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

Years have gone by.Soapes never stops striking the wall. Now I know for whom and towhat end. His name is Noffo Dei. This Dei (through what mysteriouscabala do Dei and Dee sound so alike?), prompted by Soapes, hasdenounced Bacon. What he said, I do-jpot know, but a few days agoVerulam was imprisoned. Accused of sodomy, because, they said (Itremble at the thought that it might be true), you, the Dark Lady,Black Virgin of Druids and of Templars, are none other....noneother than the eternal androgyne created by the knowing handsof....of....? Now, now I know...of your lover, the Comte deSaint-Germain! But who is Saint-Germain if not Bacon himself?(Soapes knows all sorts of things, this obscure Templar of manylives...)

* * *

Verulam has beenreleased from prison, has regained through his magic arts the favorof the monarch. Now, William tells me, he spends his nights alongthe Thames, in Pilad's Pub, playing that strange machine inventedfor him by an Italian from Nola whom he then had burned at thestake in Rome. It is an astral device, which devours small madspheres that race through infinite worlds in a sparkle of angeliclight. Verulam gives obscene blows of triumphant bestiality withhis groin against the frame, miming the events of the celestialorbs in the domain of the decans in order to understand theultimate secrets of the Great Establishment and the secret of theNew Atlantis itself, which he calls Gottlieb's, parodying thesacred language of the manifestoes attributed to Andreae...Ah! Icry, now lucidly aware, but too late and in vain, as my heart beatsconspicuously beneath the laces of my corset: this is why he tookaway my trumpet, amulet, talisman, cosmic bond that could commanddemons. What will he be plotting in the House of Solomon? It'slate, I repeat to myself, by now he has been given too muchpower.

* * *

They say Bacon is dead.Soapes assures me it is not true. No one has seen the body. He isliving under a false name with the landgrave of Hesse; he is nowinitiated into the supreme mysteries and hence immortal, ready tocontinue his grim battle for the triumph of the Plan¡Xin his nameand under his control.

After this allegeddeath, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, whichthe bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in SonnetIII, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: "To what it worksin, like the dyer's hand..."

"I never wrote that," Itold him. And it was true...It's obvious: Bacon inserted thosewords before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will thenwelcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert indyes...I believe that in the future he will try to make peoplebelieve he wrote William's works himself. How clear everythingbecomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!

* * *

Where art thou, Muse,that thou forget'st so long? I feel weary, sick. William isexpecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at theGlobe.

Soapes is writing. Ilook over his shoulder. An incomprehensible message: "riverrun,past Eve and Adam's...." He hides the page, looks at me, sees mepaler than a ghost, reads Death in my eyes. He whispers to me,"Rest. Never fear. I'll write for you."

And so he is doing, maskbehind a mask. I slowly fade, and he takes from me even the lastlight, that of obscurity.

74

Though his will be good,his spirit and his prophecies are illusions of the Devil...They arecapable of deceiving many curious people and of causing great harmand scandal to the Church of Our Lord God.

¡XOpinion on GuillaumePostel sent to Ignatius Loyola by the Jesuit fathers Salmeron,Lhoost, and Ugoletto, May 10, 1545

Belbo, detached, told uswhat he had concocted, but he didn't read his pages to us andeliminated all personal references. Indeed, he led us to believethat Abulafia had supplied him with the connections. The idea thatBacon was the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes he had alreadycome upon somewhere or other. But one thing in particular struckme: that Bacon was Viscount St. Albans.

It buzzed in my head; ithad something to do with my old thesis. I spent that night diggingin my card file.

"Gentlemen," I said tomy accomplices with a certain solemnity the next morning, "we don'thave to invent connections. They exist. When, in 1164, SaintBernard launched the idea of a council at Troyes to legitimize theTemplars, among those charged to organize everything was the priorof Saint Albans. Saint Alban was the first English martyr, whoevangelized the British Isles. He lived in Verulamium, which becameBacon's property. He was a Celt and unquestionably a Druidinitiate, like Saint Bernard."

"That's not very much,"Belbo said.

"Wait. This prior ofSaint Albans was abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey wherethe Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers was laterinstalled!"

Belbo reacted. "MyGod!"

"And that's not all," Isaid. "The Conservatoire was conceived as homage to Bacon. On 25Brumaire of the year 111, the Convention authorized its Comited'lnstruction Publique to have the complete works of Bacon printed.And on 18 Vendemiaire of the same year the same Convention hadpassed a law providing for the construction of a house of arts andtrades that would reproduce the House of Solomon as described byBacon in his New Atlantis, a place where all the inventions ofmankind are collected."

"And so?" Diotalleviasked.

"The Pendulum is in theConservatoire," Belbo said. And from Diotallevi's reaction Irealized that Belbo had told him about Foucault'sPendulum.

"Not so fast," I said."The Pendulum was invented and installed only in the last century.We should skip it."

"Skip it?" Belbo said."Haven't you ever seen the Monad Hieroglyph of John Dee, thetalisman that is supposed to concentrate all the wisdom of theuniverse? Doesn't it look like a pendulum?"

[...]

"All right," I said,"let's suppose a connection can be established. But how do we gofrom Saint Albans to the Pendulum?"

I was to learn how inthe space of a few days.

"So then, the prior ofSaint Albans is the abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, whichtherefore becomes a Templar center. Bacon, through his property,establishes a contact with the Druid followers of Saint Albans. Nowlisten carefully: as Bacon is beginning his career in England,Guillaume Postel in France is ending his."

An almost imperceptibletwitch on Belbo's face. I recalled the dialog at Riccardo's show:Postel made Belbo think of the man