Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (56 page)

Nazism was the moment
when the spirit of magic seized the helm of material progress.
Lenin said Communism was socialism plus electricity. In a sense,
Hitlerism was Guenonism plus armored divisions.

¡XPauwels and Bergier,
Le matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, 2, vii

Now Belbo had managed to
work Hitler into the Plan. "It's all there, black on white. The
founders of Nazism were involved in Teutonic
neo-Templarism."

"An airtight
case."

"I'm not inventing,
Casaubon, for once I'm not inventing!"

"Take it easy. When did
we ever invent anything? We've always started with objective data,
with information in the public domain."

"This time, too. In 1912
a Germanenorden group is formed, proposing the tenet of Aryan
superiority. In 1918 a certain Baron von Sebottendorf founds a
related group, the Thule Gesellschaft, a secret society, yet
another variation on the Templar Strict Observance, but with strong
racist, pan-German, neo-Aryan tendencies. And in ¡¥33 Sebottendorf
writes that he had sown what Hitler reaped. Furthermore, it is in
Thule Gesellschaft circles that the hooked cross appears. And who
was among the first to join the Thule? Rudolf Hess, Hitler's evil
genius! Then Rosenberg! Then Hitler himself! And note that in his
cell in Spandau even today, as you've surely read in the papers,
Hess studies the esoteric sciences. Sebottendorf in ¡¥24 writes a
pamphlet on alchemy, and remarks that the first experiments in
atomic fission demonstrate the truths of the Great Work. He also
writes a novel on the Ros-icrucians! Later he edits an astrological
magazine, Astrologische Rundschau, and Trevor-Roper tells us that
the Nazi chiefs, Hitler first among them, never made a move without
having a horoscope cast. In 1943 a group of psychics is consulted
to discover where Mussolini is being held prisoner. In other words,
the whole Nazi leadership is connected with Teutonic
neo-occultism."

Belbo seemed to have got
over the incident with Lorenza, and I built a fire under him to get
on with his theory. "We can look at Hitler's power as a
rabble-rouser also from this point of view," I said. "Physically,
he was a toad, he had a shrill voice. How could such a man whip
crowds into a frenzy? He must have possessed psychic powers.
Perhaps, instructed by some Druid from his hometown, he knew how to
establish contact with the subterranean currents. Perhaps he was a
living valve, a biological menhir transmitting the currents to the
faithful in the Nuremberg stadium. For a while it worked for him;
then his batteries ran down."

To All the World: I
declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a
number of solid, concentric spheres; one within the other, and that
it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees.

¡XJ. Cleves Symmes of
Ohio, late Captain of Infantry, April 10, 1818; quoted in Sprague
de Camp and Ley, Lands Beyond, New York, Rinehart, 1952,

"Congratulations,
Casaubon. In your innocence you hit upon the truth. Hitler's one
genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the
theory of the hollow earth, Hohl-weltlehre."

"I'm leaving. I've got
gastritis," Diotallevi said.

"Wait. We're getting to
the best part. The earth is hollow: we don't live outside it, on
the convex crust, but inside, on the concave surface. What we think
is the sky is actually a gaseous mask, with points of brilliant
light, which fills the interior of our globe. All astronomical
measurements have to be reinterpreted. The sky is not infinite:
it's circumscribed. The sun, if it really exists, is no bigger than
it looks, a mere crumb having a diameter of thirty centimeters at
the center of the earth. The Greeks had already suspected as
much."

"You made this up,"
Diotallevi said wearily.

"I did not! Somebody had
the idea at the beginning of the last century, an American, a man
named Symmes. Then, at the end of the century, another
American¡Xname of Teed¡X revived the notion, supported by
alchemistic experiments and a reading of Isaiah. After the First
World War, the hollow-earth theory was perfected by a German¡XI
forget his name¡Xwho founded the Hohlweltlehre movement. Hitler and
his cronies discovered that Hohlweltlehre corresponded exactly to
their principles, and they even, according to one report, misaimed
some of the V-ls because they calculated their trajectories on the
basis of a concave, not a convex, surface. Hitler at this point was
convinced that the King of the World was himself and that the Nazi
General Staff members were the Unknown Superiors. Where does the
King of the World live? Beneath; not above.

