Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (21 page)

All the traditions of
the earth must be seen as deriving from a fundamental
mother-tradition that, from the beginning, was entrusted to sinful
man and to his first offspring.

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

And I saw Salvador:
Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the "black Rome," with three
hundred and sixty-five churches, which stand out against the line
of hills or nestle along the bay, churches where the gods of the
African pantheon are honored.

Amparo knew a primitive
artist who painted big wooden panels crammed with Biblical and
apocalyptic visions, dazzling as a medieval miniature, with Coptic
and Byzantine elements. Naturally he was a Marxist; he talked about
the coming revolution, but he spent his days dreaming in the
sacristies of the sanctuary of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim: a triumph of
horror vacui, scaly with ex-votos that hung from the ceiling and
encrusted the walls, a mystical assemblage of silver hearts, wooden
arms and legs, images of wondrous rescues from glittering storms,
waterspouts, maelstroms. He took us to the sacristy of another
church, which was full of great furnishings redolent of jacaranda.
"Who is that a painting of?" Amparo asked the sacristan. "Saint
George?"

The sacristan gave us a
knowing look. "They call him Saint George," he said, "and if you
don't call him that, the pastor gets angry. But he's
Oxossi."

For two days the painter
led us through naves and cloisters hidden behind decorated fagades
like silver plates now blackened and worn. Wrinkled, limping famuli
accompanied us. The sacristies were sick with gold and pewter,
heavy chests, precious frames. Along the walls, in crystal cases,
life-size images of saints towered, dripping blood, their open
wounds spattered with ruby droplets; Christs writhed in pain, their
legs red. In a glow of late-Baroque gold, I saw angels with
Etruscan faces, Romanesque griffins, and Oriental sirens peeping
out from the capitals.

I moved along ancient
streets, enchanted by names that sounded like songs: Rua da Agonia,
Avenida dos Amores, Tra-vessa de Chico Diabo. Our visit to Salvador
took place during a period when the local government, or someone
acting in its name, was trying to renew the old city, and was
closing down the thousands of brothels. But the project was only at
midpoint. At the feet of those deserted and leprous churches
embarrassed by their own evil-smelling alleys, fifteen-year-old
black prostitutes still swarmed, ancient women selling African
sweets crouched along the sidewalks with their steaming pots, and
hordes of pimps danced amid trickles of sewage to the sound of
transistor radios in nearby bars. The ancient palaces of the
Portuguese settlers, surmounted by coats of arms now illegible, had
become houses of ill-repute.

On the third day, our
guide took us to the bar of a hotel in a renovated part of the
upper city, on a street full of luxury antique shops. He was to
meet an Italian gentleman, he told us, who wanted to buy¡Xand for
the asking price¡Xa painting of his, three meters by two, in which
teeming angelic hosts waged the final battle against the opposing
legions.

And so we met Signor
Aglie. Impeccably dressed in a double-breasted pin-striped suit
despite the heat, he wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses and had a rosy
complexion, silver hair. He kissed Amparo's hand as if he knew of
no other way to greet a lady, and he ordered champagne. When the
painter had to leave, Aglifc handed him a pack of traveler's checks
and said to send the picture to his hotel. We stayed on to chat.
Aglie spoke Portuguese correctly, but it sounded as if he had
learned it in Lisbon. This accent made him seem even more like a
gentleman of bygone days. He asked about us, commented on the
possible Genevan origin of my name, and expressed curiosity about
Amparo's family history, though somehow he had already guessed that
the main branch was from Recife. About his own origins he was
vague. "I'm like many people here," he said. "Countless races are
represented in my genes...The name is Italian, from the ancient
estate of an ancestor. Perhaps a nobleman, but who cares these
days? It was curiosity that brought me to Brazil. All forms of
tradition fascinate me."

He told us he had a fine
library of religious sciences in Milan, where he had been living
for some years. "Come and see me when you get back. I have a number
of interesting things, from Afro-Brazilian rites to the Isis cults
of the late Roman Empire." "I adore the Isis cults," Amparo said,
who often, out of pride, pretended to be silly. "You must know
everything there is to know about them."

Aglie replied modestly:
"Only what little IVe seen of them." Amparo tried again: "But
wasn't it two thousand years ago?" "I'm not as young as you are."
Aglie smiled.

"Like Cagliostro," I
joked. "Wasn't he the one who was heard to murmur to his attendant
as they passed a crucifix, ¡¥I told that Jew to be careful that
evening, but he just wouldn't listen'?"

