by Umberto Eco
We reassured him on that point.
"Perhaps I am being excessively cautious," he said, "but I do not wish to have anything to do with a member of the OTO." Seeing our puzzlement, he added: "Ordo Templi Orientis, the conventicle of the remaining self-styled followers of Aleister Crowley....I see that you are not connected.... All the better: there will be no prejudices on your side." He agreed to sit down. "Because, you understand, the work I would now like to show you takes a courageous stand against Crowley. All of us, myself included, are still faithful to the revelations of the Liber AL vel legis, which, as you probably know, was dictated to Crowley in Cairo in 1904 by a higher intelligence named Aiwaz. This text is followed by the faithful of the OTO even today. They draw on all four editions, the first of which preceded by nine months the outbreak of the war in the Balkans, the second by nine months the outbreak of the First World War, the third by nine months the Sino-Japanese War, and the fourth by nine months the massacres of the Spanish Civil War...."
I couldn't help crossing my fingers. He noticed and said with a funereal smile, "I understand your apprehension. What I am bringing you is the fifth edition of that book. What, you ask, will happen in nine months' time? Nothing, gentlemen, rest assured. Because what I am proposing is an enlarged Liber legis, inasmuch as I have had the good fortune to be visited not by a mere higher intelligence but by Al himself, the supreme principle—namely, Hoor-paar-Kraat, who is the double or the mystical twin of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. My sole concern, also to ward off evil influences, is that my work be published before the winter solstice."
"I think that could be managed," Belbo said.
"I'm most pleased. The book will cause a stir in the circles of initiates, because, as you will understand, my mystical source is more serious and authenticated than Crowley's. I don't know how Crowley could have activated the Rituals of the Beast without bearing in mind the Liturgy of the Sword. Only by unsheathing the sword can the nature of Mahapralaya be understood, the Third Eye of Kundalini, in other words. And also in his arithmology, all based on the Number of the Beast, he failed to consider the New Numbers: 93, 118, 444, 868, and 1001.
"What do they mean?" asked Diotallevi, suddenly all ears.
"Ah," said Professor Camestres, "as was already stated in the first Liber legis, every number is infinite and therefore there is no real difference!"
"I understand," Belbo said. "But don't you think all this will be a bit obscure for the common reader?"
Camestres almost bounced in his chair. "Why, it's absolutely indispensable. Anyone who approached these secrets without the proper preparation would plunge headlong into the Abyss! Even by making them public in a veiled way, believe me, I am running risks. I work within the environment of the worship of the Beast, but more radically than Crowley: you will see, in my pages on the congressus cum daemone, the requirements for the furnishing of the temple and the carnal union with the Scarlet Woman and the Beast she rides. Crowley stopped at so-called carnal congress against nature, while I carry the ritual beyond Evil as we conceive it. I touch the inconceivable, the absolute purity of goety, the extreme threshold of the Bas-Aumgn and the Sa-Ba-Ft...."
The only thing left for Belbo to do was to sound out Camestres's financial capability. He did this with long, roundabout sentences, and finally it emerged that, like Bramanti before him, the professor had no thought of self-financing. Then the dismissal phase began, with a mild request of could we keep the manuscript for a week, we would have a look at it, and then we would see. But at this point Camestres clasped the manuscript to his bosom, said he had never been treated with such distrust, and went out, hinting that he had means, out of the ordinary, to make us regret the insult we had given him.
But before long we had dozens of manuscripts from eligible SFAs. A modicum of selectivity was necessary, since these books were also meant to be sold. Because it was impossible for us to read them all, we glanced at the contents, the indexes, some of the text, then traded discoveries.
45
And from this springs the extraordinary question: Did the Egyptians know about electricity?
—Peter Kolosimo, Terra senza tempo, Milan, Sugar, 1964, p. 111
"I have a text on vanished civilizations and mysterious lands," Belbo said. "It seems that originally there existed, somewhere around Australia, a continent of Mu, and from there the great currents of migration spread out. One went to Avalon, one to the Caucasus and the source of the Indus; then there were the Celts, and the founders of Egyptian civilization, and finally the founders of Atlantis...."
