by Umberto Eco
"Anyway, let's not rend our garments; we were led astray by everyone. They all, from Postel on, probably, made this mistake. Two hundred years after Provins, they were convinced that the sixth group was the Jerusalemites. It wasn't."
"Look, Casaubon, we were the ones who revised Ardenti's theory, we were the ones who said that the appointment at the rock didn't mean Stonehenge but the Rock in the Mosque of Omar."
"And we were wrong. There are other rocks. We should have thought of a place founded on rock, on a mountain, a stone, a spur, a cliff.... The sixth group waits in the fortress of Alamut."
103
And Kairos appeared, holding in his hand a scepter that signified royalty, and he gave it to the first created God, and he took it and said: "Your secret name shall have 36 letters."
—Hasan as-Sabbāh, Surgozasht is-Sayyidna
A bravura performance, but now explanations were in order. I provided them in the days that followed: long explanations, detailed, documented. On a table at Pilade's I showed Belbo proof after proof, which he followed with increasingly glazed eyes while he chain-smoked and every five minutes held out his empty glass, the ghost of an ice cube at the bottom, and Pilade would hasten to refill it, without waiting to be told.
My first sources were the same ones in which the earliest accounts of the Templars appeared, from Gerard of Strasbourg to Joinville. The Templars had come into contact—into conflict, sometimes, but more often into mysterious alliance—with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain.
The story was complicated and began after the death of Mahomet, with the schism between the followers of the ordinary law, the Sunnis, and the supporters of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, Fatima's husband, who saw the succession taken from him. It was the enthusiasts of Ali, the group of adepts called the Shiites, who created the heretic branch of Islam, the Shī'ah. An occult doctrine, which saw the continuity of the Revelation not in traditional meditation upon the words of the Prophet but in the very person of the Imam, lord, leader, epiphany of the divine, theophanic reality, King of the World.
Now, what happened to this heretic Islamic branch, which was gradually infiltrated by all the esoteric doctrines of the Mediterranean basin, from Manicheanism to gnosticism, from Neoplatonism to Iranian mysticism, by all those impulses whose shifts and development in the West we had followed for years? It was a long story, impossible to unravel, partly because the various Arab authors and protagonists had extremely long names, the texts were transcribed with a forest of diacritical marks, and as the evening wore on we could no longer distinguish between Abū 'Abd Allāh Muhammad ibn Alī ibn Razzām al-Tā'ī al-Kūfī, Abū Muhammad 'Ubayd Allāh, and Abū Mu'īnī Abd Dīn Nāsir ibn Khusraw Marvāzī Qubādiyānī. But an Arab, I imagine, would have the same difficulty with Aristoteles, Aristoxenus, Aristarchus, Aristides, Aristago-ras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anacreon, and Anacharsis.
But one thing was certain: Shiism in turn split into two branches, one called the Twelvers, who await a lost and future imam, and the other, the Ismailis, born in the realm of the Fatimids, in Cairo, who subsequently gave rise to reformed Ismailism in Persia through a fascinating figure, the mystical and ferocious Hasan as-Sabbāh. Sabbāh set up his headquarters to the southwest of the Caspian, in the impregnable fortress of Alamut, the Nest of the Raptor.
There Sabbāh surrounded himself with his devotees, the fidā'īyīn or fedayeen, those faithful unto death; and he used them to carry out his political assassinations, to be instruments of the jihād hafī, the secret holy war. The fedayeen later gained an unfortunate reputation under the name Assassins—not a lovely word now, but for them it was splendid, the emblem of a race of warrior monks who greatly resembled the Templars; a spiritual knighthood.
The fortress or castle of Alamut: the Rock. Built on an airy crest four hundred meters long and in places only a few meters wide, thirty at most. From the distance, to one arriving along the Azerbaijan road, it looked like a natural wall, dazzling white in the sun, bluish in the purple dusk, bloody at dawn; on some days it blended with the clouds or flashed with lightning. Along its upper ridge you could just make out what seemed a row of flint swords that shot upward for hundreds of meters. The most accessible side was a treacherous slope of gravel, which archeologists even today are unable to scale. The fortress was reached by a secret stairway bitten out of the rock, like the spiral peel of a stone apple, and a single archer could defend it. Dizzying, a world elsewhere. Alamut could be reached only astride eagles.
Here Sabbāh ruled, and his successors after him, each to be known as the Old Man of the Mountain. First of them was the sulfurous Sinan.
Sabbāh had invented a method of dominion over his men, and to his adversaries he declared that if they did not submit to him, they would die. There was no escaping the Assassins. Nizam al-Mulk, prime minister of the sultan when the Crusaders were still exerting themselves to conquer Jerusalem, was stabbed to death, as he was being carried on his litter to the quarters of his women. I he killer had approached him disguised as a dervish. And the atabeg of Hims, guarded by a squad of men armed to the teeth, as he came down from his castle to go to Friday prayers, was slain by the Old Man's killers.
