Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (43 page)

Da Rosa, nada digamos
agora....

¡XSampayo Bruno, Os
Cavalheiros do Amor, Lisbon, Guimaraes, 1960, p. 155

When you assume an
attitude of suspicion, you overlook no clue. After our fantasy on
the power train and the Tree of the Sefirot, I was prepared to see
symbols in every object I came upon.

I had kept in touch with
my Brazilian friends, and in Portugal just then, at Coimbra, a
conference was being held on Lusitanian culture. More out of a wish
to see me again than out of respect for my expertise, my Rio
friends managed to have me invited. Lia didn't go with me; she was
in her seventh month, and though her pregnancy had changed her
slender figure only slightly, transforming her into a Flemish
madonna, she preferred to stay home.

I spent three merry
evenings with my old comrades. As we were returning by bus to
Lisbon, an argument developed about whether we should stop at
Fatima or Tomar. Tomar was the castle to which the Portuguese
Templars had withdrawn after the king and the pope saved them from
trial and ruin by transforming them into the Order of the Knights
of Christ. I couldn't miss a Templar castle, and luckily the rest
of the party was not enthusiastic about Fatima.

If I could have invented
a Templar castle, it would have been Tomar. You reach it by
ascending a fortified road that flanks the outer bastions, which
have cruciform slits, and you breathe Crusader air from the first
moment. The Knights of Christ prospered for centuries in that
place. Tradition has it that both Henry the Navigator and
Christopher Columbus belonged to that order, and in fact it devoted
itself to the conquest of the seas¡Xmaking the fortune of Portugal.
The knights' long and happy existence there had caused the castle
to be rebuilt and extended through the centuries, so to its
medieval part were joined Renaissance and Baroque wings. I was
moved as I entered the church of the Templars, which had an
octagonal rotunda reproducing that of the Holy Sepulcher, and I was
surprised to see that the Templars' crosses had different forms,
depending on their location. It was a problem I had encountered
before, when I went through the confused iconography on the
subject. Whereas the cross of the Knights of Malta had remained
more or less the same, the Templar cross had been influenced by
periods and local traditions. That's why Templar-hunters, finding
any kind of cross in a place, immediately think they've discovered
a trace of the knights.

Our guide took us to see
the Manueline window, the janela par excellence, a filigree, a
collage of marine and submarine troves, seaweeds, shells, anchors,
capstans, and chains, celebrating the knights' achievements on the
oceans. The window was framed by two towers, which were decorated
with carvings of the insigne of the Garter. What was the symbol of
an English order doing in a Portuguese fortified monastery? The
guide couldn't say; but a little later, on another side, the
northeast, I believe, he showed us the insigne of the Golden
Fleece. I couldn't help thinking of the subtle game of alliances
that had united the Garter to the Golden Fleece, the Fleece to the
Argonauts, the Argonauts to the Grail, and the Grail to the
Templars. Remembering Colonel Ardenti's narrative and a few pages
from the Diabolicals' manuscripts, I started when our guide showed
us into a side room whose ceiling was gripped by keystones. They
were rosettes, but on some of them was carved a bearded caprine
face: Baphomet...

We went down into a
crypt. After seven steps, a bare stone floor led to the apse, where
an altar could stand, or the chair of the grand master. You reached
it by passing beneath seven keystones, each in the form of a rose,
one larger than the next, with the last set over a well. The Cross
and the Rose, in a Templar monastery, and in a room surely built
before the Rosicrucian manifestoes...I put some questions to the
guide. He smiled. "If you knew how many students of the occult
sciences come here on pilgrimages....It's said that this was the
initiation chamber."

Entering by chance a
room not yet restored, which contained a few pieces of dusty
furniture, I found the floor cluttered with great cardboard boxes.
Rummaging at random, I uncovered some fragments of volumes in
Hebrew, presumably from the seventeenth century. What were the Jews
doing in Tomar? The guide told me that the knights had maintained
friendly relations with the local Jewish community. He had me look
out the window and showed me a little garden designed like an
elegant French maze¡Xthe work, he told me, of an eighteenth-century
Jewish architect: Samuel Schwarz.