"Old hat. If you're looking for books about Mu, I'll swamp your desk with them," I said.
"But this writer may pay. Besides, he has a beautiful chapter on Greek migrations into Yucatan, and tells about the bas-relief of a warrior at Chichén Itzá who is the spit and image of a Roman legionary. Two peas in a pod..."
"All the helmets in the world have either plumes or horse tails," Diotallevi said. "That's not evidence."
"Not for you, but for him. He finds serpent worship in all civilizations and concludes that there is a common origin...."
"Who hasn't worshiped the serpent?" Diotallevi said. "Except, of course, the Chosen People."
"They worshiped calves."
"Only in a moment of weakness. I'd reject this one, even if he pays. Celtism and Aryanism, Kaly-vuga, the decline of the West, and SS spirituality. I may be paranoid, but he sounds like a Nazi to me."
"For Garamond, that isn't necessarily a drawback."
"No, but there's a limit to everything. Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs."
"Not the Seven Dwarfs, the Nibelungs."
"The dwarfs it mentions are the Little People of Ireland. The bad guys are the fairies, but the Little People are good, just mischievous."
"Put it aside. What about you, Casaubon? What have you found?"
"A text on Christopher Columbus: it analyzes his signature and finds in it a reference to the pyramids. Columbus's real aim was to reconstruct the Temple of Jerusalem, since he was grand master of the Templars-in-exile. Being a Portuguese Jew and therefore an expert cabalist, he used talismanic spells to calm storms and overcome scurvy. I didn't look at any texts on the cabala, because I assumed Diotallevi was checking them."
"The Hebrew letters are all wrong, photocopied from dream books."
"Remember, we're choosing texts for Isis Unveiled. Let's steer clear of philology. If the Diabolicals like to take their Hebrew letters from dream books, let them do it. The problem I have is all the submissions on the Masons. Signor Garamond told me to be very careful there; he doesn't want to get mixed up in polemics among the various rites. But I wouldn't neglect this manuscript about Masonic symbolism in the grotto of Lourdes. Or this one about a mysterious gentleman, probably the Comte de Saint-Germain, an intimate friend of Franklin and Lafayette, who appeared at the moment of the creation of the flag of the United States. It explains the meaning of the stars very well, but becomes confused on the subject of the stripes."
"The Comte de Saint-Germain!" I said. "Well, well!"
"You know him?"
"If I said ves, you wouldn't believe me. Forget it. Now here, gentlemen, is a four-hundred-page monstrosity decrying the errors of modern science. The atom, a Jewish lie. The error of Einstein and the mystical secret of energy. The illusion of Galileo and the immaterial nature of the moon and the sun."
"In that line," Diotallevi said, "what I liked most is this review of Fortian sciences."
"What are they?"
"Named after Charles Hoy Fort, who gathered an immense collection of inexplicable bits of news. A rain of frogs in Birmingham, footprints of a fabulous animal in Devon, mysterious steps and sucker marks on the ridges of some mountains, irregularities in the precession of the equinoxes, inscriptions on meteorites, black snow, rains of blood, winged creatures at an altitude of eight t
housand meters above Palermo, luminous wheels in the sea, fossils of giants, a shower of dead leaves in France, precipitations of living matter in Sumatra, and, naturally, all the signs marked on Machu Picchu and other peaks in South America that bear witness to the landing of powerful spacecraft in prehistoric times. We arc not alone in the universe."
"Not bad," Belbo said. "But what particularly intrigues me are these five hundred pages on the pyramids. Did you know that the pyramid of Cheops sits right on the thirtieth parallel, which is the one that crosses the greatest stretch of land above sea level? That the geometric ratios found in the pyramid of Cheops are the same ones found at Pedra Pin-tada in Amazonia? That Egypt possessed two plumed serpents, one on the throne of Tutankhamen and the other on the pyramid of Saqqara, and the latter serpent points to Quetzalcoatl?"
