Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (52 page)

The Baron Hundt,
Chevalier Ramsay....and numerous others who founded the grades in
these rites, worked under instructions from the general of the
Jesuits...Templarism is Jesuitism.

¡XLetter to Madame
Blavatsky from Charles Southeran, 32 .'. A and P.R. 94 .'. Memphis,
K.R. , K. Kadosch, M.M. 104, Eng., etc. Initiate of the English
Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, January
11, 1877; from /sis Unveiled, 1877, vol. ii, p. 390

We had run into them too
often, from the time of the first Ro-sicrucian manifestoes on. As
early as 1620, in Germany, the Rosa Jesuitica appears, reminding us
that the symbolism of the rose was Catholic and Marian before it
was Rosicrucian, and the hint is made that the two orders are in
league, that Rosicru-cianism is only a reformulation of the Jesuit
mystique for consumption in Reformation Germany.

I remernbered what Salon
had said about Father Kircher's rancorous attack on the
Rosicrucians¡Xright in the middle of his discourse on the depths of
the terraqueous globe.

"Father Kircher," I
said, "is a central character in this story. Why would this man,
who so often showed a gift for observation and a taste for
experiment, drown these few good ideas in thousands of pages
overflowing with incredible hypotheses? He was in correspondence
with the best English scientists. Each of his books deals with
typical Rosicrucian subjects, ostensibly to contest them, actually
to espouse them, offering his own Counter Reformation version. In
the first edition of the Fama, Herr Has-elmayer, condemned to the
galleys by the Jesuits because of his reforming ideas, hastens to
say that the Rosicrucians are the true Jesuits. Very well. Kircher
writes his thirty-odd volumes to argue that the Jesuits are the
true Rosicrucians. The Jesuits are trying to get their hands on the
Plan. Kircher wants to study those pendulums himself, and he does,
in his own way. He in-vents a planetary clock that will give the
exact time in all the headquarters of the Society of Jesus
scattered throughout the world."

"But how did the Jesuits
know of the Plan, when the Templars let themselves be killed rather
than reveal it?" Diotallevi asked.

It was no good answering
that the Jesuits always know everything. We needed a more seductive
explanation.

We quickly found one.
Guillaume Postel again. Leafing through the history of the Jesuits
by Cre'tineau-Joly (and how we chuckled over that unfortunate
name), we learned that in 1554 Postel, in a fit of mystical fervor
and thirst for spiritual regeneration, joined Ignatius Loyola in
Rome. Ignatius welcomed him with open arms, but Postel was unable
to part with his manias, his cabalism, his ecumenicalism, and the
Jesuits couldn't accept these things, especially one mania that
Postel absolutely refused to abandon: the idea that the King of the
World was the king of France. Ignatius may have been a saint, but
he was also Spanish.

So at last a rupture
came about; Postel left the Jesuits¡Xor the Jesuits kicked him out.
But since he had been a Jesuit, even if only briefly, he had sworn
obedience perinde ac cadaver to Saint Ignatius, and therefore must
have revealed to him his mission. "Dear Ignatius," he must have
said, "in receiving me you receive also the secret of the Templar
Plan, whose unworthy representative I am in France, and indeed,
while we are all awaiting the third centenary meeting in 1584, we
might as well await it ad majorem Dei gloriam."

So the Jesuits, thanks
to Postel's moment of weakness, come to know the secret of the
Templars. This knowledge must be exploited. Saint Ignatius goes to
his eternal reward, but his successors remain watchful. They keep
an eye on Postel; they want to know whom he will meet in that
fateful year 1584. But, alas, Postel dies before then. Nor is it
any help that¡Xas one of our sources tells us¡Xan unknown Jesuit is
present at his deathbed. The Jesuits do not learn who his successor
is.

"I'm sorry, Casaubon,"
Belbo said, "but something here doesn't add up. If what you say is
true, the Jesuits couldn't know that the meeting failed to come off
in 1584."

"Don't forget that the
Jesuits," Diotaillevi remarked, "were men of iron, not easily
fooled."

"Ah, as for that," Belbo
said, "a Jesuit could eat two Templars for breakfast and another
two for dinner. They also were disbanded, and more than once, and
all the governments of Europe lent a hand, but they're still
here."

We had to put ourselves
in a Jesuit's shoes. What would a Jesuit do if Postel slipped from
his grasp? I had an idea immediately, but it was so diabolical that
not even our Diabolicals, I thought, would swallow it: The
Rosicrucians were an invention of the Jesuits!

"After Postel's death,"
I argued, "the Jesuits¡Xclever as they are¡Xmathematically foresee
the confusion of the calendars and decide to take the initiative.
They set up this Rosicrucian red herring, calculating exactly what
will happen. Among all the fanatics who swallow the bait, someone
from one of the genuine groups, caught off guard, will come
forward. Imagine the fury of Bacon: ¡¥Fludd, you idiot, couldn't
you have kept your mouth shut?"But, my lord, they seemed to be with
us..."Fool, weren't you taught never to trust papists? They should
have burned you, not that poor wretch from Nola!' "

"But in that case,"
Belbo said, "when the Rosicrucians move to France, why do the
Jesuits, or those polemicists in their hire, attack the newcomers
as heretics possessed by devils?"

