by Umberto Eco
So the Jesuits, thanks to Postel's moment of weakness, come to know the secret of the Templars. This knowledge must be exploited. Saint Ignatius goes to his eternal reward, but his successors remain watchful. They keep an eye on Postel; they want to know whom he will meet in that fateful year 1584. But, alas, Postel dies before then. Nor is it any help that—as one of our sources tells us—an unknown Jesuit is present at his deathbed. The Jesuits do not learn who his successor is.
"I'm sorry, Casaubon," Belbo said, "but something here doesn't add up. If what you say is true, the Jesuits couldn't know that the meeting failed to come off in 1584."
"Don't forget that the Jesuits," Diotallevi remarked, "were men of iron, not easily fooled."
"Ah, as for that," Belbo said, "a Jesuit could eat two Templars for breakfast and another two for dinner. They also were disbanded, and more than once, and all the governments of Europe lent a hand, but they're still here."
We had to put ourselves in a Jesuit's shoes. What would a Jesuit do if Postel slipped from his grasp? I had an idea immediately, but it was so diabolical that not even our Diabolicals, I thought, would swallow it: The Rosicrucians were an invention of the Jesuits!
"After Postel's death," I argued, "the Jesuits—clever as they are—mathematically foresee the confusion of the calendars and decide to take the initiative. They set up this Rosicrucian red herring, calculating exactly what will happen. Among all the fanatics who swallow the bait, someone from one of the genuine groups, caught off guard, will come forward. Imagine the fury of Bacon: 'Fludd, you idiot, couldn't you have kept your mouth shut?' 'But, my lord, they seemed to be with us....' 'Fool, weren't you taught never to trust papists? They should have burned you, not that poor wretch from Nola!'"
"But in that case," Belbo said, "when the Rosicrucians move to France, why do the Jesuits, or those polemicists in their hire, attack the newcomers as heretics possessed by devils?"
"Surely you don't expect the Jesuits to work in a straightforward way. What sort of Jesuits would they be then?"
We quarreled at length over my proposal and finally decided, unanimously, that the original hypothesis was better: The Rosicrucians were the bait cast, for the FYench, by the Baconians and the Germans. But the Jesuits, as soon as the manifestoes appeared, caught on. And they immediately joined in the game, to muddy the waters. Obviously, the Jesuits' aim was to prevent the English and German groups from meeting with the French; and to that end any trick would do, no matter how dirty.
Meanwhile, they recorded events, gathered information, and put it all—where? In Abulafia, Belbo joked. But Diotallevi, who had been gathering information himself, said it was no joke. Surely the Jesuits were constructing an immense, tremendously powerful computer that would draw a conclusion from this patiently accumulated, age-old brew of truth and falsehood.
"The Jesuits," Diotallevi said, "understood what neither the poor old Templars of Provins nor the Baconian camp had yet realized, namely, that the reconstruction of the map could be accomplished by ars combinatoria; in other words, with a method that foreshadowed our modern electronic brains. The Jesuits were the first to invent Abulafia! Father Kircher reread all the treatises on the combinatorial art, from Lullus on, and you see what he published in his Ars Magna Sciendi...."
"It looks like a crochet pattern to me," Belbo said.
"No, gentlemen, these are all the possible combinations. Factor analysis, that of the Sefer Yesirah. Calculation of permutations, the very essence of the temurah!"
This was certainly so. It was one thing to conceive Fludd's vague project of identifying the map by beginning with a polar projection; it was quite another to figure out how many trials would be required in order to arrive at the correct solution. And, again, it was one thing to create an abstract model of all the possible combinations, and another to invent a machine able to carry them out. So both Kircher and his disciple Schott built mechanical devices, mechanisms with perforated cards, computers ante litteram. Binary calculators. Cabala applied to modern technology.
IBM: Iesus Babbage Mundi, Iesum Binarium Magnificamur. AMDG: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam? Not on your life! Ars Magna, Digitale Gaudium! IHS: Iesus Hardware & Software!
