Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (53 page)

Oh, how well you have
unmasked those infernal sects that are preparing the way for the
Antichrist...But there is still one sect that you have touched only
lightly.

¡XLetter from Captain
Simonini to Barruel, published in Lacivilta cattolica, October 21,
1882

Napoleon's rapprochement
with the Jews caused the Jesuits to alter their course. Barruel's
Memoires had contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 he
received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who reminded him
that Mani and the Old Man of the Mountain were also Jews, that
Masonry had been founded by the Jews, and that the Jews had
infiltrated all the existing secret societies.

Simonini's letter,
shrewdly circulated in Paris, was an embarrassment for Napoleon,
who had just got in touch with the Grand Sanhedrin. This move
obviously alarmed the Paulicians too, because the Holy Synod of the
Russian Orthodox Church declared: "Napoleon now proposes to unite
all the Jews, whom the wrath of God has scattered over the face of
the earth, so that they will overturn the church of Christ and
proclaim Napoleon the true Messiah."

The good Barruel
accepted the idea that the plot was not only Masonic but also
Judeo-Masonic. Further, this satanic element allowed him to attack
a new enemy: the Alta Vendita Carbonara, and later the anticlerical
fathers of the Risorgimento, from Maz-zini to Garibaldi.

"But this all happens in
the middle of the nineteenth century," Diotallevi said, "whereas
the big anti-Semitic campaign gets under way at the end of the
century, with the publication of the Protocols of the Learned
Elders ofZion. And the Protocols appear in Russia. So they are an
initiative of the Paulicians."

"Naturally," Belbo said.
"It's clear now that the Jerusalemite group had broken up into
three branches. The first branch, through the Spanish and Provencal
cabalists, went on to inspire the neo-Templar camp; the second was
taken over by the Baconian wing, and they all became scientists and
bankers. They're the ones the Jesuits oppose so fiercely. But there
is a third branch, and it established itself in Russia. The Russian
Jews are generally small tradesmen and moneylenders, and for that
reason are hated by the impoverished peasants; but since Jewish
culture is a culture of the Book, and all Jews know how to read and
write, they eventually swell the ranks of the liberal and
revolutionary intelligentsia. The Paulicians, in contrast, are
mystics, reactionaries, hand in glove with the landowners, and they
have also infiltrated the court. Obviously, between them and the
Jerusa-lemites there can be no traffic. So they are bent on
discrediting the Jews, and through the Jews¡Xthis they learned from
the Jesuits¡Xthey cause trouble for their adversaries abroad, both
the neo-Templars and the Baconians."

There can no longer be
any doubt. With all the power and the terror of Satan, the reign of
the triumphant King of Israel is approaching our unregenerate
world; the King born from the blood of Zion, the Antichrist,
approaches the throne of universal power.

¡XSergei Nilus, Epilogue
to the Protocols

The idea was acceptable.
We had only to consider who had introduced the Protocols in
Russia.

One of the most
influential Martinists at the end of the century, Papus, dazzled
Nicholas II during his visit to Paris, then went to Moscow, taking
with him one Philippe Nizier Anselme Vachot. Possessed by the Devil
at the age of six, healer at thirteen, magnetizer in Lyon, Philippe
fascinated both Nicholas II and his hysterical wife. He was invited
to court, named physician of the military academy of St.
Petersburg, made a general and a councilor of state.

His enemies decided to
diminish his influence by setting against him an equally
charismatic figure. And Nilus was found.

Nilus was an itinerant
monk who, in priestly habit, wandered in the forests (what else?)
displaying a prophet's great beard, two wives, a little daughter,
an assistant (or lover, perhaps), all hanging on his every word.
Half guru, the kind that runs off with the collection plate, and
half hermit, the kind that yells that the end is near, he was in
fact obsessed by the Antichrist.

The plan of Nilus's
supporters was to have him ordained, and then, after he married
(what was another wife, more or less?) Elena Alexandrovna Ozerova,
the tsarina's maid of honor, to have him become the confessor of
the sovereigns.

"I'm anything but a
bloodthirsty man," Belbo said, "but I begin to feel that the
massacre of Tsarskoye Selo was perhaps a justifiable extermination
of vermin."

