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

of the Knights of Christ, aplace where survivors of the order enjoyed complete freedom,unchanged guarantees, and where they could be in contact with theagents of the second group!

I left Tomar andPortugal with my mind ablaze. No longer was I laughing atthe'message Ardenti had shown us. The Templars, when they became asecret order, worked out a Plan that was to last six hundred yearsand conclude in our century. The Templars were serious men. If theytalked about a castle, they meant a real castle. The Plan began atTomar. And what would the ideal route have been, the sequence ofthe other five meetings? Places where the Templars could count onfriendship, protection, complicity. The colonel spoke ofStonehenge, Avalon, Agarttha...Nonsense. The message had to becompletely re-studied.

Of course¡XI remindedmyself on my way home¡Xthe idea is not to discover the Templars'secret, but to construct it.

Belbo seemed disturbedat the thought of going back to the document left by the colonel,and he found it only after digging reluctantly in a lower drawer.But, I saw, he had kept it. Together we reread the Provins message,after so many years.

It began with themessage coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisiblesseparez en six bandes. And then:

a la....SaintJean

36 p charrete defein

6...entiers avecsaiel

p....les blancsmantiax

r...5...chevaliers dePruins pour la....j. nc.

6 foil 6 en 6places

chascune foiz 20 a...720a...

iceste est I¡¥ordonation

al donjon lipremiers

it li secunz joste iceusqui....pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame deI'altre part de I'iau

it a I ¡¥ostel despopelicans

it a lapierre

3 foiz 6 avant lafeste....la Grant Pute.

"Thirty-six years afterthe hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealedmessages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsedknights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twentyyears each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, thisis the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate thebread, then at the Refuge, then at Our Lady Beyond the River, thenat the House of the Pope-licans, then at the Stone. You see, in1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, infact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we mustask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you arean escaping Templar, where would you go to form the secondgroup?''

"H'm...If it's true thatthose in the wain fled to Scotland....But why should they have goneto Scotland in particular to eat the bread?"

I was becoming a masterof chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland.Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice.Saint John's Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about SaintJohn's Fire in Frazer's Golden Bough.

I telephoned Lia. "Do mea favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about SaintJohn's Fire."

Lia was terrific at thissort of thing. She found the chapter at once. "What do you want toknow? It's a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all Europeancountries. It's celebrated at the moment when the sun is at itspeak. Saint John was added to make the thingChristian..."

"Do they eat bread inScotland?"

"Let me see...I don'tthink so...Ah, here it is: they don't eat bread for Saint John, buton the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires,originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in theScottish highlands..."

"We've got it! Whatkind?"

"They knead a cake offlour and oats and toast it on embers...Then a rite follows thatrecalls ancient human sacrifices...The bread's called bannockcakes..."

"What? Spell it!" Shedid, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morganle Fay, and other endearments.

I tried to remember mythesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge inScotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped theking win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them upas the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew ofScotland.

I took a big Englishdictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok inMiddle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind ofcake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or othergrain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn asthe French Templars would have done when they sent news fromScotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get somethinglike the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread. Thosewho ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of thebread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time hadspread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal toEngland. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti's fromPole to Palestine.

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Let your garments bewhite...If it is dark, set many lights burning...Now begincombining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them untilyour heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the lettersand to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heartis warm, when you see that through the combination of the lettersyou grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with theaid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence ofthe divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundityof your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higherangels, as if they were human beings beside you.

¡XAbulafia, Sefer HaieOlam

"It makes sense," Belbosaid. "And in that ease, where would the Refuge be?"

"The six groups settlein six places, but only one place is called the Refuge. Odd. Thismust mean that in the other places, like Portugal and Britain, theTemplars can live undisturbed, although under another name, whereasin the Refuge they are completely hidden. I would say it is wherethe Templars of Paris went after they left the Temple. To me itseems economical for the route to go to England from France, butwhy not assume that the Templars took an even more economicalcourse and set up a refuge in a secret and protected place in Parisitself? Being sound politicians, they reasoned that in two hundredyears the situation would change and they would be able to act inthe light of day, or almost."

"Paris it is. And thefourth place?"

"The colonel wasthinking of Chartres, but if we make Paris the