by Umberto Eco
But what I wish to engage with here is not so much the spread of the conspiracy syndrome, which is clear to all, but with what I would call the pseudo-semiotic techniques used to prove and justify conspiracies.
Usually a conspiracy theory makes use of random coincidences that become dense with meaning, and of connections made between completely unconnected facts. Just to give some examples, here is a fine series of coincidences that, if they have not yet degenerated into conspiracy theories, are on the borderline. I read on the internet that Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, Kennedy was elected in 1946, Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both their wives lost a child while living in the White House. Both were shot in the head by a Confederate southerner on a Friday. Lincoln’s secretary was called Kennedy, and Kennedy’s secretary was called Lincoln. Lincoln’s successor was Andrew Johnson (born 1808) and Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, was born in 1908. John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Lincoln, was born in 1839, and Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939. Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater. Kennedy was hit in a Ford Lincoln car. Lincoln was shot in a theatre and his killer hid in a warehouse. Kennedy’s assassin shot from a warehouse and went to hide in a theatre. Both Booth and Oswald were killed before the trial. The (rather vulgar) icing on the cake: one week before his death Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland. A week before he was killed, Kennedy was “in” Monroe, Marilyn.
Speculation in a similar vein has surrounded the collapse of the twin towers and the recurrence of the number 11.
Again, on the internet, and just to add a little more fuel, it is explained that, if you fold a $50 bill following a procedure similar to that of origami, you get the image of the two towers in flames, a sign that Masonic conspirators had been planning that disaster for a very long time. (It is customary to find Masonic symbols on American banknotes, and not by chance, because most of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were Freemasons.)
Some time ago, taking my cue from such fantasies, I wrote a parody of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. If we observe Leonardo’s Last Supper we see that there are thirteen at the table. However, if we eliminate Jesus and Judas (who were both to die shortly afterwards) this leaves eleven guests. Eleven is the sum of the letters in the names Petrus and Judas, 11 is the number of letters in the word Apocalypsis, there are also 11 letters in Ultima Coena (Last Supper), on either side of Jesus one apostle appears with hands spread open and another with the index finger extended, in both cases forming an eleven. Finally, the sum of the panels at the sides and the windows shown in the fresco comes to eleven. Moreover, following an elementary cabalistic principle, if we assign a progressive number to the 26 letters of the alphabet, substituting each letter with a number, the name Leonardo da Vinci gives 12 + 5 + 15 + 14 + 1 + 18 + 4 + 15 + 4 + 1 + 22 + 9 + 14 + 3 + 9 = 146, and the sum of the digits 1, 4 and 6 makes 11. Now do the same operation with the name of Matteo (Matthew): the sum of the numerical values of the letters is equal to 74, and 7 plus 4 makes 11. Eleven times eleven makes 121—but if we subtract the ten commandments from this figure, we get 111.
The sum of the numerical values of the letters of Giuda (Judas) is 42, and 4 plus 2 makes 6. This appearance of the number 6 leads us to multiply 111 by 6, and we get 666, the Number of the Beast.
So, at the same time as it denounces the betrayal of Christ, The Last Supper announces the coming of the Antichrist.
Of course, to make the figures add up I had to call Peter by his Latin name, Petrus, and Matthew by his Italian name, Judas once in Italian and once in English, Ultima coena in Latin (there was no way round that) and to get 111 I had to subtract the 10 commandments from 121 and not the 5 holy wounds of the Lord or the 7 works of corporal mercy. But that’s the way it goes in numerology.
But I would like to end by reconstructing a phony conspiracy that still leads thousands of curious people to the village of Rennes-le-Château. This notion is based on the idea that Christ married Mary Magdalene thereby founding the Merovingian dynasty and then the imaginary Priory of Sion, purportedly still active today. The conspiracy is linked, how could it be otherwise, to the mystery of the Grail.