Anyway, Philippe's
supporters accused Nilus of leading a lewd life, and God knows they
were right. Nilus had to leave the court, but at this point someone
came to his aid, handing him the text of the Protocols. Since
everybody got the Martinists (who derived from Saint Martin) mixed
up with the Martinezists (followers of Martfnez Pasqualis, whom
Aglie so dislikes), and since Pasqualis, according to a widespread
rumor, was Jewish, by discrediting the Jews the Protocols also
discredited the Martinists, and with the discrediting of the
Martinists, Philippe was booted out.

Actually, a first,
incomplete, version of the Protocols had already appeared in 1903,
in Znamia, a St. Petersburg paper edited by a rabid anti-Semite
named Kruscevan. In 1905, with the approval of the government
censors, a complete text anonymously appeared, under the tide The
Source of Our Evils, edited by one Boutmi, who with Kruscevan had
founded the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black
Hundreds, which enlisted common criminals to carry out pogroms and
extremist right-wing acts of violence. Boutmi later published,
under his own name, further editions of the work, with the title
The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols from the Secret Archives
of the Central Chancellery ofZion.

But these were cheap
booklets. An expanded version of the Protocols, the one that was to
be translated all over the world, came out in 1905, in the third
edition of Nilus's book, The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is
an Imminent Political Possibility, Tsarskoye Selo, under the aegis
of a local chapter of the Red Cross. The scope was broader, the
framework that of mystical reflection, and the book ended up in the
hands of the tsar. The metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud
in all the churches of the city.

"But what," I asked, "is
the connection between the Protocols and our Plan? We keep talking
about these Protocols. Should we read them?"

"Nothing could be
simpler," Diotallevi said. "There's always someone who reprints
them. Publishers used to do it with a great show of indignation,
purely out of a sense of duty to make available a historical
document, then little by little they stopped apologizing and
reprinted it with unrepentant pleasure." "What genteel
gentiles."

The only society known
to us that is capable of rivaling us in these arts is that of the
Jesuits. But we have succeeded in discrediting the Jesuits in the
eyes of the stupid populace, because that society is an open
organization, whereas we stay in the wings, maintaining
secrecy.

¡XProtocols,
V

The Protocols are a
series of twenty-four declarations, a program of action, attributed
to the Elders of Zion. To us, these Elders' intentions seemed
somewhat contradictory. At one point they wanted to abolish freedom
of the press, at another they seemed to encourage libertinage. They
criticized liberalism, but supported the sort of thing today's
leftist radicals attribute to the capitalist multinationals,
including the use of sports and visual education to stultify the
working class. They analyzed various methods of seizing world
power; they praised the strength of gold; they advocated supporting
revolution in every country, sowing discontent and confusion by
proclaiming liberal ideas, but they also wanted to exacerbate
inequality. They schemed to establish everywhere regimes of straw
men they would control; they fomented war and urged the production
of arms and (as Salon had said) the building of metros (the
underground world!) in order to have a way of mining the big
cities.

They said the end
justified the means and were in favor of anti-Semitism both to
control the population of Jewish poor and to soften the hearts of
gentiles in the face of Jewish tragedy (an expensive ploy,
Diotallevi said, but effective). They candidly declared, "We have
unlimited ambition, an all-consuming greed, a merciless desire for
revenge, and an intense hatred" (displaying an exquisite masochism
by reinforcing, with gusto, the cliche of the evil Jew that was
already in circulation in the anti-Semitic press, the stereotype
that would adorn the cover of all the editions of their book). They
called for abolishment of the study of the classics and of ancient
history.

"In other words," Belbo
said, "the Elders of Zion were a bunch of blockheads."

"Don't joke," Diotallevi
said. "This book was taken very seriously. But there's something
that strikes me as odd. While the Jewish plot was meant to seem
centuries old, all the references in the Protocols are to petty
fin-de-siecle French questions. The business about visual education
stulifying the masses is a clear allusion to the educational
program of Leon Bourgeois, who had five Masons in his government.
Another passage advises electing people compromised in the Panama
Scandal, and one of these was Emile Loubet, who in 1899 became
president of the French republic. The Metro is mentioned because in
those days the right-wing papers were complaining that the
Compag-nie du Metropolitain had too many Jewish shareholders. Hence
the theory that the text was cobbled up in France in the last
decade of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Dreyfus
Affair, to weaken the liberal front."