"What does Quetzalcoatl have to do with Amazonia, if he's part of the Mexican pantheon?" I asked.
"Well, maybe I missed a connection. But for that matter, how do you explain the fact that the statues of Easter Island are megaliths exactly-like the Celtic ones? Or that a Polynesian god called Ya is clearly the Yod of the Jews, as is the ancient Hungarian Io-v', the great and good god? Or that an ancient Mexican manuscript shows the earth as a square surrounded by sea, and in its center is a pyramid that has on its base the inscription Aztlan, which is close to Atlas and Atlantis? Why are pyramids found on both sides of the Atlantic?"
"Because it's easier to build pyramids than spheres. Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon."
"I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment," Diotallevi said.
"Let me continue. The cult of Ra doesn't appear in Egyptian religion before the New Empire, and therefore it comes from the Celts. Remember Saint Nicholas and his sleigh? In prehistoric Egypt the ship of the Sun was a sleigh. Since there was no snow in Egypt, the sleigh's origin must have been Nordic...."
I couldn't let that pass: "Before the invention of the wheel, sleighs were used also on sand."
"Don't interrupt. The book says that first you identify the analogies and then you find the reasons. And it says that, in the end, the reasons are scientific. The Egyptians knew electricity. Without electricity they wouldn't have been able to do what they did. A German engineer placed in charge of the sewers of Baghdad discovered electric batteries still operating that dated back to the Sassanids. In the excavations of Babylon, accumulators were found that had been made four thousand years ago. And, finally, the Ark of the Covenant (which contained the Tables of the Law, Aaron's rod, and a pot of manna from the desert) was a kind of electric strongbox capable of producing discharges on the order of five hundred volts."
"I saw that in a movie."
"So what? Where do you think scriptwriters get their ideas? The ark was made of acacia wood sheathed in gold inside and out—the same principle as electric condensers, two conductors separated by an insulator. It was encircled by a garland, also of gold, and set in a dry region where the magnetic field reached five hundred to six hundred volts per vertical meter. It's said that Porsena used electricity to free his realm from the presence of a frightful animal called Volt."
"Which is why Alessandro Volta chose that exotic pseudonym. Before, his name was simply Szmrszlyn Khraznapahwshkij."
"Be serious. Also, besides the manuscripts, I have letters that offer revelations on the connections between Joan of Arc and the Sibylline Books, between Lilith the Talmudic demon and the hermaphroditic Great Mother, between the genetic code and the Martian alphabet, between the secret intelligence of plants, cosmology, psychoanalysis, and Marx and Nietzsche in the perspective of a new angelology, between the Golden Number and the Grand Canyon, Kant and occultism, the Eleusian mysteries and jazz, Cagliostro and atomic energy, homosexuality and gnosis, the golem and the class struggle. In conclusion, a letter promising a work in eight volumes on the Grail and the Sacred Heart."
"What's its thesis? That the Grail is an allegory of the Sacred Heart or that the Sacred Heart is an allegory of the Grail?"
"He wants it both ways, I think. In short, gentlemen, I don't know what course to follow. We should sound out Signor Garamond."
So we sounded him out. He said that, as a matter of principle, nothing should be thrown out, and we should give everyone a hearing.
"But most of this stuff," I argued, "repeats things you can find on any station newsstand. Even published authors copy from one another, and cite one another as authorities, and all base their proofs on a sentence of Iamblicus, so to speak."
"Well," Garamond said, "would you try to sell readers something they knew nothing about? The Isis Unveiled books must deal with the exact same subjects as all the others. They confirm one another; therefore they're true. Never trust originality."
"Very well," Belbo said, "but we can't tell what's obvious and what isn't. We need a consultant."
"What sort of consultant?"
"I don't know. He must be less credulous than a Diabolical, but he must know their world. And then tell us what direction we should take in Hermetics. A serious student of Renaissance Hermeticism..."
