Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (50 page)

The earth is a magnetic
body; in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast
magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago.

¡XH. P. Blavatsky, Isis
Unveiled, New York, Boulton, 1877, I, p. xxiii

We gave it a try, and we
succeeded.

The earth is a great
magnet, and the force and direction of its currents are influenced
by the celestial spheres, the cycle of the seasons, the precession
of the equinoxes, the cosmic cycles. Thus the pattern of the
currents changes. But it must change like hair, which, though it
grows everywhere on the top and sides of the skull, nevertheless
spirals out from a point toward the back, where it rebels most
against the comb. When that point has been identified, when the
most powerful station has been established there, it will be
possible to control, direct, command all the telluric currents of
the planet. The Templars realized that the secret lay not only in
possessing the global map of the currents, but also in knowing the
critical point, the Omphalos, the Umbilicus Telluris, the Navel of
the World, the Source of the Command.

All alchemistic
talk¡Xthe chthonic descent of the Black Work, the electric charge
of the White¡Xis only a metaphor, a metaphor clear to the
initiated, for this age-old auscultation whose final result will be
the Red: global knowledge, brilliant dominion over the planetary
system of currents. The secret, the real secret, of alchemy and
Templars is the search for the Wellspring of that internal rhythm,
as sweet, awesome, and regular as the throbbing of the serpent
Kundalini, still unknown in many of its aspects, yet surely as
precise as a clock, for it is the rhythm of the one true Stone that
fell in exile from heaven, the Great Mother Earth.

This was what Philip the
Fair wanted to know. Hence the inquisitors' sly insistence on the
mysterious kiss in posteriori parte spine dorsi. They wanted the
secret of Kundalini; who cares about sodomy.

"It's perfect,"
Diotallevi said. "But then, when you know how to direct the
telluric currents, what do you do with them? Make beer?"

"Come on," I said.
"Haven't you grasped the significance of this discovery? In the
Telluric Navel you place the most powerful valve, which enables you
to foresee rain and drought, to release hurricanes, tidal waves,
earthquakes, to split continents, sink islands (no doubt Atlantis
disappeared in some such reckless experiment), raise mountain
chains....You realize the atomic bomb is nothing in comparison?
Besides which, it also hurts the one who drops it. From your
control tower you telephone, for example, the president of the
United States, and you say to him: By tomorrow morning I want a
dodecadillion dollars¡Xor the independence of Latin America, or the
state of Hawaii, or the destruction of your stockpile of nuclear
weapons¡Xor else the San Andreas Fault will crack definitively and
Las Vegas will become a floating casino..."

"But Las Vegas is in
Nevada."

"Doesn't matter. When
you control the telluric currents, you can snip off Nevada, too,
and Colorado. Then you telephone the Supreme Soviet and you say:
Comrades, by Monday I want all the caviar of the Volga, and I want
Siberia as my frozen-food locker; otherwise I'll suck the Urals
under, I'll make the Caspian overflow, I'll cut loose Lithuania and
Estonia and sink them in the Philippine Trench."

"Yes," Diotallevi said.
"The power would be immense. The earth could be rewritten like the
Torah. Japan lands in the gulf of Panama."

"Panic on Wall
Street."

"Forget about Star Wars.
Forget about transforming base metal into gold. You aim the right
current, stir up the bowels of the earth, and make them do in ten
seconds what it used to take them billions of years to do, and the
whole Ruhr becomes a diamond mine. Eliphas Le"vi said the knowledge
of the universe's tides and currents holds the secret of human
omnipotence."

"That must be so," Belbo
said. "It's like transforming the whole world into an orgone box.
It's obvious. Reich was definitely a Templar."

"Everyone was, except
us. Thank God weVe caught on. Now we're a step ahead of
them."

But what stopped the
Templars, once they knew the secret? The problem was how to exploit
it. Between knowing and know-how there was a gap. So, instructed by
the diabolical Saint Bernard, the Templars replaced the menhirs,
poor Celtic valves, with Gothic cathedrals, far more sensitive and
powerful, their subterranean crypts containing black virgins, in
direct contact with the radioactive strata; and they covered Europe
with a network of receiver-transmitter stations communicating to
one another the power and the direction, the flow and the tension,
of the telluric currents.

"I say they located the
silver mines in the New World, caused eruptions of silver there,
and then, controlling the Gulf Stream, shifted that precious metal
to the Portuguese coast. Tomar was the distribution center; the
Foret d'Orient, the chief storehouse. This was the origin of their
wealth. But this was peanuts. They realized that to exploit their
secret fully they would have to wait for a technological advance
that would take at least six hundred years."