89
In the bosom of the deepest darkness a society has been formed, a society of new being's, who know one another though they have never seen one another, who understand one another without explanations, who serve one another without friendship.... From the Jesuit rule this society adopts blind obedience; from the Masons it takes the trials and the ceremonies, and from the Templars the subterranean mysteries and the great audacity. Has the Comte de Saint-Germain simply imitated Guillaume Postel, who desperately wanted people to believe him older than he was?
—Marquis de Luchet, Essai sur la secte des illuminés, Paris, 1789, v and xii
The Jesuits knew that if you want to confound your enemies, the best technique is to create clandestine sects, wait for dangerous enthusiasms to precipitate, then arrest them all. In other words, if you fear a plot, organize one yourself; that way, all those who join it come under your control.
I remembered the reservation Agliè had expressed about Ramsay, the first to posit a direct connection between the Masons and the Templars; Agliè said that Ramsay had ties with Catholic circles. In fact, Voltaire had already denounced Ramsay as a tool of the Jesuits. Faced with the birth of English Freemasonry, the Jesuits in France responded with Scottish neo-Templarism.
Responding to this French plot, a certain Marquis de Luchet produced, in 1789, anonymously, Essai sur la secte des illuminés, in which he lashed out against the Illuminati of every stripe, Bavarian or otherwise, priest-baiting anarchists and mystical neo-Templars alike, and he threw on the heap (incredible, how all the pieces of our mosaic were fitting together!) even the Paulicians, even Postel and Saint-Germain. His complaint was that these forms of Templar mysticism were undermining the credibility of Masonry, which in contrast was a society of good and honest people.
The Baconians had invented Masonry to be like Rick's in Casablanca, Jesuit neo-Templarism had parried that move, and now Luchet was hired to bump off all the groups that weren't Baconian.
At this point, however, we were confronted with another problem, which was too much for poor Agliè to handle. Why had de Maistre, who was the Jesuits' man, gone to Wilhelmsbad to sow dissension among the neo-Templars a good seven years before the Marquis de Luchet appeared on the scene?
"Neo-Templarism was all right in the first half of the eighteenth century," Belbo said, "and it was all wrong at the end of the century; first because it had been taken over by revolutionaries, for whom anything served, the Goddess Reason, the Supreme Being, even Cagliostro, provided they could cut off the king's head, and second because the German princes were now putting their thumbs in the pie, especially Frederick of Prussia, and his aims surely didn't correspond to those of the Jesuits. When mystical neo-Templarism, whoever invented it, began producing things like The Magic Flute, Loyola's men naturally decided to wipe it out. It's like high finance: you buy a company, you sell off its assets, you declare bankruptcy, you close it down, and you reinvest its capital. The important thing is the overall strategy, not what happens to the janitor. Or it's like a used car: when it stops running, you send it to the junkyard."
90
In the true Masonic code no other god will be found save Mani. He is the god of the cabalist Masons, of the ancient Rosicrucians, of the Martinist Masons....All the outrages attributed to the Templars are precisely those attributed, before them, to the Manicheans.
—Abbe Barruel, Mémoires pour servir á l'histoire du jacobinisme, Hamburg, 1798, 2, xiii
The Jesuits' strategy became clear to us when we discovered Father Barruel. Between 1797 and 1798, in response to the French Revolution, he writes his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme, a real dime novel that begins, surprise surprise, with the Templars. After the burning of Molav, they transform themselves into a secret society to destroy mon
archy and papacy and to create a world republic. In the eighteenth century they take over Freemasonry and make it their instrument. In 1763 they create a literary academy consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d'Alembert, which meets in the house of Baron d'Holbach and in 1776, plot after plot, they bring about the birth of the Jacobins. But they are mere marionettes, their strings pulled by the real bosses, the Illuminati of Bavaria—regicides by vocation.
Junkyard? After having split Masonry in two with the help of Ramsay, the Jesuits were putting it together again in order to fight it head-on.
