Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

  "But what about this Willermoz and this Martinez Pasqualis, who founded one sect after another?"

  "Pasqualis was an old pirate. He practiced theurgical operations in a secret chamber, and angelic spirits appeared to him in the form of luminous trails and hieroglyphic characters. Willermoz took him seriously, because he himself was an enthusiast, honest but naive. Fascinated by alchemy, Willermoz dreamed of a Great Work to which the elect should devote themselves: to discover the point of alliance of the six noble metals through studying the measurements comprised in the six letters of the original name of God, which Solomon had allowed his elect to know."

  "And then?

  "Willermoz founded many orders and joined many lodges at the same time, as was the custom in those days, always seeking the definitive revelation, always fearing it was hidden elsewhere—which indeed is the case. That is, perhaps, the only truth....So he joined the Elus Cohen of Pasqualis. But in '72 Pasqualis disappeared, sailed for Santo Domingo, and left everything up in the air. Why did he leave? I suspect he came into possession of a secret he didn't want to share. In any case, requiescat; he disappeared on that dark continent, into well-deserved darkness."

  "And Willermoz?"

  "In that year we had all been shaken by the death of Swedenborg, a man who could have taught many things to the ailing West, had the West listened to him. But now the century began its headlong race toward revolutionary madness, following the ambitions of the Third Estate....It was then that Willermoz heard about Hund's rite of the Strict Observance and was fascinated by it. He was told that a Templar who reveals himself—by founding a public association, say—is not a Templar. But the eighteenth century was an era of great credulity. Willermoz created, with Hund, the various alliances that appear on your list, until Hund was unmasked—I mean, until they discovered he was the sort who runs off with the cash box—and the Duke of Brunswick expelled him from the organization."

  Agliè cast another glance at the list. "Ah, yes, Weishaupt. I nearly forgot. The Illuminati of Bavaria: with a name like that, they attracted, at the beginning, a number of generous minds. But Weishaupt was an anarchist; today we'd call him a Communist, and if you gentlemen only knew the things they raved about in that ambience—coups d'état, dethroning sovereigns, bloodbaths ... Mind you, I admired Weishaupt a great deal—not for his ideas, but for his extremely clearheaded view of how a secret society should function. It's possible to have a splendid organizational talent but quite confused ideas.

  "In short, the Duke of Brunswick, seeing the confusion around him left by Hund, realized that at this juncture there were three conflicting currents in the German Masonic world: the sapiential-occultist camp, including some Rosicrucians; the rationalist camp; and the anarchist-revolutionary camp of the Illuminati of Bavaria. He proposed that the various orders and rites meet at Wilhelmsbad for a 'convent,' as they were called then, an Estates-General, you might say. The following questions had to be answered: Does the order truly originate from an ancient society, and if so, which? Are there really Unknown Superiors, keepers of the ancient Tradition, and if so, who are they? What are the true aims of the order? Is the chief aim to restore the order of the Templars? And so forth, including the problem of whether the order should concern itself with the occult sciences. Willermoz joined in, enthusiastic, hoping to find at last the answers to the questions he had been asking himself all his life.... And here the de Maistre affair began."

  "Which de Maistre?" I asked. "Joseph or Xavier?"

  "Joseph."

  "The reactionary?"

  "If he was reactionary, he wasn't reactionary enough. A curious man. Consider: this devout son of the Catholic Church, just when the first popes were beginning to issue bulls against Masonry, became a member of a lodge, assuming the name Josephus a Floribus. He approached Masonry in 1773, when a papal brief condemned the Jesuits. Of course it was the Scottish lodges that de Maistre approached, since he was not a bourgeois follower of the Enlightenment; he was an Illuminato."

  Agliè sipped his cognac. From a cigarette case of almost white metal he took out some cigarillos of an unusual shape. "A tobacconist in London makes them for me," he said, "like the cigars you found at my house. Please ... They're excellent...." He spoke with his eyes lost in memory.

  "De Maistre ... a man of exquisite manners; to listen to him was a spiritual pleasure. He gained great authority in occult circles. And yet, at Wilhelmsbad he betrayed our expectations. He sent a letter to the duke, in which he firmly renounced any Templar affiliation, abjured the Unknown Superiors, and denied the utility of the esoteric sciences. He rejected it all out of loyalty to the Catholic Church, but he did so with the arguments of a bourgeois Encyclopedist. When the duke read the letter to a small circle of intimates, no one wanted to believe it. De Maistre now asserted that the order's aim was nothing but spiritual regeneration and that the ceremonials and the traditional rites served only to keep the mystical spirit alive. He praised all the new Masonic symbols, but said that an image that represented several things no longer represented anything. Which—you'll forgive me—runs counter to the whole hermetic tradition, for the more ambiguous and elusive a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. Otherwise, what becomes of the spirit of Hermes, god of a thousand faces?

