confined themselves to digging wells; they had planted their stations and aimed them straight to the heavens, to communicate from megalith to megalith, and to catch the influences of the stars.
The idea came to Belbo during a night of insomnia. He leaned out the window and saw in the distance, above the roofs of Milan, the lights of the steel tower of the Italian Radio, the great city antenna. A moderate, prudent Babel. And he understood.
"The Eiffel Tower," he said to us the next morning. "Why didn't we think of it before? The metal megalith, the menhir of the last Celts, the hollow spire taller than all Gothic spires. What need did Paris have of this useless monument? It's the celestial probe, the antenna that collects information from every hermetic valve stuck into the planet's crust: the statues of Easter Island; Machu Picchu; the Statue of Liberty, conceived first by the initiate Lafayette; the obelisk of Luxor; the highest tower of Tomar; the Colossus of Rhodes, which still transmits from the depths of a harbor that no one can find; the temples of the Brahman jungle; the turrets of the Great Wall; the top of Ayers Rock; the spires of Strasbourg, which so delighted the initiate Goethe; the faces of Mount Rushmore¡Xhow much the initiate Hitchcock understood!¡Xand the TV antenna of the Empire State Building. And tell me to what empire this creation of American initiates refers if not the empire of Rudolf of Prague! The Eiffel Tower picks up signals from underground and compares them with what comes from the sky. And who is it who gave us the first, terrifying movie image of the Tour Eiffel? Rene Clair, in Paris qui dort. Rene Clair, R.C."
The entire history of science had to be reread. Even the space race became comprehensible, with those crazy satellites that did nothing but photograph the crust of the globe to localize invisible tensions, submarine tides, currents of warmer air. And speak among themselves, speak to the Tower, to Stonehenge....
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It is a remarkable coincidence that the 1623 Folio, known by the name of Shakespeare, contains exactly thirty-six plays...
¡XW. F. C. Wigston, Francis Bacon versus Phantom Captain Shakespeare: The Rosicrucian Mask, London, Kegan Paul, 1891, p. 353
When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us¡X and rightly¡Xthat we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed. We consoled ourselves with the realization¡Xunspoken, now, respecting the etiquette of irony¡Xthat we were parodying the logic of our Diabolicals. But during the long intervals in which each of us collected evidence to produce at the plenary meetings, and with the clear conscience of those who accumulate material for a medley of burlesques, our brains grew accustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything with everything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit. I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
It's the old story of spies: they infiltrate the secret service of the enemy, they develop the habit of thinking like the enemy, and if they survive, it's because they Ve succeeded. And before long, predictably, they go over to the other side, because it has become theirs. Or take those who live alone with a dog. They speak to him all day long; first they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dog understands them, he's shy, he's jealous, he's hypersensitive; next they're teasing him, making scenes, until they're sure he's become just like them, human, and they're proud of it, but the fact is that they have become just like him: they have become canine.
Perhaps because I was in daily contact with Lia, and with the baby, I was, of the three, the least affected by the game. I was convinced I was its master; I felt as if I were again playing the agogo during the rite in Brazil: you stay on the side of those who control the emotions and not with those who are controlled by them. About Diotallevi, I didn't know then; I know now. He was training himself viscerally to think like a Diabolical. As for Belbo, he was identifying at a more conscious level. I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real. We were losing that mysterious and bright and most beautiful ability to say that Si-gnor A has grown bestial¡Xwithout thinking for a moment that he now has fur and fangs. The sick man, however, thinking "bestial," immediately sees Signer A on all fours, barking or grunting.
In Diota
llevi's case¡Xas we would have realized if we hadn't been so excited ourselves¡Xit began when he returned at the end of the summer. He seemed thinner, but it wasn't the healthy thinness of someone who has spent a few weeks hiking in the mountains. His delicate albino skin now had a yellowish cast. Perhaps we thought, if we noticed at all, that he had spent his vacation poring over rabbinic scrolls. But our minds were on other things.
In the days that followed, we were able to account also for the camps opposed to the Baconian.
For example, current Masonic studies believe that the Illu-minati of Bavaria, who advocated the destruction of nations and the destabilization of the state, inspired not only the anarchism of Bakunin but also Marxism itself. Puerile. The Illuminati were provocateurs; they were Baconians who had infiltrated the Teutonics. Marx and Engels had something quite different in mind when they began their Manifesto of 1848 with the eloquent sentence "A specter is haunting Europe." Why this Gothic metaphor? The Communist Manifesto is alluding sarcastically to the secret hunt for the Plan, which has agitated the continent for centuries. The Manifesto suggests an alternative both to the Baconians and to the neo-Templars. Marx, a Jew, perhaps initially the spokesman for the rabbis of Gerona or Safed, tries to involve the entire Chosen People in the search. But then the project possesses him, and he identifies the Shekhinah¡Xthe exiled people in the Kingdom¡Xwith the proletariat, and thus, betraying the expectations of those who taught him, he turns all Messianic Judaism on its head. Templars of the world, unite! The map to the workers! Splendid! What better historical justification for Communism?
Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Page 48