Sinān decided to murder the Marquis Corrado di Montefeltro, a Christian, and readied two of his men, who introduced themselves among the infidels able to mimic their customs and language after much preparation. They had disguised themselves as monks and, while the bishop of Tyre was entertaining the hapless marquis at a banquet, leaped upon the victim and stabbed him. One Assassin was immediately killed by the bodyguards; the other took refuge in a church, waited until the wounded man was brought there, attacked him again, finishing him off, then died blissfully.
Blissfully because, as the Arab historiographers of the Sunni line and then the Christian chroniclers from Oderic of Pordenone to Marco Polo wrote, the Old Man had discovered a way to make his knights faithful even to the supreme sacrifice, to make them invincible, horrible war machines. He took them as youths, asleep, to the summit of the mountain, where he stupefied them with pleasures—wine, women, flowers, delectable banquets, and hashish—which gave the sect its name. When they could no longer do without the perverse delights of that invented paradise, he dragged them out of their sleep and set before them a choice: Go, kill, and if you succeed, this paradise you leave will again be yours, and forever; but if you fail, you will plunge back into the Gehenna of the everyday.
Dazed by the drug, helpless before his demands, they sacrificed themselves in sacrificing others; they were killers destined to be killed, victims condemned to make victims.
How they were feared! What tales the Crusaders told about them on moonless nights as the simoom howled over the desert! How the Templars admired, envied those splendid animals; how awed they were by the clear will to martyrdom! The Templars agreed to pay their tolls, asking, in exchange, formal tributes, in a game of reciprocal concessions, complicity, brotherhood of arms, disemboweling one another in the open field but embracing one another in secret, exchanging murmured words of mystical visions, magic formulas, alchemic subtleties....
From the Assassins, the Templars learned occult rites. It was cowardice and ignorance that kept King Philip's inquisitors from seeing that the spitting on the cross, the kiss on the anus, the black cat, and the worship of Baphomet were simply a repetition of other ceremonies, ceremonies performed under the influence of the first secret the Templars learned in the Orient: the use of hashish.
So it was obvious that the Plan was born—had to be born—there. From the men of Alamut, the Templars learned of the subterranean currents. They met the men of Alamut in Provins and established the secret plot of the Thirty-six Invisibles, and that is why Christian Rosencreutz journeyed to Fez and other places in the Orient, and that is why it was to the Orient that Postel turned, and why it was from Egypt, home of the Fatimid Ismailis, that the mages of the Renaissance imported the eponymous divinity of the Plan, Hermes, Hermes-Teuth or Toth, and why Egyptian figures were used by the m
ountebank Cagliostro for his rituals. And the Jesuits, less narrow than we had thought, with the good Father Kircher, lost no time in throwing themselves into hieroglyphics, Coptic, and the other Oriental languages, and Hebrew was only a cover, a nod to the fashion of the period.
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These texts are not addressed to common mortals.... Gnostic perception is a path reserved for an elite.... For, in the words of the Bible: Do not cast your pearls before swine.
—Kamal Jumblatt, Interview in Le Jour, March 31, 1967
Arcana publicata vilescunt: et gratiam prophanata amittunt. Ergo: ne margaritas obijce porcis, seu asinus substerne rosas.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian
Rnsenereutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, frontispiece
For that matter, where else could you find someone able to wait on the rock for six centuries, someone who had actually waited on the rock? True, Alamut eventually fell, under the pressure of the Mongols, but the Ismaili sect survived throughout the East: it mingled with non-Shiite Sufism, it generated the terrible sect of the Druzes, and it survived finally among the Indian Khojas, the followers of the Aga Khan, not far from the site of Agarttha.
But I had discovered more. Under the Fatimid dynasty, through the Academy of Heliopolis, the hermetic notions of the ancient Egyptians were rediscovered in Cairo, and a house of sciences was established there. House of sciences! Was it from this that Bacon drew the inspiration for his House of Solomon, which in turn was the model for the Conservatoire?
"That's it, that's it, there's no doubt about it," Belbo said, intoxicated. "But now how do the cabalists fit in?"
"That's only a parallel story. The rabbis of Jerusalem sense that something happened between the Templars and the Assassins, and the rabbis of Spain, snooping around under the pretense of lending money at interest to the European commanderies, get a whiff of something. They have been excluded and, spurred by national pride, they decide to figure it out on their own. What?! We, the Chosen People, are kept in the dark about the Secret of Secrets? And, bang, the cabalistic tradition begins: a heroic attempt of the dispersed, the outsiders, to show up the masters, the ones in power, by claiming to know all."
"But, doing that, they give the Christians the impression that they really do know all."
"And at a certain point somebody makes the supreme goof, confusing Ismail with Israel."
"For God's sake, don't tell me that Barruel and the Protocols and all the rest were simply the result of a misspelling. Casaubon, we're reducing a tragic chapter in history to a mistake of Pico della Mirandola."
"No, maybe there's another reason. The Chosen People had taken on the duty of interpreting the Book. People are afraid of those who make them look squarely at the Law. But the Assassins? Why didn't they turn up sooner?"
