Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (49 page)

He opened his coffer. In
indescribable disorder it contained collars, rubber bands, kitchen
utensils, badges of different technical schools, even the monogram
of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legion of
Honor. On everything, in his madness, he saw the seal of the
Antichrist, in the form of two linked triangles.

¡XAlexandre Chayla,
"Serge A. Nilus et les Protocoles," La Tribune Juive, May 14, 1921,
p.3

"You see," Salon went
on, "I was born in Moscow. And it was in Russia, when I was a
youth, that people discovered the secret Jewish documents that
said, in so many words, that to control governments it was
necessary to work underground. Listen." He picked up a little
notebook, in which he had copied out some quotations. " ¡¥Today's
cities have metropolitan railroads and underground passages: from
these we will blow up all the capitals of the world.' Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, Document Number Nine!"

It occurred to me that
the collection of spinal columns, the box with the eyes, the skins
stretched over armatures came from some extermination camp. But no,
I was dealing with an elderly man nostalgic about the old days of
Russian anti-Semitism. "If I follow you, then, there's a
conventicle of Jews¡Xsome Jews, not all¡Xwho are plotting
something. But why underground?"

"That's obvious! Any
plotter must plot underground, not in the light of day. This has
been known from the beginning of time. Dominion over the world
means dominion over what lies beneath it. The subterranean
currents."

I remembered a question
of Agile's in his study, and then the Druidesses in Piedmont, who
called on telluric currents.

"Why did the Celts dig
sanctuaries in the heart of the earth, making tunnels that
communicated with a sacred well?" Salon continued. "The well goes
down into radioactive strata, as everyone knows. How was
Glastonbury built? And isn't the island of Avalon where the myth of
the Grail originated? And who invented the Grail if not a
Jew?"

The Grail again, my God.
But what grail? There was only one grail: my Thing, in contact with
the radioactive strata of Lia's womb, and perhaps now swimming
happily toward the mouth of that well, perhaps now preparing to
come out, and here I was among stuffed owls, among a hundred dead
and one pretending to be alive.

"All Europe's cathedrals
are built where the Celts had their menhirs. Why did the Celts set
these stones in the ground, considering the effort it cost
them?"

"Why did the Egyptians
go to so much trouble to erect the pyramids?"

"There you are.
Antennas, thermometers, probes, needles like the ones Chinese
doctors use, stuck into the body's nodal points. At the center of
the earth is a nucleus of fusion, something similar to the
sun¡Xindeed, an actual sun around which things revolve, describing
different paths. Orbits of telluric currents. The Celts knew where
they were, and how to control them. And Dante? What about Dante?
What was he trying to tell us with the account of his descent into
the depths? You understand me, dear friend?"

I didn't like being his
dear friend, but I went on listening to him. Giulio/Giulia, my
Rebis planted like Lucifer at the center of Lia's womb, but he/she,
the Thing, would be upside down, would be struggling upward, and
would somehow emerge. The Thing was created to emerge upward from
the viscera, and not make its entrance with head bowed, in sticky
secrecy.

Salon by now was lost in
a monologue he seemed to repeat from memory. "You know what the
English leys are? If you fly over England in a plane, you'll see
that all the sacred places are joined by straight lines, a grid of
lines interwoven across the whole country, still visible because
they suggested the lines of later roads..."

"The sacred places were
connected by roads, and people simply tried to make roads as
straight as possible."

"Indeed? Then why do
birds migrate along these lines? Why do flying saucers follow them?
It's a secret that was lost after the Roman invasion, but there are
those who still know it..."

"The Jews," I
suggested.

"They also dig. The
first alchemistic principle is VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae,
Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapi-dem."

Lapis exillis. My Stone
that was slowly coming out of exile, from the sweet oblivious
hypnotic exile of Lia's vessel; my Stone, beautiful and white, not
seeking further depths, but seeking the surface...I wanted to rush
home to Lia, to wait with her, hour by hour, for the appearance of
the Thing, the triumph of the surface regained. Salon's den had the
musty smell of tunnels. Tunnels were the origin that had to be
abandoned; they were not the destination. And yet I followed Salon,
and new, malicious ideas for the Plan whirled in my head. While I
awaited the one Truth of this sublunar world, I racked my brain to
construct new falsehoods; blind as the animals
underground.

