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

"But look¡Xand forgivemy banality¡Xdo the Rosicrucians exist or not?''

"What do you mean byexist?"

"You tellme."

"The Great WhiteFraternity¡Xwhether you call them Rosicrucians or the spiritualknighthood of which the Templars are a temporary incarnation¡Xis acohort of a few, a very few, elect wise men who journey throughhuman history in order to preserve a core of eternal knowledge.History does not happen randomly. It is the work of the Masters ofthe World, whom nothing escapes. Naturally, the Masters of theWorld protect themselves through secrecy. And that is why anyonewho says he is a master, a Rosicrucian, a Templar is lying. Theymust be sought elsewhere."

"Then the story goes onendlessly."

"Exactly. And itdemonstrates the shrewdness of the Masters."

"But what do they wantpeople to know?"

"Only that there's asecret. Otherwise, if everything is as it appears to be, why go onliving?"

"And what is thesecret?"

"What the revealedreligions have been unable to reveal. The secret liesbeyond."

33

The visions are white,blue, white, pale red. In the end they mingle and are all pale, thecolor of the flame of a white candle; you will see sparks, you willfeel gooseflesh all over your body. This announces the beginning ofthe attraction exerted on the one who fulfills themission.

¡XPapus, Marlines dePasqually, Paris, Chamuel, 1895, p. 92

The promised eveningarrived. Aglie picked us up just as he had in Salvador. The tendawhere the session, or gira, was to take place was in a fairlycentral district, if you can speak of a center in a city whosetongues of land stretch through hills and lick the sea. Seen fromabove, illuminated in the evening, the city looks like a head withpatches of alopecia areata.

"Remember, mis is anumbanda tonight, not a candomble. The participants will bepossessed not by orixas, but by the eguns, spirits of the departed.And by Exu, the African Hermes you saw in Bahia, and his companion,Pompa Gira. Exu is a Yoruba divinity, a demon inclined to mischiefand joking, but there was a trickster god in Amerind mythology,too."

"And who are thedeparted?"

"Pretos velhos andcaboclos. The pretos velhos are old African wise men who guidedtheir people at the time of deportation, like Rei Congo and PaiAgostinho...They are the memory of a milder phase of slavery, whenthe blacks, no longer animals, became family friends, uncles,grandfathers. The caboclos, on the other hand, are Indian spirits,virgin forces representing the purity of original nature. In theumbanda the African orixas stay in the background, completelysyncretized with Catholic saints, and these beings alone intervene.They are the ones who produce the trance. At a certain point in thedance, the medium, the cavalo, is penetrated by a higher being andloses all awareness of self. He continues to dance until the divinebeing has left him, and he emerges feeling better. Clean,purified."

"Lucky mediums," Amparosaid.

"Lucky indeed," Agliesaid. "They attain contact with mother earth. These worshipers havebeen uprooted, flung into the horrible melting pot of the city,and, as Spengler said, at a time of crisis the mercantile Westturns once more to the world of the earth."

We arrived. The tendalooked like an ordinary building from the outside. Here, too, youentered through a little garden, more modest than the one in Bahia,and at the door of the barracao, a kind of storehouse, was a littlestatue of Exu, already surrounded by propitiatoryofferings.

Amparo drew me aside aswe went in. "IVe figured it out," she said. "That tapir at thelecture talked about the Aryan age, remember? And this one talksabout the decline of the West. Blut und Boden, blood and earth.It's pure Nazism."

"It's not that simple,darling. This is a different continent."

"Thanks for the news.The Great White Fraternity! You eat your God fordinner."

"It's the Catholics whodo that. It's not the same thing."

"It is too. Weren't youlistening? Pythagoras, Dante, the Virgin Mary, and the Masons.Always out to screw us. Make um-banda, not love."

"You're the one who'ssyncretized. Come on, let's have a look. This, teo, isculture."

"There's only oneculture: strangle the last priest with the entrails of the lastRosicrucian."

Aglie signaled us to goin. If the outside was seedy, the inside was a blaze of violentcolors. It was a quadrangular hall, with one area set aside for thedancing of the cavalos. The altar was at the far end, protected bya railing, against which stood the platform for the drums, theatabaques. The ritual space was still empty, but on our side of therailing a heterogeneous crowd was already stirring: believers andthe merely curious, blacks and whites, all mixed, some barefoot,others wearing tennis shoes. I was immediately struck by thefigures around the altar: pretos velhos, caboclos in multicoloredfeathers, saints who would have seemed to be marzipan were it notfor their Pantagruelian dimensions, Saint George in a shiningbreastplate and scarlet cloak, saints Cosmas and Damian, a Virginpierced by swords, and a shamelessly hyperrealist Christ, his armsoutstretched like the redeemer of Corcovado, but in color. Therewere no orixas, but you could sense their presence in the faces ofthe crowd and in the sweetish odor of cane and cooked foods, in thestench of sweat caused by the heat and by the excitement of theimminent gira.

The pai-de-santo wentforward and took a seat near the altar, where he received thefaithful, scenting them with dense exhalations of his cigar,blessing them, and offering them a cup of liquor as if in a rapidEucharistic rite. I knelt and drank with my companions, noticing,as I watched a cambone pour the liquid from a bottle, that it wasDubonnet. No matter. I savored it as if it were an elixir from theFountain of Youth. On the platform the atabaques were alreadybeating, to brisk blows, as the initiates chanted a propitiatorysong to Exu and to Pompa Gira: Seu Tranca Ruas e Mojuba! E Mojuba,e Mojuba! Sete Encruzilhadas 6 Mojuba! E Mojuba, 6 Mojuba! SeuMaraboe e Mojuba! Seu Tiriri ? Mojuba! Exu Veludo, i Mojuba! APompa Gira ? Mojuba!

The pai-de-santo beganto swing his thurible, releasing a heavy odor of Indian incense,and to chant special orations to OxaM and Nossa Senhora.

The atabaques beatfaster, and the cavalos invaded the space before the altar,beginning to fall under the spell of the pontos. Most were women,and Amparo made sarcastic asides about the sensitivity of hersex.

Among the women weresome