That was when I saw the Pendulum

To dream of living in a new and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead live elsewhere, nor is it known where.

—Gerolamo Cardano, Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, p. 58

While Gevurah is the Sefirah of awe and evil, Tiferet is the Sefirah of beauty and harmony. As Diotallevi said: It is the light of understanding, the tree of life; it is pleasure, hale appearance. It is the concord of Law and Freedom.

And that year was for us the year of pleasure, of the joyful subversion of the great text of the universe, in which we celebrated the nuptials of Tradition and the Electronic Machine. We created, and we delighted in our creation. It was the year in which we invented the Plan.

For me at least, it was truly a happy year. Lia’s pregnancy proceeded tranquilly, and between Garamond and my agency I was beginning to make a comfortable living. I kept my office in the old factory building, but we remodeled Lia’s apartment.

The wonderful adventure of metals was now in the hands of the compositors and proofreaders. That was when Signor Garamond had his brainstorm: “An illustrated history of magic and the hermetic sciences. With the material that comes in from the Diabolicals, with the expertise you three have acquired, with the advice of that incredible man Aglie, we can put together a big volume, four hundred pages, dazzling full-color plates, in less than a year. Reusing some of the graphics from the history of metals.”

“But the subject matter is so different,” I said. “What can I do with a photograph of a cyclotron?’’

“What can you do with it? Imagination, Casaubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they’re called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It’s magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermes. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old Abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don’t you see? The real magician isn’t the bleary-eyed guy who doesn’t understand a thing; it’s the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us! Hint that at Mount Pal-omar they know more than they’re letting on...”

To encourage me, he gave me a raise, almost perceptible. I concentrated on the miniatures of the Liber Solis of Trismosin, the Mutus Liber of Pseudo-Lullus; I filled folders with pentacles, sefirotic trees, decans, talismans; I combed the loneliest rooms of libraries; I bought dozens of volumes from booksellers who in the old days had peddled the cultural revolution.

Among the Diabolicals, I moved with the ease of a psychiatrist who becomes fond of his patients, enjoying the balmy breezes that waft from the ancient park of his private clinic. After a while he begins to write pages on delirium, then pages of delirium, unaware that his sick people have seduced him. He thinks he has become an artist. And so the idea of the Plan was born.

Diotallevi went along with the game because, for him, it was a form of prayer. As for Jacopo Belbo, I thought he was having as much fun as I was. I realize only now that he derived no real pleasure from it. He took part in it nervously, anxiously biting his nails. Or, rather, he played along, in the hope of finding at least one of the unknown addresses, the stage without footlights, which he mentions in the file named Dream. A surrogate theology for an angel that will never appear.

FILENAME: Dream

I don’t remember if I dreamed one dream within another, or if they followed one another in the course of the same night, or if they alternated night by night.

I am looking for a woman, a woman I know, I have had an intense relationship with her, but cannot figure out why I let it cool, it was my fault, not keeping in touch. Inconceivable, that I could have allowed so much time to go by. I am looking for her—or for them, there is more than one woman, there are many, I lost them all in the same way, through neglect—and I am seized by uncertainty, because even just one would be enough for me, because I know this: in losing them, I have lost much. As a rule, in my dream, I cannot find, no longer possess, am unable to bring myself to open the address book where the phone number is written, and even if I do open it, it’s as if I were farsighted, I can’t read the names.

I know where she is, or, rather, I don’t know where the place is, but I know what it’s like. I have the distinct memory of a stairway, a lobby, a landing. I don’t rush about the city looking for the place; instead, I am frozen, blocked by anguish, I keep racking my brain for the reason I permitted—or wanted—the relationship to cool, the reason I failed to show up at our last meeting. She’s waiting for a call from me, I’m sure. If only I knew her name. I know perfectly well who she is, I just can’t reconstruct her features.

Sometimes, in the half-waking doze that follows, I argue with the dream. You remember everything, I say, you’ve settled all your scores, there’s no unfinished business. There is no place you remember whose location you don’t know. There is nothing to the dream.

But the suspicion remains that I have forgotten something, left something among the folds of my eagerness, the way you forget a bank note or a paper with an important fact in some small marsupial pouch of your trousers or old jacket, and it’s only later that you realize it was the most important thing of all, crucial, unique.

Of the city I have a clearer image. It’s Paris. I’m on the Left Bank. And when I cross the river, I find myself in a square that could be Place des Vosges...no, more open, because at the end stands a kind of Madeleine. Passing the square, moving behind the temple, I come to a street—there’s a secondhand bookshop on the corner—that curves to the right, through a series of alleys that are unquestionably the Barrio Gotico of Barcelona. It could turn into a very broad avenue full of lights, and it’s on this avenue—and I remember it with the clarity of a photograph—that I see, to the right, at the end of a blind alley, the Theater.

