On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  In fact the Rosicrucian story produced historical developments of considerable significance. Symbolic Masonry, a transformation of actual masonry (which had real confraternities of artisans, who had preserved over the course of the centuries the terms and ceremonies of the ancient builders of cathedrals), emerges in the eighteenth century thanks to some English gentlemen. With Andersons Constitutions, symbolic Masonry tried to legitimize itself by maintaining the antiquity of its origins, which they claimed went back to the Temple of Solomon. In subsequent years, through the efforts of Ramsay, who created so-called Scottish Masonry, what is worked into this foundation myth is the relationship between the builders of the Temple and the Templars, whose secret tradition apparently reaches modern Masonry through the mediation of the Rosicrucians.

  If in early Masonry the Rosicrucian theme introduces elements of mysticism and the occult into an organization that is by now a rival to throne and altar, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it will be in defense of throne and altar that the Rosicrucian and Templar myth will be taken up again in order to combat the spirit of the Enlightenment.

  Already before the French Revolution people discussed the myth of secret societies and the fact that there existed Unknown Superiors who guided the destiny of the world. In 1789 the marquis de Luchet (in his Essai sur le secte des Illuminés) warned: "in the bosom of the thickest darkness a society of new beings has been formed, who know each other without ever having been seen.... This society takes from the Jesuit rule its blind obedience, from Masonry its trials and external ceremonies, and from the Templars its subterranean echoes and incredible daring."

  Between 1789 and 1798, as a response to the French Revolution, the Abbé Barruel wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de jacobinisme, apparently a historical work but one that could however be read as a serial novel. After being destroyed by Philippe le Bel, the Templars turned into a secret society to destroy the monarchy and the papacy. In the eighteenth century they got hold of Masonry to create a sort of academy whose diabolical members included Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and D'Alembert—and it was from this group that Jacobinism was born. But the Jacobins themselves were in turn controlled by an even more secret society, the Bavarian Illuminati, who were regicides by vocation. The French Revolution was the final outcome of this conspiracy.

  It did not matter that there were profound differences between secular, enlightened Masonry and the Masonry of the Illuminati, which was occultist and related to the Templars, nor that the Templar myth had already been exploded by one of its brothers and fellow travelers, who would later take another road: I am referring to Joseph de Maistre.... No, it did not matter, it was too good a story.

  Barruel's book contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 Barruel received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who reminded him that both the Mani and the Old Man of the Mountains of Muslim memory (the Templars were suspected of being in league with the latter) were Jews (and you can see that here the network of occult ancestry becomes dizzying). Masonry then had been founded by the Jews, who had infiltrated all secret societies.

  Barruel did not take up this rumor publicly, and in any case it did not produce any interesting effects until the middle of the century, when the Jesuits began to worry about the anticlerical originators of the Risorgimento, such as Garibaldi, who were affiliated with Masonry. The idea of showing that the Carbonari were emissaries of a Judeo-Masonic plot appeared to be useful as a polemic.

  But still in the nineteenth century, the anticlerical supporters in turn tried to defame the Jesuits, to show that the latter were doing nothing other than plotting against the good of humanity. More than some "serious" authors (from Michelet and Quinet to Garibaldi and Gioberti), the writer who made this motif popular was a novelist, Eugène Sue. In The Wandering Jew, the evil Monsieur Rodin, the quintessence of Jesuit skulduggery, clearly appears as a replica of the Unknown Superiors of both Masonic and clerical memory. Monsieur Rodin reappears on the scene in Sue's last novel, The Mysteries of the People, where the notorious Jesuit plot is exposed down to the last detail. Rudolph of Gerolstein, who has migrated from The Mysteries of Paris to this novel, denounces the Jesuit plot, warning "with what cunning this infernal plot has been organized, and what terrifying outrages, what horrendous slavery, what despotic destiny it meant for Europe...."

  After Sue's novels came out, a certain Monsieur Joly wrote a pamphlet of liberal inspiration in 1864, directed against Napoléon III: in it Machiavelli, who stands for the cynical dictator, converses with Montesquieu. The Jesuit plot described by Sue is now attributed by Joly to Napoléon III.

  In 1868 Hermann Goedsche, who had published other clearly libelous pamphlets, wrote a popular novel, Biarritz, under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, in which he describes an occult ceremony in the cemetery in Prague. Goedsche is simply copying a scene from Dumas's Joseph Balsamo (1849), which describes the meeting between Cagliostro, head of the Unknown Superiors, and other Illuminati, when they are all plotting the affair of the Queen's necklace. But instead of Cagliostro and company, Goedsche has representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel appear at a meeting, as they prepare to take over the world. Five years later the same story will be taken up in a Russian work ( The Jews, Masters of the World), where it is treated as if it were real history. In 1881 Le Contemporain reprints the same story, claiming that it comes from a reliable source, the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1896 François Bournand uses the story of the Grand Rabbi again (but this time he is called John Readcliff) in his book Les Juifs, nos contemporains. From this point onward, the Masonic meeting invented by Dumas, blended with the Jesuit plot invented by Sue and attributed by Joly to Napoléon III, becomes the real speech made by the Great Rabbi, which then resurfaces in various forms and in various places.

