Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (57 page)

And Kairos appeared,
holding in his hand a scepter that signified royalty, and he gave
it to the first created God, and he took it and said: "Your secret
name shall have 36 letters."

¡XHasan as-Sabbah,
Sargozasht is-Sayyidna

A bravura performance,
but now explanations were in order. I provided them in the days
that followed: long explanations, detailed, documented. On a table
at Pilade's I showed Belbo proof after proof, which he followed
with increasingly glazed eyes while he chain-smoked and every five
minutes held out his empty glass, the ghost of an ice cube at the
bottom, and Pilade would hasten to refill it, without waiting to be
told.

My first sources were
the same ones in which the earliest accounts of the Templars
appeared, from Gerard of Strasbourg to Joinville. The Templars had
come into contact¡Xinto conflict, sometimes, but more often into
mysterious alliance¡Xwith the Assassins of the Old Man of the
Mountain.

The story was
complicated and began after the death of Mahomet, with the schism
between the followers of the ordinary law, the Sunnis, and the
supporters of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, Fatima's husband, who
saw the succession taken from him. It was the enthusiasts of Ali,
the group of adepts called the Shiites, who created the heretic
branch of Islam, the Shi'ah. An occult doctrine, which saw the
continuity of the Revelation not in traditional meditation upon the
words of the Prophet but in the very person of the Imam, lord,
leader, epiphany of the divine, theophanic reality, King of the
World.

Now, what happened to
this heretic Islamic branch, which was gradually infiltrated by all
the esoteric doctrines of the Mediterranean basin, from
Manicheanism to gnosticism, from Neopla-tonism to Iranian
mysticism, by all those impulses whose shifts and development in
the West we had followed for years? It was a long story, impossible
to unravel, partly because the various Arab authors and
protagonists had extremely long names, the texts were transcribed
with a forest of diacritical marks, and as the evening wore on we
could no longer distinguish between Abu ¡¥Abd Allah Muhammad ibn
¡¥AH ibn Razzam al-Ta I al-Kufi, Abu Muhammad ¡¥Ubayd Allah, and
Abu Mu'inl ¡¥Abd Din Na-sir ibn Khusraw MarvazI Qubadiyanl. But an
Arab, I imagine, would have the same difficulty with Aristoteles,
Aristoxenus, Aristarchus, Aristides, Aristagoras, Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Anacreon, and Anacharsis.

But one thing was
certain: Shiism in turn split into two branches, one called the
Twelvers, who await a lost and future imam, and the other, the
Ismailis, born in the realm of the Fa-timids, in Cairo, who
subsequently gave rise to reformed Is-mailism in Persia through a
fascinating figure, the mystical and ferocious Hasan as-Sabbah.
Sabbaty set up his headquarters to the southwest of the Caspian, in
the impregnable fortress of Ala-mut, the Nest of the
Raptor.

There Sabbah surrounded
himself with his devotees, the fidalyln or fedayeen, those faithful
unto death; and he used them to carry out his political
assassinations, to be instruments of the jihad hafi, the secret
holy war. The fedayeen later gained an unfortunate reputation under
the name Assassins¡Xnot a lovely word now, but for them it was
splendid, the emblem of a race of warrior monks who greatly
resembled the Templars; a spiritual knighthood.

The fortress or castle
of Alamut: the Rock. Built on an airy crest four hundred meters
long and in places only a few meters wide, thirty at most. From the
distance, ¡¥o one arriving along the Azerbaijan road, it looked
like a natural wall, dazzling white in the sun, bluish in the
purple dusk, bloody at dawn; on some days it blended with the
clouds or flashed with lightning. Along its upper ridge you could
just make out what seemed a row of flint swords that shot upward
for hundreds of meters. The most accessible side was a treacherous
slope of gravel, which arche-ologists even today are unable to
scale. The fortress was reached by a secret stairway bitten out of
the rock, like the spiral peel of a stone apple, and a single
archer could defend it. Dizzying, a world elsewhere. Alamut could
be reached only astride eagles.

Here Sabbah ruled, and
his successors after him, each to be known as the Old Man of the
Mountain. First of them was the sulfurous Sinan.