The second appointment
in Jerusalem....And the first at the Castle? Wasn't that how the
message of Provins went? By God, the Castle of the Ordonation
mentioned in Ingolf's document was not the Monsalvat of chivalric
novels, the Avalon of the Hyperboreal. No. What castle would the
Templars of Provins, more used to directing commandaries than to
reading romances of the Round Table, have chosen for their first
meeting place? Why, Tomar, the castle of the Knights of Christ, a
place where survivors of the order enjoyed complete freedom,
unchanged guarantees, and where they could be in contact with the
agents of the second group!

I left Tomar and
Portugal with my mind ablaze. No longer was I laughing at
the'message Ardenti had shown us. The Templars, when they became a
secret order, worked out a Plan that was to last six hundred years
and conclude in our century. The Templars were serious men. If they
talked about a castle, they meant a real castle. The Plan began at
Tomar. And what would the ideal route have been, the sequence of
the other five meetings? Places where the Templars could count on
friendship, protection, complicity. The colonel spoke of
Stonehenge, Avalon, Agarttha...Nonsense. The message had to be
completely re-studied.

Of course¡XI reminded
myself on my way home¡Xthe idea is not to discover the Templars'
secret, but to construct it.

Belbo seemed disturbed
at the thought of going back to the document left by the colonel,
and he found it only after digging reluctantly in a lower drawer.
But, I saw, he had kept it. Together we reread the Provins message,
after so many years.

It began with the
message coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisibles
separez en six bandes. And then:

a la....Saint
Jean

36 p charrete de
fein

6...entiers avec
saiel

p....les blancs
mantiax

r...5...chevaliers de
Pruins pour la....j. nc.

6 foil 6 en 6
places

chascune foiz 20 a...720
a...

iceste est I
¡¥ordonation

al donjon li
premiers

it li secunz joste iceus
qui....pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame de
I'altre part de I'iau

it a I ¡¥ostel des
popelicans

it a la
pierre

3 foiz 6 avant la
feste....la Grant Pute.

"Thirty-six years after
the hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealed
messages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsed
knights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twenty
years each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, this
is the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate the
bread, then at the Refuge, then at Our Lady Beyond the River, then
at the House of the Pope-licans, then at the Stone. You see, in
1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, in
fact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we must
ask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you are
an escaping Templar, where would you go to form the second
group?''

"H'm...If it's true that
those in the wain fled to Scotland....But why should they have gone
to Scotland in particular to eat the bread?"

I was becoming a master
of chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland.
Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice.
Saint John's Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about Saint
John's Fire in Frazer's Golden Bough.

I telephoned Lia. "Do me
a favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about Saint
John's Fire."

Lia was terrific at this
sort of thing. She found the chapter at once. "What do you want to
know? It's a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all European
countries. It's celebrated at the moment when the sun is at its
peak. Saint John was added to make the thing
Christian..."

"Do they eat bread in
Scotland?"

"Let me see...I don't
think so...Ah, here it is: they don't eat bread for Saint John, but
on the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires,
originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in the
Scottish highlands..."

"We've got it! What
kind?"

"They knead a cake of
flour and oats and toast it on embers...Then a rite follows that
recalls ancient human sacrifices...The bread's called bannock
cakes..."

"What? Spell it!" She
did, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morgan
le Fay, and other endearments.

I tried to remember my
thesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge in
Scotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped the
king win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them up
as the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of
Scotland.

I took a big English
dictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok in
Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind of
cake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or other
grain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn as
the French Templars would have done when they sent news from
Scotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get something
like the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread. Those
who ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of the
bread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time had
spread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal to
England. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti's from
Pole to Palestine.

Let your garments be
white...If it is dark, set many lights burning...Now begin
combining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them until
your heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the letters
and to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heart
is warm, when you see that through the combination of the letters
you grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with the
aid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence of
the divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundity
of your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higher
angels, as if they were human beings beside you.

¡XAbulafia, Sefer Haie
Olam

"It makes sense," Belbo
said. "And in that ease, where would the Refuge be?"

"The six groups settle
in six places, but only one place is called the Refuge. Odd. This
must mean that in the other places, like Portugal and Britain, the
Templars can live undisturbed, although under another name, whereas
in the Refuge they are completely hidden. I would say it is where
the Templars of Paris went after they left the Temple. To me it
seems economical for the route to go to England from France, but
why not assume that the Templars took an even more economical
course and set up a refuge in a secret and protected place in Paris
itself? Being sound politicians, they reasoned that in two hundred
years the situation would change and they would be able to act in
the light of day, or almost."

