Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (46 page)

Quickening our steps, we
arrived at the door of a hovel in a poorly lit alley, sinister and
Semitic.

We knocked, and the door
opened as if by magic. We entered a spacious room: there were
seven-branched candelabra, tetragrams in relief, Stars of David
like monstrances. Old violins, the color of the veneer on certain
old paintings, were piled in the entrance on a refectory table of
anamorphic irregularity. A great crocodile hung, mummified, from
the ceiling, swaying slightly in the dim glow of a single torch, or
of many, or of none. In the rear, before a kind of curtain or
canopy under which stood a tabernacle, kneeling in prayer,
ceaselessly and blasphemously murmuring the seventy-two names of
God, was an old man. I knew, by a sudden stroke of nous, that this
was Heinrich Khunrath.

"Come to the point,
Dee," he said, turning and breaking off his prayer. "What do you
want?" He resembled a stuffed armadillo, an ageless
iguana.

"Khunrath," Dee said,
"the third encounter did not take place."

Khunrath exploded in a
horrible curse: "Lapis exillis! Now what?"

"Khunrath," Dee said,
"you could throw out some bait; you could put me in touch with the
German line."

"Let me see," Khunrath
said. "I could ask Maier, who is in touch with many people at the
court. But you will tell me the secret of Virgin's Milk, the Most
Secret Oven of the Philosophers."

Dee smiled. Oh the
divine smile of that Sophos! He concentrated then as if in prayer,
and said in a low voice: "When you wish to translate into water or
Virgin's Milk a sublimate of Mercury, place the Thing duly
pulverized over the lamina between the little weights and the
goblet. Do not cover it but see that the hot air strikes the naked
matter, administer it to the fire of three coals, and keep it alive
for eight solar days, then remove it and pound it well on marble
until it is a fine paste. This done, put it inside a glass alembic
and distill it in a Balneum Mariae over a cauldron of water set in
such a way that it does not touch the water below by the space of
two fingers but remains suspended in air, and at the same time
light the fire beneath the Balneum. Then, and only then, though the
Silver does not touch the water, finding itself in this warm and
moist womb, will it change to liquid."

"Master," said Khunrath,
sinking to his knees and kissing the bony, diaphanous hand of Dr.
Dee. "Master, so I will do. And you will have what you wish.
Remember these words: the Rose and the Cross. You will hear talk of
them."

Dee wrapped himself in
his cloaklike coat, and only his eyes, glistening and malign, could
be seen. "Come, Kelley," he said. "This man is now ours. And you,
Khunrath, keep the golem well away from us until our return to
London. And then, let all Prague burn as a sole pyre."

He started to go off.
Crawling, Khunrath seized him by the hem of his coat. "One day,
perhaps, a man will come to you. He will want to write about you.
Be his friend."

"Give me the Power," Dee
said with an unspeakable expression on his fieshless face, "and his
fortune is assured."

We went out. Over the
Atlantic a low-pressure air mass was advancing in an easterly
direction toward Russia.

"Let's go to Moscow," I
said to him.

"No," he said. "We're
returning to London."

"To Moscow, to Moscow,"
I murmured crazily. You knew very well, Kelley, that you would
never go there. The Tower awaited you.

Back in London, Dee
said, "They're trying to reach the solution before we do. Kelley,
you must write something for William....something diabolically
insinuating about them."

Belly of the demon, I
did it, but William ruined the text, shifting everything from
Prague to Venice. Dee flew into a rage. But the pale, shifty
William felt protected by his royal concubine. And still he wasn't
satisfied. As I handed over to him, one by one, his finest sonnets,
he asked me, with shameless eyes, about Her, about You, my Dark
Lady. How horrible to hear your name on that mummer's lips! (I
didn't know that he, his soul damned to duplicity and to the
vicarious, was seeking her for Bacon.) "Enough," I said to him.
"I'm tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for
yourself."

"I can't," he answered
with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. "He won't let
me."

"Who? Dee?"

"No, Verulam. Don't you
know he's now the one in charge? He's forcing me to write works
that later he'll claim as his own. You understand, Kelley? I'm the
true Bacon, and posterity will never know. Oh, parasite! How I hate
that firebrand of hell!"

"Bacon's a pig, but he
has talent," I said. "Why doesn't he write his own
stuff?"

