by Umberto Eco
Before the throne was a long table decorated with palms. A sword had been placed on it, and between throne and table stood a stuffed lion, its jaws wide. Someone must have put a red light bulb inside the head, because the eyes shone, incandescent, and flames seemed to come from the throat. This, I thought, must be the work of Signor Salon, remembering the odd customers he had referred to that day in the Munich coal mine.
At the table was Bramanti, decked out in a scarlet tunic and embroidered green vestments, a white cape with gold fringe, a sparkling cross on his chest, and a hat vaguely resembling a miter, decorated with a red-and-white plume. Before him, hieratically deployed, were about twenty-men, also in scarlet tunics but without vestments. On their chests they all wore a gold medal that I thought I recognized: I remembered a Renaissance portrait, the big Hapsburg nose, and the curious lamb with legs dangling, hanging by the waist. They had adorned themselves with imitations, not bad, of the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Bramanti was speaking, his arms upraised, as if uttering a litany, and the others responded from time to time. Then Bramanti raised the sword, and from their tunics the others drew stilettos or paper knives and held them high. At this point Agliè lowered the curtain. We had seen too much.
We stole away with the tread of the Pink Panther (as Diotallevi put it; he was remarkably abreast of the perversions of popular culture) and found ourselves back in the garden, slightly breathless.
Garamond was overwhelmed. "But are they ... Masons?"
"And what," Agliè replied, "does Mason mean? They are the adepts of a chivalric order inspired by the Rosicrucians, and indirectly by the Templars."
"But what does that have to do with the Masons?" Garamond asked again.
"If what you saw has anything in common with the Masons, it's the fact that Bramanti's rite is also a pastime for provincial politicians and professional men. It was thus from the beginning: Freemasonry was a weak exploitation of the Templar legend. And this is the caricature of a caricature. Except that those gentlemen take it extremely seriously. Alas! The world is teeming with Rosicrucians and Templars like the ones you saw this evening. You mustn't expect any revelation from them, though among their number occasionally you can come across an initiate worthy of trust."
"But you, after all," Belbo said, without irony, as if the matter concerned him personally, "spend time with them. Which ones do you believe in? Or did you once believe in?"
"None, of course. Do I look like a credulous individual? I consider them with the cold objectivity, the understanding, the interest with which a theologian might observe a Naples crowd shouting in anticipation of the miracle of San Gennaro. The crowd bears witness to a faith, a deep need, and the theologian wanders among the sweating, drooling people because he might encounter there an unknown saint, the bearer of a higher truth, a man capable of casting new light on the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. But the Holy Trinity is one thing, San Gennaro is another."
He could not be pinned down. I didn't know how to define it—hermetic skepticism? liturgical cynicism?—this higher disbelief that led him to acknowledge the dignity of all the superstitions he scorned.
"It's simple," he was saying to Belbo. "If the Templars, the real Templars, did leave a secret and did establish some kind of continuity, then it is necessary to seek them out, and to seek them in the places where they could most easily camouflage themselves, perhaps by inventing rites and myths in order to move unobserved, like fish in water. What do the police do when they seek the archvillain, the evil mastermind? They dig into the lower depths, the notorious dives filled with petty crooks who will never conceive the grandiose crimes of the dark genius the police are after. What does the terrorist leader do to recruit new acolytes? Where does he look for them and find them? He circulates in the haunts of the pseudosubversives, the fellow-travelers who would never have the courage to be the real thing, but who openly ape the attitudes of their idols. Concealed light is best sought in fires, or in the brush where, after the blaze, the flames go on brooding under twigs, under trampled muck. What better hiding place for the true Templar than in the crowd of his caricatures?"
62
We consider societies druidic if they are druidic in their titles or their aims, or if their initiations are inspired by druidism.
—M. Raoult, Les druides. Les sociétés imtiatiques celtes contemporaines, Paris, Rocher, 1983, p. 18
Midnight was approaching, and according to Agliè's program the second surprise of the evening awaited us. Leaving the Palatine gardens, we resumed our journey through the hills.
After we had driven three-quarters of an hour, Agliè made us park the two cars at the edge of a wood. We had to cross some underbrush, he said, to arrive at a clearing, and there were neither roads nor trails.
We proceeded, picking our way through shrubs and vines, our shoes slipping on rotted leaves and slimy roots. From time to time Agliè switched on a flashlight to find a path, but only for a second, because, he said, we should not announce our presence to the celebrants. Diotallevi made a remark—I don't recall it exactly, something about Little Red Riding-Hood—and Agliè, with tension in his voice, asked him to be quiet.
