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

"Pasqualis was an oldpirate. He practiced theurgical operations in a secret chamber, andangelic spirits appeared to him in the form of luminous trails andhieroglyphic characters. Wilier- : moz took him seriously, becausehe himself was an enthusiast, honest but naive. Fascinated byalchemy, Willermoz dreamed of a Great Work to which the electshould devote themselves: to discover the point of alliance of thesix noble metals through studying the measurements comprised in thesix letters of the original name of God, which Solomon had allowedhis elect to know."

"And then?"

"Willermoz founded manyorders and joined many lodges at the same time, as was the customin those days, always seeking the definitive revelation, alwaysfearing it was hidden elsewhere¡Xwhich indeed is the case. That is,perhaps, the only truth...So he joined the Elus Cohen of Pasqualis.But in ¡¥72 Pasqualis disappeared, sailed for Santo Domingo, andleft everything up in the air. Why did he leave? I suspect he cameinto possession of a secret he didn't want to share. In any case,re-quiescat; he disappeared on that dark continent, intowell-deserved darkness."

"AndWillermoz?"

"In that year we had allbeen shaken by the death of Sweden-borg, a man who could havetaught many things to the ailing West, had the West listened tohim. But now the century began its headlong race towardrevolutionary madness, following the ambitions of the ThirdEstate.It was then that Willermoz heard about Hund's rite of theStrict Observance and was fascinated by it. He was told that aTemplar who reveals himself¡Xby founding a public association,say¡Xis not a Templar. But the eighteenth century was an era ofgreat credulity. Willermoz ereated, with Hund, the variousalliances that appear on your list, until Hund was unmasked¡XImean, until they discovered he was the sort who runs off with thecash box¡Xand the Duke of Brunswick expelled him from theorganization."

Aglid cast anotherglance at the list. "Ah, yes, Weishaupt. I nearly forgot. TheIlluminati of Bavaria: with a name like that, they attracted, atthe beginning, a number of generous minds. But Weishaupt was ananarchist; today we'd call him a Communist, and if you gentlemenonly knew the things they raved about in that ambience¡Xcoupsd'etat, dethroning sovereigns, bloodbaths....Mind you, I admiredWeishaupt a great deal¡Xnot for his ideas, but for his extremelyclearheaded view of how a secret society should function. It'spossible to have a splendid organizational talent but quiteconfused ideas.

"In short, the Duke ofBrunswick, seeing the confusion around him left by Hund, realizedthat at this juncture there were three conflicting currents in theGerman Masonic world: the sapiential-occultist camp, including someRosicrucians; the rationalist camp; and the anarchist-revolutionarycamp of the Illuminati of Bavaria. He proposed that the variousorders and rites meet at Wilhelmsbad for a ¡¥convent,' as they werecalled then, an Estates-General, you might say. The followingquestions had to be answered: Does the order truly originate froman ancient society, and if so, which? Are there really UnknownSuperiors, keepers of the ancient Tradition, and if so, who arethey? What are the true aims of the order? Is the chief aim torestore the order of the Templars? And so forth, including theproblem of whether the order should concern itself with the occultsciences. Willermoz joined in, enthusiastic, hoping to find at lastthe answers to the questions he had been asking himself all hislife...And here the de Maistre affair began."

"Which de Maistre?" Iasked. "Joseph or Xavier?"

"Joseph."

"Thereactionary?"

"If he was reactionary,he wasn't reactionary enough. A curious man. Consider: this devoutson of the Catholic Church, just when the first popes werebeginning to issue bulls against Masonry, became a member of alodge, assuming the name Josephus a Floribus. He approached Masonryin 1773, when a papal brief condemned the Jesuits. Of course it wasthe Scottish lodges that de Maistre approached, since he was not abourgeois follower of the Enlightenment; he was anIlluminate."

Aglie sipped his cognac.From a cigarette case of almost white metal he took out somecigarillos of an unusual shape. "A tobacconist in London makes themfor me," he said, "like the cigars you found at my house.Please....They're excellent..."He spoke with his eyes lost inmemory.

"De Maistre...a man ofexquisite manners; to listen to him was a spiritual pleasure. Hegained great authority in occult circles. And yet, at Wilhelmsbadhe betrayed our expectations. He sent a letter to the duke, inwhich he firmly renounced any Templar affiliation, abjured theUnknown Superiors, and denied the utility of the esoteric sciences.He rejected it all out of loyalty to the Catholic Church, but hedid so with the arguments of a bourgeois Encyclopedist. When theduke read the letter to a small circle of intimates, no one wantedto believe it. De Maistre now asserted that the order's aim wasnothing but spiritual regeneration and that the ceremonials and thetraditional rites served only to keep the mystical spirit alive. Hepraised all the new Masonic symbols, but said that an image thatrepresented several things no longer represented anything.Which¡Xyou'll forgive me¡Xruns counter to the whole hermetictradition, for the more ambiguous and elusive a symbol is, the moreit gains significance and power. Otherwise, what becomes of thespirit of Hermes, god of a thousand faces?

"Apropos of theTemplars, de Maistre said that the order of the Temple had beencreated by greed, and greed had destroyed it, and that was that.The Savoyard could not forget, you see, that the order had beendestroyed with the consent of the pope. Never trust Catholiclegitimists, no matter how ardent their hermetic vocation. DeMaistre's dismissal of the Unknown Superiors was also laughable:the proof that they do not exist is that we have no knowledge ofthem. We could not have knowledge of them, of course, or they wouldnot be unknown. Odd, how a believer of such fiber could beimpermeable to the sense of mystery. Then de Maistre made his finalappeal: Let us return to the Gospels and abandon the follies ofMemphis. He was simply restating the millennial line of theChurch.

"You can understand theatmosphere in which the Wilhelms-bad meeting took place. With thedefection of an authority like de Maistre, Willermoz would be inthe minority; at most, a compromise could be reached. The Templarrite was maintained; any conclusion about the origins of the orderwas postponed; in short, the convent was a failure. That was themoment the