Barruel's book had some influence; in fact, in the French National Archives there were at least two reports ordered by Napoleon on the clandestine sects. These reports were drawn up by a certain Charles de Berkheim, who—in the best tradition of secret police—obtained his information from sources already published; he copied freely, first from the book by the Marquis de Luchet and then from Barruel's.
Reading these horrifying descriptions of the Illuminati as well as the denunciation of a directorate of Unknown Superiors capable of ruling the world, Napoleon did not hesitate: he decided to join them. He had his brother Joseph named grand master of the Great Orient, and he himself, according to many sources, made contact with the Masons and became a very high official in their ranks. It is not known, however, in which rite. Perhaps, prudently, in all of them.
We had no idea what Napoleon knew, but we weren't forgetting that he had spent time in Egypt, and God knows what sages he conversed with in the shadow of the pyramids (even a child could see that the famous forty centuries there looking down on him were a clear reference to the Hermetic Tradition).
Napoleon must have known something, because in 1806 he convoked an assembly of French Jews. The official reasons were banal: an attempt to reduce usury, to assure himself of the loyalty of the Jewish population, to find new financing.... None of which explains why he called that assembly the Grand Sanhédrin, a name suggesting a directorate of superiors more or less unknown. The truth is that the shrewd Corsican had identified the representatives of the Jerusalemite branch, and was trying to unite the various scattered Templar groups.
"It's no accident that in 1808 Maréchal Ney's troops are at Tomar. You see the connection?"
"We're here to see connections."
"Now Napoleon, about to defeat England, has almost all the European centers in his hand, and through the French Jews he has the jerusalemites as well. What does he still lack?"
"The Paulicians."
"Exactly. And we haven't yet decided where they end up. But Napoleon provides us with a clue: he goes to look for them in Russia."
Living for centuries in Slavic regions, the Paulicians naturally reorganize under the labels of various Russian mystic groups. One of the most influential advisers of Alexander I is Prince Galitzin, connected with sects of Martinist inspiration. And who do we find in Russia, a good ten years before Napoleon, as plenipotentiary of the House of Savoy, tying bonds with the mystic cénacles of St. Petersburg? De Maistre.
At this point de Maistre distrusts any organization of Illuminati; for him, they are no different from the men of the Enlightenment responsible for the bloodbath of the Revolution. During this period, in fact, repeating Barruel almost word for word, he talks of a satanic sect that wants to conquer the world, and probably he has Napoleon in mind. If our great reactionary is aiming, then, to seduce the Martinist groups, it is because he suspects that they, though drawing their inspiration from the same sources as French and German neo-Templarism, are the heirs of the one group not yet corrupted by Western thought: the Paulicians.
But apparently de Maistre's plan does not succeed. In 1815 the Jesuits are expelled from St. Petersburg, and de Maistre returns to Turin.
"All right," Diotallevi said, "we've found the Paulicians again. Let's get rid of Napoleon, who obviously failed in his purpose—otherwise, on St. Helena, he could have made his enemies quake by merely snapping his fingers. What happens now among all these people? My head is splitting."
"At least you still have a head."
91
Oh, how well you have unmasked those infernal sects that are preparing the way for the Antichrist.... But there is still one sect that you have touched only lightly.
—Letter from Captain Simonini to Barruel, published in La
civiltà cattolica, October 21, 1882
Napoleon's rapprochement with the Jews caused the Jesuits to alter their course. Barruel's Mémoires had contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 he received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who reminded him that Mani and the Old Man of the Mountain were also Jews, that Masonry had been founded by the Jews, and that the Jews had infiltrated all the existing secret societies.
Simonini's letter, shrewdly circulated in Paris, was an embarrassment for Napoleon, who had just got in touch with the Grand Sanhédrin. This move obviously alarmed the Paulicians too, because the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church declared: "Napoleon now proposes to unite all the Jews, whom the wrath of God has scattered over the face of the earth, so that they will overturn the church of Christ and proclaim Napoleon the true Messiah."