"Surely you don't expect
the Jesuits to work in a straightforward way. What sort of Jesuits
would they be then?"

We quarreled at length
over my proposal and finally decided, unanimously, that the
original hypothesis was better: The Rosicrucians were the bait
cast, for the French, by the Baconians and the Germans. But the
Jesuits, as soon as the manifestoes appeared, caught on. And they
immediately joined in the game, to muddy the waters. Obviously, the
Jesuits' aim was to prevent the English and German groups from
meeting with the French; and to that end any trick would do, no
matter how dirty.

Meanwhile, they recorded
events, gathered information, and put it all¡Xwhere? In Abulafia,
Belbo joked. But Diotallevi, who had been gathering information
himself, said it was no joke. Surely the Jesuits were constructing
an immense, tremendously powerful computer that would draw a
conclusion from this patiently accumulated, age-old brew of truth
and falsehood.

[...]

"The Jesuits,"
Diotallevi said, "understood what neither the poor old Templars of
Provins nor the Baconian camp had yet realized, namely, that the
reconstruction of the map could be accomplished by ars
combinatoria; in other words, with a method that foreshadowed our
modern electronic brains. The Jesuits were the first to invent
Abulafia! Father Kircher reread all the treatises on the
combinatorial art, from Lullus on, and you see what he published in
his Ars Magna Sciendi..."

"It looks like a crochet
pattern to me," Belbo said.

"No, gentlemen, these
arc all the possible combinations. Factor analysis, that of the
Sefer Yesirah. Calculation of permutations, the very essence of the
temurah!"

This was certainly so.
It was one thing to conceive Fludd's vague project of identifying
the map by beginning with a polar projection; it was quite another
to figure out how many trials would be required in order to arrive
at the correct solution. And, again, it was one thing to create an
abstract model of all the possible combinations, and another to
invent a machine able to carry them out. So both Kircher and his
disciple Schott built mechanical devices, mechanisms with
perforated cards, computers ante litteram. Binary calculators.
Cabala applied to modern technology.

IBM: lesus Babbage
Mundi, lesum Binarium Magnificamur. AMDG: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam?
Not on your life! Ars Magna, Digitale Gaudium! IHS: lesus Hardware
& Software!

In the bosom of the
deepest darkness a society has been formed, a society of new
beings, who know one another though they have never seen one
another, who understand one another without explanations, who serve
one another without friendship...From the Jesuit rule this society
adopts blind obedience; from the Masons it takes the trials and the
ceremonies, and from the Templars the subterranean mysteries and
the great audacity. Has the Comte de Saint-Germain simply imitated
Guillaume Postel, who desperately wanted people to believe him
older than he was?

¡XMarquis de Luchet,
Essai sur la secte des illumines, Paris, 1789,v and xii

The Jesuits knew that if
you want to confound your enemies, the best technique is to create
clandestine sects, wait for dangerous enthusiasms to precipitate,
then arrest them all. In other words, if you fear a plot, organize
one yourself; that way, all those who join it come under your
control.

I remembered the
reservation Aglie had expressed about Ramsay, the first to posit a
direct connection between the Masons and the Templars; Aglie said
that Ramsay had ties with Catholic circles. In fact, Voltaire had
already denounced Ramsay as a tool of the Jesuits. Faced with the
birth of English Freemasonry, the Jesuits in France responded with
Scottish neo-Templarism.

Responding to this
French plot, a certain Marquis de Luchet produced, in 1789,
anonymously, Essai sur la secte des illumines, in which he lashed
out against the Illuminati of every stripe, Bavarian or otherwise,
priest-baiting anarchists and mystical neo-Templars alike, and he
threw on the heap (incredible, how all the pieces of our mosaic
were fitting together!) even-the Paulicians, even Postel and
Saint-Germain. His complaint was that these forms of Templar
mysticism were undermining the credibility of Masonry, which in
contrast was a society of good and honest people.

The Baconians had
invented Masonry to be like Rick's in Casablanca, Jesuit
Neo-Templarism had parried that move, and now Luchet was hired to
bump off all the groups that weren't Baconian.

At this point, however,
we were confronted with another problem, which was too much for
poor Aglie to handle. Why had de Maistre, who was the Jesuits' man,
gone to Wilhelmsbad to sow dissension among the neo-Templars a good
seven years before the Marquis de Luchet appeared on the
scene?