  "Apropos of the Templars, de Maistre said that the order of the Temple had been created by greed, and greed had destroyed it, and that was that. The Savoyard could not forget, you see, that the order had been destroyed with the consent of the pope. Never trust Catholic legitimists, no matter how ardent their hermetic vocation. De Maistrc's dismissal of the Unknown Superiors was also laughable: the proof that they do not exist is that we have no knowledge of them. We could not have knowledge of them, of course, or they would not be unknown. Odd, how a believer of such fiber could be impermeable to the sense of mystery. Then de Maistre made his final appeal: Let us return to the Gospels and abandon the follies of Memphis. He was simply restating the millennial line of the Church.

  "You can understand the atmosphere in which the Wilhelmsbad meeting took place. With the defection of an authority like de Maistre, Willermoz would be in the minority; at most, a compromise could be reached. The Templar rite was maintained; any conclusion about the origins of the order was postponed; in short, the convent was a failure. That was the moment the Scottish branch missed its opportunity; if things had gone differently, the history of the following century might have been different."

  "And afterward?" I asked. "Was nothing patched together again?"

  "What was there to patch—to use your word?...Three years later, an evangelical preacher who had joined the Illuminati of Bavaria, a certain Lanze, died in a wood, struck by lightning. Instructions of the order were found on him, the Bavarian government intervened, it was discovered that Weishaupt was plotting against the state, and the order was suppressed the following year. And further: Weishaupt's writings were published, containing the alleged projects of the Illuminati, and for a whole century they discredited all French and German neo-Templarism.... It's possible that Weishaupt's Illuminati were really on the side of Jacobin Masonry and had infiltrated the neo-Templar branch to destroy it. It was probably not by chance that this evil breed had attracted Mirabeau, the tribune of the Revolution, to its side. May I say something in confidence?"

  "Please."

  "Men like me, interested in joining together again the fragments of a lost Tradition, are bewildered by an event like Wilhelmsbad. Some guessed and remained silent; some knew and lied. And then it was too late: first the revolutionary whirlwind, then the uproar of nineteenth-century occultism.... Look at your list: a festival of bad faith and credulity, petty spite, reciprocal excommunications, secrets that circulated on every tongue. The theater of occultism."

  "Occultists seem fickle, wouldn't you say?" Belbo remarked.

  "You must be able to distinguish occultism from esotericism. Esotericism is the search for a learning transmitted only through symbols, closed to the profane. The oc
cultism that spread in the nineteenth century was the tip of the iceberg, the little that surfaced of the esoteric secret. The Templars were initiates, and the proof of that is that when subjected to torture, they died to save their secret. It is the strength with which they concealed it that makes us sure of their initiation, and that makes us yearn to know what they knew. The occultist is an exhibitionist. As Péladan said, an initiatory secret revealed is of no use to anyone. Unfortunately, Péladan was not an initiate, but an occultist. The nineteenth century was the century of informers. Everybody rushed to publish the secrets of magic, theurgy, cabala, tarot. And perhaps they believed in it."

  Aglié continued looking over our list, with an occasional snicker of commiseration. "Elena Petrovna. A good woman, at heart, but she never said a thing that hadn't already been written everywhere.... Guaita, a drug-addict bibliomane. Papus: What a character!" Then he stopped abruptly. "Très ... Where does this come from? Which manuscript?"

  Good, I thought, he's noticed the interpolation. I answered vaguely: "Well, we put together the list from so many texts. Most of them have already been returned. They were plain rubbish. Do you recall, Belbo, where this Très comes from?"

  "I don't think I do. Diotallevi?"

  "It was days ago ... Is it important?"

  "Not at all," Agliè said. "It's just that I never heard of it before. You really can't tell me who mentioned it?"

  We were terribly sorry, we didn't remember.

  Agliè took his watch from his vest. "Heavens, I have another engagement. You gentlemen will forgive me."

  He left, and we stayed on, talking.

  "It's all clear now. The English Templars put forth the Masonic proposal in order to make all the initiates of Europe rally around the Baconian plan."

  "But the plan only half-succeeds. The idea of the Baconians is so fascinating that it produces results contrary to their expectations. The so-called Scottish line sees the new conventicle as a way to reestablish the succession, and it makes contact with the German Templars."

  "To Agliè, what happened made no sense. But it's obvious—to us, now. The various national groups entered the lists, one against the other. I wouldn't be surprised if Martinez Pasqualis was an agent of the Tomar group. The English rejected the Scottish; then there were the French, obviously divided into two groups, pro-English and pro-German. Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of different groups—God knows where the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were—met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece of the secret from the others."

  "Masonry was like Rick's in Casablanca," Belbo said. "Which turns upside down the common view that it is a secret society."

  "No, no, it's a free port, a Macao. A façade. The secret is elsewhere."

  "Poor Masons."

  "Progress demands its victims. But you must admit we are uncovering an immanent rationality of history."

  "The rationality of history is the result of a good recombining of the Torah," Diotallevi said. "And that's what we're doing, and blessed be the name of the Most High."