He didn't have the time.
We realized this only years later, when Germany was invaded by the
Rosy Cross madness. Then, from scattered references, certain
phrases, putting two and two together, I saw that the author of the
Rosicrucian manifestoes was really he. He wrote under the pseudonym
of Johann Valentin Andreae!

Now, in the darkness of
this cell where I languish, more clearheaded than Don Isidro
Parodi, I know for whom Andreae was writing. I was told by Soapes,
my companion in imprisonment, a former Portuguese Templar. Andreae
was writing a novel of chivalry for a Spaniard, who was languishing
meanwhile in another prison. I don't know why, but this project
served the infamous Bacon, who wanted to go down in history as the
secret author of the adventures of the knight of La Man-cha. Bacon
asked Andreae to pen for him, in secret, a novel whose hidden
author he would then pretend to be, enjoying in the shadows (but
why? why?) another man's triumph.

But I digress. I am cold
in this dungeon and my thumb hurts. I am writing, in the dim light
of a dying lamp, the last works that will pass under William's
name.

Dr. Dee died, murmuring,
"Light, more light!" and asking for a toothpick. Then he said,
"Qualis Artifex Pereo!" It was Bacon who had him killed. Before the
queen died, for years unhinged of mind and heart, Verulam managed
to seduce her. Her features then were changed; she was reduced to
the condition of a skeleton. Her food was limited to a little white
roll and some soup of chicory greens. At her side she kept a sword,
and in moments of wrath she would thrust it violently into the
curtains and arras that covered the walls of her refuge. (And what
if there were someone behind there, listening? How now! A rat? Good
idea, old Kelley, must make note of it.) With the poor woman in
this condition, it was easy for Bacon to make her believe he was
William, her bastard¡Xpresenting himself at her knees, she being
now blind, covered in a sheep's skin. The Golden Fleece! They said
he was aiming at the throne, but I knew he was after something
quite different, control of the Plan. That was when he became
Viscount St. Albans. His position strengthened, he eliminated
Dee.

The queen is dead, long
live the king...Now, I was an embarrassing witness. He led me into
an ambush one night when at last the Dark Lady could be mine and
was dancing in my arms with abandon under the influence of a grass
capable of producing visions, she, the eternal Sophia, with her
wrinkled face like an old nanny goat's...He entered with a handful
of armed men, made me cover my eyes with a cloth. I guessed at
once: vitriol! And how he laughed. And she! How you laughed,
Pinball Lady¡X and gilded honor shamefully misplaced and maiden
virtue rudely strum-peted¡Xwhile he touched her with his greedy
hands and you called him Simon¡Xand kissed his sinister
scar....

"To the Tower, to the
Tower." Verulam laughed. Since then, here I lie, with this human
wraith who says he is Soapes, and the jailers know me only as Seven
Seas Jim. I have studied thoroughly, and with ardent zeal,
philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and, unfortunately, also
theology. Here I am, poor madman, and I know as much as I did
before.

Through a slit of a
window I witnessed the royal wedding, the knights with red crosses
cantering to the sound of a trumpet. I should have been there
playing the trumpet, for Cecilia, but once again the prize had been
taken from me. It was William playing. I was writing in the
shadows, for him.

"I'll tell you how to
avenge yourself," Soapes whispered, and that day he revealed to me
what he truly is: a Bonapartist abbe buried in this dungeon for
centuries.

"Will you get out?" I
asked him.

"If...." he began to
reply, but then was silent. Striking his spoon on the wall, in a
mysterious alphabet that, he confided in me, he had received from
Trithemius, he began transmitting messages to the prisoner in the
next cell. The count of Monsalvat.

Years have gone by.
Soapes never stops striking the wall. Now I know for whom and to
what end. His name is Noffo Dei. This Dei (through what mysterious
cabala do Dei and Dee sound so alike?), prompted by Soapes, has
denounced Bacon. What he said, I do-jpot know, but a few days ago
Verulam was imprisoned. Accused of sodomy, because, they said (I
tremble at the thought that it might be true), you, the Dark Lady,
Black Virgin of Druids and of Templars, are none other....none
other than the eternal androgyne created by the knowing hands
of....of....? Now, now I know...of your lover, the Comte de
Saint-Germain! But who is Saint-Germain if not Bacon himself?
(Soapes knows all sorts of things, this obscure Templar of many
lives...)