I’m not sure what happens in that place of pleasure, no doubt something entertaining and slightly louche, like a striptease. For this reason I don’t dare make inquiries, but I know enough to want to return, full of excitement. In vain: toward Chatham Road the streets become confused.

I wake with the taste of failure, an encounter missed. I cannot resign myself to not knowing what I’ve lost.

Sometimes I’m in a country house. It’s big, I know there’s another wing, but I’ve forgotten how to reach it, as if the passage has been walled up. In that other wing there are rooms and rooms. I saw them once, and in detail, thoroughly—it’s impossible that I dreamed them in another dream—with old furniture and faded engravings, brackets supporting little nineteenth-century toy theaters made of punched cardboard, sofas with embroidered coverlets, and shelves filled with books, a complete set of the Illustrated Journal of Travel and of Adventures on Land and Sea. It’s not true that they came apart from being read so often and that Mama gave them to the trash man. I wonder who got the corridors and stairs mixed up, because that is where I would have liked to build my buen retire, in that odor of precious junk.

* * *

Why can’t I dream of college entrance exams like everybody else?

....the frame....was twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order...The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys...

—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, III, 5

I believe that in embellishing his dream, Belbo returned once again to the idea of lost opportunity and his vow of renunciation, to his life’s failure to seize—if it ever existed—the Moment. The Plan began because Belbo had now resigned himself to creating private, fictitious moments.

I asked him for some text or other, and he rummaged through the papers on his desk, where there was a heap of manuscripts perilously piled one on top of the other, with no concern for weight or size. He found the one he was looking for and tried to slip it out, thus causing the others to spill to the floor. Folders came open; pages escaped their flimsy containers.

“Couldn’t you have moved the top half first?” I asked. Wasting my breath: this was how he always did it.

He replied, as he always did: “Gudrun will pick them up this evening. She has to have a mission in life; otherwise she loses her identity.”

But this time I had a personal stake in the safety of the manuscripts, because I was now part of the firm. “Gudrun won’t be able to put them back together,” I said. “She’ll put the wrong pages in the wrong folders.”

“If Diotallevi heard you, he’d rejoice. A way of producing different books, eclectic, random books. It’s part of the logic of the Diabolicals.”

“But we’d find ourselves in the situation of the cabalists: taking millennia to discover the right combination. You’re simply using Gudrun in place of the monkey that spends an eternity at the typewriter. As far as evolution goes, we’ve made no progress. Unless there’s some program in Abulafia to do this work.”

Meanwhile Diotallevi had come in.

“Of course there is,” Belbo said, “and in theory you could have up to two thousand entries. All that’s needed is the data and the desire. Take, for example, poetry. The program asks you how many lines you want in the poem, and you decide: ten, twenty, a hundred. Then the program randomizes the line numbers. In other words, a new arrangement each time. With ten lines you can make thousands and thousands of random poems. Yesterday I entered such lines as ‘And the linden trees quiver,”Thou sinister albatross,”The rubber plant is free,”I offer thee my life,’ and so on. Here are some of my better efforts.”

I count the nights, the sistrum sounds....

Death, thy victory,

Death, thy victory....

The rubber plant is free.

From the heart of dawn

Thou sinister albatross.

(The rubber plant is free...)

Death, thy victory.

And the linden trees quiver,

I count the nights, the sistrum sounds,

The hoopoe awaits me,

And the linden trees quiver.

“It’s repetitive, yes, but repetitions can make poetic sense.” “Interesting,” Diotallevi said. “This reconciles me to your machine. So if we fed it the entire Torah and told it—what’s the term?—to randomize, it would perform some authentic temurah, recombining the verses of the Book?” “Yes, but it’s a question of time. That would take centuries.” I said: “What if, instead, you fed it a few dozen notions taken from the works of the Diabolicals—for example, the Templars fled to Scotland, or the Corpus Hermeticum arrived in Florence in 1460—and threw in a few connective phrases like ‘It’s obvious that’ and ‘This proves that’? We might end up with something revelatory. Then we fill in the gaps, call the repetitions prophecies, and—voila—a hitherto unpublished chapter of the history of magic, at the very least!” “An idea of genius,” Belbo said. “Let’s start right away.”

“No. It’s seven o’clock. Tomorrow.”

“I’m starting tonight. Help me, just for a minute. Pick up, say, twenty of those pages on the floor, at random, glance at the first sentence of each, and that will be an entry.”

I bent over, picked up, and read: “Joseph of Arimathea carries the Grail into France.”

“Excellent...I’ve written it. Go on.”

“According to the Templar Tradition, Godefroy de Bouillon founded the Grand Priory of Zion in Jerusalem.”

And “Debussy was a Rosicrucian.”

“Excuse me,” Diotallevi said, “but you also have to include some neutral data—for example, the koala lives in Australia, or Papin invented the pressure cooker.”

