by Umberto Eco
I had almost reached my office when Signor Salon's door opened. The old man appeared in his yellow apron. I couldn't avoid greeting him, and he asked me to come inside. I had never seen his laboratory.
It must have been an apartment once, but Salon had had all the dividing walls demolished, and what I saw was a cave, vast, hazy. For some obscure architectural reason, this wing of the building had a mansard roof, and the light entered obliquely. I don't know whether the glass panes were dirty or frosted, or if Salon had installed shades to keep out the direct sun, or if it was the heap of objects on all sides proclaiming a fear of spaces left empty, but the light in the cave was late dusk. The room was divided by old pharmacy shelves in which arches opened to passages, junctions, perspectives. The dominant color was brown: the objects, the shelves, the tables, the diffuse blend of daylight and the patchy illumination from old lamps. My first impression was of having entered an instrument maker's atelier, abandoned from the time of Stradivarius, with years of accumulated dust on the striated bellies of the lutes.
Then, as my eyes gradually adjusted, I saw that I was in a petrified zoo. A bear cub with glassy eyes climbed an artificial bough; a dazed and hieratic owl stood beside me; on the table in front of me was a weasel—or marten or skunk; I couldn't tell. Behind it was a prehistoric animal, feline, its bones showing. It might have been a puma, a leopard, or a very big dog. Part of the skeleton had already been covered with straw and paste, and it was all supported by an iron armature.
"The Great Dane of a rich lady with a soft heart," Salon said with a snicker, "who wants to remember it as it was in the days of their conjugal life. You see? You skin the animal, on the inside of the skin you smear arsenic soap, then you soak and bleach the bones.... Look at that shelf and you'll see a great collection of spinal columns and rib cages. A lovely ossuary, don't you think? You connect the bones with wire, reconstruct the skeleton, mount it on an armature. To stuff it, I use hay, papiermáché, or plaster. Finally you fit the skin back on. I repair the damage done by death and corruption. This owl—doesn't it seem alive to you?"
From then on, every live owl would seem dead to me, consigned by Salon to a sclerotic eternity. I regarded the face of that embalmer of animal pharaohs, his bushy eyebrows, his gray cheeks, and I could not decide whether he was a living being or a masterpiece of his own art.
The better to look at him, I took a step backward, and felt something graze my nape. I turned with a shudder and saw I had set a pendulum in motion.
A great disemboweled bird swayed, following the movement of the lance that pierced it. The weapon had entered the head, and through the open breast you could see it pass where the heart and gizzard had once been, then branch out to form an upside-down trident. One thicker prong went through the now-emptied belly and pointed toward the ground like a sword, while the two other prongs entered the feet and emerged symmetrically from the talons. The bird swung, and the three points cast their shadow on the floor, a mystic sign.
"A fine specimen of the golden eagle," Salon said. "But I still have a few days' work to do on it. I was just choosing the eyes." He showed me a box full of glass corneas and pupils, as if the executioner of Saint Lucy had collected the trophies of his entire career. "It's not always easy, as it is with insects, where all you need is a box and a pin. This, for example, has to be treated with formalin."
I smelled its morgue odor. "It must be an enthralling job," I said. And meanwhile I was thinking of the living creature that throbbed in Lia's belly. A chilling thought seized me. If the Thing dies, I said to myself, I want to bury it. I want it to feed the worms underground and enrich the earth. That's the only way I'll feel it's still alive....
Salon was still talking. He took a strange specimen from one of the shelves. It was about thirty centimeters long. A dragon, a reptile with black membranous wings, a cock's crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny sawlike teeth. "Handsome, isn't he? My own composition. I used a salamander, a bat, snake's scales....A subterranean dragon. I was inspired by this...." He showed me, on another table, a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with leather ties. "It cost me a fortune. I'm not a bibliophile, but this was something I had to have. It's the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665. Here's the dragon. Identical, don't you think? It lives in the caves of volcanoes, that good Jesuit said, and he knew everything about the known, the unknown, and the nonexistent...."
"You think always of the underground world," I said, recalling our conversation in Munich and the words I had overheard through the Ear of Dionysius.
He opened the volume to another page, to an image of the globe, which looked like an anatomical organ, swollen and black, covered by a spider web of luminescent, serpentine veins. "If Kircher was right, there are more paths in the heart of the earth than there are on the surface. Whatever takes place in nature derives from the heat and steam below..."
I thought of the Black Work, of Lia's belly, of the Thing that was struggling to break out of its sweet volcano.
"...and whatever takes place in the world of men is planned below."
"Does Padre Kircher say that, too?"
"No. He concerns himself only with nature.... But it is odd that the second part of this book is on alchemy and the alchemists, and that precisely here, you see, there is an attack on the Rosicrucians. Why attack the Rosicrucians in a book on the underground world? Our Jesuit knew a thing or two; he knew that the last Templars had taken refuge in the underground kingdom of Agarttha...."
"And they're still there, it seems," I ventured.
"They're still there," Salon said. "Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us, right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who directed the excavations?"
"Expert engineers, I'd say."
"Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books ... How many Jews are there among your authors?"
"We don't ask our authors to fill out racial forms," I replied stiffly. "You mustn't think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends ... I have in mind a certain kind of Jew...."
"What kind?"
"I know what kind...."
79
He opened his coffer. In indescribable disorder it contained collars, rubber bands, kitchen utensils, badges of different technical schools, even the monogram of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. On everything, in his madness, he saw the seal of the Antichrist, in the form of two linked triangles.