Thus the Templars
organized the Plan in such a way that only their successors, at the
moment when they would be able to make proper use of what they
knew, would learn the location of the Umbilicus Telluris. But how
did the Templars distribute the pieces of the revelation to the
thirty-six scattered throughout the world? How could a
straightforward message have that many parts? And why would they
need such a complicated message just to say that the Umbilicus was,
for example, in Baden-Baden, or Tralee, or Chattanooga?

A map? But a map would
be marked with an X at the point of the Umbilicus. Whoever held the
piece with the X would know everything and not need the other
pieces. No; it had to be more involved. We racked our brains for
several days, until Belbo decided to resort to Abulafia. And the
reply was:

Guillaume Postel dies in
1581.

Bacon is Viscount St.
Albans.

In the Conservatoire is
Poucault's Pendulum.

The time had come to
find a function for the Pendulum.

I was able, in few days,
to suggest a rather elegant solution. A Diabolical had submitted to
us a text on the hermetic secret of cathedrals. According to this
author, the builders of Chartres one day left a plumb line hanging
from the keystone of a vault, and from that had easily deduced the
rotation of the earth. Hence the motive for the trial of Galileo,
Diotallevi remarked: the Church had caught a whiff of Templar about
him. No, Belbo said; the cardinals who condemned Galileo were
Templar adepts infiltrating Rome. They wanted to shut up that
damned Tuscan quickly, that traitor Templar who in his vanity was
about to spill the beans four hundred years before the date of the
Plan's fulfillment.

This explained why
beneath the Pendulum those master masons had drawn a labyrinth, a
stylized image of the system of subterranean currents. We sought an
illustration of the labyrinth of Chartres: a solar clock, a compass
card, a vein system, a sleepy sinusoidal trail of the Serpent. A
global chart of the telluric tides.

"All right, let's assume
the Templars used the Pendulum to indicate the Umbilicus. Instead
of the labyrinth, which is, after all, an abstract scheme, on the
floor you put a map of the world. The point marked by the tip of
the Pendulum at a given hour is the point that marks the Umbilicus.
But which Pendulum?"

"The place is beyond
discussion: Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the Refuge."

"Yes," Belbo replied,
"but let's suppose that at the stroke of midnight the Pendulum
swings from Copenhagen to Capetown. Where is the Umbilicus? In
Denmark or in South Africa?"

"A good observation," I
said. "But our Diabolical tells us also that in Chartres there is a
fissure in a stained-glass window of the choir, and at a given hour
of the day a sunbeam enters through the crack and always hits the
same place, always the same stone of the floor. I don't remember
what conclusion he draws from this, but in any event it's a great
secret. So here's the mechanism: in the choir of Saint-Martin there
is a window that has an uncolored spot near the juncture of two
lead cames. It was carefully calculated, and probably for six
hundred years someone has always taken care to keep it as it is. At
sunrise on a given day of the year..."

"...which can only be
the dawn of June 24, Saint John's day, feast of the summer
solstice..."

"...yes, on that day and
at that hour, the first pure ray of sun that comes through the
windows strikes the floor beneath the Pendulum, and the Pendulum's
intersection of the ray at that instant is the precise point on the
map where the Umbilicus is to be found!"

"Perfect," Belbo said.
"But suppose it's overcast?"

"They wait until the
following year."

"I'm sorry, but..."
Belbo said. "The last meeting is to be in Jerusalem. Shouldn't the
Pendulum be hanging from the top of the dome of the Mosque of
Omar?"

"No," I said. "At
certain places on the globe the Pendulum completes its circle in
thirty-six hours; at the North Pole it takes twenty-four hours; at
the Equator the cycle doesn't vary with the season. So the location
matters. If the Templars made their discovery at Saint-Martin,
their calculation is valid only in Paris; in Palestine, the
Pendulum would mark a different curve."

"And how do we know they
made the discovery at Saint-Martin?"

"The fact that they
chose Saint-Martin as their Refuge, that from the prior of Saint
Albans, to Postel, to the Convention they kept it under their
control, that after Foucault's first experiments they installed the
Pendulum there. Too many clues."

"But still, the last
meeting is in Jerusalem."

"So? In Jerusalem
they'll put the message together, and that's not a matter of a few
minutes. Then they'll prepare for a year, and the following June 23
all six groups will meet in Paris, to learn finally where the
Umbilicus is, and then they'll set to work to conquer the
world."

"But," Belbo insisted,
"there's still something I can't figure out. Although there's this
final revelation about the Umbilicus, all thirty-six must have
known that before. The Pendulum had been used in cathedrals; so it
wasn't a secret. What would have prevented Bacon or Postel, or even
Foucault¡Xwho must have been a Templar himself, seeing all the fuss
he made over the Pendulum¡Xfrom just putting a map of the world on
the floor and orienting it by the cardinal points? We're oif the
track."

