Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

  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 Horologiutn 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 Académie 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 fils à plomb.

  I found phantasmagorical titles, like that by Jean Baptiste Biot in 1821: Recueil d'observations géodésiques, astronomiques et physiques, exécutées par ordre du Bureau des Longitudes de France, en Espagne, en France, en Angleterre et en Ecosse, pour déterminer la variation de la pésanteur et des degrés terrestres sur le prolongement du méridien 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—Jean 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 Conquérant, R. C., Rosy Cross. And Robur read backward is Rubor, the red of the rose."

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  Phileas Fogg. A name that is also a signature: Eas, 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 Phileas 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.

  —Michel Lamy, Jules Verne, initié 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—encyclopedias, newspapers, cartoon strips, publishers' catalogs—and 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—the rest of life going on around us—I 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—always, 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 René 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? René de Chateaubriand. And who, in Bacon's time, wrote Steps to the Templet Richard Crashaw. And what about Ranieri de' Calzabigi, René Char, Raymond Chandler? And Rick of Casablanca?

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  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 Citeaux.... They were known, in the last century, as Compagnons du Tour de France. It was to them that Eiffel turned to build his tower.

  —L. Charpentier, Les mystères de la cathédrale 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 at 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 R
ushmore—how much the initiate Hitchcock understood!—and 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? René Clair, in Paris qui dort. René 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....

  —W. 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—and rightly—that 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—unspoken, now, respecting the etiquette of irony—that 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 vou 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 Signor A has grown bestial—without thinking for a moment that he now has fur and fangs. The sick man, however, thinking "bestial," immediately sees Signor A on all fours, barking or grunting.

  In Diotallevi's case—as we would have realized if we hadn't been so excited ourselves—it began when he returned at the end of the summer. He seemed thinner, but it wasn't that 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 Illuminati 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—the exiled people in the Kingdom—with 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?

  "Yes," Belbo said, "but the Baconians also run into trouble along the way; don't think they don't. Some of them set out for the superhighway of science and end up in a blind alley. At the end of the dynasty, the Einsteins and the Fermis, after hunting for the secret in the heart of the microcosm, stumble upon the wrong invention: instead of telluric energy—clean, natural, sapiential—they discover atomic energy—technological, unnatural, polluted...."

  "Space-time: the error of the West," Diotallevi said.

  "It's the loss of the Center. Vaccine and penicillin as caricatures of the Elixir of Eternal Life," I added.

  "Or like that other Templar, Freud," Belbo said, "who instead of probing the labyrinths of the physical underground, probed those of the psychic underground, as if everything about them hadn't already been said, and better, by the alchemists."

  "But you're the one," Diotallevi objected, "who is trying to publish the books of Dr. Wagner. For me, psychoanalysis is for neurotics."

  "Yes, and the penis is nothing but a phallic symbol," I concluded. "Come, gentlemen, let's not digress. And let's not waste time. We still don't know where to put the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites."

  But before we were able to answer this question, we came upon another group, one that, not part of the thirty-six invisibles, had nevertheless entered the game at quite an early stage, somewhat upsetting its designs, causing confusion: the Jesuits.

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  The Baron Hundt, Chevalier Ramsay ... and numerous others who founded the grades in these rites, worked under instructions from the general of the Jesuits.... Templarism is Jesuitism.

  —Letter to Madame Blavatsky from Charles Southeran, 32 ∴ A and P.R. ∴ 94 Memphis, K.R. K. Kadosch, M.M. 104, Eng., etc. Initiate of the English Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, January 11, 1877; from his Unveiled, 1877, vol. ii, p. 390

  We had run into them too often, from the time of the first Rosicrucian manifestoes on. As early as 1620, in Germany, the Rosa Jesuítica appears, reminding us that the symbolism of the rose was Catholic and Marian before it was Rosicrucian, and the hint is made that the two orders are in league, that Rosicrucianism is only a reformulation of the Jesuit mystique for consumption in Reformation Germany.

  I remembered what Salon had said about Father Kircher's rancorous attack on the Rosicrucians—right in the middle of his discourse on the depths of the terraqueous globe.

  "Father Kircher," I said, "is a central character in this story. Why would this man, who so often showed a gift for observation and a taste for experiment, drown these few good ideas in thousands of pages overflowing with incredible hypotheses? He was in correspondence with the best English scientists. Each of his books deals with typical Rosicrucian subjects, ostensibly to contest them, actually to espouse them, offering his own Counter Reformation version. In the first edition of the Fama, Herr Haselmayer, condemned to the galleys by the Jesuits because of his reforming ideas, hastens to say that the Rosicrucians are the true Jesuits. Very well. Kircher writes his thirty-odd volumes to argue that the Jesuits are the t
rue Rosicrucians. The Jesuits are trying to get their hands on the Plan. Kircher wants to study those pendulums himself, and he does, in his own way. He invents a planetary clock that will give the exact time in all the headquarters of the Society of Jesus scattered throughout the world."

  "But how did the Jesuits know of the Plan, when the Templars let themselves be killed rather than reveal it?" Diotallevi asked.

  It was no good answering that the Jesuits always know everything. We needed a more seductive explanation.

  We quickly found one. Guillaume Postel again. Leafing through the history of the Jesuits by Cretineau-Joly (and how we chuckled over that unfortunate name), we learned that in 1554 Postel, in a fit of mystical fervor and thirst for spiritual regeneration, joined Ignatius Loyola in Rome. Ignatius welcomed him with open arms, but Postel was unable to part with his manias, his cabalism, his ecumenicalism, and the Jesuits couldn't accept these things, especially one mania that Postel absolutely refused to abandon: the idea that the King of the World was the king of France. Ignatius may have been a saint, but he was also Spanish.

  So at last a rupture came about; Postel left the Jesuits—or the Jesuits kicked him out. But since he had been a Jesuit, even if only briefly, he had sworn obedience perinde ac cadaver to Saint Ignatius, and therefore must have revealed to him his mission. "Dear Ignatius," he must have said, "in receiving me you receive also the secret of the Templar Plan, whose unworthy representative I am in France, and indeed, while we are all awaiting the third centenary meeting in 1584, we might as well await it ad majorem Dei gloriam."