The legendary relic has traveled a tortuous route, now in one place now in another, and according to one of the most recent legends, which sprang from the books of the Nazi Otto Rahn, it was in Montségur, in southern France. The area was right for a revival of the legend: all that was needed was a pretext. And the pretext came with the story of Abbé Bérenger Saunière, parish priest from 1885 to 1909 of Rennes-le-Château, a small village about forty kilometers from Carcassonne. Saunière had restored the local church inside and outside, built a house, Villa Bethania, and a tower on the hill, the Magdala Tower, which resembled the Tower of David in Jerusalem.
It was calculated that the cost was 200,000 francs at the time, corresponding to about two hundred years of salary for a provincial priest, so the bishop of Carcassonne launched an investigation and then transferred Saunière to another parish. Saunière refused and retired to private life, before dying in 1917.
After his death a whole range of theories arose. It was said that during the renovation works to the parish church, Saunière had found a treasure trove. In reality, the wily priest had been advertising for people to send money in exchange for promised masses for their deceased relatives, thereby amassing a fortune for hundreds of masses that he had never celebrated—and it was for precisely this reason he was put on trial by the bishop of Carcassonne.
On his death, Saunière left everything to his housekeeper, Marie Dénarnaud, who, to add value to the properties she inherited, continued to fuel the legend of the treasure. When he inherited Marie’s estate in 1946, a certain Noël Corbu opened a restaurant in the village and used the local press to spread news of the “billionaire priest,” thereby prompting several treasure hunters to show up in the village.
At that point, enter Pierre Plantard, a character who had been active in extreme right-wing groups, had founded anti-Semitic groups, and at the age of seventeen had launched Alpha Galates, a movement siding with the collaborationist Vichy regime. This had not stopped him, after the liberation, from claiming that his organizations were partisan resistance groups.
In December 1963, after six months in prison for breach of trust (he was later sentenced to a year for the corruption of minors), Plantard presented his Priory of Sion, boasting that it was almost two thousand years old, on the basis of documents that Saunière had allegedly found. These documents demonstrated the survival of the Merovingian royal line, and Plantard claimed he was a descendant of Dagobert II.
Plantard’s scam crossed paths with a book by Gérard de Sède, who in 1962 had written about the mysteries of the Castle of Gisors, in Normandy, where he had met Roger Lhomoy, half tramp and half lunatic, who had worked for a time as a gardener and custodian at the castle. There he spent two years digging at night in the cellars where he found old tunnels. Lhomoy claimed he had entered a room where he supposedly saw a stone altar, images of Jesus and the twelve apostles on the walls, and, lined up along the walls, stone sarcophagi and thirty coffers in precious metal.
Despite the discovery of a few tunnels, none of the subsequent research, encouraged by de Sède, led to the fabulous room. In the meantime, de Sède had been approached by Plantard, who claimed to have not only secret documents that unfortunately he could not show, but also a map of the mysterious room. In reality, he had drawn the map himself following the statements made by the said Lhomoy, but this had encouraged de Sède to write his book and to surmise, as always happens in these cases, that the Templars had had a hand in the affair. In 1967, de Sède published L’Or de Rennes (The Treasure of Rennes) and with this book he definitively brought the myth of the Priory of Sion to the attention of the media, including the reproduction of the fake parchments that Planchard had been able to distribute in some libraries in the meantime. In fact, as Plantard himself later confessed, the fake parchments had been drawn up by Philippe de Cherisey, a Fr
ench radio humorist and actor, who in 1979 had finally declared that he was the author of the forgeries and that he had copied the uncial script from documents found in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
In these documents De Sède found a disquieting reference to a famous painting, Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds, where (as had already happened in a painting by Guercino) some shepherds open a tomb with the words Et in Arcadia ego on it. It is a classic memento mori, in which death announces its presence even in happy Arcadia. But Plantard maintained that the phrase had been on his family coat of arms since the thirteenth century (unlikely, given that Plantard was the son of a waiter), that the landscape in the paintings resembled that of Rennes-le-Château (whereas Poussin was born in Normandy and Guercino had never been in France), and that the tombs in Poussin’s and Guercino’s paintings resembled a sepulchre visible until the 1980s, on a road between Rennes-le-Château and Rennes-les-Bains. Unfortunately it has been proved that the tomb was not built until the twentieth century.