"Paris it is. And the
fourth place?"

"The colonel was
thinking of Chartres, but if we make Paris the third place, we
can't put down Chartres as the fourth, because obviously the Plan
has to involve all the centers of Europe. Besides, we're leaving
the mystical trail to work out a political trail. The pattern
appears to be a sine wave, so we should go to the north of Germany.
¡¥Beyond the water,' that is, beyond the Rhine, there's a city¡Xnot
a church¡Xof Our Lady. Near Danzig, there's a city of the
Virgin¡Xin other words, Marienburg."

"Why meet at
Marienburg?"

"Because it was the seat
of the Teutonic Knights! Relations between the Templars and the
Teutonics hadn't been poisoned like those between the Templars and
the Hospitalers, who had waited like vultures for the suppression
of the Temple in order to seize its wealth. The Teutonics were
created in Palestine by German emperors as a counterbalance to the
Templars, but they were soon called north to stem the invasion of
Prussian barbarians. They succeeded so well that in the space of
two centuries they became a state that spread out over all the
Baltic lands. They moved between Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia.
They founded KQnigsberg. They were defeated only once, by
Alek-sandr Nevski in Estonia. About the time the Templars were
arrested in Paris, the Teutonics established the capital of their
realm at Marienburg. If there was any spiritual-knighthood plan of
world conquest, the Templars and the Teutonics had divided the
spheres of influence between them."

"You know what?" Belbo
said. "I'm with you. Now the fifth group. Where are these
Popelicans?"

"I don't know," I
said.

"You disappoint me,
Casaubon. Maybe we should ask Abu-lafia."

"No. Abulafia can only
connect facts, not create them. The Popelicans are a fact, not a
connection, and facts are the province of Sam Spade. Give me a few
days."

"I'll give you two
weeks," Belbo said. "If, within two weeks, you don't hand the
Popelicans over to me, you'll buy me a bottle of twelve-year-old
Ballantine's."

Beyond my means. A week
later I delivered the Popelicans to my greedy partners.

"It's all clear. Now
follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to
Byzantium, when various movements of Manichean inspiration have
already spread throughout the Mediterranean. We begin with the
Archontics, founded in Armenia by Peter of Capharbarucha¡Xand you
have to admit that's a pretty grand name. Anti-Semitic, the
Archontics identify the Devil with Sabaoth, the god of the Jews,
who lives in the seventh heaven. To reach the Great Mother of Light
in the eighth heaven, it is necessary to reject both Sabaoth and
baptism. All right?"

"Consider them
rejected," Belbo said.

"But the Archontics are
still nice kids at heart. In the fifth century the Massalians come
along, and actually they survive until the eleventh century, in
Thrace. The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they
have dealings with the infernal powers, and in fact some texts call
them Borborites, from borboros, filth, because of the unspeakable
things they do."

"What do they
do?"

"The usual unspeakable
things. Men and women hold in the palm of their hand, and raise to
heaven, their own ignominy, namely, sperm or menstruum, then eat
it, calling it the Body of Christ. And if by chance a woman is made
pregnant, at the opportune moment they stick a hand into her womb,
pull out the embryo, throw it into a mortar, mix in some honey and
pepper, and gobble it up."

"How revolting, honey
and pepper!" Diotallevi said.

"So those are the
Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or
Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for
other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latter-day
Gnostics, therefore dualists, who worshiped the Great Mother
Barbelo, and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics,
or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were
already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect,
the Rotary Club of the whole business. But maybe the Stratiotics
were only the Hylics of the Mithraists."

"Sounds a bit confused,"
Belbo said.

"Naturally. None of
these people left records. The only things we know about them come
to us from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. I'm just
trying to show you what a mess the Middle East was at the time. And
to set the stage for the Paulicians. These are the followers of a
certain Paul, joined by some iconoclasts expelled from Albania.
From the eighth century on, the Paulicians grow rapidly, the sect
becomes a community, the community a force, a political power, and
the emperors of Byzantium, beginning to get worried, send the
imperial armies against them. The Paulicians extend as far as the
confines of the Arab world; they spread toward the Euphrates, and
northward as far as the Black Sea. They establish colonies more or
less everywhere, and we find them as late as the seventeenth
century, when they are converted by the Jesuits, and some
communities still exist today in the Balkans or thereabouts. Now,
what do the Paulicians believe in? In God, One and Three, except
that the Demiurge defiantly created the world, with the unfortunate
results visible to all. The Paulicians reject the Old Testament,
refuse the sacraments, despise the Cross, and don't honor the
Virgin, because Christ was incarnated directly in heaven and passed
through Mary as through a pipe. The Bogo-mils, who are partly
derived from them, say that Christ went in one ear of Mary and came
out the other, without her even noticing. The Paulicians are also
accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing
children's blood in their bread and the Eucharistic
wine."