—Alexandre Chayla, "Serge A. Nilus et les Protocoles," La Tribune Juive, May 14, 1921, p. 3
"You see," Salon went on, "I was born in Moscow. And it was in Russia, when I was a youth, that people discovered the secret Jewish documents that said, in so many words, that to control governments it was necessary to work underground. Listen." He picked up a little notebook, in which he had copied out some quotations. "'Today's cities have metropolitan railroads and underground passages: from these we will blow up all the capitals of the world.' Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Document Number Nine!"
It occurred to me that the collection of spinal columns, the box with the eyes, the skins stretched over armatures came from some extermination camp. But no, I was dealing with an elderly man nostalgic about the old days of Russian anti-Semitism. "If I follow you, then, there's a conventicle of Jews—some Jews, not all—who are plotting something. But why underground?"
"That's obvious! Any plotter must plot underground, not in the light of day. This has been known from the beginning of time. Dominion over the world means dominion over what lies beneath it. The subterranean currents."
I remembered a question of Agliè's in his study, and then the Druidesses in Piedmont, who called on telluric currents.
"Why did the Celts dig sanctuaries in the heart of the earth, making tunnels that communicated with a sacred well?" Salon continued. "The well goes down into radioactive strata, as everyone knows. How was Glastonbury built? And isn
't the island of Avalon where the myth of the Grail originated? And who invented the Grail if not a Jew?"
The Grail again, my God. But what grail? There was only one grail: my Thing, in contact with the radioactive strata of Lia's womb, and perhaps now swimming happily toward the mouth of that well, perhaps now preparing to come out, and here I was among stuffed owls, among a hundred dead and one pretending to be alive.
"All Europe's cathedrals are built where the Celts had their menhirs. Why did the Celts set these stones in the ground, considering the effort it cost them?"
"Why did the Egyptians go to so much trouble to erect the pyramids?"
"There you are. Antennas, thermometers, probes, needles like the ones Chinese doctors use, stuck into the body's nodal points. At the center of the earth is a nucleus of fusion, something similar to the sun—indeed, an actual sun around which things revolve, describing different paths. Orbits of telluric currents. The Celts knew where they were, and how to control them. And Dante? What about Dante? What was he trying to tell us with the account of his descent into the depths? You understand me, dear friend?"
I didn't like being his dear friend, but I went on listening to him. Giulio/Giulia, my Rebis planted like Lucifer at the center of Lia's womb, but he/she, the Thing, would be upside down, would be struggling upward, and would somehow emerge. The Thing was created to emerge upward from the viscera, and not make its entrance with head bowed, in sticky secrecy.
Salon by now was lost in a monologue he seemed to repeat from memory. "You know what the English leys are? If you fly over England in a plane, you'll see that all the sacred places are joined by straight lines, a grid of lines interwoven across the whole country, still visible because they suggested the lines of later roads...."
"The sacred places were connected by roáds, and people simply tried to make roads as straight as possible."
"Indeed? Then why do birds migrate along these lines? Why do flying saucers follow them? It's a secret that was lost after the Roman invasion, but there are those who still know it...."
"The Jews," I suggested.
"They also dig. The first alchemistic principle is VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem."
Lapis exillis. My Stone that was slowly coming out of exile, from the sweet oblivious hypnotic exile of Lia's vessel; my Stone, beautiful and white, not seeking further depths, but seeking the surface ... I wanted to rush home to Lia, to wait with her, hour by hour, for the appearance of the Thing, the triumph of the surface regained. Salon's den had the musty smell of tunnels. Tunnels were the origin that had to be abandoned; they were not the destination. And yet I followed Salon, and new, malicious ideas for the Plan whirled in my head. While I awaited the one Truth of this sublunar world, I racked my brain to construct new falsehoods; blind as the animals underground.
I stirred. I had to get out of the tunnel. "I must go," I said. "Perhaps you can suggest some books on this subject."
"Ha! Everything they've written about it is false, false as the soul of Judas. What I know I learned from my father...."
"A geologist?"
"Oh no," Salon said, laughing, "no, not at all. My father—nothing to be ashamed of; water under the bridge—worked for the Okhrana. Directly under the chief, the legendary Rachkovski."
Okhrana, Okhrana? Something like the KGB? The tsarist secret police, wasn't it? And who was Rachkovski? Wasn't there someone who had a similar name? By God, the colonel's mysterious visitor, Count Rakosky ... No, enough of this. No more coincidences. I didn't stuff dead animals; I created living animals.
80
When White arrives in the matter of the Great Work, Life has conquered Death, the King is resuscitated, Earth and Water have become Air, it is the domain of the Moon, their Child is born.... Then Matter achieves such a degree of fixity that Fire can no longer destroy it.... When the artist sees perfect whiteness, the Philosophers say the books must be torn up, for they are now useless.
—Dom J. Pernety, Dictionnaire mytho-hermélique, Paris, Handle, 1758, "Blanchcur"
I mumbled some excuse, in haste. I believe I said, "My girlfriend's having a baby tomorrow." Salon haltingly offered me congratulations, as if not sure who the father was. I ran home, to breathe some clean air.
Lia wasn't in. On the kitchen table, a piece of paper: "Darling, the waters have broken. Couldn't get you at the office. Taking a taxi to the hospital. Come. I feel alone."
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—I don't know how—I 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....
—Ferdinand 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 Agliè 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 does 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 Agliè, 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—when 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 Avers Rock, we would have the Answer. Avers Rock is the antipode of the great (unknown) mountain that is the Pole, the true, occult Pole, not the one that any bourgeois explo
rer 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 the}- 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—because, as the Tabula Smuragdma 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—the 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...."