“Minnie Mouse is Mickey’s fiancee.”

“We mustn’t overdo it.”

“No, we must overdo it. If we admit that in the whole universe there is even a single fact that does not reveal a mystery, then we violate hermetic thought.”

“That’s true. Minnie’s in. And, if you’ll allow me, I’ll add a fundamental axiom: The Templars have something to do with everything.”

“That goes without saying,” Diotallevi agreed.

We went on for a while, but then it was really late. Belbo told us not to worry, he’d continue on his own. When Gudrun came in and told us she was locking up, he said he’d be staying to do some work and asked her to pick up the papers on the floor. Gudrun made sounds that could have belonged either to Latin sine flexione or to Chermish but that clearly expressed indignation and dismay, which demonstrated the universal kinship of all languages, descendants branched from a single, Adamic root. She obeyed, randomizing better than any computer.

The next morning, Belbo was radiant. “It works,” he said. “It works beyond anything we could have hoped for.” He handed us the printout.

The Templars have something to do with everything

What follows is not true

Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate

The sage Omus founded the Rosy Cross in Egypt

There are cabalists in Provence

Who was married at the feast of Cana?

Minnie Mouse is Mickey’s fiancee

It logically follows that

The Druids venerated black virgins

Then

Simon Magus identifies Sophia as a prostitute of Tyre

Who was married at the feast of Cana?

The Merovingians proclaim themselves kings by divine right

The Templars have something to do with everything

“A bit obscure,” Diotallevi said.

“Because you don’t see the connections. And you don’t give due importance to the question that recurs twice: Who was married at the feast of Cana? Repetitions are magic keys. Of course, I’ve compiled; but compiling the truth is the initiate’s right. Here is my interpretation: Jesus was not crucified, and for that reason the Templars denied the Crucifix. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea covers a deeper truth: Jesus, not the Grail, landed in France, among the cabalists of Provence. Jesus is the metaphor of the King of the World, the true founder of the Rosicrucians. And who landed with Jesus? His wife. In the Gospels why aren’t we told who was married at Cana? It was the wedding of Jesus, and it was a wedding that could not be discussed, because the bride was a public sinner, Mary Magdalene. That’s why, ever since, all the Illuminati from Simon Magus to Postel seek the principle of the eternal feminine in a brothel. And Jesus, meanwhile, was the founder of the royal line of France.”

If our hypothesis is correct, the Holy Grail....was the breed and descendant of Jesus, the “Sang real” of which the Templars were the guardians...At the same time, the Holy Grail must have been, literally, the vessel that had received and contained the blood of Jesus. In other words it must have been the womb of the Magdalene.

—M. Baigent, R. Leigh, H. Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, 1982, London, Cape, xiv

“Nobody would take that seriously,” Diotallevi said.

“On the contrary, it would sell a few hundred thousand copies,” I said grimly. “The story has already been written, with slight variations, in a book on the mystery of the Grail and the secrets of Rennes-le-Chateau. Instead of reading only manuscripts, you should look at what other publishers are printing.”

“Ye Holy Seraphim!” Diotallevi said. “Then this machine says only what we already know.” And he went out, dejected.

Belbo was piqued. ‘“What is he saying—that my idea is an idea others have had? So what? It’s called literary polygenesis. Signer Garamond would say that means I’m telling the truth. It must have taken years for the others to come up with it, whereas the machine and I solved the problem in one evening.”

“I’m with you. The machine’s useful. But I believe we should feed in more statements that don’t come from the Diabolicals. The challenge isn’t to find occult links between Debussy and the Templars. Everybody does that. The problem is to find occult links between, for example, cabala and the spark plugs of a car.”

I was speaking oif the top of my head, but I had given Belbo an idea. He talked to me about it a few mornings later.

“You were right. Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says ‘No littering.’ “

“Of course. Catharist moralism. The horror of fornication.”

“Last night I happened to come across a driver’s manual. Maybe it was the semidarkness, or what you had said to me, but I began to imagine that those pages were saying Something Else. Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as metaphor of creation? And we mustn’t confine ourselves to the exterior, or to the surface reality of the dashboard; we must learn to see what only the Maker sees, what lies beneath. What lies beneath and what lies above. It is the Tree of the Sefirot.”

“You don’t say.”

“I am not the one who says; it is the thing itself that says. The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot.”

“But the positions don’t coincide.”

“Who says they don’t? Diotallevi’s explained to us that in certain versions Tiferet isn’t the sixth Sefirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth.”

“Fiat.”

“But let’s pursue the dialectic of the tree. At the summit is the engine, Omnia Movens, of which more later: this is the Creative Source. The engine communicates its creative energy to the two front or higher wheels: the Wheel of Intelligence and the Wheel of Knowledge.”

“If the car has front-wheel drive.”