"And the first time you hand him the Grail and the Sacred Heart," Diotallevi said, "he storms out, slamming the door."
"Not necessarily."
"I know someone who would be just right," I said. "He's certainly erudite; he takes these things fairly seriously, but with elegance, even irony, I'd say. I met him in Brazil, but he should be in Milan now. I must have his phone number somewhere."
"Contact him," Garamond said. "Tentatively. It depends on the cost. And try also to make use of him for the wonderful adventure of metals."
Agliè seemed happy to hear from me again. He inquired after the charming Amparo, and when I hinted that was over, he apologized and made some tactful remarks about how a young person could always begin, with ease, a new chapter in his life. I mentioned an editorial project. He showed interest, said he would be glad to meet us, and set a time, at his house.
From the birth of Project Hermes until that day, I had enjoyed myself heedlessly at the expense of many people. Now, They were preparing to present the bill. I was as much of a bee as the ones we wanted to attract; and, like them, I was being quickly lured to a flower, though I didn't yet know what that flower was.
46
During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish.... Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it.
—From a ritual of Aleister Crowley
Agliè lived in the Piazzale Susa area: a little secluded street, a turn-of-the-centurv building, soberly art nouveau. An elderly butler in a striped jacket opened the door and led us into a small sitting room, where he asked us to wait for the count.
"So he's a count," Belbo whispered.
"Didn't I tell you? He's Saint-Germain redivivus."
"He can't be redivivus if he's never died," Diotallevi said. "Sure he's not Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew?"
"According to some, the Comte de Saint-Germain had also been Ahasuerus."
"You see?"
Agliè came in, impeccable as always. He shook our hands and apologized: a tiresome meeting, quite unforeseen, forced him to remain in his study for another ten minutes or so. He told the butler to bring coffee and begged us to make ourselves at home. Then he went out, drawing aside a heavy curtain of old leather. It wasn't a door, and as we were having our coffee, we heard agitated voices coming from the next room. At first we spoke loudly among ourselves, in order not to listen; then Belbo remarked that perhaps we were disturbing the others. In a moment of silence, we heard a voice, and a sentence that aroused our curiosity.
Diotallevi got up and went over, as if he wanted to admire a seventeenth-century print on the wall by the curtain. It showed a mountain cave, to which some pilgrims were climbing by way of seven steps. Soon all three of us were pretending to study the print.
The man we had heard was surely Br
amanti, and the sentence was: "See here, I don't send devils to people's houses!"
That day we realized Bramanti had not only a tapir's face but also a tapir's voice.
The other voice belonged to a stranger: a thick French accent and a shrill, almost hysterical tone. From time to time Agliè's voice, soft and conciliatory, intervened.
"Come, gentlemen," he was saying now, "you have appealed to my verdict, and I am honored, but you must therefore listen to me. Allow me, first of all, to say that you, dear Pierre, were imprudent, at the very least, in writing that letter...."
"It's an extremely simple matter, Monsieur le Comte," the French voice replied. "This Signor Bramanti, he writes an article, in a publication we all respect, in which he indulges himself in some fairly strong irony about certain Luciferans, who, he says, make hosts fly though they don't even believe in the Real Presence, and they transmute silver, and so forth and so on. Bon, everyone knows that the only recognized Eglise Luciferienne is the one where I am the humble tauroboliaste and psychopompe, and it is also well known that my church does not indulge itself in vulgar Satanism and does not make ratatouille with hosts—things worthy of chanoine Docre at Saint-Sulpice. In my letter I said that we are not vieux jeu Satanists, worshipers of the Grand Tenancier du Mal, and that we do not have to ape the Church of Rome, with all those pyxes and those—comment dit-on?—chasubles.... We are, au contraire, Palladians, as all the world knows, and, for us, Luciferre is the principe of good. If anything, it is Adonai who is the principe of evil, because He created this world, whereas Luciferre tried to oppose..."