In any case he deduced from this the proof that Guercino’s and Poussin’s paintings had been commissioned by the Priory of Sion. But the deciphering of Poussin’s painting did not stop there: by anagramming Et in Arcadia ego he derived the command I! Tego arcana Dei. In other words, “Begone! I conceal the mysteries of God.” Hence the “proof” that the tomb was that of Jesus.
De Sède observed that in the church restored by Saunière there appears the inscription Terribilis est locus iste, which thrilled mystery lovers. Actually, it is a quotation from Genesis 24 that appears in many churches and refers to Jacob’s vision when he dreamed of ascending to heaven and, on waking up, he says in the Latin version of the Vulgate: “How terrible this place is!.” But in Latin terribilis also means worthy of veneration, awe inspiring—and therefore there is nothing menacing about the expression.
The font in the church rests on a kneeling demon, thought to be Asmodeus, and here too we could cite many Romanesque churches with representations of demons. Asmodeus is surmounted by four angels, beneath which is inscribed the phrase: “Par ce signe tu le vincrais,” which might refer to Constantine’s In hoc signo vinces, but the addition of that “le” persuaded the hunters of mystery to count the letters in the phrase, which amount to 22 like the teeth of the skull placed at the entry to the cemetery, 22 like the merlons of the Magdala Tower, 22 like the steps of the two staircases that lead to the tower. The letters of “le” are moreover the thirteenth and fourteenth of the phrase, add 13 and 14 and we get 1314, which is the date on which the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake. On later seeing the other statues and taking account of the initials of the saints they represent (Germain, Rocco, Anthony the Hermit, Anthony of Padua and Luke) you get the word Graal, or Grail.
The legend of Rennes-le-Château might have been gradually debunked if de Sède’s book had not impressed a journalist, Henry Lincoln, who devoted three BBC documentaries to Rennes-le-Château. Together with Richard Leigh, another lover of occult mysteries and the journalist Michael Baigent, they published a book, The Holy Grail (1982), which soon racked up big sales. In short, the book picked up on all the information spread by de Sède and Plantard, fictionalized it even more and, by presenting everything as an undisputed historical truth, claimed that the founders of the Priory of Sion were descended from Jesus Christ, who supposedly did not die on the cross but married Mary Magdalene, before fleeing to France and founding the Merovingian dynasty. What Saunière allegedly found was no treasure but a series of documents that proved the bloodline of Jesus Christ, royal blood, and hence Sang Real, later deformed into Santo Graal, or Holy Grail. Saunière’s riches allegedly came from the gold paid by the Vatican to keep this terrible discovery secret. Moreover, Plantard had already claimed that over the centuries the members of the Priory had included Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Robert Fludd, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. Only Asterix was missing.
All these fake documents have reinforced the myth of Rennes-le-Château, transforming it into a destination for many pilgrims. The only ones who basically did not believe it were the men who had concocted this bunkum. After the story had already been inflated by Baigent and his colleagues, in a book published in 1988, de Sède denounced the various scams and deceptions invented about Saunière’s village. And in 1989, Pierre Plantard also disavowed everything he had said previously and offered a second version of the legend, according to which the Priory was established only in 1781 in Rennes-le-Château—and also revised some of his fake documents, adding to the list of Grand Masters of the Priory one Roger-Patrice Pelat, a friend of François Mitterrand, later put on trial for illicit stock exchange transactions. Plantard, summoned as a witness, admitted under oath that he had invented the entire history of the Priory.