"Neo-Templarism was all
right in the first half of the eighteenth century," Belbo said,
"and it was all wrong at the end of the century; first because it
had been taken over by revolutionaries, for whom anything served,
the Goddess Reason, the Supreme Being, even Cagliostro, provided
they could cut off the king's head, and second because the German
princes were now putting their thumbs in the pie, especially
Frederick of Prussia, and his aims surely didn't correspond to
those of the Jesuits. When mystical neo-Templarism, whoever
invented it, began producing things like The Magic Flute, Loyola's
men naturally decided to wipe it out. It's like high finance: you
buy a company, you sell off its assets, you declare bankruptcy, you
close it down, and you reinvest its capital. The important thing is
the overall strategy, not what happens to the janitor. Or it's like
a used car: when it stops running, you send it to the
junkyard."

In the true Masonic code
no other god will be found save Mani. He is the god of the cabalist
Masons, of the ancient Rosicrucians, of the Martinis! Masons...All
the outrages attributed to the Templars are precisely those
attributed, before them, to the Manicheans.

¡XAbbe" Barruel,
M&moires pour servir A I'histoire du jacobinisme, Hamburg,
1798, 2, xiii

The Jesuits' strategy
became clear to us when we discovered Barruel. Between 1797 and
1798, in response to the French Revolution, he writes his Memoires
pour servir d I'histoire du ja-cobinisme, a real dime novel that
begins, surprise surprise, with the Templars. After the burning of
Molay, they transform themselves into a secret society to destroy
monarchy and papacy and to create a world republic. In the
eighteenth century they take over Freemasonry and make it their
instrument. In 1763 they create a literary academy consisting of
Voltaire, Turgot, Con-dorcet, Diderot, and d'Alembert, which meets
in the house of Baron d'Holbach and in 1776, plot after plot, they
bring about the birth of the Jacobins. But they are mere
marionettes, their strings pulled by the real bosses, the
Illuminati of Bavaria¡X regicides by vocation.

Junkyard? After having
split Masonry in two with the help of Ramsay, the Jesuits were
putting it together again in order to fight it head-on.

Barruel's book had some
influence^ in fact, in the French National Archives there were at
least two reports ordered by Napoleon on the clandestine sects.
These reports were drawn up by a certain Charles de Berkheim,
who¡Xin the best tradition of secret police¡Xobtained his
information from sources already published; he copied freely, first
from the book by the Marquis de Luchet and then from
Barruel's.

Reading these horrifying
descriptions of the Illuminati as well as the denunciation of a
directorate of Unknown Superiors capable of ruling the world,
Napoleon did not hesitate: he decided to join them. He had his
brother Joseph named grand master of the Great Orient, and he
himself, according to many sources, made contact with the Masons
and became a very high official in their ranks. It is not known,
however, in which rite. Perhaps, prudently, in all of
them.

We had no idea what
Napoleon knew, but we weren't forgetting that he had spent time in
Egypt, and God knows what sages he conversed with in the shadow of
the pyramids (even a child could see that the famous forty
centuries (here looking down on him were a clear reference to the
Hermetic Tradition).

Napoleon must have known
something, because in 1806 he convoked an assembly of French Jews.
The official reasons were banal: an attempt to reduce usury, to
assure himself of the loyalty of the Jewish population, to find new
financing...None of which explains why he called that assembly the
Grand San-hedrin, a name suggesting a directorate of superiors more
or less unknown. The truth is that the shrewd Corsican had
identified the representatives of the Jerusalemite branch, and was
trying to unite the various scattered Templar groups.

"It's no accident that
in 1808 Marechal Ney's troops are at Tomar. You see the
connection?"

"We're here to see
connections."

"Now Napoleon, about to
defeat England, has almost all the European centers in his hand,
and through the French Jews he has the Jerusalemites as well. What
does he still lack?"

"The
Paulicians."

"Exactly. And we haven't
yet decided where they end up. But Napoleon provides us with a
clue: he goes to look for them in Russia."

Living for centuries in
Slavic regions, the Paulicians naturally reorganize under the
labels of various Russian mystic groups. One of the most
influential advisers of Alexander I is Prince Galitzin, connected
with sects of Martinist inspiration. And who do we find in Russia,
a good ten years before Napoleon, as plenipotentiary of the House
of Savoy, tying bonds with the mystic cenacles of St. Petersburg?
De Maistre.

At this point de Maistre
distrusts any organization of Illuminati; for him, they are no
different from the men of the Enlightenment responsible for the
bloodbath of the Revolution. During this period, in fact, repeating
Barruel almost word for word, he talks of a satanic sect that wants
to conquer the world, and probably he has Napoleon in mind. If our
great reactionary is aiming, then, to seduce the Martinist groups,
it is because he suspects that they, though drawing their
inspiration from the same sources as French and German
neo-Templarism, are the heirs of the one group not yet corrupted by
Western thought: the Paulicians.

But apparently de
Maistre's plan does not succeed. In 1815 the Jesuits are expelled
from St. Petersburg, and de Maistre returns to Turin.

"All right," Diotallevi
said, "we've found the Paulicians again. Let's get rid of Napoleon,
who obviously failed in his purpose¡Xotherwise, on St. Helena, he
could have made his enemies quake by merely snapping his fingers.
What happens now among all these people? My head is
splitting."

"At least you still have
a head."