Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (4 page)

And if you happen to
write what modesty forbids, it all goes onto a floppy disk, and you
can give the disk a password, and no one will be able to read you.
Excellent for secret agents. You write the message, save it, then
put the disk in your pocket and walk off. Not even Tor-quemada
could find out what you've written: It's between you and it (It?).
And if they torture you, you pretend to confess; you start entering
the password, then press a secret key, and the message disappears
forever. Oh, I'm so sorry, you say, my hand slipped, an accident,
and now it's gone. What was it? I don't remember. It wasn't
important. I have no Message to reveal. But later on¡Xwho knows?¡XI
might.

He who attempts to
penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key
resembles a man who would walk without feet.

¡XMichael Maier,
Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim, De Bry, 1618, emblem XXVII

That was the only file
that had been printed out. I would have to go through the disks on
the computer. They were arranged by number, and I thought I might
as well start with the first. But Belbo had mentioned a password.
He had always been possessive with Abulafia's secrets.

When I loaded the
machine, a message promptly appeared: "Do you have the password?"
Not in the imperative. Belbo was a polite man.

The machine doesn't
volunteer its help. It must be given the word; without the word, it
won't talk. As though it were saying: "Yes, what you want to know
is right here hi my guts. Go ahead and dig, dig, old mole; you'll
never find it." We'll see about that, I said to myself; you got
such a kick out of playing with Diotallevi's permutations and
combinations, and you were the Sam Spade of publishing. As Jacopo
Belbo would have said: Find the falcon.

The password to get into
Abulafia had to be seven letters or fewer. Letters or numbers. How
many groups of seven could be made from all the letters of the
alphabet, including the possibility of repetition, since there was
no reason the word couldn't be "cadabra"? I knew the formula. The
number was six billion and something. A giant calculator capable of
running through all six billion at the rate of a million per second
would still have to feed them to Abulafia one at a time. And it
took Abulafia about ten seconds to ask for the password and verify
it. That made sixty billion seconds. There were over thirty-one
million seconds in a year. Say thirty, to have a round figure. It
would take, therefore, two thousand years to go through all the
possibilities. Nice work.

I would have to proceed,
instead, by inductive guesswork. What word would Belbo have chosen?
Was it a word he had decided on at the start, when he began using
the machine, or was it one he had come up with only recently, when
he realized that these disks were dangerous and that, for him at
least, the game was no longer a game? This would make a big
difference.

Better assume the
latter, I thought. Belbo feels he is being hunted by the Plan,
which he now takes seriously (as he told me on the phone). For a
password, then, he would use some term connected with our
story.

But maybe not: a term
associated with the Tradition might also occur to Them. Then I
thought: What if They had already broken into the apartment and
made copies of the disks, and were now, at this very moment, trying
all the combinations of letters in some remote place? Using the
supreme computer, in a castle in the Carpathians.

Nonsense, I told myself.
They weren't computer people. They would use the notarikon, the
gematria, the temurah, treating the disks like the Torah, and
therefore would require as much time as had passed since the
writing of the Sefer Yesirah. No, if They existed, They would
proceed cabalistically, and if Belbo believed that They existed, he
would follow the same path.

Just to be on the safe
side, I tried the ten Sefirot: Keter, Hokh-mah, Binah, Hesed,
Gevurah, Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod, Malkhut. They didn't work, of
course: it was the first thing that would have occurred to
anyone.

Still, the word had to
be something obvious, something that would come to mind at once,
because when you work on a text as obsessively as Belbo must have
during the past few days, you can't think of anything else, of any
other subject. It would not be human for him to drive himself crazy
over the Plan and at the same time pick Lincoln or Mombasa for the
password. The password had to be connected with the Plan. But
what?

I tried to put myself
inside Belbo's head. He had been chainsmoking as he wrote, and
drinking. I went to the kitchen for a clean glass, found only one,
poured myself the last of the whiskey, sat down at the keyboard
again, leaned back in the chair, and propped my feet on the table.
I sipped my drink (wasn't that how Sam Spade did it? Or was it
Philip Marlowe?) and looked around. The books were too far away; I
couldn't read the titles on their spines.

I finished the whiskey,
shut my eyes, opened them again. Facing me was the
seventeenth-century engraving, a typical Rosi-crucian allegory of
the period, rich in coded messages addressed to the members of the
Fraternity. Obviously it depicted the Temple of the Rosy-Cross, a
tower surmounted by a dome in accordance with the Renaissance
iconographic model, both Christian and Jewish, of the Temple of
Jerusalem, reconstructed on the pattern of the Mosque of
Omar.