As we were about to come to the end of the brush, we heard voices. We had reached the edge of the clearing, which was illuminated by a glow from remote torches—or perhaps votive lights, flickering at ground level, faint and silvery, as if a gas were burning with chemical coldness in bubbles drifting over the grass. Agliè told us to stop where we were, still shielded by bushes, and wait.
"In a little while the priestesses will come. The Druidesses, that is. This is an invocation of the great cosmic virgin Mikil. Saint Michael is a popular Christian adaptation, and it's no accident that he is an angel, hence androgynous, hence able to take the place of a female divinity...."
"Where do they come from?" Diotallevi whispered.
"From many places: Normandy, Norway, Ireland ... It is a very special event, and this is a propitious place for the rite."
"Why?" Garamond asked.
"Certain places have more magic than others."
"But who are they—in real life?"
"People. Secretaries, insurance agents, poets. People you might run into tomorrow and not recognize."
Now we could see a small group preparing to enter the clearing. The phosphorescent light, I realized, came from little lamps the priestesses held up in their hands. They had seemed, earlier, to be at ground level because the clearing was on the top of a hill; the Druidesses had climbed up from below and were approaching the flat, open hilltop. They were dressed in white tunics, which fluttered in the slight breeze. They formed a circle; in the center, three celebrants stood.
"Those are the three hallouines of Lisieux, Clonmacnoise, and Pino Torinese," Agliè said. Belbo asked why those three in particular. Agliè shrugged and said: "No more. We must wait now in silence. I can't summarize for you in a few words the whole ritual and hierarchy of Nordic magic. Be satisfied with what I can tell you. If I do not tell you more, it is because I do not know ... or am not allowed to tell. I must respect certain vows of privacy."
In the center of the clearing I noticed a pile of rocks, which suggested a dolmen. Perhaps the clearing had been chosen because of the presence of those boulders. One of the celebrants climbed up on the dolmen and blew a trumpet. Even more than the trumpet we had seen a few hours earlier, this looked like something out of the triumphal march in Aida. But a muffled and nocturnal sound came from it, as if from far away. Belbo touched my arm: "It's the ramsing, the horn of the Thugs around the sacred banyan...."
My reply was cruel, because I didn't realize he was joking precisely to repress other associations, and it must have twisted the knife in the wound. "It would no doubt be less magical with the bombardon," I said.
Belbo nodded. "Yes, they're here precisely because they don't want a bombardon," he said.
Was it on that evening he began to see a connection between his private dreams and what had been
happening to him in those months?
Agliè hadn't followed our words, but heard us whispering. "It's not a warning or a summons," he explained, "but a kind of ultrasound, to establish contact with the subterranean currents. You see, now the Druidesses are all holding hands, in a circle. They are creating a kind of living accumulator, to collect and concentrate the telluric vibrations. Now the cloud should appear...."
"What cloud?" I whispered.
"Tradition calls it the green cloud. Wait..."
I didn't really expect a green cloud. Almost immediately, however, a soft mist rose from the ground—a fog, I would have said, if it had been thicker, more homogeneous. But it was composed of flakes, denser in some places than in others. The wind stirred it, raised it in puffs, like spun sugar. Then it moved with the air to another part of the clearing, where it gathered. A singular effect. For a moment, you could see the trees in the background, then they would be hidden in a whitish steam, while the turf in the center of the clearing would smoke and further obscure our view of whatever was going on, as the moonlight shone around the concealed area. The flake cloud shifted, suddenly, unexpectedly, as if obeying the whims of a capricious wind.
A chemical trick, I thought, but then I reflected: we were at an altitude of about six hundred meters, and it was possible that this was an actual cloud. Foretold by the rite? Summoned? Or was it just that the celebrants knew that on that hilltop, under favorable conditions, those erratic banks of vapor formed just above the ground?
It was difficult to resist the fascination of the scene. The celebrants' tunics blended with the white of the cloud, and their forms entered and emerged from that milky obscurity as if it had spawned them.
There was a moment when the cloud filled the entire center of the little meadow. Some wisps, rising, separating, almost hid the moon, but the clearing was still bright at its edges. We saw a Druidess come from the cloud and run toward the wood, crying out, her arms in front of her. I thought she had discovered us and was hurling curses. But she stopped within a few meters of us, changed direction, and began running in a circle around the cloud, disappearing in the whiteness to the left, only to reappear after a few minutes from the right. Again she was very close to us, and I could see her face.