Sabbah had invented a
method of dominion over his men, and to his adversaries he declared
that if they did not submit to him, they would die. There was no
escaping the Assassins. Nizam al-Mulk, prime minister of the sultan
when the Crusaders were still exerting themselves to conquer
Jerusalem, was stabbed to death, as he was being carried on his
litter to the quarters of his women. The killer had approached him
disguised as a dervish. And the atabeg of Hims, guarded by a squad
of men armed to the teeth, as he came down from his castle to go to
Friday prayers, was slain by the Old Man's killers.

Sinan decided to murder
the Marquis Corrado di Montefeltro, a Christian, and readied two of
his men, who introduced themselves among the infidels able to mimic
their customs and language after much preparation. They had
disguised themselves as monks and, while the bishop of Tyre was
entertaining the hapless marquis at a banquet, leaped upon the
victim and stabbed him. One Assassin was immediately killed by the
bodyguards; the other took refuge in a church, waited until the
wounded man was brought there, attacked him again, finishing him
off, then died blissfully.

Blissfully because, as
the Arab historiographers of the Sunni line and then the Christian
chroniclers from Oderic of Porde-none to Marco Polo wrote, the Old
Man had discovered a way to make his knights faithful even to the
supreme sacrifice, to make them invincible, horrible war machines.
He took them as youths, asleep, to the summit of the mountain,
where he stupefied them with pleasures¡Xwine, women, flowers,
delectable banquets, and hashish¡Xwhich gave the sect its name.
When they could no longer do without the perverse delights of that
invented paradise, he dragged them out of their sleep and set
before them a choice: Go, kill, and if you succeed, this paradise
you leave will again be yours, and forever; but if you fail, you
will plunge back into the Gehenna of the everyday.

Dazed by the drug,
helpless before his demands, they sacrificed themselves in
sacrificing others; they were killers destined to be killed,
victims condemned to make victims.

How they were feared!
What tales the Crusaders told about them on moonless nights as the
simoom howled over the desert! How the Templars admired, envied
those splendid animals; how awed they were by the clear will to
martyrdom! The Templars agreed to pay their tolls, asking, in
exchange, formal tributes, in a game of reciprocal concessions,
complicity, brotherhood of arms, disemboweling one another in the
open field but embracing one another in secret, exchanging murmured
words of mystical visions, magic formulas, alchemic
subtleties...

From the Assassins, the
Templars learned occult rites. It was cowardice and ignorance that
kept King Philip's inquisitors from seeing that the spitting on the
cross, the kiss on the anus, the black cat, and the worship of
Baphomet were simply a repetition of other ceremonies, ceremonies
performed under the influence of the first secret the Templars
learned in the Orient: the use of hashish.

So it was obvious that
the Plan was born¡Xhad to be born¡Xthere. From the men of Alamut,
the Templars learned of the subterranean currents. They met the men
of Alamut in Provins and established the secret plot of the
Thirty-six Invisibles, and that is why Christian Rosencreutz
journeyed to Fez and other places in the Orient, and that is why it
was to the Orient that Postel turned, and why it was from Egypt,
home of the Fatimid Ismailis, that the mages of the Renaissance
imported the eponymous divinity of the Plan, Hermes, Hermes-Teuth
or Toth, and why Egyptian figures were used by the mountebank
Cagliostro for his rituals. And the Jesuits, less narrow than we
had thought, with the good Father Kircher, lost no time in throwing
themselves into hieroglyphics, Coptic, and the other Oriental
languages, and Hebrew was only a cover, a nod to the fashion of the
period.

These texts are not
addressed to common mortals...Gnostic perception is a path reserved
for an elite...For, in the words of the Bible: Do not cast your
pearls before swine.

¡XKamal Jumblatt,
Interview in Le Jour, March 31, 1967

Arcana publicata
vilescunt: et gratiam prophanata amittunt. Ergo: ne margaritas
obijce porcis, seu asino substerne rosas.

¡XJohann Valentin
Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,
Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, frontispiece

For that matter, where
else could you find someone able to wait on the rock for six
centuries, someone who had actually waited on the rock? True,
Alamut eventually fell, under the pressure of the Mongols, but the
Ismaili sect survived throughout the East: it mingled with
non-Shiite Sufism, it generated the terrible sect of the Druzes,
and it survived finally among the Indian Khojas, the followers of
the Aga Khan, not far from the site of Agarttha.