I stirred. I had to get
out of the tunnel. "I must go," I said. "Perhaps you can suggest
some books on this subject."

"Ha! Everything they've
written about is false, false as the soul of Judas. What I know I
learned from my father..."

"A
geologist?"

"Oh no," Salon said,
laughing, "no, not at all. My father-nothing to be ashamed of;
water under the bridge¡Xworked for the Okhrana. Directly under the
chief, the legendary Rachkov-ski."

Okhrana, Okhrana?
Something like the KGB? The tsarist secret police, wasn't it? And
who was Rachkovski? Wasn't there someone who had a similar name? By
God, the colonel's mysterious visitor, Count Rakosky....No, enough
of this. No more coincidences. I didn't stuff dead animals; I
created living animals.

When White arrives in
the matter of the Great Work, Life has conquered Death, the King is
resuscitated, Earth and Water have become Air, it is the domain of
the Moon, their Child is born...Then Matter achieves such a degree
of fixity that Fire can no longer destroy it...When the artist sees
perfect whiteness, the Philosophers say the books must be torn up,
for they are now useless.

¡XDom J. Pernety,
Dictionnaire mytho-hermetique, Paris, Bauche, 1758,
"Blancheur"

I mumbled some excuse,
in haste. I believe I said, "My girlfriend's having a baby
tomorrow." Salon haltingly offered me congratulations, as if not
sure who the father was. I ran home, to breathe some clean
air.

Lia wasn't in. On the
kitchen table, a piece of paper: "Darling, the waters have broken.
Couldn't get you at the office. Taking a taxi to the hospital.
Come. I feel alone."

A moment of panic. I had
to be there to count with Lia. I should have been in the office,
reachable. It was my fault: the Thing would be born dead, Lia would
die with it, Salon would stuff them both.

I entered the hospital
on unsteady legs, asked directions of people who didn't know
anything, twice ended up in the wrong ward. I shouted that they had
to know where Lia was having the baby, and they told me to calm
down, because here everybody was having a baby.

Finally¡XI don't know
how¡XI found myself in a room. Lia was pearly pale but smiling.
Someone had lifted her hair and put it under a white cap. For the
first time I saw Lia's forehead in all its splendor. Next to her
was the Thing.

"It's Giulio," she
said.

My Rebis. I, too, had
made him, and not with chunks of dead bodies or arsenic soap. He
was whole, all his fingers and toes were in the right
place.

I insisted on seeing all
of him, his little cock, his big balls. Then I kissed Lia on her
naked brow: "The credit is yours, darling; it all depends on the
vessel."

"Of course the credit is
mine, you shit. I had to count all by myself.''

"For me you are all that
counts," I told her.

The subterranean people
have reached the highest knowledge...If our mad humankind should
begin a war against them, they would be able to explode the whole
surface of our planet...

¡XFerdinand Ossendowski,
Beasts, Men and Gods, 1924, v

I stayed at home with
Lia because, once she left the hospital and had to change the
baby's diapers, she cried and said she would never be able to cope.
Somebody explained to us that this was normal: the excitement over
the victory of birth is followed by a feeling of helplessness in
the face of the immensity of the job. During those days, while I
loafed around the house, useless and not qualified, of course, for
breast-feeding, I spent long hours reading everything I had been
able to find concerning telluric currents.

On my return, I sounded
out Aglfe on them. He made a gesture of boredom. "Weak metaphors,
referring to the secret of the serpent Kundalini. Chinese geomancy
also sought in the earth the traces of the dragon. The telluric
serpent simply stands for the occult serpent. The goddess reposes,
coiled, and sleeps her eternal sleep. Kundalini throbs gently,
binding heavy bodies to lighter bodies. Like a vortex or a
whirlpool, like the first half of the syllable om."

"But what secret cfoes
the serpent refer to?" "To the telluric currents." "What are the
telluric currents?"

"A great cosmological
metaphor, which refers to the serpent." To hell with Aglie, I said
to myself, I know more than that.

