Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (23 page)

"And it's no lie. He has
discovered the secret. And so have I."

"Listen, you better read
on. You're acting as if we just met tonight."

"With you, it's always
like the first time."

"Ah, but I don't get too
familiar with the first one who comes along. Anyway, you have quite
a collection now. First Templars, then Rosicrucians. You haven't
read Plekhanov by any chance?"

"No. I'm waiting to
discover his sepulcher a hundred and twenty years from now. Unless
Stalin buried him with tractors."

"Idiot. I'm taking a
bath."

And the famous
confraternity of the Rosy Cross declares even now that throughout
the universe delirious prophecies circulate. In fact, the moment
the ghost appeared (though Fama and Confessio prove that this was a
mere invention of idle minds), it produced a hope of universal
reform, and generated things partly ridiculous and absurd, partly
incredible. Thus upright and honest men of various countries
exposed themselves to contempt and derision in order to lend open
support, or to reveal themselves to these brothers...through the
Mirror of Solomon or in some other occult way.

¡XChristoph von Besold
(?), Appendix to Tommaso Campanella, Van der Spanischen Monarchy,
1623

The best came later, and
when Amparo returned, I was able to give her a foretaste of
wondrous events. "It's an incredible story. The manifestoes
appeared in an age teeming with texts of that sort. Everyone was
seeking renewal, a golden century, a Cockaigne of the spirit. Some
pored over magic texts, others labored at forges, melting metals,
others sought to rule the stars, and still others invented secret
alphabets and universal languages. In Prague, Rudolph II turned his
court into an alchemistic laboratory, invited Comenius and John
Dee, the English court astrologer who had revealed all the secrets
of the cosmos in the few pages of his Monas lerogliphica. Are you
with me?"

"To the end of
time."

"Rudolph's physician was
a man named Michael Maier, who later wrote a book of visual and
musical emblems, the Atalanta Fugiens, an orgy of philosopher's
eggs, dragons biting their tails, sphinxes. Nothing was more
luminous than a secret cipher; everything was the hieroglyph of
something else. Think about it. Galileo was dropping stones from
the Tower of Pisa, Richelieu played Monopoly with half of Europe,
and in the meantime they all had their eyes peeled to read the
signs of the world. Pull of gravity, indeed; something else lies
beneath (or, rather, above) all this, something quite different.
Would you like to know what? Abracadabra. Torricelli invented the
barometer, but the rest of them were messing around with ballets,
water games, and fireworks in the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg.
And the Thirty Years' War was about to break out."

"Mutter Courage must
have been delighted."

"But even for them it
wasn't all fun and games. In 1619 the Palantine elector accepted
the crown of Bohemia, probably because he was dying to rule Prague,
the magic city. But the next year, the Hapsburgs nailed him to the
White Mountain. In Prague the Protestants were slaughtered,
Comenius's house and library were burned, and his wife and son were
killed. He fled from court to court, harping on how great and full
of hope the idea of the Rosy Cross was."

"Poor man, but what did
you expect him to do? Console himself with the barometer? Wait a
minute. Give a poor girl time to think. Who wrote these
manifestoes?"