She was a sibyl with a great, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which opened like a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and one skewed canine. The eyes were shifty, hawklike, piercing. I heard, or thought I heard—or think now that I remember hearing, but I may be superimposing other memories—a series of Gaelic words mixed with evocations in a kind of Latin, something on the order of "O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!" Suddenly the fog lifted, disappeared, the clearing became bright again, and I saw that it had been invaded by a troop of pigs, their short necks encircled by garlands of green apples. The Druidess who had blown the trumpet, still atop the dolmen, now brandished a knife.
"We go now," Agliè said sharply. "It's over."
I realized, as I heard him, that the cloud was above us and around us, and I could barely make out my companions.
"What do you mean, over?" Garamond said. "Looks to me like the real stuff is just beginning!"
"What you were permitted to see is over. Now it is not permitted. We must respect the rite. Come."
He reentered the wood, was promptly swallowed up by the mist that enfolded us. We shivered as we moved, slipping on dead leaves, panting, in disarray, like a fleeing army, and regrouped at the road. We could be in Milan in less than two hours. Before getting back into Garamond's car, Agliè said good-bye to us: "You must forgive me for interrupting the show for you. I wanted you to learn something, to see the people for whom you are now working. But it was not possible to stay. When I was informed of this event, I had to promise I wouldn't disturb the ceremony. Our continued presence would have had a negative effect on what follows."
"And the pigs? What happens to them?" Belbo asked.
"What I could tell you, I have told you."
63
"What does the fish remind you of?"
"Other fish."
"And what do other fish remind you of?"
"Other fish."
—Joseph Heller, Catch 22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii
I came back from Piedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgot the desires that had grazed me.
Still, our expedition left other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time I wasn't troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter by chapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals, but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any more than I had been able to in Rio. How was this Réaumur cylindrical stove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, or from this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterus for the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if they had installed the Deutsches Museum in the Piedmont castle I had visited the week before.
It was becoming harder for me to keep apart the world of magic and what today we call the world of facts. Men I had studied in school as bearers of mathematical and physical enlightenment now turned up amid the murk of superstition, for I discovered they had worked with one foot in cabala and the other in the laboratory. Or was I rereading all history through the eyes of our Diabolicals? But then I would find texts above all suspicion that told me how in the time of positivism physicists barely out of the university dabbled in'séances and astrological cénacles, and how Newton had arrived at the law of gravity because he believed in the existence of occult forces, which recalled his investigations into Rosicrucian cosmology.
I had always thought that doubting was a scientific duty, but now I came to distrust the very masters who had taught me to doubt.
I said to myself: I'm like Amparo; I don't believe in it, yet I surrender to it. Yes, I caught myself marveling over the fact that the height of the Great Pyramid really was one-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun, and that you really could draw striking parallels between Celtic and Amerind mythologies. And I began to question everything around me: the houses, the shop signs, the clouds in the sky, and the engravings in the library, asking them to tell me not their superficial story but another, deeper story, which they surely were hiding—but finally would reveal thanks to the principle of mystic resemblances.
Lia saved me, at least temporarily.
I told her everything—or almost—about the trip to Piedmont, and evening after evening I came home with curious new bits of information to add to my file of cross references. She said, "Eat. You're thin as a rail." One evening, she sat beside me at the desk. With her hair parted in the middle of her brow, she could now look straight into my eyes. She had her hands in her lap: a housewifely pose. I had never seen her sit like that before, her legs wide, skirt taut from knee to knee. An inelegant position, I thought. But then I saw her face: radiant, slightly flushed. I listened to her—though I didn't yet know why—with respect.
"Pow," she said, "I don't like what's happening to you with this Manutius business. First you collected facts the way people collect seashells. Now it's as if you were marking down lottery numbers."
"I just enjoy myself more, with the Diabolicals."
"It's not enjoyment; it's passion. There's a difference. Be careful: they'll make you sick."
"Now, don't exaggerate. They're the sick ones, not I. You don't go crazy because you work in an asylum."
"That remains to be seen."
"You know, I've always been suspicious of analogies. But now I find myself at a great feast of analogies, a Coney Island, a Moscow May Day, a Jubilee Year of analogies, and I'm beginning to wonder if by any-chance there isn't a reason."
"I've seen your files, Pow," Lia said to me, "because I have to keep them in order. Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a good look." And she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet nurse, solid and health
y—she so slim and supple—with a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority.
"Pow, archetypes don't exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there's a little man, a date, a baobab.
"And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn't stink as much, because it's better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That's why up is angelic and down devilish.
"But because what I said before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down and inside are beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the spirit of Mercury and Manicheanism have nothing to do with it. Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you're a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if you touch it, gives you a blister this big; therefore, if you think of something preserved for millennia, like wisdom, you have to think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you then want to know why wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it's because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would rise and there wouldn't be rain."