"This hypothesis
inspired Hitler to change the whole direction of German research
toward the concept of the final map, the interpretation of the
Pendulum! The six Templar groups had to be reassembled; everything
had to be begun again from the beginning. Consider the logic of
Hitler's conquests...First, Danzig, to have under his control the
classical places of the Teutonic group. Next he conquered Paris, to
get his hands on the Pendulum and the Eiffel Tower, and he
contacted the syn-archic groups and put them into the Vichy
government. Then he made sure of the neutrality¡Xin effect, the
cooperation¡Xof the Portuguese group. His fourth objective was, of
course, England; but we know that wasn't easy. Meanwhile, with the
African campaigns, he tried to reach Palestine, but here again he
failed. Then he aimed at the dominion of the Paulician territories,
by invading the Balkans and Russia.

"When Hitler had
four-sixths of the Plan in his hands, he sent Hess on a secret
mission to England to propose an alliance. The Baconians, however,
refused. He had another idea: those who were holding the most
important part of the secret must be his eternal enemies the Jews.
He didn't look for them in Jerusalem, where few were left. The
Jerusalemite group's piece of the message wasn't in Palestine
anyway; it was in the possession of a group of the Diaspora. And so
the Holocaust is explained."

"How is
that?"

"Just think for a
moment. Suppose you wanted to commit genocide..."

"Excuse me," Diotallevi
said, "but this is going too far. My stomach hurts. I'm going
home."

"Wait, damn it. When the
Templars were disemboweling the Saracens, you enjoyed yourself,
because it was so long ago. Now you're being delicate, like a petty
intellectual. We're remaking history; we can't be
squeamish."

We let him continue,
subdued by his vehemence.

"The striking thing
about the genocide of the Jews is the lengthiness of the
procedures. First they're kept in camps and starved, then they're
stripped naked, then the showers, then the scrupulous piling up of
the corpses, and the sorting and storing of clothes, the listing of
personal effects...None of this makes sense if it was just a
question of killing them. It makes sense if it was a question of
looking for something, for a message that one of those millions of
people¡Xthe Jerusalemite representative of the Thirty-six
Invisibles¡Xwas hiding in the hem of a garment, or in his mouth, or
had tattooed on his body...Only the Plan explains the inexplicable
bureaucracy of this genocide! Hitler was searching the Jews for the
clue that would allow him to determine, with the Pendulum, the
exact point under the earth's concave vault where the telluric
currents converged.

"And now you see the
beauty of the idea. The telluric currents become equated with the
celestial currents. The hollow-earth theory gives new life to the
age-old hermetic intuition, namely, that what lies beneath is equal
to what lies above! The Mystic Pole coincides with the Heart of the
Earth. The secret pattern of the stars is nothing other than the
secret pattern of the subterranean passages of Agarttha. There is
no longer any difference between heaven and hell, and the Grail,
the lapis exillis, is the lapis ex coelis, the philosopher's stone,
the terminal, the limit, the chthonian uterus of the empyrean! And
if Hitler can identify that point in the hollow center of the
earth, which is also the exact center of the sky, he will be Master
of the World, whose king he is by right of race. And that's why, to
the very end, in the depths of his bunker, he thought he could
still control the Mystic Pole."

"Stop," Diotallevi said.
"Enough is enough. I'm sick."

"He's really sick. It's
not an ideological protest," I said.

Belbo finally
understood. Concerned, he went to Diotallevi, who was leaning
against the desk, apparently on the verge of fainting. "Sorry, my
friend. I got carried away. You're sure it's not anything I said?
We've joked together for twenty years, you and I. Maybe you do have
gastritis. Look, try a Merankol tablet and a hot-water bottle.
Come, I'll drive you home. Then you'd better call a doctor, have
yourself looked at."

Diotallevi said he could
take a taxi home, he wasn't at death's door yet. He just had to lie
down. Yes, he would call a doctor, he promised. And it wasn't the
Holocaust business that had upset him; he had been feeling bad
since the previous evening. Belbo, relieved, went with him to the
taxi.

When he came back, he
looked worried. "Now that I think about it, Diotallevi hasn't been
himself for several weeks. Those circles under his eyes....It's not
fair; I should have died of cirrhosis ten years ago, and here I am,
the picture of health, whereas he lives like an ascetic and has
gastritis or maybe worse. If you ask me, it's an ulcer. To hell
with the Plan. We're not living right."

"A Merankol will fix him
up," I said.

"Yes, and a hot-water
bottle on his stomach. Let's hope he acts sensibly."

Qui operator in
Cabala...si errabit in opere aut non purificatus accesserit,
deuorabitur ab Azazale.

¡XPico della Mirandola,
Conclusiones Magicae

Diotallevi's condition
took a decided turn for the worse in late November. He called the
office to say he was going into the hospital. The doctor had told
him there was nothing to worry about, but it would be a good idea
to have some tests.