Aglie stiffened. Afraid
I had offended him, I started to apologize, but our host stopped me
with an indulgent smile. "Cagliostro was a humbug. It's common
knowledge when and where he was born, and he didn't even manage to
live very long. A braggart."

"I don't doubt
it."

"Cagliostro was a
humbug," Aglie repeated, "but that does not mean that there have
not been¡Xand still are¡Xprivileged persons who have lived many
lives. Modern science knows so little about the aging process. It's
quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor
education. Cagliostro was a humbug, but the Comte de Saint-Germain
was not. He may not have been boasting when he claimed to have
learned some of his chemical secrets from the ancient Egyptians.
Nobody believed him, so out of politeness to his listeners he
pretended to be joking."

"And now you pretend to
be joking in order to convince us you're telling the truth," Amparo
said.

"You are not only
beautiful, but extraordinarily perceptive too," Aglie said. "But I
beseech you, do not believe me. Were I to appear before you in the
dusty splendor of my many centuries, your own beauty would wither,
and I could never forgive myself.''

Amparo was conquered,
and I felt a twinge of jealousy. I changed the subject to churches,
and to the Saint George-Oxossi we had seen. Aglie said we
absolutely had to attend a candom-ble". "Not one where they charge
admission. They let you into the real ones without asking anything
of you. You don't even have to be a believer. You must observe
respectfully, of course, showing the same tolerance of all faiths
as they do in accepting your unbelief. At first sight a pai or
mae-de-santo might seem to be straight out of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
but they have as much culture as a Vatican theologian."

Amparo put her hand on
his. "Take us!" she said. "I went to one many years ago, in a tenda
de umbanda, but I can't recall much about it. All I remember is
great turmoil."

The physical contact
embarrassed Aglie, but he didn't take his hand away. He did
something I later saw him do in moments of reflection: reaching
into his vest with his other hand, he took out a little
gold-and-silver box with an agate on the lid. It looked like a
snuffbox or a pillbox. There was a small wax light burning on the
table, and Aglie, as if by chance, held the box near it. When
exposed to heat, the agate's color could no longer be discerned,
and in its place appeared a miniature, very fine, in green, blue,
and gold, depicting a shepherdess with a basket of flowers. He
turned it in his fingers with absent-minded devotion, as if telling
a rosary. When he noticed my interest, he smiled and put the object
away.

"Turmoil? I hope, my
sweet lady, that, although you are so perceptive, you are not
excessively sensitive. An exquisite quality, of course, when it
accompanies grace and intelligence, but dangerous if you go to
certain places without knowing what to look for or what you will
find. Moreover, the umbanda must not be confused with the
candomble". The latter is completely indigenous¡XAfro-Brazilian, as
they say¡Xwhereas the former is a much later development born of a
fusion of native rites and esoteric European culture, and with a
mystique I would call Templar..."

The Templars had found
me again. I told Aglie I had studied them. He regarded me with
interest. "A most curious circumstance, my young friend, to find a
young Templar here, under the Southern Cross."

"I wouldn't want you to
consider me an adept¡X"

"Please, Signor
Casaubon. If you knew how much nonsense there is in this
field."

"I do know."

"Good. But we'll see one
another soon." In fact, we arranged to meet the next day: all of us
wanted to explore the little covered market along the
port.

We met there the next
morning, and it was a fish market, an Arab souk, a saint's-day fair
that had proliferated with cancerous virulence, like a Lourdes
overrun by the forces of evil, wizard rainmakers side by side with
ecstatic and stigmatized Capuchins. There were little propitiatory
sacks with prayers sewn into the lining, little hands in
semiprecious stones, the middle finger extended, coral horns,
crucifixes, Stars of David, sexual symbols of pre-Judaic religions,
hammocks, rugs, purses, sphinxes, sacred hearts, Bororo quivers,
shell necklaces. The degenerate mystique of the European
conquistadors was owed to the occult knowledge of the slaves, just
as the skin of every passerby told a similar story of lost
genealogies.

"This," Aglie said, "is
the very image of what the ethnology textbooks call Brazilian
syncretism. An ugly word, in the official view. But in its loftiest
sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs
through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy.
The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the
shreds of light, from wherever they may come...These slaves, or
descendants of slaves, are therefore wiser than the ethnologists of
the Sorbonne. At least you understand me, do you not, lovely
lady?"

"In my mind, no," Amparo
said. "But in my womb, yes. Sorry, I don't imagine the Comte de
Saint-Germain ,ever expressed himself in such terms. What I mean
is: I was born in this country, and even things I don't understand
somehow speak to me from somewhere...Here, I believe." And she
touched her breast.