"Belbo! Think what a depressed area that was after the battle of Lepanto. Sebottendorf knows that there is something to be learned from the Turk dervishes, but Alamut is no more; those Turks are holed up God knows where. They wait. And finally their moment comes; on the tide of Islamic irredentism they stick their heads out again. Putting Hitler in the Plan, we found a good reason for the Second World War. Now, putting in the Assassins of Alamut, we explain what has been happening for years in the Persian Gulf. And this is where we find a place for our Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. A society whose aim is to heal the rift, at last, between the spiritual knighthoods of different faiths."
"Or else to stimulate conflict and take advantage of the confusion. Once again we've done our job and set History straight. Can it be that at the supreme moment the Pendulum will reveal that the Umbilicus Mundi is at Alamut?"
"Let's not go too far. I'd leave that last point hanging."
"Like the Pendulum."
"If you like. We can't just say whatever enters our heads."
"No, no. Strict scholarship, above all."
That evening I congratulated myself on having invented a great tale. I was an aesthete who used the flesh and blood of the world to make Beauty. But Belbo by now was an adept, and, like other adepts, not through enlightenment, but faute de mieux.
105
Claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens.
—Lucretius, De Renan Natura, iii, 453
It must have been about then that Belbo tried to take stock of what was happening to him. But the most severe self-analysis could not free him now from the sickness to which he had grown accustomed.
FILENAME: And what if it's true?
To invent a Plan. The Plan justifies you to such a degree that you can no longer be held accountable, not even for the Plan itself. Just throw the stone and hide your hand. If there really were a Plan, there would be no failure.
You never had Cecilia because the Archons made Annibale Can-talamcssa and Pio Bo unskilled even with the friendliest of the brass instruments. You fled the Canal gang because the Decans wanted to spare you for another holocaust. And the man with the scar has a talisman more powerful than yours.
A Plan, a guilty party. The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it's His fault.
The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it's the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company. Misery, company, too many dactyls.
Nothing can dispel from my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute Optimism.
I have committed fornication, true (or not true), but God is the one unable to solve the problem of Evil. Come, let us pound the fetus in the mortar with honey and pepper. Dieu le veult.
If belief is absolutely necessary, let it be in a religion that doesn't make you feel guilty. A religion out of joint, fuming, subterranean, without an end. Like a novel, not like a theology.
Five paths to a single destination. What a waste. Better a labyrinth that leads everywhere and nowhere. To die with style, live in the Baroque.
Only a bad Demiurge makes us feel good.
But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.
And what if there is a Plan, but it has eluded you—and will elude you for all eternity?
When religion fails, art provides. You invent the Plan, metaphor of the Unknowable One. Even a human plot can fill the void. They didn't publish my Hearts in Exstasy because I don't belong to the Templar clique.
To live as if there were a Plan: the philosopher's stone.
If you can't beat them, join them. If there's a Plan, adjust to it.
Lorenza puts me to the test. Humility. If I had the humility to appeal to the Angels, even without believing in them, and to draw the right circle, I would have peace. Maybe.
Believe there is a secret and you will feel like an initiate. It costs nothing.
To create an immense hope that can never be uprooted, because it has no root. Ancestors who do not exist will never appear and say that you have betrayed. A religion you can keep while betraying it infinitely.
Like Andreac: to create, in jest, the greatest revelation of history and, while others are destroyed by it, swear for the rest of your life that you had nothing to do with it.
***
To create a truth with a hazy outline: when somebody tries to clarify it, you excommunicate him. Accept only those hazier than yourself. Jamais d'ennemis à droite.
Why write novels? Rewrite history. The history that then comes true.
Why not set it in Denmark, Mr. William S.? Seven Seas Jim Johann Valentin Andreae Luke-Matthew roams the archipelago of the Sunda between Patmos and Avalon, from the White Mountain to Mindanao, from Atlantis to Thessalonica to the Council of Nicaea. Origen cuts off his testicles and shows them, bleeding, to the fathers of the City of the Sun, and Hiram sneers filioque filioque while Constantine digs his greedy nails into the hollow eye sockets of Robert Fludd, death death to the Jews of the ghetto of Ant
ioch, Dieu et mon droit, wave the Beauceant, lay on, down with the Ophites and the Borborites, the snakes. Trumpets blare, and here come the Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité Sainte with the Moor's head bristling on their pike. The Rcbis, the Rebis! Magnetic hurricane, the Tower collapses, Rachkovsky grins over the roasted corpse of Jacques de Molay.
***
I did not possess you, but I can blow up history.
***
If the problem is this absence of being and if what is is what is said, then the more we talk, the more being there is.
The dream of science is that there be little being, that it be concentrated and sayable, E = mc2. Wrong. To be saved at the very beginning, for all eternity, it is necessary for that being to be tangled. Like a serpent tied into knots by a drunken sailor: impossible to untie.
***
Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to summarize. A simple relay race among symbols, one says the name of the next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endless. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an anagram. Anagrams = ars magna.
That must have been how it happened. Belbo decided to take the universe of the Diabolicals seriously, not because of an abundance of faith, but because of a total lack of it.