  "All right," Belbo said. "Now the Baconians have Saint-Martin-des-Champs, while the Franco-Roman neo-Templar line is breaking down into a hundred sects.... And we still haven't decided what this secret is all about."

  "That's up to you two," Diotallevi said.

  "Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don't come out honorably, we'll all look silly."

  "Silly to whom?"

  "Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth."

  "Quid est Veritas?" Belbo asked.

  "Us," I said.

  77

  This herb is called Devilbane by the Philosophers. It has been demonstrated that only its seed can expel devils and their hallucinations.... When given to a young woman who was tormented by a devil during the night, this herb made him flee.

  —Johannes de Rupescissa, Tractatus de Quinta Essentia, II

  During the next few days, I neglected the Plan. Lia's pregnancy was coming to term, and whenever possible I stayed with her. I was anxious, but she calmed me, saying the time had not yet come. She was taking a course in painless childbirth, and I was trying to follow her exercises. Lia had rejected science's offer to tell us the baby's sex in advance. She wanted to be surprised. Accepting this eccentricity on her part, I touched her belly and did not ask myself what would come out. We called it the Thing.

  I asked how I could take part in the birth. "It's mine, too, this Thing," I said. "I don't want to be one of those movie fathers, pacing up and down the corridor, chain-smoking."

  "Pow, there's only so much you can do. The moment comes when it's all up to me. Besides, you don't smoke. Surely you're not going to start smoking just for this occasion."

  "'What'll I do, then?"

  "You'll take part before and afterward. Afterward, if it's a boy, you'll teach him, guide him, give him a fine old Oedipus complex in the usual way, with a smile you'll play out the ritual parricide when the time comes—no fuss—and at some point you'll show him your squalid office, the card files, the page proofs of the wonderful adventure of metals, and you'll say to him, 'My son, one day all this will be yours.'"

  "And if it's a girl?"

  "You'll say to her, 'My daughter, one day all this will be your no-good husband's.'"

  "And what do I do before?"

  "During labor, between one wave of pain and the next, you have to count, because as the interval grows shorter, the moment approaches. We'll count together, and you'll set the rhythm for me, like rowers in a galley. It'll be as if you, too, were coaxing the Thing out from its dark lair. Poor little Thing ... Feel it. Now it's so cozy there in the dark, sucking up humors like an octopus, all free, and then—wham—it pops out into the daylight, blinks, and says, Where the hell am I?"

  "Poor little Thing. And it hasn't even met Signor Garamond. Come on, let's rehearse the counting part."

  We counted in the darkness, holding hands. I daydreamed. The Thing, with its birth, would give reality and meaning to all the old wives' tales of the Diabolicals. Poor Diabolicals, who spent their nights enacting chemical weddings with the hope that eighteen-karat gold would result and wondering if the philosopher's stone was really the lapis exillis, a wretched terra-cotta grail—and my grail was in Lia's belly.

  "Yes," Lia said, running her hand over her swelling, taut vessel, "here is where your good primal matter is steeping. Those people you saw at the castle, what did they think happened in the vessel?"

  "Oh, they thought that melancholy was grumbling in it, sulfurous earth, black lead, oil of Saturn, a Styx of purifications, distillations, pulverizations, ablutions, liquefactions, submersions, terra foetida, stinking sepulcher..."

  "What are they, impotent? Don't they know that in the vessel our Thing ripens, all white and pink and beautiful?"

  "They know, but for them your dear little belly is also a metaphor, full of secrets...."

  "There are no secrets, Pow. We know exactly how the Thing is formed, its little nerves and muscles, its little eyes and spleens and pancreases..."

  "Oh my God, more than one spleen? What is it, Rosemary's baby?"

  "I was speaking in general. But of course we'll have to be ready to love it even if it has two heads."

  "Of course! I'll teach it to play duets: trumpet and clarinet.... No, then it would need four hands, and that's too many. But, come to think about it, he'd make a great pianist. A concerto for two left hands? Nothing to it! Brr ... But then, my Diabolicals also know that on that day, in the hospital, there will be born the Great Work, the White, the Rebis, the androgyne...."

  "That's all we need. Listen. We'll call him Giulio, or her Giulia, after my grandfather. What do you say?"

  "I like it. Good."

  ***

  If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden mean
ing; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia, and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go ask that old fool de Maistre.

  But no. We, the sardonic, insisted on playing games with the Diabolicals, on showing them that if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all.

  Serves you right, I said to myself that other evening. Now here you are, waiting for what will happen under Foucault's Pendulum.

  78

  Surely this monstrous hybrid comes not from a mother's womb but from an Ephialtes, an Incubus, or some other horrendous demon, as though spawned in a putrid and venomous fungus, son of Fauns and Nymphs, more devil than man.

  —Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, Jansson, 1665, II, pp. 279–280

  That day, I wanted to stay home—I had a presentiment—but Lia told me to stop acting the prince consort and go to work. "There's time, Pow; it won't be born yet. I have to go out, too. Run along."