"That isn't what
impresses me," Belbo said. "It's the sense of deja vu. The upshot
is that these Elders are planning to conquer the world, and we've
heard all that before. Take away the references to events and
problems of the last century, replace the tunnels of the Metro with
the tunnels of Provins, and everywhere it says Jews write Templars,
and everywhere it says Elders of Zion write Thirty-six Invisibles
divided into six...My friends, this is the Ordonation of
Provins!"

Voltaire lui-meme est
mort jesuite: en avoit-il le moindre soupcon?

¡XF. N. de Bonneville,
Les Jesuites chasses de la Mafonnerie et leur poignard brise par
les Masons, Orient de Londres, 1788, 2, p. 74

All along it had been
right in front of us, the whole thing, and we had failed to see it.
Over six centuries, six groups fight to achieve the Plan of
Provins, and each group takes the text of that Plan, simply changes
the subject, and attributes it to its adversaries.

After the Rosicrucians
turn up in France, the Jesuits reverse the Plan, replace it with
its negative: discrediting the Baconians and the emerging English
Masonry.

When the Jesuits invent
neo-Templarism, the Marquis de Lu-chet attributes the Plan to the
neo-Templars. The Jesuits, who by now are jettisoning the
neo-Templars, copy Luchet, through Barruel, but they attribute the
Plan to all Freemasons in general.

Then the Baconian
counteroffensive. Digging into the texts of this liberal and
secular polemic, we discovered that from Mi-chelet and Quinet down
to Garibaldi and Gioberti, the Ordonation was attributed to the
Jesuits (perhaps that idea originated with the Templar Pascal and
his friends). The subject was popularized by Le Juif errant of
Eugene Sue and by his character, the evil Monsieur Rodin,
quintessence of the Jesuit world conspiracy. But as we looked
further into Sue, we found far more: a text that seemed copied¡Xbut
half a century in advance¡Xfrom the Protocols, almost word for
word. This was the final chapter of Les Mysteres du peuple, where
the diabolical Jesuit plan is exposed down to the last criminal
detail: in a document sent by the general of the Society, Father
Roothaan (historical figure) to Monsieur Rodin (who appears in the
earlier Juif errant). Ru-dolphe de Gerolstein (previously the hero
of the Mysteres de Paris) comes into possession of this document
and reveals it to the other democracy-loving characters: "You see,
my dear Le-brenn, how cunningly this infernal plot is ordered, and
what frightful sorrows, what horrendous enslavement, what terrible
despotism it would spell for Europe and the world, were it to
succeed..."

It seemed Nilus's
preface to the Protocols. Sue also attributed to the Jesuits the
motto (which will be found in the Protocols, attributed to the
Jews), "The end justifies the means."

There is no need to
multiply the evidence to prove that this degree of Rosy Cross was
skillfully introduced by the leaders of Masonry...The doctrine, its
hatred, and its sacrilegious practices, exactly those of the
Cabala, of the Gnostics, and of the Manicheans, reveals to us the
identity of the authors, namely the Jewish Cabalists.

¡XMons. Leon Meurin,
S.J., La Franc-Mafonnerie, Synagogue de Satan, Paris, Retaux, 1893,
p. 182

When Les Mysteres du
peuple appears and the Jesuits see that the Ordonation is
attributed to them, they quickly adopt the one tactic not yet used
by anyone. Exploiting Simonini's letter, they attribute the
Ordonation to the Jews.

In 1869, Henri Gougenot
de Mousseaux, famous for two books on magic, publishes Les Juifs,
le judaisme et la judaisation des peuples chretiens, which says
that the Jews use the cabala and are worshipers of Satan, since a
secret line of descent links Cain directly to the Gnostics, the
Templars, and the Masons. Gou-genot receives a special benediction
from Pius IX.

But the Plan, novelized
by Sue, is rehashed by others, who are not Jesuits. There's a nice
story, almost a thriller, that takes place a bit later. In
1921¡Xafter the appearance of the Protocols, which it took very
seriously¡Xthe Times of London learns that a Russian monarchist
landowner who fled to Turkey has bought from a former officer of
the Russian secret police, now a refugee in Constantinople, a
number of old books, and among them is one without a cover. On its
spine it has only "Joli," and there is a preface dated 1864. This
is the source of the Protocols. The Times does some research in the
British Museum and discovers the original book, by Maurice Joly,
Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, Bruxelles
(though it says Geneve on the title page), 1864. Maurice Joly has
no connection with Cretineau-Joly, but the similarity of the names
must mean something.