"Like everybody
else."

"Those were the days
when, for a heretic, going to Mass was a torment. Might as well
become Moslem. Anyway, that's the sort of people they were. And I'm
telling you about them because, when the dualist heretics spread
through Italy and Provence, they are called¡Xto indicate that
they're like the Paulicians¡XPopelicans, Publicans, Populicans, who
gallice etiam dicuntur ab aliquis popelicant!"

"So there they
are."

"Yes, finally. The
Paulicians continue into the ninth century, driving the Byzantine
emperors crazy until Emperor Basil vows that if he gets his hands
on their leader, Chrysocheir, who invaded the church of Saint John
of God at Ephesus and watered his horse at the holy-water
fonts..."

"A familiar nasty
habit," Belbo said.

"...he'll shoot three
arrows into his head. He sends the imperial army after Chrysocheir;
they capture him, cut off his head, send it to the emperor, who
places it on a table¡Xor a trumeau, on a little porphyry
column¡Xand shoots three arrows, wham wham wham, into it, probably
an arrow for each eye and the third for the mouth."

"Nice folks," Diotallevi
said.

"They didn't do it to be
mean," Belbo said. "It was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon:
our Diotallevi doesn't understand theological fine
points."

"To conclude: the
Crusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them near
Antioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics are
fighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at the
siege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community of
Philippopolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsar
Yoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehar-douin tells us. Here's
the connection with the Templars and the solution to our riddle.
Legend has the Templars inspired by the Cathars, but it's really
the other way around. The Templars, encountering the Paulician
communities in the course of the Crusades, established mysterious
relations with them, as they had before with the mystics and the
Moslem heretics. Just follow the track of the Ordonation. It has to
pass through the Balkans."

"Why?"

"Because, clearly, the
sixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to the
stone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslems
venerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take off
our shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar in
Jerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don't
know who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group of
surviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connected
with the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalem
from Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, and
there the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see how
straightforward and economical the Plan becomes?"

"I must say I'm
persuaded," Belbo said. "But where in the Balkans were the
Popelicans waiting?"

"If you ask me, the
natural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils,
but the Templars of Provins couldn't have known that a few years
later Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and remain under their
dominion for five centuries."

"Which would suggest
that the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany and
Bulgaria. When was that to take place?"

"In 1824," Diotallevi
said.

"Why's that?"

Diotallevi quickly
sketched the following diagram:

PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCE
GERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM

1344 1464 1584 1704 1824
1944

"In 1344 the first grand
masters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribed
places. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grand
masters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixth
master of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In
1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master.
The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with the
Paulicians fails, it must fail in 1824."

"Let's assume it fails,"
I said. "But I don't understand why such shrewd men, when they had
four-sixths of the message in their hands, weren't able to
reconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fell
through, they didn't get in touch with the next group."

"Casaubon," Belbo said,
"do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If they
wanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years,
they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knows
where to find the master of the following group, but not where to
find the others, and none of the later groups know where to find
the masters of the preceding groups. If the Germans lose the
Bulgarians, they'll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and the
Jerusalemites won't know where anyone else is. As for
reconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends on
how the message has been divided. Certainly not~ in logical
sequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message is
incomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can't make
any use of it."

"Just think," Diotallevi
said. "If the Bulgarian meeting didn't take place, Europe today is
the theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not finding
one another, while each group knows that one small piece of
information might be enough to make it master of the world. What's
the name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe a
Plot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battle
to reconstruct a lost message. We don't see them, but, invisible,
they act all around us."

The same idea then
occurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and we
quickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discovered
that at least two expressions in the Provins message¡Xthe reference
to thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and the
hundred-and-twenty-year deadline¡Xalso appeared in the debate on
the Rosicrucians.