  There now comes on the scene Pëter Ivanovic Rakovskij, a Russian already suspected of contacts with groups of revolutionaries and nihilists, who later (having duly repented of his past) would become involved with the Black Centurions, a terrorist organization of the extreme Right, and then turn informer before becoming head of the czar's political police (the Okhrana). Now Rakovskij, to help his political protector (Count Sergej Witte), who had been worried by an opponent of his, Elie de Cyon, had Cyon's house searched and found a pamphlet in which Cyon had copied Joly's text against Napoléon III, but attributed Machiavelli's ideas to Witte. Rakovskij, fiercely anti-Semitic—this was happening at the time of the Dreyfus affair—takes that text, cancels all references to Witte, and attributes the ideas to the Jews. One cannot be called Cyon, even with a C (rather than an'S), without evoking a Jewish conspiracy.

  The text altered by Rakovskij probably constituted the primary source for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It betrays its novelistic source since it is not really credible, except in a novel by Sue, that the "baddies" should express their wicked plans in such an open and shameless way. The Elders openly declare that they have "a vaulting ambition, an all-consuming greed, a ruthless desire for revenge and an intense hatred." They want to abolish the freedom of the press but encourage libertinism. They criticize Liberalism but uphold the idea of capitalist multinationals. To stir up revolution in every country, they intend to exacerbate social inequalities. They want to build subways so as to bomb big cities. They want to abolish the study of the classics and ancient history but to encourage sport and visual communication in order to turn the working classes into imbeciles...

  It was easy to identify a document produced in nineteenth-century France in the Protocols, because it abounds in references to problems in French society at the time, but it was also easy to spot many very famous popular novels among its sources. Alas, the story—once more—was so convincing in narrative terms that it was taken seriously.

  The rest of this story is History. An itinerant monk, Sergej Nilus, in order to further his "Rasputinian" ambitions, and obsessed with the Antichrist, printed and commented on the Protocols. After this the text travel
s across Europe until it comes into Hitlers hands....*

  We have explored some false ideas that have made history, and about which everyone has more or less heard. But there are other crazed ideas we have forgotten about.

  From 1925 onward publicity was given in Nazi circles to the theory of an Austrian pseudoscientist, Hans Hörbiger, a theory called WEL, that is, Welteislehre, the theory of eternal ice. It had enjoyed the favor of men such as Rosenberg and Himmler. But with Hitler's rise to power Hörbiger was taken seriously even in some scientific circles—for instance, by a scholar like Lenard, who had discovered x-rays along with Roentgen.

  According to the theory of eternal ice (expounded as early as 1913 by Philip Fauth in his Glacial-Kosmogonié), the cosmos is the theater of an eternal struggle between ice and fire, which produces not an evolution but an alternation of cycles, or of epochs.* There was once an enormous mass at a very high temperature, millions of times bigger than the sun, which collided with an immense accumulation of cosmic ice. The mass of ice penetrated this incandescent body, and after working inside it as vapor for hundreds of millions of years, it caused the whole thing to explode. Various fragments were projected both into icy space and into an intermediate zone where they became the solar system. The moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are made of ice, and the Milky Way is a chain of ice that traditional astronomy has viewed as stars; but in fact these are photographic tricks. Sunspots are produced by blocks of ice detaching themselves from Jupiter.

  Now the force of the original explosion is decreasing, and every planet completes not an elliptical revolution, as official science erroneously believes, but something approximating an (imperceptible) spiral around the bigger planet that attracts it. At the end of the cycle through which we are living, the moon will come closer and closer to the earth, gradually making the waters of the oceans rise, submerging the tropics, and allowing only the tallest mountains to emerge, while the cosmic rays will become more and more powerful and cause genetic mutations. Finally the moon will explode, turning into a mixture of ice, water, and gas, which in the end will plummet down onto the earth's globe. Because of complicated events due to the influence of Mars, the earth too will turn into a sphere of ice and in the end will be reabsorbed by the sun. Then there will be a new explosion and a new beginning, just as in the past the earth had already had and then reabsorbed another three satellites.

  This cosmogony presupposed a sort of Eternal Return that went back to very ancient myths and epics. Once more, what today's Nazis call the wisdom of Tradition was in this way set up against the false knowledge of liberal Jewish science. Furthermore, a glacial cosmogony seemed very Nordic and Aryan. In The Morning of the Magicians Pauwels and Bergier attribute to this profound belief in the glacial origins of the cosmos the confidence, encouraged by Hitler, that his troops would be able to cope very well in the frosts of Russian territory.* But they also maintain that the need to prove how cosmic ice would react had slowed down the experiments on the V-1s. Still in 1952, a certain Elmar Brugg published a book in honor of Hörbiger, whom he hailed as the twentieth-century Copernicus, claiming that the theory of eternal ice explained the profound links between earthly events and cosmic forces, and concluding that the silence of democratic-Jewish science about Hörbiger was a typical example of the conspiracy of mediocrities.