Belbo and I somehow
connected Diotallevi's illness with the Plan, which perhaps we had
carried too far. It was irrational, but we felt guilty. This was
the second time I seemed to be Belbo's partner in crime. Once, we
had remained silent together, withholding information from De
Angelis; and now we had talked too much. We told each other this
was silly, but we couldn't shake off our uneasiness. And so, for a
month or more, we did not discuss the Plan.

Meanwhile, after he had
been out for two weeks or so, Dio-tallevi dropped by to tell us, in
a nonchalant tone, that he had asked Garamond for sick leave. A
treatment had been recommended to him. He didn't go into details,
but it involved his reporting to the hospital every two or three
days, and it would leave him somewhat weak. I didn't see how he
could get much weaker; his face now was as white as his
hair.

"And forget about those
stories," he said. "They're bad for the health, as you'll see. It's
the Rosicrucians' revenge."

"Don't worry," Belbo
said to him, smiling. "We'll make life really unpleasant for those
Rosicrucians, and they'll leave you alone. Nothing to it." And he
snapped his fingers.

The treatment lasted
until the beginning of the new year. I was absorbed by my history
of magic¡Xthe real thing, serious stuff, I said to myself, not our
nonsense. Garamond came by at least once a day to ask for news of
Diotallevi. "And please, gentlemen, let me know if any need arises,
any problem, any circumstance in which I, the firm, can do
something for our admirable friend. For me, he's like a son¡Xmore,
a brother¡X and thank heaven this is a civilized country, whatever
people may say; we have a public health system we can be proud
of."

Aglie expressed concern,
asked for the name of the hospital, and telephoned its director, a
dear friend (who, moreover, happened to be the brother of an SEA
with whom Aglie was on excellent terms). Diotallevi would be
treated with special consideration.

Lorenza showed up often
to ask for news. This should have made Belbo happy, but he took it
as another indication that his prognosis was not good. Lorenza was
there, but still elusive, because she wasn't there for
him.

Shortly before
Christmas, I'd caught a snatch of their conversation. Lorenza was
saying to him: "The snow is just right, and they have charming
little rooms. You can do cross-country skiing, can't you?" I
concluded that they would be spending New Year's Eve together. But
one day after Epiphany, when Lorenza appeared in the corridor,
Belbo said to her, "Happy New Year," and dodged her attempt to give
him a hug.

Leaving this place, we
came to a settlement known as Milestre....where it is said that one
known as the Old Man of the Mountain dwelled...And he built, over
high mountains surrounding a valley, a very thick and high wall, in
a circuit of thirty miles, and it was entered by two doors, and
they were hidden, cut into the mountain.

¡XOdorico da Pordenone,
De rebus incognitis, Impressus Esauri, 1513, xxi, p. 15

One day, at the end of
January, as I was walking along Via Marchese Gualdi, where I had
parked my car, I saw Salon coming out of Manutius. "A little chat
with my friend Aglie," he said to me.

Friend? As I seemed to
recall from the Piedmont party, Aglie was not fond of him. Was
Salon snooping around Manutius, or was Aglie using him for some
contact or other?

Salon didn't give me
time to ponder this; he suggested a drink, and we ended up at
Pilade's. I had never seen Salon in this part of town, but he
greeted old Pilade as if they had known each other for years. We
sat down. He asked me how my history of magic was progressing. So
he knew about that, too. I prodded him about the hollow-earth
theory and about Sebottendorf, the man Belbo had
mentioned.

He laughed. "You people
certainly draw your share of madmen. I'm not familiar with this
business of the earth being hollow. As for Sebottendorf, now there
was a character...He gave Himmler and company some ideas that were
suicidal for the German people."

"What ideas?"

"Oriental fancies. That
man, wary of the Jews, ended up worshiping the Arabs and the Turks.
Did you know that on Himm-ler's desk, along with Mein Kampf, there
was always the Koran? Sebottendorf, fascinated in his youth by an
occult Turkish sect, began studying Islamic gnosis. He said Fiihrer
but thought Old Man of the Mountain. When they all got together and
founded the SS, they had in mind an organization like the
Assassins...Ask yourself why Germany and Turkey, in the First World
War, were allies."

"How do you know these
things?"

"I told you, I think,
that my poor father worked for the Okh-rana. Well, I remember in
those days how the tsarist police were concerned about the
Assassins. Rachkovsky got wind of it first...But they gave up that
trail, because if the Assassins were involved, then the Jews
couldn't be, and the Jews were the danger. As always. The Jews went
back to Palestine and made those others leave their caves. But the
whole thing is complicated, confused. Let's leave it at
that."