“The good thing about the Belboth tree is that it allows metaphysical alternatives. So we have the image of a spiritual cosmos with front-wheel-drive, where the engine, in front, transmits its wishes to the higher wheels, whereas in the materialistic version we have a degenerate cosmos in which motion is imparted by the engine to the two lower wheels: from the depths, the cosmic emanation releases the base forces of matter.”

“What about an engine in back, rear-wheel drive?”

“Satanic. Higher and lower coincide. God is identified with the motion of crude matter. God as an eternally frustrated aspiration to divinity. The result of th Breaking of the Vessels.”

“Not the Breaking of the Muffler?”

“That occurs in aborted universes, where the noxious breath of the Archons spreads through the ether. But we mustn’t digress. After the engine and two wheels comes the clutch, the Sefirah of grace that establishes or interrupts the flow of love that binds the rest of the tree of the Supernal Energy. A disk, a mandala that caresses another mandala. Then the coffer of change—the gear box, or transmission, as the positivists call it, which is the principle of Evil, because it allows human will to speed up or slow down the constant process of emanation. For this reason, an automatic transmission costs more, for there it is the tree itself that decides, in accordance with its own Sovereign Equilibrium. Then comes the universal joint, the axle, the drive shaft, the differential—note the opposition/repetition of the quaternion of cylinders in the engine, because the differential (Minor Keter) transmits motion to the earthly wheels. Here the function of the Sefirah of difference is obvious, as, with a majestic sense of beauty, it distributes the cosmic forces to the Wheel of Glory and the Wheel of Victory, which in an unaborted universe (front-wheel drive) are subordinate to the motion imparted by the higher wheels.”

“A coherent exegesis. And the heart of the engine, seat of the One, the Crown?”

“You have but to look with the eyes of an initiate. The supreme engine lives by an alternation of intake and exhaust. A complex, divine respiration, a cycle initially based on two units called cylinders (an obvious geometrical archetype), which then generate a third, and finally gaze upon one another in mutual love and bring forth the glory of a fourth. In the cycle of the first cylinder (none is first hierarchically, but only through the miraculous alternation of position), the piston (etymology: Pistis Sophia) descends from the upper neutral position to the lower neutral position as the cylinder fills with energy in the pure state. I’m simplifying, because here angelic hierarchies come into play, the valves, which, as my handbook says, ‘allow the opening and closing of the apertures that link the interior of the cylinders to the induction pipes leading out of the carburetor.’ The inner seat of the engine can communicate with the rest of the cosmos only through this mediation, and here I believe is revealed—I am reluctant to utter heresy—the original limit of the One, which, in order to create, somehow depends on the Great Eccentrics. A closer reading of the text may be required here. The cylinder fills with energy, the piston returns to the upper neutral position and achieves maximum compression—the sim-sun. And lo, the glory of the Big Bang: combustion, expansion. A spark flies, the mixture of fuel flares and blazes, and this the handbook calls the active phase of the cycle. And woe, woe if in the mixture of fuel the Shells intrude, the qelippot, drops of impure matter like water or Coca-Cola. Then expansion does not take place or occurs in abortive starts...”

“Then the meaning of Shell is qelippot? We’d better not use it anymore. From now on, only Virgin’s Milk...”

“We’ll check. It could be a trick of the Seven Sisters, lower emanations trying to control the process of creation...In any case, after expansion, behold the great divine release, the exhaust. The piston rises again to the upper neutral position and expels the formless matter, now combusted. Only if this process of purification succeeds can the new cycle begin. Which, if you think about it, is also the Neoplatonic mechanism of Exodus and Parodos, miraculous dialectic of the Way Up and the Way Down.”

“Quantum mortalia pectora ceacae noctis habent! And the sons of matter never realized it!”

“They never saw the connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.”

“For tomorrow, I’ll prepare a mystical interpretation of the phone book.”

“Ever ambitious, our Casaubon. Mind you, there you’ll have to solve the unfathomable problem of the One and the Many. Better succeed slowly. Start, instead, with the washing machine.”

“That’s too easy. The alchemistic transformation from black to whiter than white.”

Da Rosa, nada digamos agora....

—Sampayo Bruno, Os Cavalheiros do Amor, Lisbon, Guimaraes, 1960, p. 155

When you assume an attitude of suspicion, you overlook no clue. After our fantasy on the power train and the Tree of the Sefirot, I was prepared to see symbols in every object I came upon.

I had kept in touch with my Brazilian friends, and in Portugal just then, at Coimbra, a conference was being held on Lusitanian culture. More out of a wish to see me again than out of respect for my expertise, my Rio friends managed to have me invited. Lia didn’t go with me; she was in her seventh month, and though her pregnancy had changed her slender figure only slightly, transforming her into a Flemish madonna, she preferred to stay home.

