Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

that other sacred number,ten. There have to be ten commandments because, if there weretwelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up hisfingers, and comes to the last two, he'd have to borrow a hand fromthe sacristan.

"Now, if you take thebody and count all the things that grow from the trunk, arms, legs,head, and cock, you get six; but for women it's seven. For thisreason, it seems to me that among your authors six is never takenseriously, except as the double of three, because it's familiar tothe males, who don't have any seven. So when the males rule, theyprefer to see seven as the mysterious sacred number, forgettingabout women's tits, but what the hell.

"Eight....eight....giveme a minute...If arms and legs don't count as one apiece but two,because of elbows and knees, you have eight parts that move; addthe torso and you have nine, add the head and you have ten. Juststicking with the body, you can get all the numbers you want. Theorifices, for example."

"Theorifices?"

"Yes. How many holesdoes the body have?"

I counted. "Eyes,nostrils, ears, mouth, ass: eight."

"You see? Another reasoneight is a beautiful number. But I have nine! And with that ninth Ibring you into the world, therefore nine is holier than eight! Or,if you like, take the anatomy of your menhir, which your authorsare always talking about. Standing up during the day, lying down atnight¡Xyour thing, too. No, don't tell me what it does at night.The fact is that erect it works and prone it rests. So the verticalposition is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as treesstand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death.All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, butnobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of anarchaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: ifyou worship a vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, youcan all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone,only those in the front row can see it, and the others startpushing, me too, me too, which is not a fitting sight for a magicalceremony..."

"Butrivers..."

"Rivers are worshipednot because they're horizontal, but because there's water in them,and you don't need me to explain to you the relation between waterand the body...Anyway, that's how we're put together, all of us,and that's why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometersapart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you seethat people with a brain in their head, if they're shown analchemist's oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the bellyof the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that theMadonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist'soven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and itwas there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in themirror."

"You always tell me thetruth. You see my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want todiscover all the secret archetypes of the body." That evening weinaugurated the expression "discovering archetypes" to indicate ourmoments of greatest intimacy.

I was half-asleep whenLia touched my shoulder. "I almost forgot," she said. "I'mpregnant."

I should have listenedto Lia. She spoke with the wisdom of life and birth. Venturing intothe underground passages of Agart-tha, into the pyramid of IsisUnveiled, we had entered Gevurah, the Sefirah of fear, the momentin which wrath manifests itself in the world. I had let myself beseduced by the thought of Sophia. Moses Cordovero says that theFemale is to the left, and all her attributes point toGevurah....unless the Male, using these attributes, adorns hisBride, and causes her to move to the right, toward good. Everydesire must remain within its limits. Otherwise Gevurah becomesJudgment, the dark appearance, the universe of demons.

To disciplinedesire....This I had done in the tenda de um-banda. I had playedthe agogd, I had taken an active part in the spectacle, and I hadescaped the trance. I had done the same with Lia: I had regulateddesite out of homage to the Bride, and I had been rewarded in thedepths of my loins; my seed had been blessed.

But I was not topersevere. I was to be seduced by the beauty of Tiferet.

TIFERET

64

To dream of living in anew and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead liveelsewhere, nor is it known where.

¡XGerolamo Cardano,Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, p. 58

While Gevurah is theSefirah of awe and evil, Tiferet is the Sefirah of beauty andharmony. As Diotallevi said: It is the light of understanding, thetree of life; it is pleasure, hale appearance. It is the concord ofLaw and Freedom.

And that year was for usthe year of pleasure, of the joyful subversion of the great text ofthe universe, in which we celebrated the nuptials of Tradition andthe Electronic Machine. We created, and we delighted in ourcreation. It was the year in which we invented the Plan.

For me at least, it wastruly a happy year. Lia's pregnancy proceeded tranquilly, andbetween Garamond and my agency I was beginning to make acomfortable living. I kept my office in the old factory building,but we remodeled Lia's apartment.

The wonderful adventureof metals was now in the hands of the compositors and proofreaders.That was when Signor Garamond had his brainstorm: "An illustratedhistory of magic and the hermetic sciences. With the material thatcomes in from the Diabolicals, with the expertise you three haveacquired, with the advice of that incredible man Aglie, we can puttogether a big volume, four hundred pages, dazzling full-colorplates, in less than a year. Reusing some of the graphics from thehistory of metals."

"But the subject matteris so different," I said. "What can I do with a photograph of acyclotron?''

"What can you do withit? Imagination, Casaubon, use your imagination! What happens inthose atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whateverthey're called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese andout come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It's magic madeflesh, Hermes and Hermes. Here on the left, the engraving ofParacelsus, old Abracadabra with his alembics, against a goldbackground, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavywater, gravitational galactic antimatter,