By this time no one took him seriously. But in 2003 Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code came out, clearly inspired by de Sède, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln and a lot of other literature on the occult. Brown has stated that all the information he gives is historically true. But Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh sued him for plagiarism. Now, the preface to The Holy Grail presents everything in the book as historical truth. So, if someone establishes the truth of a historical fact (that Caesar was killed on the Ides of March) as soon as the historical truth is made public it becomes collective property, and no accusation of plagiarism can be made if someone mentions the twenty-three stab wounds inflicted on Caesar in the Senate. Instead, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, in suing Brown for plagiarism, publicly admitted that everything they had peddled as historical truth was a figment of their imagination, and therefore their exclusive literary property. It is true that in order to trouser part of Brown’s billion-dollar loot some men would be willing to swear on the Bible that they are not the son of their legitimate father but of one of the dozens of sailors who habitually frequented their mother, and Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln deserve all our heartfelt understanding. The even more curious thing is that, during the trial, Brown maintained he had never read the book by Lincoln and colleagues, a contradictory defense for an author who averred he had taken all his information from reliable sources (which said exactly what the authors of The Holy Grail had said).
At this point we could end the story of Rennes-le-Château, were it not for the fact that to this day it is still the destination of many pilgrimages, as if it were Medjugorje. The case of Rennes-le-Château not only tells us how easy it is to create a legend ex novo, but how it can be successful even when historians, courts, and other institutions have recognized its untruthful nature. All this brings to mind an aphorism attributed to Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Which corresponds to one of Popper’s observations and strikes me as a suitable epigraph for these thoughts on the conspiracy syndrome.
[La Milanesiana, 2015]
12. Representations of the Sacred
I am one of those people who does what he is told. Elisabetta Sgarbi told me that the topic of this year’s festival is “the Invisible,” and I will go along with that. But I dealt with a similar topic a few years ago at a conference of the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies, which was dedicated to “the Sacred.” And since I realized that the sacred is one of the most invisible things around, I have decided to talk about the ways and means used to take what is least visible in the natural world and render it visible.
I know that a few years ago here I had to discuss “the Absolute” (don’t blame me if La Milanesiana returns a little obsessively to such intractable subjects) and I also know that the sacred is commonly understood as a feeling or vision of something that transcends our experience, but gives a meaning to that experience. Some might say that the sacred amounts to the same thing as the absolute. But the absolute is the subject of some philosophies or religions, and it is a philosophical concept, whereas the sacred has been considered to be a mysterious
force that is the wellspring of every thought or religious sentiment. When it comes to the sacred, philosophy can at best recognize its existence, or at least its apparition as a psychological constant of the human mind. Simply put, a lightning strike that incinerates a tree accompanied by a clap of thunder would in itself be only a frightening accident and sensation were it not seen and justified as a manifestation of some transcendent entity or will—without this, though the event would remain impressive in memory, it would not have tremendous import.
The sacred is therefore presented as the numinoso, mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the numinous, terrible yet fascinating mystery) which confounds reason, which overwhelms and arouses wonder, amazement, and dismay, but which at the same time gives rise to forces of both repulsion and attraction—and as such, it resists immediate description in conceptual terms but is instead experiential, to use Friedrich Schleiermacher’s term, involving an ingrained awareness of the infinite, and a feeling of dependence, weakness, impotence, and insignificance in its presence.
Sometimes the experience of the sacred, the presence of which is felt without our being able to define it, prompts people to react with practices of submission or of sacrifice, even human sacrifice. At other times, and this happens with simpler folk in particular, people want to see the sacred, hence the need for a hierophancy—a system of priests who interpret the sacred mysteries, and in that way allow the sacred to take the visible forms that will make it understandable. Those who experience the presence of the sacred, to be able to speak of it, want to see the numinous. Otherwise, there are only its effects to observe (and they are effects we like to escape)—namely, wonder, amazement, dismay, and terror.