I spent three merry evenings with my old comrades. As we were returning by bus to Lisbon, an argument developed about whether we should stop at Fatima or Tomar. Tomar was the castle to which the Portuguese Templars had withdrawn after the king and the pope saved them from trial and ruin by transforming them into the Order of the Knights of Christ. I couldn’t miss a Templar castle, and luckily the rest of the party was not enthusiastic about Fatima.

If I could have invented a Templar castle, it would have been Tomar. You reach it by ascending a fortified road that flanks the outer bastions, which have cruciform slits, and you breathe Crusader air from the first moment. The Knights of Christ prospered for centuries in that place. Tradition has it that both Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus belonged to that order, and in fact it devoted itself to the conquest of the seas—making the fortune of Portugal. The knights’ long and happy existence there had caused the castle to be rebuilt and extended through the centuries, so to its medieval part were joined Renaissance and Baroque wings. I was moved as I entered the church of the Templars, which had an octagonal rotunda reproducing that of the Holy Sepulcher, and I was surprised to see that the Templars’ crosses had different forms, depending on their location. It was a problem I had encountered before, when I went through the confused iconography on the subject. Whereas the cross of the Knights of Malta had remained more or less the same, the Templar cross had been influenced by periods and local traditions. That’s why Templar-hunters, finding any kind of cross in a place, immediately think they’ve discovered a trace of the knights.

Our guide took us to see the Manueline window, the janela par excellence, a filigree, a collage of marine and submarine troves, seaweeds, shells, anchors, capstans, and chains, celebrating the knights’ achievements on the oceans. The window was framed by two towers, which were decorated with carvings of the insigne of the Garter. What was the symbol of an English order doing in a Portuguese fortified monastery? The guide couldn’t say; but a little later, on another side, the northeast, I believe, he showed us the insigne of the Golden Fleece. I couldn’t help thinking of the subtle game of alliances that had united the Garter to the Golden Fleece, the Fleece to the Argonauts, the Argonauts to the Grail, and the Grail to the Templars. Remembering Colonel Ardenti’s narrative and a few pages from the Diabolicals’ manuscripts, I started when our guide showed us into a side room whose ceiling was gripped by keystones. They were rosettes, but on some of them was carved a bearded caprine face: Baphomet...

We went down into a crypt. After seven steps, a bare stone floor led to the apse, where an altar could stand, or the chair of the grand master. You reached it by passing beneath seven keystones, each in the form of a rose, one larger than the next, with the last set over a well. The Cross and the Rose, in a Templar monastery, and in a room surely built before the Rosicrucian manifestoes...I put some questions to the guide. He smiled. “If you knew how many students of the occult sciences come here on pilgrimages....It’s said that this was the initiation chamber.”

Entering by chance a room not yet restored, which contained a few pieces of dusty furniture, I found the floor cluttered with great cardboard boxes. Rummaging at random, I uncovered some fragments of volumes in Hebrew, presumably from the seventeenth century. What were the Jews doing in Tomar? The guide told me that the knights had maintained friendly relations with the local Jewish community. He had me look out the window and showed me a little garden designed like an elegant French maze—the work, he told me, of an eighteenth-century Jewish architect: Samuel Schwarz.

The second appointment in Jerusalem....And the first at the Castle? Wasn’t that how the message of Provins went? By God, the Castle of the Ordonation mentioned in Ingolf’s document was not the Monsalvat of chivalric novels, the Avalon of the Hyperboreal. No. What castle would the Templars of Provins, more used to directing commandaries than to reading romances of the Round Table, have chosen for their first meeting place? Why, Tomar, the castle of the Knights of Christ, a place where survivors of the order enjoyed complete freedom, unchanged guarantees, and where they could be in contact with the agents of the second group!

I left Tomar and Portugal with my mind ablaze. No longer was I laughing at the’message Ardenti had shown us. The Templars, when they became a secret order, worked out a Plan that was to last six hundred years and conclude in our century. The Templars were serious men. If they talked about a castle, they meant a real castle. The Plan began at Tomar. And what would the ideal route have been, the sequence of the other five meetings? Places where the Templars could count on friendship, protection, complicity. The colonel spoke of Stonehenge, Avalon, Agarttha...Nonsense. The message had to be completely re-studied.

Of course—I reminded myself on my way home—the idea is not to discover the Templars’ secret, but to construct it.

Belbo seemed disturbed at the thought of going back to the document left by the colonel, and he found it only after digging reluctantly in a lower drawer. But, I saw, he had kept it. Together we reread the Provins message, after so many years.

It began with the message coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisibles separez en six bandes. And then:

a la....Saint Jean

36 p charrete de fein

6...entiers avec saiel

p....les blancs mantiax

r...5...chevaliers de Pruins pour la....j. nc.