I read my notes to Belbo
and Diotallevi, and we no longer had any doubt. At last we were in
a position to supply the Templars with a decent secret. It was the
most economical, the most elegant solution to the problem, and all
the pieces of our millennial puzzle fit together.

So: the Celts knew about
the telluric currents: they had learned the secret from the
Atlantides, when the survivors of the submerged continent
emigrated, some to Egypt, some to Brittany.

The Atlantides had
learned it from those ancestors of ours who ventured forth from
Avalon across the continent of Mu as far as the central desert of
Australia¡Xwhen all the continents were a single land mass, the
wondrous Pangaea. If only we could still read (as the Aborigines
can, but they remain silent) the mysterious alphabet carved on the
great boulder Ayers Rock, we would have the Answer. Ayers Rock is
the antipode of the great (unknown) mountain that is the Pole, the
true, occult Pole, not the one that any bourgeois explorer can
reach. As usual, and this should be obvious to anyone whose eyes
have not been blinded by the false light of Western science, the
Pole that we see is not the real Pole, for the real Pole is the one
that cannot be seen, except by some adepts, whose lips are
sealed.

The Celts, however,
believed it was enough to discover the global configuration of the
currents. That's why they erected megaliths. The menhirs had
sensitive devices, like electric valves, planted at the points
where the currents branched and changed direction. The leys marked
the routes of currents already identified. The dolmens were
chambers of accumulated energy, where the Druids, with geomantic
tools, attempted to map, by extrapolation, the global design. The
cromlechs and Stonehenge were micro-macrocosmic observatories from
which they studied the pattern of the constellations in order to
divine the pattern of the currents¡Xbecause, as the Tabula
Smaragdina tells us, what is above is isomorphic to what is
below.

But there was more to
the problem than that. The other branch of the Atlantidean
emigration realized as much. The occult knowledge of the Egyptians
passed from Hermes Trismegistus to Moses, who took care not to pass
it on to his band of tatterdemalions, their craws still stuffed
with manna; to them he offered the Ten Commandments, which was as
much as they could comprehend. The higher truth is aristocratic;
Moses encoded it in the Pentateuch. The cabalists understood
this.

"Just think," I said,
"everything was already written, an open book, in the measurements
of the Temple of Solomon, and the keepers of the secret were the
Rosicrucians, who formed the Great White Fraternity¡Xthe Essenes,
in other words, who, as is well known, let Jesus in on their
secrets. And there you have the real reason why Jesus was
crucified..."

"Of course, the Passion
of Christ is an allegory, prefiguring the trial of the
Templars."

"Right. And Joseph of
Arimathea takes, or takes back, the secret of Jesus to the land of
the Celts. But obviously the secret is still incomplete; the
Christian Druids know only a fragment of it, and that is the
esoteric meaning of the Grail: there is something missing, but we
don't know what. The secret¡Xwhat the Temple already said in
full¡Xis suspected only by a small group of rabbis who remained in
Palestine. They entrust it to the occult Moslem sects, to the
Sufis, the Ismailis, the Motak-allimun. And from them the Templars
learn it."

"At last, the Templars!
I was beginning to worry," Belbo said.

We were shaping the
Plan, which, like soft clay, obeyed our thumbs, our narrative
desires. The Templars had discovered the secret during those
sleepless nights, embracing their saddle mates in the desert, where
the implacable simoom was blowing. They had wrested it, bit by bit,
from those who knew the powers of cosmic focus in the Black Stone
of Mecca, the heritage of the Babylonian magi¡Xfor it was clear now
that the Tower of Babel had been simply an attempt, however hasty
and deservedly a failure because of the pride of its architects, to
build the most powerful menhir of all. But the Babylonians got
their calculations wrong. As Father Kircher has demonstrated, had
the tower reached its peak, its excessive weight would have made
the earth's axis rotate ninety degrees and maybe more, and our poor
globe, instead of having an ithyphallic crown pointing upward,
would have found itself with a sterile appendix, a limp mentula, a
monkey tail flopping downward, a Shekhinah lost in the dizzying
abyss of an antarctic Malkhut, a flaccid hieroglyph for
penguins.

"So, in a word, what's
the secret discovered by the Templars?"

"Don't rush me. We're
getting there. It took seven days to make the world. And now we'll
give it a try."