Joly's book is a liberal
pamphlet against Napoleon III, in which Machiavelli, who represents
the dictator's cynicism, argues with Montesquieu. Joly is arrested
for this revolutionary venture, he serves fifteen years in prison,
and in 1878 he kills himself. The Jewish plot enunciated in the
Protocols is taken almost literally from the words Joly puts in
Machiavelli's mouth (the end justifies the means); after
Machiavelli, the words become Napoleon's. The Times, however, does
not realize (but we do) that Joly had shamelessly copied Sue's
document, which predates it by at least seven years.

An anti-Semite
authoress, devotee of the plot theory and the Unknown Superiors, a
certain Nesta Webster, faced by this development, which reduces the
Protocols to the level of cheap plagiarism, provides us with a
brilliant idea, the sort of idea that only a true initiate or
initiate-hunter can have: Joly was an initiate, he knew the Plan of
the Unknown Superiors, and attributed it to Napoleon III, whom he
hated. But this does not mean that the Plan does not exist
independently of Napoleon. Since the Plan outlined in the Protocols
is a perfect description of the customary behavior of the Jews,
then the Jews must have invented the Plan. We had only to reread
Mrs. Webster in the light of her own logic: Since the Plan
coincided exactly with what the Templars wanted, it was the Plan of
the Templars.

Besides, we had the
logic of facts on our side. We were particularly attracted by the
episode in the Prague cemetery. This was the story of a certain
Hermann Goedsche, an insignificant Prussian postal employee who
published false documents to discredit the democrat Waldeck. The
documents accused him of planning to assassinate the king of
Prussia. Goedsche, after he was unmasked, became the editor of the
organ of the big conservative landowners. Die Preussische
Kreuzzeitung. Then, under the name Sir John RetclifFe, he began
writing sensational novels, including Biarritz, 1868. In it he
described an occultist scene in the Prague cemetery, very similar
to the meeting of the Illuminati described by Dumas at the
beginning of Giuseppe Balsamo, where Cagliostro, chief of the
Unknown Superiors, among them Swedenborg, arranges the Affair of
the Diamond Necklace. In the Prague cemetery the representatives of
the twelve tribes of Israel gather, to expound their plans for the
conquest of the world.

In 1876 a Russian
pamphlet reprints the scene from Biarritz, but as if it were fact,
not fiction. And in 1881, in France, Le Contemporain does the same
thing, claiming that the news comes from an unimpeachable source:
the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1896 one Bournand
publishes a book, Les Juifs, nos contemporains, and repeats the
scene of the Prague cemetery; he says that the subversive speech is
made by the great rabbi John Readclif. A later version; however,
reports that the real Readclif was taken to the fatal cemetery by
Ferdinand Las-salle.

The plans revealed are
more or less the same as described a few years earlier, in 1880, by
the Revue des Etudes Juives, which publishes two letters attributed
to Jews of the fifteenth century. The Jews of Aries ask the help of
the Jews of Constantinople, because in France they are being
persecuted, and the latter reply: "Well-beloved brothers in Moses,
if the king of France forces you to become Christian, do so,
because you cannot do otherwise, but preserve the law of Moses in
your hearts. If they strip you of your possessions, raise your sons
to be merchants, so that eventually they can strip Christians of
their possessions. If they threaten your lives, raise your sons to
be physicians and pharmacists, so that they can take the lives of
Christians. If they destroy your synagogues, raise your sons, to be
canons and clerics, so that they can destroy the churches of the
Christians. If they inflict other tribulations on you, raise your
sons to be lawyers and notaries and have them mingle in the
business of every state, so that putting the Christians under your
yoke, you will rule the world and can then take your
revenge."

It was, again, the Plan
of the Jesuits and, before that, of the Ordonation of the Templars.
Few variations, few changes: the Protocols were self-generating; a
blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another.

And when we racked our
brains to find the missing link that connected this whole fine
story to Nilus, we encountered Rach-kovsky, the head of the tsar's
secret police, the terrible Okhrana.