The landscape around the
tower was incongruous, and inhabited incongruously, like one of
those rebuses where you see a palace, a frog in the foreground, a
mule with its pack, and a king receiving a gift from a page. In the
lower left was a gentleman emerging from a well, clinging to a
pulley that was attached, through ridiculous winches, to some point
inside the tower, the rope passing through a circular window. In
the center were a horseman and a wayfarer. On the right, a kneeling
pilgrim held a heavy anchor as though it were his staff. Along the
right margin, almost opposite the tower, was a precipice from which
a character with a sword was falling, and on the other side,
foreshortened, stood Mount Ararat, the Ark aground on its summit.
In each of the upper corners was a cloud illuminated by a star that
cast oblique rays along which two figures floated, a nude man in
the coils of a serpent, and a swan. At the top center, a nimbus was
surmounted by the word "Oriens" and bore Hebrew letters from which
the hand of God emerged to hold the tower by a string.

The tower moved on
wheels. Its main part was square, with windows, a door, and a
drawbridge on the right. Higher up, there was a kind of gallery
with four observation turrets, each turret occupied by an armed man
who waved a palm branch and carried a shield decorated with Hebrew
letters. Only three of these men were visible; the fourth had to be
imagined, since he was behind the octagonal dome, from which rose a
lantern, also octagonal, with a pair of great wings affixed. Above
the winged lantern was another, smaller, cupola, with a
quadrangular turret whose open arches, supported by slender
columns, revealed a bell inside. To the final small four-vaulted
dome at the top was tied the thread held by the hand of God. The
word "Fa/ma" appeared here, and above that, a scroll that read
"Collegium Fraternitatis."

There were other
oddities. An enormous arm, out of all proportion to the figures,
jutted from a round window in the tower on the left. It held a
sword, and belonged perhaps to the winged creature shut up in the
tower. From a similar window on the right jutted a great trumpet.
Once again, the trumpet.

The number of openings
in the tower drew my attention. There were too many of them, and
the ones in the dome were too regular, whereas the ones in the base
seemed random. Since only half the tower was shown in this
orthogonal perspective, you could assume that symmetry was
preserved and the doors, windows, and portholes on this side were
repeated in the same order on the other side. That would mean,
altogether, four arches in the dome of the bell tower, eight
windows in the lower dome, four turrets, six openings in the east
and west facades, and fourteen in the north and south facades. I
added it up.

Thirty-six. For more
than ten years that number had haunted me. The Rosicrucians. One
hundred and twenty divided by thirty-six came to 3.333333, going to
seven digits. Almost too perfect, but it was worth a try. I tried.
And failed.

It occurred to me then
that the same number, multiplied by two, yielded the number of the
Beast: 666. That guess also proved too farfetched.

Suddenly I was struck by
the nimbus in the middle, the divine throne. The Hebrew letters
were large; I could see them even from my chair. But Belbo couldn't
write Hebrew on Abulafia. I took a closer look: I knew them, of
course, from right to left, yod, he, vav, he. The Tetragrammaton,
Yahweh, the name of God.

And begin by combining
this name, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its
combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and
back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its
matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the
fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your
thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until
there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not
abandon it.

¡XAbulafia, Hayye
ha-Nefes, MS Munchen 408, fols. 65a-65b

The name of God...Of
course! I remembered the first conversation between Belbo and
Diotallevi, the day Abulafia was set up in the office.

Diotallevi was at the
door of his room, pointedly tolerant. Diotallevi's tolerance was
always exasperating, but Belbo didn't seem to mind it. He tolerated
it.

"It won't be of any use
to you, you know. You're not planning, surely, to rewrite the
manuscripts you don't read anyway."

"It's for riling, making
schedules, updating lists. If I write a book with it, it'll be my
own, not someone else's."

"You swore that you'd
never write anything of your own."

"That I wouldn't inflict
a manuscript on the world, true. When I concluded I wasn't cut out
to be a protagonist¡X"

"You decided you'd be an
intelligent spectator. I know all that. And so?"

"If an intelligent
spectator hums the second movement on his way home from the
concert, that doesn't mean he wants to conduct it in Carnegie
Hall."

"So you'll try humming
literature to make sure you don't write any.''

"It would be an honest
choice."

"You think
so?"

Diotallevi and Belbo,
both from Piedmont, often claimed that any good Piedmontese had the
ability to listen politely, look you in the eye, and say "You think
so?" in a tone of such apparent sincerity that you immediately felt
his profound disapproval. I was a barbarian, they used to say: such
subtleties would always be lost on me.

"Barbarian?" I would
protest. "I may have been born in Milan, but my family came from
Val d'Aosta."

