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

people boasted that they hadread Fama in manuscript. It wasn't so easy to prepare a book forpublication in those days, especially if it had engravings, but in1616, Robert Fludd¡Xwho wrote in England but printed in Leyden, soyou have to figure in the time to ship the proofs¡XcirculatedApologia compendiaria Fratemitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis etin-famiis maculis aspersam, veritatem quasi Fluctibus abluens etabstergens, to defend the brethren and free them from suspicion,from the ¡¥slander' that had been their reward. In other words, adebate was raging in Bohemia, Germany, England, and Holland, alivewith couriers on horseback and itinerant scholars."

"And the Rosicruciansthemselves?"

"Deathly silence. PostCXX annos patebo, my ass. They watched, from the vacuum of theirpalace. I believe it was their silence that agitated everyone somuch. The fact that they didn't answer was taken as proof of theirexistence. In 1617 Fludd wrote Tractatus apologeticus integritatemsocietatis de Rosea Cruce de-fendens, and somebody in a De NaturaeSecretis, 1618, said that the time had come to reveal the secret ofthe Rosicrucians."

"And didthey?"

"Anything but. They onlycomplicated things, explaining that if you subtracted from 1618 theone hundred and eighty-eight years promised by the Rosicrucians,you got 1430, the year when the Order of the Golden Fleece, laToison d'Or, was established."

"What's that got to dowith anything?"

"I don't understand theone hundred and eighty-eight years. It seems to me it should havebeen one hundred and twenty, but mystical subtractions andadditions always come out the way you want. As for la Toison d'Or,it's a reference to the Argonauts, who, an unimpeachable sourceonce told me, had some connection with the Holy Grail and thereforewith the Templars. But that's not all. Fludd, who seems to havebeen as prolific as Barbara Cartland, brought out four more booksbetween 1617 and 1619, including Utriusque cosmi historia, briefremarks on the universe, illustrated with roses and crossesthroughout. Maier then mustered all his courage and put out hisSilentium post clamores, in which he claimed that the confraternitydid indeed exist and was connected not only to la Toison d'Or butalso to the Order of the Garter. Except that he was too lowly aperson to be received into it. Imagine the reaction of the scholarsof Europe! If the Rosicrucians didn't accept even Maier, the ordermust have been really exclusive. So now all the pseuds bent overbackward to get in. In other words, everyone said the Rosicruciansexisted, though no one admitted to having actually seen them.Everyone wrote as if trying to set up a meeting or wheedle anaudience, but no one had the courage to say I'm one, and some,maybe only because they had never been approached, said the orderdidn't exist; others said the order existed precisely because theyhad been approached."

"And not a peep out ofthe Rosicrucians."

"Quiet asmice."

"Open your mouth. Youneed some mamaia."

"Yum. Meanwhile, theThirty Years' War began, and Johann Valentin Andreae wrote TurnsBabel, promising that the Antichrist would be defeated within theyear, while one Ireneus Agnostus wrote Tintinnabulumsophorum¡X"

"Tintinnabulum! I loveit."

"¡Xnot a word of whichis comprehensible. But then Campa-nella, or someone acting on hisbehalf, declared in Spanischen Monarchy that the whole Rosy Crossbusiness was a game of corrupt minds...And that's it. Between 1621and 1623 they all shut up."

"Just likethat?"

"Just like that. Theygot tired of it. Like the Beatles. But only in Germany. Otherwise,it's the story of a toxic cloud. It shifted to France. One finemorning in 1623, Rosicrucian manifestoes appeared on the walls ofParis, informing the good citizens that the deputies of theconfraternity's chief college had moved to their city and wereready to accept applications. But according to another version, themanifestoes came right out and said there were thirty-sixinvisibles scattered through the world in groups of six, and thatthey had the power to make their adepts invisible. Hey! Thethirty-six again!"

"Whatthirty-six?"

"The ones in my Templardocument."

"No imagination at all,these people. What next?"

"Collective madnessbroke out. Some defended the Rosicrucians, others wanted to meetthem, still others accused them of devil worship, alchemy, andheresy, claiming that Ashtoreth had intervened to make them rich,powerful, capable of flying from place to place. The talk of thetown, in other words."

"Smart, those brethren.Nothing like a Paris launching to make you fashionable."

"You're right. Listen towhat happened next. Descartes¡Xthat's right, Descarteshimself¡Xhad, several years before, gone looking for them inGermany, but he never found them, because, as his biographer says,they deliberately disguised themselves. By the time he got back toParis, the manifestoes had appeared, and he learned mat everybodyconsidered him a Rosicrucian. Not a good thing to be, given theatmosphere at the time. It also irritated his friend Mersenne, whowas already fulminating against the Rosicrucians, calling themwretches, subversives, mages, and cabalists bent on sowingperverted doctrines. So what does Descartes do? Simply appears inpublic as often as possible. Since everybody can undeniably seehim, he must not be a Rosicru-cian, because if he were, he'd beinvisible."

"That's method foryou!"

"Of course, denying itwouldn't have worked. The way things were, if somebody came up toyou and said, ¡¥Hi there, I'm a Rosicrucian,' that meant he wasn't.No self-respecting Rosicru-cian would acknowledge it. On thecontrary, he would deny it to his last breath."

"But you can't say thatanyone who denies being a Rosicrucian is a Rosicrucian, because Isay I'm not, and that doesn't make me one."

"But the denial isitself suspicious."

"No, it's not. Whatwould a Rosicrucian do once he realized people weren't believingthose who said they were, and that people suspected only those whosaid they weren't? He'd say he was, to make them think hewasn't."

"Damnation. So those whosay they're Rosicrucians are lying, which means they really are!No, no, Amparo, we musn't fall into their trap. Their spies areeverywhere, even under this bed, so now they know that we know, andtherefore they say they aren't."

"Darling, you're scaringme."

"Don't worry, I'm here,and I'm stupid, so when they say they aren't, I'll believe they areand unmask them at once. The Rosicrucian unmasked is harmless; youcan shoo him out the window with a rolled-up newspaper."

"What about Aglie? Hewants us to think he's the Comte de Saint-Germain. Obviously sowe'll think he isn't. Therefore, he's a Rosicrucian. Or isn'the?"

"Listen, Amparo, let'sget some sleep."

"Oh, no, now I want tohear the rest."

"The rest is a completemess. Everybody's a Rosicrucian. In 1627 Francis Bacon's NewAtlantis was published,