  The cultivators of magical-Hermetic and neo-Templar sciences operating around the Nazi Party—for instance, the adepts of the Thule Gesellschaft founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf—is a phenomenon that has been widely studied.† Apparently in Nazi circles they also paid attention to another theory, which posits that the earth is empty and we live not on its outside, on its eternal, convex crust, but inside it, on the internal concave surface. This theory was articulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a certain Captain J. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who wrote to various scientific societies: "To the whole world: I declare the earth is hollow, habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres; one within the other, and that it is open at the pole twelve or sixteen degrees." A wooden model of his universe is still preserved in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

  The theory was taken up again in the second half of the century by Cyrus Reed Teed, who specified that what we think is the sky is a mass of gas filling the inside of the globe, with some zones of brilliant light. The sun, the moon, and the stars are not, he said, celestial globes, but rather visual effects caused by various phenomena.

  After the First World War the theory was introduced into Germany by Peter Bender, and then by Karl Neupert, who founded the Hohlweltlehre (hollow-earth theory) movement. According to some sources, the theory was taken seriously in the upper echelons of the German hierarchy, and in some quarters of the German navy it was held that the hollow-earth theory would allow them to establish more accurately the positions of British ships, because if they used infrared rays, the curve of the earth would not obscure their observation.* It is even said that some shots with the V-1s missed their targets precisely because they calculated their trajectory on the hypothesis of a concave, not a convex, earth's surface. Here—if this is true—we can see the historical, even providential usefulness of deranged astronomical theories.

  But it is easy to say that the Nazis were mad and that they are all dead, apart from good old Martin Borman, who is always said to be in hiding somewhere. The fact is that if you go on the Internet and ask any search engine to find sites dealing with Hollow Earth, you will find that there are still very many followers of the theory. And it is no use saying that the sites (and the books they publicize) have been created by some cunning old foxes counting on a public of idiots and/or devotees of New Age ideas. The social and cultural problem is not the cunning foxes, but the idiots, who are clearly still legion. *

  What unites all the stories I have mentioned, and what made them so persuasive and credible?

  The Donation of Constantine was probably created not as a deliberate forgery but as a rhetorical exercise that people only began to take seriously later.

  The Rosicrucian manifestos were, at least according to their presumed authors, an erudite game and, if not a joke, at least a literary exercise that could be categorized under the genre of Utopias.

  Prester Johns letter was certainly a deliberate fake, but equally certainly it did not intend to produce the effects it in fact created.

  Cosmas Indicopleustes was guilty of fundamentalism, a pardonable weakness considering the times in which he lived, but as we have seen, no one really took him seriously, and his text was maliciously exhumed as an "authoritative" work only more than a thousand years later.

  The Protocols emerge initially on their own, through an accumulation of novelistic themes that gradually kindle the imagination of a few fanatics and become transformed en route.

  And yet each one of these stories had an advantage: they appeared convincing in narrative terms, more so than day-to-day or historical reality, which is much more complex and incredible, and they seemed to provide a good explanation for something that otherwise was more difficult to understand.

  Let us turn again to Ptolemy's account. We now know that Ptolemy's hypothesis was scientifically false. And yet, if our intelligence is now Copernican, our perception is still Ptolemaic: we not only see the sun rising in the East and traveling across the sky throughout the hours of daylight, but we behave as though the sun went around us and we stayed still. And we say: "the sun rises, is high in the sky, is going down, sets...." Even a professor of astronomy speaks, thinks, and perceives this way: Ptolemaically.

  Why did the story of the Donation of Constantine have to be disproved? It guaranteed a continuity of power after the collapse of the empire, it perpetuated an idea of Latinity, it indicated a guide, a point of reference amid the flames and slaughters perpetrated by the many suitors who were competing for the nuptials of Europe....

  Why reject Cosmas's account? In other respects he was a careful traveler, a diligent gatherer of geographical and h
istorical curiosities, and in any case his theory of the flat earth—at least from a narrative point of view—was not entirely improbable. The earth was a huge rectangle bounded by four immense walls upholding two layers of the heavenly vault: on the first shone the stars, and on the intervening layer, or insole, lived the Blessed. Astronomical phenomena were explained by the presence of a very high mountain to the north, which by hiding the sun created night, and by coming between the sun and the light produced eclipses....

  As has been observed, even Teed's hollow-earth theory was difficult to refute for nineteenth-century mathematicians, because it was possible to project the convex surface of the earth onto a concave surface without noticing too many discrepancies.

  Why reject the story of the Rosicrucians if it answered the need for religious harmony? And why discount the story of the Protocols if it managed to explain so many historical events with its conspiracy myth? As Karl Popper has reminded us, "The conspiracy theory of society ... is akin to Homer's theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened in the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society ... comes from abandoning God and then asking: 'Who is in his place?' His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer."*