"What was it Cardinal
Lambertini once said to a lady wearing a splendid diamond cross on
her decolletage? ¡¥What joy it would be to die on that Calvary!'
Well, how I would love to listen to those voices! But now it is I
who must beg your forgiveness, both of you. I am from an age when
one would have accepted damnation to pay homage to beauty. You two
must want to be alone. Let's keep in touch."

"He's old enough to be
your father," I said to Amparo as I dragged her through the
stalls.

"Even my
great-great-grandfather. He implied that he's at least a thousand
years old. Are you jealous of a pharaoh's mummy?"

"I'm jealous of anyone
who makes a light bulb flash on in your head."

"How wonderful. That's
love."

One day, saying that he
had known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, he described minutely the
governor's house and listed the dishes served at supper. Cardinal
de Rohan, believing these were fantasies, turned to the Comte de
Saint-Germain's valet, an old man with white hair and an honest
expression. "My friend," he said to the servant, "I find it hard to
believe what your master is telling us. Granted that he may be a
ventriloquist; and even that he can make gold. But that he is two
thousand years old and saw Pontius Pilate? That is too much. Were
you there?" "Oh, no, Monsignore," the valet answered ingenuously,
"I have been in M. le Comte's service only four hundred
years."

¡XCollin de Plancy,
Dictionnaire infernal, Paris, Mellier, 1844, p. 434

In the days that
followed, Salvador absorbed me completely. I spent little time in
the hotel. But as I was leafing through the index of the book on
the Rosicrucians, I came across a reference to the Comte de
Saint-Germain. Well, well, I said to myself, tout se
tient.

Voltaire wrote of him,
"C'est un homme qui ne meurt jamais et qui sail tout," but
Frederick the Great wrote back, "C'est un comte pour rire." Horace
Walpole described him as an Italian or Spaniard or Pole who had
made a fortune in Mexico and then fled to Constantinople with his
wife's jewels. The most reliable information about him comes from
the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, la Pompadour's femme de chambre
(some authority, the intolerant Amparo said). He had gone by
various names: Surmont in Brussels, Welldone in Leipzig, the
Marquis of Ay-mar or Bedmar or Belmar, Count Soltikoff. In 1745 he
was arrested in London, where he excelled as a musician, giving
violin and harpsichord recitals in drawing rooms. Three years later
he offered his services as an expert in dyeing to Louis XV in
Paris, in exchange for a residence in the chateau of Chambord. The
king sent him on diplomatic missions to Holland, where he got into
some sort of trouble and fled to London again. In 1762 he turned up
in Russia, then again in Belgium, where he encountered Casanova,
who tells us how the count turned a coin into gold. In 1776 he
appeared at the court of Frederick the Great, to whom he proposed
various projects having to do with chemistry. Eight years later he
died in Schleswig, at the court of the landgrave of Hesse, where he
was putting the finishing touches on a manufactory for
paints.

Nothing exceptional, the
typical career of an eighteenth-century adventurer; not as many
loves as Casanova and frauds less theatrical than Cagliostro's.
Apart from the odd incident here and there, he enjoyed some
credibility with those in authority, to whom he promised the
wonders of alchemy, though with an industrial slant. The only
unusual feature was the rumor of his immortality, which he
undoubtedly instigated himself. In drawing rooms he would casually
mention remote events as if he had been an eyewitness, and he
cultivated his legend gracefully, en sourdine.

The book also quoted a
passage from Giovanni Papini's Gog, describing a nighttime
encounter with the Comte de Saint-Germain on the deck of an ocean
liner. The count, oppressed by his millennial past and by the
memories crowding his brain, spoke in despairing tones reminiscent
of Funes, "el memo-rioso" of Borges, except that Papini's story
dates from 1930. "You must not imagine our lot is deserving of
envy," the count says to Gog. "After a couple of centuries an
incurable ennui takes possession of the wretched immortals. The
world is monotonous, men learn nothing, and, with every generation,
they fall into the same errors and nightmares, events are not
repeated but they resemble one another...novelties end, surprises,
revelations. I can confess to you now that only the Red Sea is
listening to us: my immortality bores me. Earth holds no more
secrets for me and I have no hope anymore in my
fellows."

"Curious character," I
remarked. "Obviously our friend Aglife is playing at impersonating
him. A gentleman getting on in years, a bit dotty, with money to
spend, free time for travel, and an interest in the
supernatural."

"A consistent
reactionary, with the courage to be decadent," Amparo said.
"Actually, I prefer him to bourgeois democrats."