"Nonsense," they said.
"You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese immediately by his
skepticism."

"I'm a
skeptic."

"No, you're only
incredulous, a doubter, and that's different."

I knew why Diotallevi
distrusted Abulafia. He had heard that word processors could change
the order of letters. A test, thus, might generate its opposite and
result in obscure prophecies. "It's a game of permutation," Belbo
said, trying to explain. "Temurah? Isn't that the name for it?
Isn't that what the devout rabbi does to ascend to the Gates of
Splendor?''

"My dear friend,"
Diotallevi said, "you'll never understand anything. It's true that
the Torah¡Xthe visible Jbrah, that is¡Xis only one of the possible
permutations of the letters of the eternal Torah, as God created it
and delivered it to the angels. By rearranging the letters of the
book over the centuries, we may someday arrive again at the
original Torah. But the important thing is not the finding, it is
the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of
prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If
this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not
recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by
the long quest. And in an office! No, the Book must be murmured day
after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward
and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as
little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and
the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you
must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened
bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It
must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it.
And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single
letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the
higher sefirot is broken. To this Abraham Abulafia dedicated his
life, while your Saint Thomas was toiling to find God with his five
paths.

"Abraham Abulafia's
Hokhmath ha-Zerufvtas at once the science of the combination of
letter and the science of the purification of the heart. Mystic
logic, letters whirling in infinite change, is the world of bliss,
it is the music of thought, but see that you proceed slowly, and
with caution, because your machine may bring you delirium instead
of ecstasy. Many of Abulafia's disciples were unable to walk the
fine line between contemplation of the names of God and the
practice of magic. They manipulated the names in an effort to turn
them into a talisman, an instrument of dominion over nature,
unaware¡Xas you are unaware, with your machine¡Xthat every letter
is bound to a part of the body, and shifting a consonant without
the knowledge of its power may affect a limb, its position or
nature, and then you find yourself deformed, a monster. Physically,
for life; spiritually, for eternity."

"Listen," Belbo said to
him then. "You haven't discouraged me, you know. On the contrary. I
have Abulafia¡Xthat's what I'm calling him¡Xat my command, the way
our friends used to have the golem. Only, my Abulafia will be more
cautious and respectful. More modest. The problem is to find all
the permutations of the name of God, isn't it? Well, this manual
has a neat little program in Basic for listing all possible
sequences of four letters. It seems tailor-made for YHVH. Should I
give it a whirl?" And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi
had to agree it looked cabalistic:

10 REM
anagrams

20 INPUT L$(1), L$(2),
L$(3), L$(4)

30 PRINT

40 FOR I1 = 1 TO
4

50 FOR I2 = 1 TO
4

60 IF I2 = I1 THEN
130

70 FOR I3 = 1 TO
4

80 IF I3 = I1 THEN
120

90 IF I3 = I1 THEN
120

100 LET I4 =
10-(I1+I2+I3)

110 LPRINT
L$(I1);L$(I2);L$(I3);L$(I4)

120 NEXT I3

130 NEXT I2

140 NEXT I1

150 END

"Try it yourself. When
it asks for input, type in Y, H, V, H, and press the ENTER key. But
you may be disappointed. There are only twenty-four possible
permutations."

"Holy Seraphim! What can
you do with twenty-four names of God? You think our wise men hadn't
made that calculation? Read the Sefer Yesirah, Chapter Four,
Section Sixteen. And they didn't have computers. ¡¥Two Stones make
two Houses. Three Stones make six Houses. Four Stones make
twenty-four Houses. Five Stones make one hundred and twenty Houses.
Six Stones make seven hundred and twenty Houses. Seven Stones make
five thousand and forty Houses. Beyond this point, think of what
the mouth cannot say and the ear cannot hear. ¡¥ You know what this
is called today? Factor analysis. And you know why the Tradition
warns that beyond this point a man should quit? Because if there
were eight letters in the name of God, there would be forty
thousand three hundred and twenty permutations, and if ten, there
would be three million six hundred twenty-eight thousand eight
hundred, and the permutations of your own wretched little name,
first name and last, would come to almost forty million. Thank God
you don't have a middle initial, like so many Americans, because
then there would be more than four hundred million. And if the
names of God contained twenty-seven letters ¡X in the Hebrew
alphabet there are no vowels, but twenty -two consonants plus five
variants¡X then the number of His possible names would have
twenty-nine digits. Except that you have to allow for repetitions,
because the name of God could be aleph repeated twenty-seven times,
in which case factor analysis is of no use: with repetitions you'd
have to take twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh power, which is, I
believe, something like four hundred forty-four billion billion
billion billion. Four times ten with thirty-nine zeros after
it."