6 foil 6 en 6 places

chascune foiz 20 a...720 a...

iceste est I ‘ordonation

al donjon li premiers

it li secunz joste iceus qui....pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame de I’altre part de I’iau

it a I ‘ostel des popelicans

it a la pierre

3 foiz 6 avant la feste....la Grant Pute.

“Thirty-six years after the hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealed messages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsed knights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twenty years each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, this is the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate the bread, then at the Refuge, then at Our Lady Beyond the River, then at the House of the Pope-licans, then at the Stone. You see, in 1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, in fact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we must ask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you are an escaping Templar, where would you go to form the second group?’’

“H’m...If it’s true that those in the wain fled to Scotland....But why should they have gone to Scotland in particular to eat the bread?”

I was becoming a master of chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland. Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice. Saint John’s Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about Saint John’s Fire in Frazer’s Golden Bough.

I telephoned Lia. “Do me a favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about Saint John’s Fire.”

Lia was terrific at this sort of thing. She found the chapter at once. “What do you want to know? It’s a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all European countries. It’s celebrated at the moment when the sun is at its peak. Saint John was added to make the thing Christian...”

“Do they eat bread in Scotland?”

“Let me see...I don’t think so...Ah, here it is: they don’t eat bread for Saint John, but on the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires, originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in the Scottish highlands...”

“We’ve got it! What kind?”

“They knead a cake of flour and oats and toast it on embers...Then a rite follows that recalls ancient human sacrifices...The bread’s called bannock cakes...”

“What? Spell it!” She did, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morgan le Fay, and other endearments.

I tried to remember my thesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge in Scotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped the king win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them up as the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of Scotland.

I took a big English dictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok in Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind of cake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or other grain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn as the French Templars would have done when they sent news from Scotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get something like the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread. Those who ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of the bread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time had spread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal to England. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti’s from Pole to Palestine.

Let your garments be white...If it is dark, set many lights burning...Now begin combining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them until your heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the letters and to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heart is warm, when you see that through the combination of the letters you grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with the aid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence of the divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundity of your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higher angels, as if they were human beings beside you.

—Abulafia, Sefer Haie Olam

“It makes sense,” Belbo said. “And in that ease, where would the Refuge be?”

“The six groups settle in six places, but only one place is called the Refuge. Odd. This must mean that in the other places, like Portugal and Britain, the Templars can live undisturbed, although under another name, whereas in the Refuge they are completely hidden. I would say it is where the Templars of Paris went after they left the Temple. To me it seems economical for the route to go to England from France, but why not assume that the Templars took an even more economical course and set up a refuge in a secret and protected place in Paris itself? Being sound politicians, they reasoned that in two hundred years the situation would change and they would be able to act in the light of day, or almost.”

“Paris it is. And the fourth place?”

“The colonel was thinking of Chartres, but if we make Paris the third place, we can’t put down Chartres as the fourth, because obviously the Plan has to involve all the centers of Europe. Besides, we’re leaving the mystical trail to work out a political trail. The pattern appears to be a sine wave, so we should go to the north of Germany. ‘Beyond the water,’ that is, beyond the Rhine, there’s a city—not a church—of Our Lady. Near Danzig, there’s a city of the Virgin—in other words, Marienburg.”

“Why meet at Marienburg?”

“Because it was the seat of the Teutonic Knights! Relations between the Templars and the Teutonics hadn’t been poisoned like those between the Templars and the Hospitalers, who had waited like vultures for the suppression of the Temple in order to seize its wealth. The Teutonics were created in Palestine by German emperors as a counterbalance to the Templars, but they were soon called north to stem the invasion of Prussian barbarians. They succeeded so well that in the space of two centuries they became a state that spread out over all the Baltic lands. They moved between Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia. They founded KQnigsberg. They were defeated only once, by Alek-sandr Nevski in Estonia. About the time the Templars were arrested in Paris, the Teutonics established the capital of their realm at Marienburg. If there was any spiritual-knighthood plan of world conquest, the Templars and the Teutonics had divided the spheres of influence between them.”

“You know what?” Belbo said. “I’m with you. Now the fifth group. Where are these Popelicans?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You disappoint me, Casaubon. Maybe we should ask Abu-lafia.”

“No. Abulafia can only connect facts, not create them. The Popelicans are a fact, not a connection, and facts are the province of Sam Spade. Give me a few days.”

“I’ll give you two weeks,” Belbo said. “If, within two weeks, you don’t hand the Popelicans over to me, you’ll buy me a bottle of twelve-year-old Ballantine’s.”

Beyond my means. A week later I delivered the Popelicans to my greedy partners.

“It’s all clear. Now follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to Byzantium, when various movements of Manichean inspiration have already spread throughout the Mediterranean. We begin with the Archontics, founded in Armenia by Peter of Capharbarucha—and you have to admit that’s a pretty grand name. Anti-Semitic, the Archontics identify the Devil with Sabaoth, the god of the Jews, who lives in the seventh heaven. To reach the Great Mother of Light in the eighth heaven, it is necessary to reject both Sabaoth and baptism. All right?”