"Sisterhood is powerful,
but let a man kiss your hand and you're ecstatic."

"That's how you've
trained us, for centuries. Let us free ourselves gradually. I
didn't say I wanted to marry him."

"That's
good."

The following week Aglie
telephoned me. That evening, he said, we would be allowed to visit
a terreiro de candomble. We wouldn't be admitted to the actual
rite, because the ialorixa was suspicious of tourists, but she
would welcome us herself and would show us around before it
started.

He picked us up by car
and drove through the favelas beyond the hill. The building where
we stopped had a humble look, like a big garage, but on the
threshold an old black man met us and purified us with a fumigant.
Up ahead was a bare little garden with an immense corbeil of palm
fronds, on which some tribal delicacies, the comidas de santo, were
laid out.

Inside, we found a large
hall, the walls covered with paintings, especially ex-votos, and
African masks. Aglie explained the arrangement of furniture: the
benches in the rear were for the uninitiated, the little dais for
the instruments, and the chairs for the Oga. "They are people of
some standing, not necessarily believers, but respectful of the
cult. Here in Bahia the great Jorge Amado is an Oga in one
terreiro. He was selected by lansa, mistress of war and
winds..."

"But where do these
divinities come from?" I asked.

"It's complicated. First
of all, there's a Sudanese branch, dominant here in the north from
the early days of slavery. The candomble of the orixas¡Xin other
words, the African divinities¡Xcome from this branch. In the
southern states you find the influence of the Bantu groups, and
this is where all the intermingling starts. The northern cults
remain faithful to the original African religions, but in the south
the primitive macumba develops toward the umbanda, which is
influenced by Catholicism, Kardecism, and European
occultism..."

"So no Templars
tonight?"

"That was meant to be a
metaphor, but no, no Templars tonight. Syncretism, however, is a
very subtle process. Did you notice, outside, near the comidas de
santo, a little iron statue, a sort of devil with a pitchfork, and
with votive offerings at his feet? That's Exu, very powerful in the
umbanda, but not in the candomble. Still, the candombte also honors
him as a kind of degenerate Mercury. In the umbanda, they are
possessed by Exu, but not here. However, he's treated
affectionately. But you never can tell. You see that wall over
there?" He was pointing at the polychrome statues of a naked Indio
and an old black slave, seated, dressed in white, and smoking a
pipe. "They are a ca-boclo and a preto velho, spirits of the
departed. Very important in umbanda rites. What are they doing
here? Receiving homage. They are not used, because the candombl¢G
entertains relations only with the African orixas, but they are not
cast out on that account."

"What do all these
churches have in common, then?"

"Well, during the rite
in all Afro-Brazilian cults the initiates go into a trance and are
possessed by higher beings. In the candomble these beings are the
orixas; in the umbanda they are spirits of the
departed."

"I forgot my own country
and my own race," Amparp said. "My God, a bit of Europe and a bit
of historical materialism, and I forgot everything, the stories I
used to hear from my grandmother..."

"Historical
materialism?" Aglife smiled. "Oh, yes, I believe I've heard of it.
An apocalyptic cult that came out of the Trier region. Am I
right?"

I squeezed Amparo's arm.
"No pasaran, darling."

"God," she
murmured.

Aglie watched our brief
whispered dialog in silence. "Infinite are the powers of
syncretism, my dear. Shall I tell you a political version of this
whole story? Legally, the slaves were freed in the nineteenth
century, but all the archives of the slave trade were burned in an
effort to wipe out the stigmata of slavery. Formally, slaves were
free, but their past was gone. In the absence of any family
identity, they tried to reconstruct a collective past. It was their
way of opposing what you young people call the
Establishment."

"But you just said those
European sects were also part of it."

"My dear, purity is a
luxury, and slaves take what they can get. But they have their
revenge. By now they have captured more whites than you think. The
original African cults possessed the weakness of all religions:
they were local, ethnic, shortsighted. But when they met the myths
of the conquerors, they reproduced an ancient miracle, breathing
new life into the mystery cults that arose around the Mediterranean
during the second and third centuries of our era, when Rome in
decline was exposed to ferment that had originated in Persia,
Egypt, and pre-Judaic Palestine...In the centuries of the late
empire, Africa received the influences of all the religions of the
Mediterranean and condensed them into a package. Europe was
corrupted by Christianity as a state religion, but Africa preserved
the treasures of knowledge, just as it had preserved and spread
them in the days of the Egyptians, passing them on to the Greeks,
who wreaked such great havoc with them."