"That's the whole point:
we don't know. Let's try to figure it out...How about scratching my
rosy cross...no, between the shoulder blades, higher, to the left,
there. Yes, there. Now then, there were some incredible characters
in this German environment. Like Simon Studion, author of
Naometria, an occult treatise on the measurements of the Temple of
Solomon; Hein-rich Khunrath, who wrote Amphitheatrum sapientiae
aeternae, full of allegories, with Hebrew alphabets and cabalistic
labyrinths that must have inspired the authors of Fama, who were
probably friends of one of the countless little Utopian
conventicles of Christian rebirth. One popular rumor is that the
author was a man named Johann Valentin Andreae. A year later, he
published The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, but he had
written that in his youth, so he must have been kicking the idea of
the Rosy Cross around for quite some time. There were other
enthusiasts, in Tubingen, who dreamed of the republic of
Christianopolis. Perhaps they all got together. But it sounds as if
it was all in fun, a joke. They had no idea of the pandemonium they
were unleashing. Andreae spent the rest of his life swearing he
hadn't written die manifestoes, which he claimed were a lusus, a
ludibrium, a prank. It cost him his academic reputation. He grew
angry, said that the Rosicrucians, if indeed they existed, were all
impostors. But that didn't help. Once the manifestoes appeared, it
was as if people had been waiting for them. Learned men from all
over Europe actually wrote to the Rosicrucians, and since there was
no address, they sent open letters, pamphlets, printed volumes. In
that same year Maier published Arcana arcanissima, in which the
brethren of the Rosy Cross were not mentioned explicitly, but
everyone was sure he was talking about them and that there was more
to his book than met the eye. Some people boasted that they had
read Fama in manuscript. It wasn't so easy to prepare a book for
publication in those days, especially if it had engravings, but in
1616, Robert Fludd¡Xwho wrote in England but printed in Leyden, so
you have to figure in the time to ship the proofs¡Xcirculated
Apologia compendiaria Fratemitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis et
in-famiis maculis aspersam, veritatem quasi Fluctibus abluens et
abstergens, to defend the brethren and free them from suspicion,
from the ¡¥slander' that had been their reward. In other words, a
debate was raging in Bohemia, Germany, England, and Holland, alive
with couriers on horseback and itinerant scholars."

"And the Rosicrucians
themselves?"

"Deathly silence. Post
CXX annos patebo, my ass. They watched, from the vacuum of their
palace. I believe it was their silence that agitated everyone so
much. The fact that they didn't answer was taken as proof of their
existence. In 1617 Fludd wrote Tractatus apologeticus integritatem
societatis de Rosea Cruce de-fendens, and somebody in a De Naturae
Secretis, 1618, said that the time had come to reveal the secret of
the Rosicrucians."

"And did
they?"

"Anything but. They only
complicated things, explaining that if you subtracted from 1618 the
one hundred and eighty-eight years promised by the Rosicrucians,
you got 1430, the year when the Order of the Golden Fleece, la
Toison d'Or, was established."

"What's that got to do
with anything?"

"I don't understand the
one hundred and eighty-eight years. It seems to me it should have
been one hundred and twenty, but mystical subtractions and
additions always come out the way you want. As for la Toison d'Or,
it's a reference to the Argonauts, who, an unimpeachable source
once told me, had some connection with the Holy Grail and therefore
with the Templars. But that's not all. Fludd, who seems to have
been as prolific as Barbara Cartland, brought out four more books
between 1617 and 1619, including Utriusque cosmi historia, brief
remarks on the universe, illustrated with roses and crosses
throughout. Maier then mustered all his courage and put out his
Silentium post clamores, in which he claimed that the confraternity
did indeed exist and was connected not only to la Toison d'Or but
also to the Order of the Garter. Except that he was too lowly a
person to be received into it. Imagine the reaction of the scholars
of Europe! If the Rosicrucians didn't accept even Maier, the order
must have been really exclusive. So now all the pseuds bent over
backward to get in. In other words, everyone said the Rosicrucians
existed, though no one admitted to having actually seen them.
Everyone wrote as if trying to set up a meeting or wheedle an
audience, but no one had the courage to say I'm one, and some,
maybe only because they had never been approached, said the order
didn't exist; others said the order existed precisely because they
had been approached."

"And not a peep out of
the Rosicrucians."

"Quiet as
mice."

"Open your mouth. You
need some mamaia."

"Yum. Meanwhile, the
Thirty Years' War began, and Johann Valentin Andreae wrote Turns
Babel, promising that the Antichrist would be defeated within the
year, while one Ireneus Agnostus wrote Tintinnabulum
sophorum¡X"

"Tintinnabulum! I love
it."

"¡Xnot a word of which
is comprehensible. But then Campa-nella, or someone acting on his
behalf, declared in Spanischen Monarchy that the whole Rosy Cross
business was a game of corrupt minds...And that's it. Between 1621
and 1623 they all shut up."

"Just like
that?"