But I had discovered
more. Under the Fatimid dynasty, through the Academy of Heliopolis,
the hermetic notions of the ancient Egyptians were rediscovered in
Cairo, and a house of sciences was established there. House of
sciences! Was it from this that Bacon drew the inspiration for his
House of Solomon, which in turn was the model for the
Conservatoire?

"That's it, that's it,
there's no doubt about it," Belbo said, intoxicated. "But now how
do the cabalists fit in?"

"That's only a parallel
story. The rabbis of Jerusalem sense that something happened
between the Templars and the Assassins, and the rabbis of Spain,
snooping around under the pretense of lending money at interest to
the European commanderies, get a whiff of something. They have been
excluded and, spurred by national pride, they decide to figure it
out on their own. What?! We, the Chosen People, are kept in the
dark about the Secret of Secrets? And, bang, the cabalistic
tradition begins: a heroic attempt of the dispersed, the outsiders,
to show up the masters, the ones in power, by claiming to know
all."

"But, doing that, they
give the Christians the impression that they really do know
all."

"And at a certain point
somebody makes the supreme goof, confusing Ismail with
Israel."

"For God's sake, don't
tell me that Barruel and the Protocols and all the rest were simply
the result of a misspelling. Casau-bon, we're reducing a tragic
chapter in history to a mistake of Pico della
Mirandola."

"No, maybe there's
another reason. The Chosen People had taken on the duty of
interpreting the Book. People are afraid of those who make them
look squarely at the Law. But the Assassins? Why didn't they turn
up sooner?"

"Belbo! Think what a
depressed area that was after the battle of Lepanto. Sebottendorf
knows that there is something to be learned from the Turk
dervishes, but Alamut is no more; those Turks are holed up God
knows where. They wait. And finally their moment comes; on the tide
of Islamic irredentism they stick their heads out again. Putting
Hitler in the Plan, we found a good reason for the Second World
War. Now, putting in the Assassins of Alamut, we explain what has
been happening for years in the Persian Gulf. And this is where we
find a place for our Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. A
society whose aim is to heal the rift, at last, between the
spiritual knighthoods of different faiths."

"Or else to stimulate
conflict and take advantage of the confusion. Once again we've done
our job and set History straight. Can it be that at the supreme
moment the Pendulum will reveal that the Umbilicus Mundi is at
Alamut?"

"Let's not go too far.
I'd leave that last point hanging."

"Like the
Pendulum."

"If you like. We can't
just say whatever enters our heads."

"No, no. Strict
scholarship, above all."

That evening I
congratulated myself on having invented a great tale. I was an
aesthete who used the flesh and blood of the world to make Beauty.
But Belbo by now was an adept, and, like other adepts, not through
enlightenment, but faute de mieux.

Claudicat ingenium,
delirat lingua, labat mens.

¡XLucretius, De Rerum
Natura, iii, 453

It must have been about
then that Belbo tried to take stock of what was happening to him.
But the most severe self-analysis could not free him now from the
sickness to which he had grown accustomed.

FILENAME: And what if
it's true?

To invent a Plan. The
Plan justifies you to such a degree that you can no longer be held
accountable, not even for the Plan itself. Just throw the stone and
hide your hand. If there really were a Plan, there would be no
failure.

You never had Cecilia
because the Archons made Annibale Canta-lamessa and Pio Bo
unskilled even with the friendliest of the brass instruments. You
fled the Canal gang because the Decans wanted to spare you for
another holocaust. And the man with the scar has a talisman more
powerful than yours.

A Plan, a guilty party.
The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it's His
fault.

The thing whose address
I lost is not the End, it's the Beginning.

Not the object to be
possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company.
Misery, company, too many dactyls.

Nothing can dispel from
my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation
of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute
Optimism.

I have committed
fornication, true (or not true), but God is the one unable to solve
the problem of Evil. Come, let us pound the fetus in the mortar
with honey and pepper. Dieu le veult.

If belief is absolutely
necessary, let it be in a religion that doesn't make you feel
guilty. A religion out of joint, fuming, subterranean, without an
end. Like a novel, not like a theology.

Five paths to a single
destination. What a waste. Better a labyrinth that leads everywhere
and nowhere. To die with style, live in the Baroque.

Only a bad Demiurge
makes us feel good.

