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

was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon:our Diotallevi doesn't understand theological finepoints."

"To conclude: theCrusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them nearAntioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics arefighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at thesiege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community ofPhilippopolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsarYoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehar-douin tells us. Here'sthe connection with the Templars and the solution to our riddle.Legend has the Templars inspired by the Cathars, but it's reallythe other way around. The Templars, encountering the Pauliciancommunities in the course of the Crusades, established mysteriousrelations with them, as they had before with the mystics and theMoslem heretics. Just follow the track of the Ordonation. It has topass through the Balkans."

"Why?"

"Because, clearly, thesixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to thestone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslemsvenerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take offour shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar inJerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don'tknow who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group ofsurviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connectedwith the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalemfrom Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, andthere the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see howstraightforward and economical the Plan becomes?"

"I must say I'mpersuaded," Belbo said. "But where in the Balkans were thePopelicans waiting?"

"If you ask me, thenatural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils,but the Templars of Provins couldn't have known that a few yearslater Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and remain under theirdominion for five centuries."

"Which would suggestthat the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany andBulgaria. When was that to take place?"

"In 1824," Diotallevisaid.

"Why's that?"

Diotallevi quicklysketched the following diagram:

PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCEGERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM

1344 1464 1584 1704 18241944

"In 1344 the first grandmasters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribedplaces. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grandmasters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixthmaster of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master.The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with thePaulicians fails, it must fail in 1824."

"Let's assume it fails,"I said. "But I don't understand why such shrewd men, when they hadfour-sixths of the message in their hands, weren't able toreconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fellthrough, they didn't get in touch with the next group."

"Casaubon," Belbo said,"do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If theywanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years,they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knowswhere to find the master of the following group, but not where tofind the others, and none of the later groups know where to findthe masters of the preceding groups. If the Germans lose theBulgarians, they'll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and theJerusalemites won't know where anyone else is. As forreconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends onhow the message has been divided. Certainly not~ in logicalsequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message isincomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can't makeany use of it."

"Just think," Diotallevisaid. "If the Bulgarian meeting didn't take place, Europe today isthe theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not findingone another, while each group knows that one small piece ofinformation might be enough to make it master of the world. What'sthe name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe aPlot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battleto reconstruct a lost message. We don't see them, but, invisible,they act all around us."

The same idea thenoccurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and wequickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discoveredthat at least two expressions in the Provins message¡Xthe referenceto thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and thehundred-and-twenty-year deadline¡Xalso appeared in the debate onthe Rosicrucians.

"After all, they wereGermans," I said. "I'll read the Rosi-crucianmanifestoes."

"But you said themanifestoes were fake," Belbo said.

"So? What we're puttingtogether is fake."

"True," he said. "I wasforgetting that."

69

Elles deviennent leDiable: debiles, timorees, vaillantes a des heures exceptionnelles,sanglantes sans cesse, lacrymantes, caressantes, avec des bras quiignorent les lois....Fi! Fi! Elles ne valent rien, elles sontfaites d'un cote, d'un os courbe, d'une dissimulationrentree...Elles baisent le serpent...

¡XJules Bois, Lesatanisme et la magie, Paris, Chailley, 1895,

He was forgetting that,yes. The following file, brief and dazed, surely belongs to thisperiod.

FILENAME:Ennoia

You arrived at the housesuddenly with your grass. I didn't want any, I won't allow anyvegetable substance to interfere with the functioning of my brain(I'm lying, I smoke tobacco, drink distillations of grain). The fewtimes, in the early sixties, when somebody forced me to share inthe circulation of a joint, with that cheap slimy paper impregnatedwith saliva, and the last drag using a pin, I wanted tolaugh.

But yesterday it was youoffering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way ofoffering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the waynobody's danced for years, and¡Xthe shame of it¡Xwhile Mahler'sFourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creaturewere yeasting, with the sweet and wrinkled face of an old nannygoat, a serpent rising from the depths of my loins, and I worshipedyou as a very old and universal aunt. Probably I went on holding mybody close to yours, but I felt also that you were in flight,ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked doors,moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly,Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.

Was it not you I soughtall along? I am here, always waiting for you. Did I lose you, eachtime, because I didn't recognize you? Did I lose you, each time,because I did recognize you but was afraid? Lose you because eachtime,