The good Barruel accepted the idea that the plot was not only Masonic but also Judeo-Masonic. Further, this satanic element allowed him to attack a new enemy: the Alta Vendita Carbonara, and later the anticlerical fathers of the Risorgimento, from Mazzini to Garibaldi.
"But this all happens in the middle of the nineteenth century," Diotallevi said, "whereas the big anti-Semitic campaign gets under way at the end of the century, with the publication of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And the Protocols appear in Russia. So they are an initiative of the Paulicians."
"Naturally," Bclbo said. "It's clear now that the Jerusalemite group had broken up into three branches. The first branch, through the Spanish and Provençal cabalists, went on to inspire the neo-Templar camp; the second was taken over by the Baconian wing, and they all became scientists and bankers. They're the ones the Jesuits oppose so fiercely. But there is a third branch, and it established itself in Russia. The Russian Jews are generally small tradesmen and moneylenders, and for that reason are hated by the impoverished peasants; but since Jewish culture is a culture of the Book, and all Jews know how to read and write, they eventually swell the ranks of the liberal and revolutionary intelligentsia. The Paulicians, in contrast, are mystics, reactionaries, hand in glove with the landowners, and they have also infiltrated the court. Obviously, between them and the Jerusalemites there can be no traffic. So they are bent on discrediting the Jews, and through the Jews—this they learned from the Jesuits—they cause trouble for their adversaries abroad, both the neo-Templars and the Baconians."
92
There can no longer be any doubt. With all the power and the terror of Satan, the reign of the triumphant King of Israel is approaching our unregenerate world; the King born from the blood of Zion, the Antichrist, approaches the throne of universal power.
—Sergei Nilus, Epilogue to the Protocols
The idea was acceptable. We had only to consider who had introduced the Protocols in Russia.
One of the most influential Martinists at the end of the century, Papus, dazzled Nicholas II during his visit to Paris, then went to Moscow, taking with him one Philippe Nizier Anselme Vachot. Possessed by the Devil at the age of six, healer at thirteen, magnetizer in Lyon, Philippe fascinated both Nicholas II and his hysterical wife. He was invited to court, named physician of the military academy of St. Petersburg, made a general and a councilor of state.
His enemies decided to diminish his influence by setting against him an equally charismatic figure. And Nilus was found.
Nilus was an itinerant monk who, in priestly habit, wandered in the forests (what else?) displaying a prophet's great beard, two wives, a little daughter, an assistant (or lover, perhaps), all hanging on his every word. Half guru, the kind that runs off with the collection plate, and half hermit, the kind that yells that
the end is near, he was in fact obsessed by the Antichrist.
The plan of Nilus's supporters was to have him ordained, and then, after he married (what was another wife, more or less?) Elena Alexan-drovna Ozerova, the tsarina's maid of honor, to have him become the confessor of the sovereigns.
"I'm anything but a bloodthirsty man," Belbo said, "but I begin to feel that the massacre of Tsarskoye Selo was perhaps a justifiable extermination of vermin."
Anyway, Philippe's supporters accused Nilus of leading a lewd life, and God knows they were right. Nilus had to leave the court, but at this point someone came to his aid, handing him the text of the Protocols. Since everybody got the Martinists (who derived from Saint Martin) mixed up with the Martinezists (followers of Martinez Pasqualis, whom Agliè so dislikes), and since Pasqualis, according to a widespread rumor, was Jewish, by discrediting the Jews the Protocols also discredited the Martinists, and with the discrediting of the Martinists, Philippe was booted out.
Actually, a first, incomplete, version of the Protocols had already appeared in 1903, in Znamia, a St. Petersburg paper edited by a rabid anti-Semite named Krusccvan. In 1905, with the approval of the government censors, a complete text anonymously appeared, under the title The Source of Our Evils, edited by one Boutmi, who with Kruscevan had founded the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black Hundreds, which enlisted common criminals to carry out pogroms and extremist right-wing acts of violence. Boutmi later published, under his own name, further editions of the work, with the title The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols from the Secret Archives of the Central Chancellery of Zion.