"You're cheating, trying
to scare me. I've read your Sefer Yesirah, too. There are
twenty-two fundamental letters, and with them¡Xwith them alone¡XGod
formed all creation."

"Let's not split hairs.
Five, at this order of magnitude, won't help. If you say twenty-two
to the twenty-second power instead of twenty-seven to the
twenty-seventh, you still come up with something like three hundred
and forty billion billion billion. On the human scale, it doesn't
make much difference. If I counted one, two, three, and so on, one
number every second, it would take me almost thirty-two years to
get to one lousy little billion. And it's more complicated than
that, because cabala can't be reduced to the Sefer Yesirah alone.
Besides which, there's a good reason why any real permutation of
the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters. It's true that if
the last five letters fall in the middle of a word, they are
transformed into their normal variant. But not always. In Isaiah
9:2, for instance, there's the word "LMRBH," lemarbah¡Xwhich, note
the coincidence, means to multiply¡Xbut the mem in the middle is
written as a final mem."

"Why is
that?"

"Every letter
corresponds to a number. The normal mem is forty, but the final mem
is six hundred. This has nothing to do with temurah, which teaches
permutation; it involves, rather, gematria, which seeks sublime
affinities between words and their numeric values. With the final
mem the word "LMRBH" totals not two hundred and seventy-seven but
eight hundred and thirty-seven, and thus is equivalent to ThThZL,
or thath zal, which means ¡¥he who gives profusely.' So you can see
why all twenty-seven letters have to be considered: it isn't just
the sound that matters, but the number too. Which brings us to my
calculation. There are more than four hundred billion billion
billion billion possibilities. Have you any idea how long it would
take to try them all out, using a machine? And I'm not talking
about your miserable little computer. At the rate of one
permutation per second, you would need seven billion billion
billion billion minutes, or one hundred and twenty-three million
billion billion billion hours, which is a little more than five
million billion billion billion days, or fourteen thousand billion
billion billion years, which comes to a hundred and forty billion
billion billion centuries, or fourteen billion billion billion
millennia. But suppose you had a machine capable of generating a
million permutations per second. Just think of the time you'd save
with your electronic wheel: you'd need only fourteen thousand
billion billion millennia!

"The real and true name
of God, the secret name, is as long as the entire Torah, and there
is no machine in the world capable of exhausting all its
permutations, because the Torah itself is a permutation with
repetitions, and the art of temurah tells us to change not the
twenty-seven letters of the alphabet but each and every character
in the Torah, for each character is a letter unto itself, no matter
how often it appears on other pages. The two hes in the name YHVH
therefore count as two different letters. And if you want to
Calculate all the permutations of all the characters in the entire
Torah, then all the zeros in the world will not be enough for you.
But go ahead, do what you can with your pathetic little
accountant's machine. A machine does exist, to be sure, but it
wasn't manufactured in your Silicon Valley: it is the holy cabala,
or Tradition, and for centuries the rabbis have been doing what no
computer can do and, let us hope, will never be able to do. Because
on the day all the combinations are exhausted, the result should
remain secret, and in any case the universe will have completed its
cycle¡Xand we will all be consumed in the dazzling glory of the
great Metacyclosynchro-tron."

"Amen," Jacopo Belbo
said.

Diotallevi was already
driving him toward these excesses, and I should have kept that in
mind. How often had I seen Belbo, after office hours, running
programs to check Diotallevi's calculations, trying to show him
that at least Abu could give results in a few seconds, not having
to work by hand on yellowing parchment or use antediluvian number
systems that did not even include zero? But Abu gave his answers in
exponential notation, so Belbo was unable to daunt Diotallevi with
a screen full of endless zeros: a pale visual imitation of the
multiplication of combinatorial universes, of the exploding swarm
of all possible worlds.

After everything that
had happened, it seemed impossible to me, I thought as I stared at
the Rosicrucian engraving, that Belbo would not have returned to
those exercises on the name of God in selecting a password. And if,
as I guessed, he was also preoccupied with numbers like thirty-six
and one hundred and twenty, they would enter into it, too. He would
not have simply combined the four Hebrew letters, knowing that four
Stones made only twenty-four Houses.

But he might have played
with the Italian transcription, which contained two vowels. With
six letters¡Xlahveh¡Xhe had seven hundred and twenty permutations
at his disposal. The repetitions didn't count, because Diotallevi
had said that the two hes must be taken as two different letters.
Belbo could have chosen, say, the thirty-sixth or the hundred and
twentieth.