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

choir of Saint-Martin thereis a window that has an uncolored spot near the juncture of twolead cames. It was carefully calculated, and probably for sixhundred years someone has always taken care to keep it as it is. Atsunrise on a given day of the year..."

"...which can only bethe dawn of June 24, Saint John's day, feast of the summersolstice..."

"...yes, on that day andat that hour, the first pure ray of sun that comes through thewindows strikes the floor beneath the Pendulum, and the Pendulum'sintersection of the ray at that instant is the precise point on themap where the Umbilicus is to be found!"

"Perfect," Belbo said."But suppose it's overcast?"

"They wait until thefollowing year."

"I'm sorry, but..."Belbo said. "The last meeting is to be in Jerusalem. Shouldn't thePendulum be hanging from the top of the dome of the Mosque ofOmar?"

"No," I said. "Atcertain places on the globe the Pendulum completes its circle inthirty-six hours; at the North Pole it takes twenty-four hours; atthe Equator the cycle doesn't vary with the season. So the locationmatters. If the Templars made their discovery at Saint-Martin,their calculation is valid only in Paris; in Palestine, thePendulum would mark a different curve."

"And how do we know theymade the discovery at Saint-Martin?"

"The fact that theychose Saint-Martin as their Refuge, that from the prior of SaintAlbans, to Postel, to the Convention they kept it under theircontrol, that after Foucault's first experiments they installed thePendulum there. Too many clues."

"But still, the lastmeeting is in Jerusalem."

"So? In Jerusalemthey'll put the message together, and that's not a matter of a fewminutes. Then they'll prepare for a year, and the following June 23all six groups will meet in Paris, to learn finally where theUmbilicus is, and then they'll set to work to conquer theworld."

"But," Belbo insisted,"there's still something I can't figure out. Although there's thisfinal revelation about the Umbilicus, all thirty-six must haveknown that before. The Pendulum had been used in cathedrals; so itwasn't a secret. What would have prevented Bacon or Postel, or evenFoucault¡Xwho must have been a Templar himself, seeing all the fusshe made over the Pendulum¡Xfrom just putting a map of the world onthe floor and orienting it by the cardinal points? We're oif thetrack."

"No, we're not off thetrack," I said. "The message reveals something that none of themcould know: what map to use!"

83

A map is not theterritory.

¡XAlfred Korzybski,Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The InternationalNon-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58

"You're familiar withthe situation of cartography at the time of the Templars," I said."In that century there were Arab maps that, among other things, putAfrica at the top and Europe at the bottom; navigators' maps,fairly accurate, all things considered; and maps mat by then werealready three or four hundred years old but were still accepted insome schools. Mind you, to reveal the location of the Umbilicusthey didn't need an accurate map, in today's sense. It had to besimply a map possessing this virtue: once oriented, it would showthe Umbilicus at the point where the arc of the Pendulum is struckby the first ray of sun on June 24. Now listen carefully. Let'ssuppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the Umbilicus is inJerusalem. Even with our modern maps, the position of Jerusalemdepends on the projection used. And God knows what kind of map theTemplars had. But it doesn't matter. It's not the Pendulum that'scalibrated according to the map; it's the map that's calibratedaccording to the Pendulum. You follow me? It could be the craziestmap in the world, as long as, when placed beneath the Pendulum atthe crack of dawn on the twenty-fourth of June, it shows the oneand only spot that is Jerusalem."

"This doesn't solve ourproblem," Diotallevi said.

"Of course not, and itdoesn't solve it for the invisible thirty-six either. Because ifyou don't have the right map, forget it. Let's take the case of amap oriented in the standard way, with east in the direction of theapse and west toward the nave, since that's how churches are built.Now let's say, at random, that on that fatal dawn the Pendulum isnear the boundary of the southeast quadrant. If it were a clock,we'd say that the hour hand is at five-twenty-five. All right? Nowlook."

I went to dig out ahistory of cartography.

"Here. Exhibit number 1:a twelfth-century map. It follows the T-structured maps: Asia is atthe top with the Earthly Paradise; to the left, Europe; to theright, Africa; and here, beyond Africa, they Ve also put theAntipodes. Exhibit number 2: a map inspired by the SomniumScipionis of Macrobius, and it survives in various versions intothe sixteenth century. Africa's a bit narrow, but that's all right.Now look: orient the two maps in the same way, and you see that onthe first map five-twenty-five corresponds to Arabia, and on thesecond map to New Zealand, since that's where the second map hasthe Antipodes. You may know everything about the Pendulum, but ifyou don't know what map to use, you're lost. So the messagecontained instructions, elaborately coded, on where to find theright map, which may have been specially drawn for the occasion.The message told where to look, in what manuscript, in whatlibrary, abbey, castle. It's even possible that Dee or Bacon orsomeone else reconstructed the message. Who knows? The message saidthe map was at X, but in the meantime, with everything that wasgoing on in Europe, the abbey that housed the map burned down, orthe map was stolen, hidden God knows where. Maybe someone has themap but doesn't know the use of it, or knows it's valuable butdoesn't know why, and he's going around the world looking for abuyer. Imagine all the confusion of offers, false trails, messagesthat say other things but are understood to refer to the map, andmessages that indeed refer to the map but are read as if hintingat, say, the production of gold. No doubt some people attempt toreconstruct the map purely on the basis of conjectures."

"What sorts ofconjectures?"

[...]

"Well, for example,micro-macrocosmic correspondences. Here's another map. You knowwhere it comes from? It appears in the second treatise of theUtriusque Cosmi Historia of Robert Fludd. Fludd is theRosicrucians' man in