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

making scenes, until they're sure he's becomejust like them, human, and they're proud of it, but the fact isthat they have become just like him: they have becomecanine.

Perhaps because I was indaily contact with Lia, and with the baby, I was, of the three, theleast affected by the game. I was convinced I was its master; Ifelt as if I were again playing the agogo during the rite inBrazil: you stay on the side of those who control the emotions andnot with those who are controlled by them. About Diotallevi, Ididn't know then; I know now. He was training himself viscerally tothink like a Diabolical. As for Belbo, he was identifying at a moreconscious level. I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becomingcorrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowlylosing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell thesimilar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real. We werelosing that mysterious and bright and most beautiful ability to saythat Si-gnor A has grown bestial¡Xwithout thinking for a momentthat he now has fur and fangs. The sick man, however, thinking"bestial," immediately sees Signer A on all fours, barking orgrunting.

In Diotallevi's case¡Xaswe would have realized if we hadn't been so excited ourselves¡Xitbegan when he returned at the end of the summer. He seemed thinner,but it wasn't the healthy thinness of someone who has spent a fewweeks hiking in the mountains. His delicate albino skin now had ayellowish cast. Perhaps we thought, if we noticed at all, that hehad spent his vacation poring over rabbinic scrolls. But our mindswere on other things.

In the days thatfollowed, we were able to account also for the camps opposed to theBaconian.

For example, currentMasonic studies believe that the Illu-minati of Bavaria, whoadvocated the destruction of nations and the destabilization of thestate, inspired not only the anarchism of Bakunin but also Marxismitself. Puerile. The Illuminati were provocateurs; they wereBaconians who had infiltrated the Teutonics. Marx and Engels hadsomething quite different in mind when they began their Manifestoof 1848 with the eloquent sentence "A specter is haunting Europe."Why this Gothic metaphor? The Communist Manifesto is alludingsarcastically to the secret hunt for the Plan, which has agitatedthe continent for centuries. The Manifesto suggests an alternativeboth to the Baconians and to the neo-Templars. Marx, a Jew, perhapsinitially the spokesman for the rabbis of Gerona or Safed, tries toinvolve the entire Chosen People in the search. But then theproject possesses him, and he identifies the Shekhinah¡Xthe exiledpeople in the Kingdom¡Xwith the proletariat, and thus, betrayingthe expectations of those who taught him, he turns all MessianicJudaism on its head. Templars of the world, unite! The map to theworkers! Splendid! What better historical justification forCommunism?

"Yes," Belbo said, "butthe Baconians also run into trouble along the way; don't think theydon't. Some of them set out for the superhighway of science and endup in a blind alley. At the end of the dynasty, the Einsteins anddie Fermis, after hunting for the secret in the heart of themicrocosm, stumble upon the wrong invention: instead of telluricenergy¡Xclean, natural, sapiential¡Xthey discover atomicenergy¡Xtechnological, unnatural, polluted..."

"Space-time: the errorof the West," Diotallevi said.

"It's the loss of theCenter. Vaccine and penicillin as caricatures of the Elixir ofEternal Life," I added.

"Or like that otherTemplar, Freud," Belbo said, "who instead of probing the labyrinthsof the physical underground, probed those of the psychicunderground, as if everything about them hadn't already been said,and better, by the alchemists."

"But you're the one,"Diotallevi objected, "who is trying to publish the books of Dr.Wagner. For me, psychoanalysis is for neurotics."

"Yes, and the penis isnothing but a phallic symbol," I concluded. "Come, gentlemen, let'snot digress. And let's not waste time. We still don't know where toput the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites."

But before we were ableto answer this question, we came upon another group, one that, notpart of the thirty-six invisibles, had nevertheless entered thegame at quite an early stage, somewhat upsetting its designs,causing confusion: the Jesuits.

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The Baron Hundt,Chevalier Ramsay....and numerous others who founded the grades inthese rites, worked under instructions from the general of theJesuits...Templarism is Jesuitism.

¡XLetter to MadameBlavatsky from Charles Southeran, 32 .'. A and P.R. 94 .'. Memphis,K.R. , K. Kadosch, M.M. 104, Eng., etc. Initiate of the EnglishBrotherhood of the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, January11, 1877; from /sis Unveiled, 1877, vol. ii, p. 390

We had run into them toooften, from the time of the first Ro-sicrucian manifestoes on. Asearly as 1620, in Germany, the Rosa Jesuitica appears, reminding usthat the symbolism of the rose was Catholic and Marian before itwas Rosicrucian, and the hint is made that the two orders are inleague, that Rosicru-cianism is only a reformulation of the Jesuitmystique for consumption in Reformation Germany.

I remernbered what Salonhad said about Father Kircher's rancorous attack on theRosicrucians¡Xright in the middle of his discourse on the depths ofthe terraqueous globe.

"Father Kircher," Isaid, "is a central character in this story. Why would this man,who so often showed a gift for observation and a taste forexperiment, drown these few good ideas in thousands of pagesoverflowing with incredible hypotheses? He was in correspondencewith the best English scientists. Each of his books deals withtypical Rosicrucian subjects, ostensibly to contest them, actuallyto espouse them, offering his own Counter Reformation version. Inthe first edition of the Fama, Herr Has-elmayer, condemned to thegalleys by the Jesuits because of his reforming ideas, hastens tosay that the Rosicrucians are the true Jesuits. Very well. Kircherwrites his thirty-odd volumes to argue that the Jesuits are thetrue Rosicrucians. The Jesuits are trying to get their hands on thePlan. Kircher wants to study those pendulums himself, and he does,in his own way. He in-vents a planetary clock that will give theexact time in all the headquarters of the Society of Jesusscattered throughout the world."

"But how did the Jesuitsknow of the Plan, when the Templars let themselves be killed ratherthan reveal it?" Diotallevi asked.

It was no good answeringthat the Jesuits always know everything. We needed a more seductiveexplanation.

We quickly found one.Guillaume Postel again. Leafing through the history of the Jesuitsby Cre'tineau-Joly (and how we chuckled over that unfortunatename), we learned