“Consider them rejected,” Belbo said.

“But the Archontics are still nice kids at heart. In the fifth century the Massalians come along, and actually they survive until the eleventh century, in Thrace. The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they have dealings with the infernal powers, and in fact some texts call them Borborites, from borboros, filth, because of the unspeakable things they do.”

“What do they do?”

“The usual unspeakable things. Men and women hold in the palm of their hand, and raise to heaven, their own ignominy, namely, sperm or menstruum, then eat it, calling it the Body of Christ. And if by chance a woman is made pregnant, at the opportune moment they stick a hand into her womb, pull out the embryo, throw it into a mortar, mix in some honey and pepper, and gobble it up.”

“How revolting, honey and pepper!” Diotallevi said.

“So those are the Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latter-day Gnostics, therefore dualists, who worshiped the Great Mother Barbelo, and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics, or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect, the Rotary Club of the whole business. But maybe the Stratiotics were only the Hylics of the Mithraists.”

“Sounds a bit confused,” Belbo said.

“Naturally. None of these people left records. The only things we know about them come to us from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. I’m just trying to show you what a mess the Middle East was at the time. And to set the stage for the Paulicians. These are the followers of a certain Paul, joined by some iconoclasts expelled from Albania. From the eighth century on, the Paulicians grow rapidly, the sect becomes a community, the community a force, a political power, and the emperors of Byzantium, beginning to get worried, send the imperial armies against them. The Paulicians extend as far as the confines of the Arab world; they spread toward the Euphrates, and northward as far as the Black Sea. They establish colonies more or less everywhere, and we find them as late as the seventeenth century, when they are converted by the Jesuits, and some communities still exist today in the Balkans or thereabouts. Now, what do the Paulicians believe in? In God, One and Three, except that the Demiurge defiantly created the world, with the unfortunate results visible to all. The Paulicians reject the Old Testament, refuse the sacraments, despise the Cross, and don’t honor the Virgin, because Christ was incarnated directly in heaven and passed through Mary as through a pipe. The Bogo-mils, who are partly derived from them, say that Christ went in one ear of Mary and came out the other, without her even noticing. The Paulicians are also accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing children’s blood in their bread and the Eucharistic wine.”

“Like everybody else.”

“Those were the days when, for a heretic, going to Mass was a torment. Might as well become Moslem. Anyway, that’s the sort of people they were. And I’m telling you about them because, when the dualist heretics spread through Italy and Provence, they are called—to indicate that they’re like the Paulicians—Popelicans, Publicans, Populicans, who gallice etiam dicuntur ab aliquis popelicant!”

“So there they are.”

“Yes, finally. The Paulicians continue into the ninth century, driving the Byzantine emperors crazy until Emperor Basil vows that if he gets his hands on their leader, Chrysocheir, who invaded the church of Saint John of God at Ephesus and watered his horse at the holy-water fonts...”

“A familiar nasty habit,” Belbo said.

“...he’ll shoot three arrows into his head. He sends the imperial army after Chrysocheir; they capture him, cut off his head, send it to the emperor, who places it on a table—or a trumeau, on a little porphyry column—and shoots three arrows, wham wham wham, into it, probably an arrow for each eye and the third for the mouth.”

“Nice folks,” Diotallevi said.

“They didn’t do it to be mean,” Belbo said. “It was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon: our Diotallevi doesn’t understand theological fine points.”

“To conclude: the Crusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them near Antioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics are fighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at the siege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philippopolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehar-douin tells us. Here’s the connection with the Templars and the solution to our riddle. Legend has the Templars inspired by the Cathars, but it’s really the other way around. The Templars, encountering the Paulician communities in the course of the Crusades, established mysterious relations with them, as they had before with the mystics and the Moslem heretics. Just follow the track of the Ordonation. It has to pass through the Balkans.”

“Why?”

“Because, clearly, the sixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to the stone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslems venerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take off our shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don’t know who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group of surviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connected with the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalem from Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, and there the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see how straightforward and economical the Plan becomes?”

“I must say I’m persuaded,” Belbo said. “But where in the Balkans were the Popelicans waiting?”

“If you ask me, the natural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils, but the Templars of Provins couldn’t have known that a few years later Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and remain under their dominion for five centuries.”

“Which would suggest that the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany and Bulgaria. When was that to take place?”

“In 1824,” Diotallevi said.

“Why’s that?”

Diotallevi quickly sketched the following diagram:

PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCE GERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM

1344 1464 1584 1704 1824 1944

“In 1344 the first grand masters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribed places. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grand masters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixth master of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In 1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master. The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with the Paulicians fails, it must fail in 1824.”

