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

that internal rhythm,as sweet, awesome, and regular as the throbbing of the serpentKundalini, still unknown in many of its aspects, yet surely asprecise as a clock, for it is the rhythm of the one true Stone thatfell in exile from heaven, the Great Mother Earth.

This was what Philip theFair wanted to know. Hence the inquisitors' sly insistence on themysterious kiss in posteriori parte spine dorsi. They wanted thesecret of Kundalini; who cares about sodomy.

"It's perfect,"Diotallevi said. "But then, when you know how to direct thetelluric currents, what do you do with them? Make beer?"

"Come on," I said."Haven't you grasped the significance of this discovery? In theTelluric Navel you place the most powerful valve, which enables youto foresee rain and drought, to release hurricanes, tidal waves,earthquakes, to split continents, sink islands (no doubt Atlantisdisappeared in some such reckless experiment), raise mountainchains....You realize the atomic bomb is nothing in comparison?Besides which, it also hurts the one who drops it. From yourcontrol tower you telephone, for example, the president of theUnited States, and you say to him: By tomorrow morning I want adodecadillion dollars¡Xor the independence of Latin America, or thestate of Hawaii, or the destruction of your stockpile of nuclearweapons¡Xor else the San Andreas Fault will crack definitively andLas Vegas will become a floating casino..."

"But Las Vegas is inNevada."

"Doesn't matter. Whenyou control the telluric currents, you can snip off Nevada, too,and Colorado. Then you telephone the Supreme Soviet and you say:Comrades, by Monday I want all the caviar of the Volga, and I wantSiberia as my frozen-food locker; otherwise I'll suck the Uralsunder, I'll make the Caspian overflow, I'll cut loose Lithuania andEstonia and sink them in the Philippine Trench."

"Yes," Diotallevi said."The power would be immense. The earth could be rewritten like theTorah. Japan lands in the gulf of Panama."

"Panic on WallStreet."

"Forget about Star Wars.Forget about transforming base metal into gold. You aim the rightcurrent, stir up the bowels of the earth, and make them do in tenseconds what it used to take them billions of years to do, and thewhole Ruhr becomes a diamond mine. Eliphas Le"vi said the knowledgeof the universe's tides and currents holds the secret of humanomnipotence."

"That must be so," Belbosaid. "It's like transforming the whole world into an orgone box.It's obvious. Reich was definitely a Templar."

"Everyone was, exceptus. Thank God weVe caught on. Now we're a step ahead ofthem."

But what stopped theTemplars, once they knew the secret? The problem was how to exploitit. Between knowing and know-how there was a gap. So, instructed bythe diabolical Saint Bernard, the Templars replaced the menhirs,poor Celtic valves, with Gothic cathedrals, far more sensitive andpowerful, their subterranean crypts containing black virgins, indirect contact with the radioactive strata; and they covered Europewith a network of receiver-transmitter stations communicating toone another the power and the direction, the flow and the tension,of the telluric currents.

"I say they located thesilver mines in the New World, caused eruptions of silver there,and then, controlling the Gulf Stream, shifted that precious metalto the Portuguese coast. Tomar was the distribution center; theForet d'Orient, the chief storehouse. This was the origin of theirwealth. But this was peanuts. They realized that to exploit theirsecret fully they would have to wait for a technological advancethat would take at least six hundred years."

Thus the Templarsorganized the Plan in such a way that only their successors, at themoment when they would be able to make proper use of what theyknew, would learn the location of the Umbilicus Telluris. But howdid the Templars distribute the pieces of the revelation to thethirty-six scattered throughout the world? How could astraightforward message have that many parts? And why would theyneed such a complicated message just to say that the Umbilicus was,for example, in Baden-Baden, or Tralee, or Chattanooga?

A map? But a map wouldbe marked with an X at the point of the Umbilicus. Whoever held thepiece with the X would know everything and not need the otherpieces. No; it had to be more involved. We racked our brains forseveral days, until Belbo decided to resort to Abulafia. And thereply was:

Guillaume Postel dies in1581.

Bacon is Viscount St.Albans.

In the Conservatoire isPoucault's Pendulum.

The time had come tofind a function for the Pendulum.

I was able, in few days,to suggest a rather elegant solution. A Diabolical had submitted tous a text on the hermetic secret of cathedrals. According to thisauthor, the builders of Chartres one day left a plumb line hangingfrom the keystone of a vault, and from that had easily deduced therotation of the earth. Hence the motive for the trial of Galileo,Diotallevi remarked: the Church had caught a whiff of Templar abouthim. No, Belbo said; the cardinals who condemned Galileo wereTemplar adepts infiltrating Rome. They wanted to shut up thatdamned Tuscan quickly, that traitor Templar who in his vanity wasabout to spill the beans four hundred years before the date of thePlan's fulfillment.

This explained whybeneath the Pendulum those master masons had drawn a labyrinth, astylized image of the system of subterranean currents. We sought anillustration of the labyrinth of Chartres: a solar clock, a compasscard, a vein system, a sleepy sinusoidal trail of the Serpent. Aglobal chart of the telluric tides.

"All right, let's assumethe Templars used the Pendulum to indicate the Umbilicus. Insteadof the labyrinth, which is, after all, an abstract scheme, on thefloor you put a map of the world. The point marked by the tip ofthe Pendulum at a given hour is the point that marks the Umbilicus.But which Pendulum?"

"The place is beyonddiscussion: Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the Refuge."

"Yes," Belbo replied,"but let's suppose that at the stroke of midnight the Pendulumswings from Copenhagen to Capetown. Where is the Umbilicus? InDenmark or in South Africa?"

"A good observation," Isaid. "But our Diabolical tells us also that in Chartres there is afissure in a stained-glass window of the choir, and at a given hourof the day a sunbeam enters through the crack and always hits thesame place, always the same stone of the floor. I don't rememberwhat conclusion he draws from this, but in any event it's a greatsecret. So here's the mechanism: in the