"No, we're not off the
track," I said. "The message reveals something that none of them
could know: what map to use!"

A map is not the
territory.

¡XAlfred Korzybski,
Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The International
Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58

"You're familiar with
the situation of cartography at the time of the Templars," I said.
"In that century there were Arab maps that, among other things, put
Africa at the top and Europe at the bottom; navigators' maps,
fairly accurate, all things considered; and maps mat by then were
already three or four hundred years old but were still accepted in
some schools. Mind you, to reveal the location of the Umbilicus
they didn't need an accurate map, in today's sense. It had to be
simply a map possessing this virtue: once oriented, it would show
the Umbilicus at the point where the arc of the Pendulum is struck
by the first ray of sun on June 24. Now listen carefully. Let's
suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the Umbilicus is in
Jerusalem. Even with our modern maps, the position of Jerusalem
depends on the projection used. And God knows what kind of map the
Templars had. But it doesn't matter. It's not the Pendulum that's
calibrated according to the map; it's the map that's calibrated
according to the Pendulum. You follow me? It could be the craziest
map in the world, as long as, when placed beneath the Pendulum at
the crack of dawn on the twenty-fourth of June, it shows the one
and only spot that is Jerusalem."

"This doesn't solve our
problem," Diotallevi said.

"Of course not, and it
doesn't solve it for the invisible thirty-six either. Because if
you don't have the right map, forget it. Let's take the case of a
map oriented in the standard way, with east in the direction of the
apse and west toward the nave, since that's how churches are built.
Now let's say, at random, that on that fatal dawn the Pendulum is
near the boundary of the southeast quadrant. If it were a clock,
we'd say that the hour hand is at five-twenty-five. All right? Now
look."

I went to dig out a
history of cartography.

"Here. Exhibit number 1:
a twelfth-century map. It follows the T-structured maps: Asia is at
the top with the Earthly Paradise; to the left, Europe; to the
right, Africa; and here, beyond Africa, they Ve also put the
Antipodes. Exhibit number 2: a map inspired by the Somnium
Scipionis of Macrobius, and it survives in various versions into
the sixteenth century. Africa's a bit narrow, but that's all right.
Now look: orient the two maps in the same way, and you see that on
the first map five-twenty-five corresponds to Arabia, and on the
second map to New Zealand, since that's where the second map has
the Antipodes. You may know everything about the Pendulum, but if
you don't know what map to use, you're lost. So the message
contained instructions, elaborately coded, on where to find the
right map, which may have been specially drawn for the occasion.
The message told where to look, in what manuscript, in what
library, abbey, castle. It's even possible that Dee or Bacon or
someone else reconstructed the message. Who knows? The message said
the map was at X, but in the meantime, with everything that was
going on in Europe, the abbey that housed the map burned down, or
the map was stolen, hidden God knows where. Maybe someone has the
map but doesn't know the use of it, or knows it's valuable but
doesn't know why, and he's going around the world looking for a
buyer. Imagine all the confusion of offers, false trails, messages
that say other things but are understood to refer to the map, and
messages that indeed refer to the map but are read as if hinting
at, say, the production of gold. No doubt some people attempt to
reconstruct the map purely on the basis of conjectures."

"What sorts of
conjectures?"

[...]

"Well, for example,
micro-macrocosmic correspondences. Here's another map. You know
where it comes from? It appears in the second treatise of the
Utriusque Cosmi Historia of Robert Fludd. Fludd is the
Rosicrucians' man in London, don't forget. Now what does our man
do, our Robertus de Fluctibus, as he liked to style himself? He
offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the
entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole,
naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal
Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map specially
conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It's obvious,
undeniable; I can't imagine why somebody hasn't already
seen¡X"

"The fact is, the
Diabolicals are very, very slow," Belbo said.

"The fact is, we are the
only worthy heirs of the Templars. But, to continue. You recognize
the design. It's a mobile rotula, like the ones Trithemius used for
his coded messages. This isn't a map, then; it's a design for a
machine to produce variations of maps, until the right map is
found! And Fludd says as much in the caption: This is the sketch
for an instrumentum, it still needs work."

"But wasn't Fludd the
one who persisted in denying the rotation of the earth? How could
he think of the Pendulum?''

"We're dealing with
initiates. An initiate denies what he knows, denies knowing it, to
conceal it."

"This," Belbo said,
"would explain why Dee paid so much attention to those royal
cartographers. It was not to discover the ¡¥true' form of the
earth, but to reconstruct, among all the mistaken maps, the one
right map, the one of use to him."

"Not bad, not bad at
all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the
painstaking reconstruction of a false text."