But if there is no
cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you
there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not
exist.

And what if there is a
Plan, but it has eluded you¡Xand will elude you for all
eternity?

When religion fails, art
provides. You invent the Plan, metaphor of the Unknowable One. Even
a human plot can fill the void. They didn't publish my Hearts in
Exstasy because I don't belong to the Templar clique.

To live as if there were
a Plan: the philosopher's stone.

If you can't beat them,
join them. If there's a Plan, adjust to it.

Lorenza puts me to the
test. Humility. If I had the humility to appeal to the Angels, even
without believing in them, and to draw the right circle, I would
have peace. Maybe.

Believe there is a
secret and you will feel like an initiate. It costs
nothing.

To create an immense
hope that can never be uprooted, because it has no root. Ancestors
who do not exist will never appear and say that you have betrayed.
A religion you can keep while betraying it infinitely.

Like Andreae: to create,
in jest, the greatest revelation of history and, while others are
destroyed by it, swear for the rest of your life that you had
nothing to do with it.

To create a truth with a
hazy outline: when somebody tries to clarify it, you excommunicate
him. Accept only those hazier than yourself. Jamais d'ennemis a
droite.

Why write novels?
Rewrite history. The history that then comes true.

Why not set it in
Denmark, Mr. William S.? Seven Seas Jim Johann Valentin Andreae
Luke-Matthew roams the archipelago of the Sunda between Patmos and
Avalon, from the White Mountain to Mindanao, from Atlantis to
Thessalonica to the Council of Nicaea. Origen cuts off his
testicles and shows them, bleeding, to the fathers of the City of
the Sun, and Hiram sneers filioque filioque while Constantine digs
his greedy nails into the hollow eye sockets of Robert Fludd, death
death to the Jews of the ghetto of Antioch, Dieu et mon droit, wave
the Beauceant, lay on, down with the Ophites and the Borborites,
the snakes. Trumpets blare, and here come the Chevaliers
Beinfaisants de la Cite" Sainte with the Moor's head bristling on
their pike. The Rebis, the Rebis! Magnetic hurricane, the Tower
collapses, Rachkovsky grins over the roasted corpse of Jacques de
Molay.

I did not possess you,
but I can blow up history.

If the problem is this
absence of being and if what is is what is said, then the more we
talk, the more being there is.

The dream of science is
that there be little being, that it be concentrated and sayable, E
= mc2. Wrong. To be saved at the very beginning, for all eternity,
it is necessary for that being to be tangled. Like a serpent tied
into knots by a drunken sailor: impossible to untie.

Invent, invent wildly,
paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to
summarize. A simple relay race among symbols, one says the name of
the next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a saraband of
anagrams, endless. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is
this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an
anagram. Anagrams = ars magna.

That must have been how
it happened. Belbo decided to take the universe of the Diabolicals
seriously, not because of an abundance of faith, but because of a
total lack of it.

Humiliated by his
incapacity to create (and all his life he had dined out on his
frustrated desires and his unwritten pages, the former a metaphor
of the latter and vice versa, all full of his alleged, impalpable
cowardice), he came to realize that by inventing the Plan he had
actually created. He fell in love with his golem, found it a source
of consolation. Life¡Xhis life, mankind's¡Xas art, and art as
falsehood. Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un livre (faux). But
now he wanted to believe in this false book, because, as he had
also written, if there was a Plan, then he would no longer be
defeated, diffident, a coward.

And this is what finally
happened: he used the Plan, which he knew was unreal, to defeat a
rival he believed real. And then, aware that the Plan was mastering
him as if it existed, or as if he, Belbo, and the Plan were made of
the same stuff, he went to Paris, toward a revelation, a
liberation.

Tormented by the daily
remorse that for years and years he had lived only with ghosts of
his own making, he was now finding solace in ghosts that were
becoming objective, since they were known also to others, even
though he was the Enemy. Should he fling himself into the lion's
maw? Yes, because the lion taking shape was more real than Seven
Seas Jim, more real than Cecilia, more real perhaps than Lorenza
Pellegrini herself.

Belbo, sick from so many
missed appointments, now felt able to make a real appointment. An
appointment he could not evade from cowardice, because now his back
was to the wall. Fear forced him to be brave. Inventing, he had
created the principle of reality.