Verulam has been
released from prison, has regained through his magic arts the favor
of the monarch. Now, William tells me, he spends his nights along
the Thames, in Pilad's Pub, playing that strange machine invented
for him by an Italian from Nola whom he then had burned at the
stake in Rome. It is an astral device, which devours small mad
spheres that race through infinite worlds in a sparkle of angelic
light. Verulam gives obscene blows of triumphant bestiality with
his groin against the frame, miming the events of the celestial
orbs in the domain of the decans in order to understand the
ultimate secrets of the Great Establishment and the secret of the
New Atlantis itself, which he calls Gottlieb's, parodying the
sacred language of the manifestoes attributed to Andreae...Ah! I
cry, now lucidly aware, but too late and in vain, as my heart beats
conspicuously beneath the laces of my corset: this is why he took
away my trumpet, amulet, talisman, cosmic bond that could command
demons. What will he be plotting in the House of Solomon? It's
late, I repeat to myself, by now he has been given too much
power.

They say Bacon is dead.
Soapes assures me it is not true. No one has seen the body. He is
living under a false name with the landgrave of Hesse; he is now
initiated into the supreme mysteries and hence immortal, ready to
continue his grim battle for the triumph of the Plan¡Xin his name
and under his control.

After this alleged
death, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, which
the bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in Sonnet
III, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: "To what it works
in, like the dyer's hand..."

"I never wrote that," I
told him. And it was true...It's obvious: Bacon inserted those
words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then
welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in
dyes...I believe that in the future he will try to make people
believe he wrote William's works himself. How clear everything
becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!

Where art thou, Muse,
that thou forget'st so long? I feel weary, sick. William is
expecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at the
Globe.

Soapes is writing. I
look over his shoulder. An incomprehensible message: "riverrun,
past Eve and Adam's...." He hides the page, looks at me, sees me
paler than a ghost, reads Death in my eyes. He whispers to me,
"Rest. Never fear. I'll write for you."

And so he is doing, mask
behind a mask. I slowly fade, and he takes from me even the last
light, that of obscurity.

Though his will be good,
his spirit and his prophecies are illusions of the Devil...They are
capable of deceiving many curious people and of causing great harm
and scandal to the Church of Our Lord God.

¡XOpinion on Guillaume
Postel sent to Ignatius Loyola by the Jesuit fathers Salmeron,
Lhoost, and Ugoletto, May 10, 1545

Belbo, detached, told us
what he had concocted, but he didn't read his pages to us and
eliminated all personal references. Indeed, he led us to believe
that Abulafia had supplied him with the connections. The idea that
Bacon was the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes he had already
come upon somewhere or other. But one thing in particular struck
me: that Bacon was Viscount St. Albans.

It buzzed in my head; it
had something to do with my old thesis. I spent that night digging
in my card file.

"Gentlemen," I said to
my accomplices with a certain solemnity the next morning, "we don't
have to invent connections. They exist. When, in 1164, Saint
Bernard launched the idea of a council at Troyes to legitimize the
Templars, among those charged to organize everything was the prior
of Saint Albans. Saint Alban was the first English martyr, who
evangelized the British Isles. He lived in Verulamium, which became
Bacon's property. He was a Celt and unquestionably a Druid
initiate, like Saint Bernard."

"That's not very much,"
Belbo said.

"Wait. This prior of
Saint Albans was abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey where
the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers was later
installed!"

Belbo reacted. "My
God!"

"And that's not all," I
said. "The Conservatoire was conceived as homage to Bacon. On 25
Brumaire of the year 111, the Convention authorized its Comite
d'lnstruction Publique to have the complete works of Bacon printed.
And on 18 Vendemiaire of the same year the same Convention had
passed a law providing for the construction of a house of arts and
trades that would reproduce the House of Solomon as described by
Bacon in his New Atlantis, a place where all the inventions of
mankind are collected."

"And so?" Diotallevi
asked.

"The Pendulum is in the
Conservatoire," Belbo said. And from Diotallevi's reaction I
realized that Belbo had told him about Foucault's
Pendulum.

"Not so fast," I said.
"The Pendulum was invented and installed only in the last century.
We should skip it."

"Skip it?" Belbo said.
"Haven't you ever seen the Monad Hieroglyph of John Dee, the
talisman that is supposed to concentrate all the wisdom of the
universe? Doesn't it look like a pendulum?"

