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

theprime suspect was always the one who didn't have an alibi asradiant as Hiroshima? He said he would donate his head to an organbank if I had an alibi for the time between one A.M. and the nextmorning.

What can I say,Casaubon? Maybe I should have told him the truth, but where I comefrom, men are stubborn and never back down.

I'm writing you becauseif I found your address, then De Angelis can find it, too. If hegets in touch with you, at least you know the line I've taken. Butsince it doesn't seem a very straight line to me, go ahead and tellhim everything if you want to. I'm embarrassed, I apologize. I feellike some kind of accomplice. Try as I might, I can't seem to findany noble justification for myself. Must be my peasant origins; inour part of the country, we're a mean bunch. The whole thing is¡Xasthe Germans says¡Xunheimlich.

Yours, JacopoBelbo

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...of these mysteriousinitiates¡Xnow become numerous, bold, conspiring¡Xall was born:Jesuitism, magnetism, Martinism, philosopher's stone, somnambulism,eclecticism.

¡XC.-L.Cadet-Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Malay, Paris, Desenne,1797, p. 91

The letter upset me. Notthat I was afraid of being tracked down by De Angelis¡Xwe were indifferent hemispheres, after all¡Xbut for less definable reasons.At the time, I thought I was upset because a world I had leftbehind had bounced back at me. But today I realize that whatbothered me was yet another strand of resemblance, the suspicion ofan analogy. I was annoyed, too, at having to deal with Belbo again,Belbo and his eternal guilty conscience. I decided not to mentionthe letter to Amparo.

A reassuring secondletter arrived from Belbo two days later.

The story of the psychichad had a reasonable ending. A police informer reported that thegirl's lover had been involved in a settling of scores over a drugshipment, which he had sold retail instead of delivering it to thehonest wholesaler who had already paid. They frown on that sort ofbehavior in those circles, and he vanished to save his neck.Obviously he took the woman with him. Rummaging then among thenewspapers left in their apartment, De Angelis found some magazineson the order of Picatrix, with a series of articles heavilyunderlined in red. One was about the treasure of the Templars,another about Rosicrucians who lived in a castle, cave, or somedamn place where "post CXX annos patebo" was written and theycalled themselves the thirty-six invisibles. So for De Angelis itwas all clear. The psychic, consuming the same sort of literaturethat the colonel had, regurgitated it whin she was in a trance. Thematter was closed, passed on to the narcotics squad.

Belbo's letter exudedrelief. De Angelis's explanation seemed the mosteconomical.

The other evening in theperiscope, I told myself that the facts might have been quitedifferent. Granted, the psychic quoted something she had heard fromArdenti, but it was something her magazines never mentioned,something no one was supposed to know. Whoever had got rid of thecolonel was in the Picatrix group, and this someone noticed thatBelbo was about to question the psychic, so he eliminated her. Tothrow the investigators off the track, he also eliminated herlover, then instructed a police informer to say that the couple hadfled.

Simple enough, if therewas really a plan. But how could there have been? Since we invented"the Plan" ourselves, and only much later was it possible forreality not only to catch up with fiction, but actually to precedeit, or, rather, to rush ahead of it and repair the damage that itwould cause.

At the time, though, inBrazil, these were not my thoughts on receiving Belbo's secondletter. Instead, I felt once more that something was resemblingsomething else. I had been thinking about my trip to Bahia and hadspent an afternoon visiting bookstores and shops that sold cultobjects, places I had ignored till then. I went to out-of-the-waylittle emporiums crammed with statues and idols. I purchasedperfumadores of Yemanja, pun-gently scented mystical smoke sticks,incense, sweetish spray cans labeled "Sacred Heart of Jesus," cheapamulets. I also found many books, some for devotees, others forpeople studying devotees, a mixture of exorcism manuals like Comoadivin-harofuturo na bola de cristal and anthropology textbooks.And a monograph on the Rosicrucians.

Suddenly it all seemedto come together: Satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple ofJerusalem, African witchcraft for the sub-proletarians of theBrazilian Northeast, the message-of Provins with its hundred andtwenty years, and the hundred and twenty years of theRosicrucians.

I felt like a walkingblender mixing strange concoctions of different liquors. Or maybe Ihad caused some kind of short circuit, tripping over a varicoloredtangle of wires that had been entwining themselves for a long, longtime. I bought the book on the Rosicrucians, thinking that if Ispent a few hours in these bookstores, I would meet at least adozen Colonel Ardentis and brainwashed psychics.

I went home andofficially informed Amparo that the world was full of unnaturalcharacters. She promised me solace, and we ended the daynaturally.

That was late 1975. Idecided to put resemblances aside and concentrate on my work. Afterall, I was supposed to be teaching Italian culture, not theRosicrucians.

I devoted myself toRenaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secularmodernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the MiddleAges, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves tocabala and magic.

After two years spentwith Neoplatonists who chanted formulas designed to convince natureto do things she had no intention of doing, I received news fromItaly. It seems my old classmates¡Xor some of them, at least¡Xwerenow shooting people who didn't agree with them, to convince thestubborn to do things they had no intention of doing.

I couldn't understandit. Now part of the Third World, I made up my mind to visit Bahia.I set off with a history of Renaissance culture and the book on theRosicrucians, which had remained on a shelf, its pagesuncut.

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All the traditions ofthe earth must be seen as deriving from a fundamentalmother-tradition that, from the beginning, was entrusted to sinfulman and to his first offspring.

¡XLouis-Claude deSaint-Martin, De I'esprit des chases, Paris, Laran, 1800, II, "Del'esprit des traditions en general"

And I saw Salvador:Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the "black Rome," with threehundred and sixty-five churches, which stand out against the lineof hills