"Just like that. They
got tired of it. Like the Beatles. But only in Germany. Otherwise,
it's the story of a toxic cloud. It shifted to France. One fine
morning in 1623, Rosicrucian manifestoes appeared on the walls of
Paris, informing the good citizens that the deputies of the
confraternity's chief college had moved to their city and were
ready to accept applications. But according to another version, the
manifestoes came right out and said there were thirty-six
invisibles scattered through the world in groups of six, and that
they had the power to make their adepts invisible. Hey! The
thirty-six again!"

"What
thirty-six?"

"The ones in my Templar
document."

"No imagination at all,
these people. What next?"

"Collective madness
broke out. Some defended the Rosicrucians, others wanted to meet
them, still others accused them of devil worship, alchemy, and
heresy, claiming that Ashtoreth had intervened to make them rich,
powerful, capable of flying from place to place. The talk of the
town, in other words."

"Smart, those brethren.
Nothing like a Paris launching to make you fashionable."

"You're right. Listen to
what happened next. Descartes¡Xthat's right, Descartes
himself¡Xhad, several years before, gone looking for them in
Germany, but he never found them, because, as his biographer says,
they deliberately disguised themselves. By the time he got back to
Paris, the manifestoes had appeared, and he learned mat everybody
considered him a Rosicrucian. Not a good thing to be, given the
atmosphere at the time. It also irritated his friend Mersenne, who
was already fulminating against the Rosicrucians, calling them
wretches, subversives, mages, and cabalists bent on sowing
perverted doctrines. So what does Descartes do? Simply appears in
public as often as possible. Since everybody can undeniably see
him, he must not be a Rosicru-cian, because if he were, he'd be
invisible."

"That's method for
you!"

"Of course, denying it
wouldn't have worked. The way things were, if somebody came up to
you and said, ¡¥Hi there, I'm a Rosicrucian,' that meant he wasn't.
No self-respecting Rosicru-cian would acknowledge it. On the
contrary, he would deny it to his last breath."

"But you can't say that
anyone who denies being a Rosicrucian is a Rosicrucian, because I
say I'm not, and that doesn't make me one."

"But the denial is
itself suspicious."

"No, it's not. What
would a Rosicrucian do once he realized people weren't believing
those who said they were, and that people suspected only those who
said they weren't? He'd say he was, to make them think he
wasn't."

"Damnation. So those who
say they're Rosicrucians are lying, which means they really are!
No, no, Amparo, we musn't fall into their trap. Their spies are
everywhere, even under this bed, so now they know that we know, and
therefore they say they aren't."

"Darling, you're scaring
me."

"Don't worry, I'm here,
and I'm stupid, so when they say they aren't, I'll believe they are
and unmask them at once. The Rosicrucian unmasked is harmless; you
can shoo him out the window with a rolled-up newspaper."

"What about Aglie? He
wants us to think he's the Comte de Saint-Germain. Obviously so
we'll think he isn't. Therefore, he's a Rosicrucian. Or isn't
he?"

"Listen, Amparo, let's
get some sleep."

"Oh, no, now I want to
hear the rest."

"The rest is a complete
mess. Everybody's a Rosicrucian. In 1627 Francis Bacon's New
Atlantis was published, and readers thought he was talking about
the land of the Rosicrucians, even though he never mentioned them.
Poor Johann Valentin Andreae died, still swearing up and down that
he wasn't a Rosicrucian, or if he said he was, he had only been
kidding, but by now it was too late. The Rosicrucians were
everywhere, aided by the feet that they didn't exist.''

"Like God."

"Now that you mention
it, let's see. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of
practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest.
They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each
one's free to take it and run with it. At the end, they'll see
who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some
friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but
insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn't bad, just a
little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the
philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an
appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what's happening,
it's too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus,
Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and
a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty...Toi,
apo-cryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere. It all goes to
Peter's head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell
the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of
Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there are locusts
all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where's all this blood
coming from? The others say he's drunk, or maybe it's
arteriosclerosis...Who knows, maybe it really happened that
way."