He seemed to regret
having said so much, and hastily took his leave. Then another thing
happened. I'm now sure I didn't dream it, but that day I thought it
was a hallucination: as I watched Salon walk away from the bar, I
saw him meet a man at the corner, an Oriental.

In any case, Salon had
said enough to start my imagination working again. The Old Man of
the Mountain and the Assassins were no strangers to me: I had
mentioned them in my thesis. The Templars were accused of being in
collusion with them. How could we have overlooked this?

So I began exercising my
mind again, and my fingertips, going through old card files, and an
idea came to me, an idea so spectacular that I couldn't restrain
myself.

The next morning I burst
into Belbo's office. "They got it all wrong. We got it all
wrong."

"Take it easy, Casaubon.
What are you talking about? Oh, my God, the Plan." Then he
hesitated. "You probably don't know. There's bad news about
Diotallevi. He won't speak. I called the hospital, but they refuse
to give me the particulars because I'm not a relative. The man
doesn't have any relatives, so who is there to act on his behalf? I
don't like this reticence. A benign growth, they say, but the
therapy wasn't enough. He should .go back into the hospital for a
month or so, and minor surgery may be indicated...In other words,
those people aren't telling me the whole story, and I like this
situation less and less."

I didn't know what to
say. Embarrassed by my triumphal entry, I started leafing through
papers. But Belbo couldn't resist. He was like a gambler who's been
shown a pack of cards. "What the hell," he said. "Life goes on,
unfortunately. What did you find?"

"Well, Hitler goes to
all that trouble with the Jews, but he accomplishes nothing.
Occultists throughout the world, for centuries, have studied
Hebrew, rummaged in Hebrew texts, and at most they can draw a
horoscope. Why?"

"H'm....Because the
Jerusalemites' fragment of the message is still hidden somewhere.
Though the Paulicians' fragment never turned up either, as far as
we know..."

"That's an answer worthy
of Aglie, not of us. I have a better one. The Jews have nothing to
do with it."

"What do you
mean?"

"The Jews have nothing
to do with the Plan. They can't. Picture the situation of the
Templars, first in Jerusalem, then in their commanderies in Europe.
The French knights meet the Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish,
the Italians, the English: they all have contacts with the
Byzantine area, and in particular they combat the Turk, an
adversary with whom they fight but also maintain a gentlemanly
relationship, a relationship of equals. Who were the Jews at that
time, in Palestine? A religious and racial minority tolerated by
the condescending Arabs but treated very badly by the Christians.
We must remember that in the course of the various Crusades the
ghettos were sacked as i matter of course and there were massacres
all around. Is it conceivable that the Templars, snobs that they
were, would exchange mystical information with the Jews? Never. And
in the European commanderies, the Jews were considered usurers,
were despised, people to be exploited, not trusted. We're talking
about an alliance of knights, about a spiritual knighthood: would
the Templars of Provins allow second-class citizens to join that?
Out of the question."

"But what about all that
Renaissance magic, and the study of cabala....?"

"That was only natural.
By then we're close to the third meeting; they're champing at the
bit, looking for shortcuts; Hebrew is a sacred and mysterious
language; the cabalists have been busy on their own and to other
ends. The Thirty-six scattered around the world get the idea that a
mysterious language might conceal God knows what secrets. It was
Pico della Mirandola who said that nulla nomina, ut significativa
et in quantum nomina sunt, in magico opere virtutem habere non
possunt, nisi sint Hebraica. Pico della Mirandola was a
cretin."

"Bravo! Now you're
talking!"

"Furthermore, as an
Italian, he was excluded from the Plan. ATiat did he know? So much
the worse for Agrippa, Reuchlin, and their pals, who fell for that
red herring. I'm reconstructing the story of a red herring, a false
trail: is that clear? We let ourselves be influenced by Diotallevi,
who was always cabaliz-ing. He cabalized, so we put the Jews in the
Plan. If he had been a scholar of Chinese culture, would we have
put the Chinese in the Plan?"

"Maybe we would
have."

"Anyway, let's not rend
our garments; we were led astray by everyone. They all, from Postel
on, probably, made this mistake. Two hundred years after Provins,
they were convinced that the sixth group was the Jerusalemites. It
wasn't."

"Look, Casaubon, we were
the ones who revised Ardenti's theory, we were the ones who said
that the appointment at the rock didn't mean Stonehenge but the
Rock in the Mosque of Omar."

"And we were wrong.
There are other rocks. We should have thought of a place founded on
rock, on a mountain, a stone, a spur, a cliff...The sixth group
waits in the fortress of Ala-mut."