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

London, don't forget. Now what does our mando, our Robertus de Fluctibus, as he liked to style himself? Heoffers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of theentire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole,naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an idealPendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map speciallyconceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It's obvious,undeniable; I can't imagine why somebody hasn't alreadyseen¡X"

"The fact is, theDiabolicals are very, very slow," Belbo said.

"The fact is, we are theonly worthy heirs of the Templars. But, to continue. You recognizethe design. It's a mobile rotula, like the ones Trithemius used forhis coded messages. This isn't a map, then; it's a design for amachine to produce variations of maps, until the right map isfound! And Fludd says as much in the caption: This is the sketchfor an instrumentum, it still needs work."

"But wasn't Fludd theone who persisted in denying the rotation of the earth? How couldhe think of the Pendulum?''

"We're dealing withinitiates. An initiate denies what he knows, denies knowing it, toconceal it."

"This," Belbo said,"would explain why Dee paid so much attention to those royalcartographers. It was not to discover the ¡¥true' form of theearth, but to reconstruct, among all the mistaken maps, the oneright map, the one of use to him."

"Not bad, not bad atall," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through thepainstaking reconstruction of a false text."

84

The chief occupation ofthis Assembly¡Xand, in my opinion, the most useful¡Xshould be towork on natural history following the plans of Verulam.

¡XChristian Huygens,Letter to Colbert, Oeuvres Completes, La Haye, 1888-1950, vi, pp.95-96

The vicissitudes of thesix groups were not confined to the search for the map. In thefirst two pieces of the message, those in the hands of thePortuguese and the English, the Templars probably referred to apendulum, but ideas about pendulums were still hazy. It's one thingto swing some lead on a length of cord and quite another toconstruct a mechanism precise enough to be hit by a ray of the sunat an exact time and place. This is why the Templars calculated forsix centuries. The Baconian wing set immediately to work, and triedto draw to its side all the initiates, whom it made desperateeiforts to reach.

It is no coincidencethat Salomon de Caus, the Rosicrucians' man, writes for Richelieu atreatise on solar clocks. And afterward, from Galileo on, there isfurious research devoted to pendulums. The pretext is to figure outhow to use them for determining longitudes, but in 1681, whenHuygens discovers that a pendulum accurate in Paris is slow inCayenne, he immediately realizes that this discrepancy is due tothe variation in centrifugal force caused by the rotation of theearth. And after he publishes his Horologium Oscillatorium, inwhich he elaborates on Galileo's intuitions about the pendulum, whosummons him to Paris? Colbert, the same man who summons to ParisSalomon de Caus to work on the tunnels beneath the city!

In 1661, when theAccademia del Cimento foreshadows the conclusions of Foucault,Leopold of Tuscany dissolves it in the space of five years, andimmediately afterward receives from Rome, as a secret reward, acardinal's hat.

But there is more. Inthe centuries that follow, the hunt for the Pendulum continues. In1742 (a year before the first documented appearance of the Comte deSaint-Germain!), a certain Mairan presents a paper on pendulums atthe Academic Royale des Sciences. In 1756 (the year the TemplarStrict Observance originates in Germany!), a certain Bouguer writesSur la direction qu ¡¥affectent tous les fits a plomb.

I found phantasmagoricaltitles, like that by Jean Baptiste Biot in 1821: Recueild'observations geodesiques, astronomiqu.es et physiques, executeespar ordre du Bureau des Longitudes de France, en Espagne, enFrance, en Angleterre et en Ecosse, pour determiner la variation dela pesanteur et des degres terrestres sur le prolongement dumeridien de Paris. In France, Spain, England, and Scotland! Andreferring to the meridian of Saint-Martin! And what about SirEdward Sabine, who in 1823 publishes An Account of Experiments toDetermine the Figure of the Earth by Means of the PendulumVibrating Seconds in Different Latitudes? And the mysterious GrafFeodor Petrovich Litke, who in 1836 publishes the results of hisresearch into the behavior of the pendulum in the course of avoyage around the world? This under the auspices of the ImperialAcademy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The Russians,too?

And what if in themeantime a group, no doubt of Baconian descent, decides to discoverthe secret of the currents without map or pendulum, relying insteadon the source, the respiration of the Serpent? Salon's hunch wasright, for it was more or less at the time of Foucault that theindustrial world, creature of the Baconian camp, began diggingunderground systems in the heart of the great cities ofEurope.

"It's true," Belbo said,"the nineteenth century is obsessed with the underground¡XJeanValjean, Fantomas and Javert, Rocambole, all that coming and goingin sewers and tunnels. My God, now that I think of it, all of Verneis an occult revelation of the mysteries of the underground! Thevoyage to the center of the earth, twenty thousand leagues underthe sea, the caverns of the Mysterious Island, the immenseunderground realm of the Black Indies! If we drew a diagram of hisextraordinary travels, we would be sure to obtain, finally, asketch of the coils of the Serpent, a chart of the leys drawn foreach continent. Verne explores the network of the telluric currentsfrom above and below.''

I collaborated. "What'sthe name of the hero of the Black Indies? John Garral. Close toGrail."

"We're not ivory-towereggheads; we're men with our feet on the ground. Verne gives evenmore explicit signals. Robur le Conque"rant, R.C., Rosy Cross. AndRobur read backward is Rubor, the red of the rose."

85

Phileas Fogg. A namethat is also a signature: Eos, in Greek, has the sense of theglobal (it is therefore the equivalent of pan, of poly,) andPhileas is the same as Polyphile. As for Fogg, it is the Englishfor brouillard....and no doubt Verne belonged to "Le Brouillard."He was even kind enough to indicate the relationship between thissociety and the Rose + Cross, because what, enfin, is our nobletraveler Phi-leas Fogg if not a Rose + Cross?....And further,doesn't he