[...]

"All right," I said,
"let's suppose a connection can be established. But how do we go
from Saint Albans to the Pendulum?"

I was to learn how in
the space of a few days.

"So then, the prior of
Saint Albans is the abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, which
therefore becomes a Templar center. Bacon, through his property,
establishes a contact with the Druid followers of Saint Albans. Now
listen carefully: as Bacon is beginning his career in England,
Guillaume Postel in France is ending his."

An almost imperceptible
twitch on Belbo's face. I recalled the dialog at Riccardo's show:
Postel made Belbo think of the man who, in his mind, had robbed him
of Lorenza. But it was the matter of an instant.

"Postel studies Hebrew,
tries to demonstrate that it's the common matrix of all languages,
translates the Zohar and the Bahir, has contacts with the
cabalists, broaches a plan for universal peace similar to that of
the German Rosicrucian groups, tries to convince the king of France
to form an alliance with the sultan, visits Greece, Syria, Asia
Minor, studies Arabic¡X in a word, he retraces the itinerary of
Christian Rosencreutz. And it is no accident that he signs some
writings with the name of Rosispergius, ¡¥he who scatters dew.'
Gassendi in his Examen Philosophiae Fluddanae says that Rosencreutz
does not derive from rosa but from ros, dew. In one of his
manuscripts he speaks of a secret to be guarded until the time is
ripe, and he says: ¡¥That pearls may not be cast before swine.' Do
you know where else this gospel quotation appears? On the title
page of The Chemical Wedding. And Father Marin Mersenne, in
denouncing the Rosicrucian Fludd, says he is made of the same stuif
as atheus magnus Postel. Furthermore, it seems Dee and Postel met
in 1550, but perhaps they didn't yet know that they were both grand
masters of the Plan, scheduled to meet thirty years later, in
1584.

"Now, Postel
declares¡Xhear ye, hear ye¡Xthat, being a direct descendant of the
oldest son of Noah, and since Noah is the founder of the Celtic
race and therefore of the civilization of the Druids, the king of
France is the only legitimate pretender to the title king of the
world. That's right, he talks about the King of the World¡Xbut
three centuries before d'Alveydre. We'll skip the fact that he
falls in love with an old hag, Joanna, and considers her the divine
Sophia; the man probably didn't have all his marbles. But powerful
enemies he did have; they called him dog, execrable monster, cloaca
of all heresies, a being possessed by a legion of demons. All the
same, even with the Joanna scandal, the Inquisition doesn't
consider him a heretic, only amens, a bit of a nut, let's say. The
truth is, the Church doesn't dare destroy the man, because they
know he's the spokesman of some fairly powerful group. I would
point out to you, Diotallevi, that Postel travels also in the
Orient and is a contemporary of Isaac Luria. Draw whatever
conclusions you like. Well, in 1564, the year in which Dee writes
his Monas Hieroglyphica, Postel retracts his heresies and retires
to...guess where? The monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs! What's
he waiting for? Obviously, he's waiting for 1584."

"Obviously," Diotallevi
said.

I went on: "Are we
agreed, then? Postel is grand master of the French group, awaiting
the appointment with the English. But he dies in 1581, three years
before it. Conclusions: first, the 1584 mishap took place because
at that crucial moment a keen mind was missing, since Postel would
have been able to figure out what was going on in the confusion of
the calendars; second, Saint-Martin was a place where the Templars
were safe, always at home, where the man responsible for the third
meeting immured himself and waited. Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the
Refuge!"

"It all fits, like a
mosaic."

"Stick with me. At the
time of the failed appointment Bacon is only twenty-three. But in
1621 he becomes Viscount St. Albans. What does he find in the
ancestral possessions? A mystery. Note that this is the year he is
accused of corruption and imprisoned for a while. He had unearthed
something that caused fear in someone. In whom? This is when Bacon
understood that Saint-Martin should be watched; he conceived the
idea of putting his House of Solomon there, the laboratory in
which, through experimental means, the secret could be
discovered."

"But," Diotallevi asked,
"how do we find the link between Bacon's followers and the
revolutionary groups of the late eighteenth century?"

"Could Freemasonry be
the answer?" Belbo said.

"Splendid idea.
Actually, Aglie suggested it to us that night at the
castle."

"We should reconstruct
the events. What exactly was going on then in those
circles?"