“Let’s assume it fails,” I said. “But I don’t understand why such shrewd men, when they had four-sixths of the message in their hands, weren’t able to reconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fell through, they didn’t get in touch with the next group.”

“Casaubon,” Belbo said, “do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If they wanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years, they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knows where to find the master of the following group, but not where to find the others, and none of the later groups know where to find the masters of the preceding groups. If the Germans lose the Bulgarians, they’ll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and the Jerusalemites won’t know where anyone else is. As for reconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends on how the message has been divided. Certainly not~ in logical sequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message is incomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can’t make any use of it.”

“Just think,” Diotallevi said. “If the Bulgarian meeting didn’t take place, Europe today is the theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not finding one another, while each group knows that one small piece of information might be enough to make it master of the world. What’s the name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe a Plot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battle to reconstruct a lost message. We don’t see them, but, invisible, they act all around us.”

The same idea then occurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and we quickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discovered that at least two expressions in the Provins message—the reference to thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and the hundred-and-twenty-year deadline—also appeared in the debate on the Rosicrucians.

“After all, they were Germans,” I said. “I’ll read the Rosi-crucian manifestoes.”

“But you said the manifestoes were fake,” Belbo said.

“So? What we’re putting together is fake.”

“True,” he said. “I was forgetting that.”

Elles deviennent le Diable: debiles, timorees, vaillantes a des heures exceptionnelles, sanglantes sans cesse, lacrymantes, caressantes, avec des bras qui ignorent les lois....Fi! Fi! Elles ne valent rien, elles sont faites d’un cote, d’un os courbe, d’une dissimulation rentree...Elles baisent le serpent...

—Jules Bois, Le satanisme et la magie, Paris, Chailley, 1895,

He was forgetting that, yes. The following file, brief and dazed, surely belongs to this period.

FILENAME: Ennoia

You arrived at the house suddenly with your grass. I didn’t want any, I won’t allow any vegetable substance to interfere with the functioning of my brain (I’m lying, I smoke tobacco, drink distillations of grain). The few times, in the early sixties, when somebody forced me to share in the circulation of a joint, with that cheap slimy paper impregnated with saliva, and the last drag using a pin, I wanted to laugh.

But yesterday it was you offering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way of offering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the way nobody’s danced for years, and—the shame of it—while Mahler’s Fourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creature were yeasting, with the sweet and wrinkled face of an old nanny goat, a serpent rising from the depths of my loins, and I worshiped you as a very old and universal aunt. Probably I went on holding my body close to yours, but I felt also that you were in flight, ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked doors, moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly, Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.

Was it not you I sought all along? I am here, always waiting for you. Did I lose you, each time, because I didn’t recognize you? Did I lose you, each time, because I did recognize you but was afraid? Lose you because each time, recognizing you, I knew I had to lose you?

But where did you end up last night? I woke this morning with a headache.

Let us remember well, however, the secret references,to a period of 120 years that brother A...., the successor of D and last of the second line of succession—who lived among many of us—addressed to us, we of the third line of succession...

—Fama Fratemitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1614

First thing, I read through the two manifestoes of the Rosicrucians, the Fama and the Confessio. I also took a look at the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz by Johann Valentin Andreae, because Andreae was the presumed author of the manifestoes.

The two manifestoes appeared in Germany between 1614 and 1615, thus about thirty years after the 1584 meeting between the French and English Templars and almost a century before the French were to meet with the Germans.

I read, not to believe what the manifestoes said, but to look beyond them, as if the words meant something else. To help them mean something else, I knew I should skip some passages and attach more importance to some statements than to others. But this was exactly what the Diabolicals and their masters were teaching us. If you move in the refined time of revelation, do not follow the fussy, philistine chains of logic and their monotonous sequentiality.

Taken literally, these two texts were a pile of absurdities, riddles, contradictions. Therefore they could not be saying what they seemed to be saying, and were neither a call to profound spiritual reformation nor the story of poor Christian Rosen-creutz. They were a coded message to be read by superimposing them on a grid, a grid that left certain spaces free while covering others. Like the coded message of Provins, where only the initial letters counted. Having no grid, I had to assume the existence of one. I had to read with mistrust.

The manifestoes spoke of the Plan of Provins—there could be no doubt about that. In the grave of C. R. (allegory of the Grange-aux-Dimes, the night of June 23, 1344) a treasure had been placed for posterity to discover, a treasure “hidden....for one hundred and twenty years.” It was not money; that much was clear. Not only was there a polemic against the unrestrained greed of the alchemists, but the text said openly that what had been promised was a great historical change. And if the reader failed to understand that, the second manifesto said that there could be no ignoring an offer that concerned the miranda sextae aetatis (the wonders of the sixth and final appointment!), and it repeated: “If only it had pleased God to bring down to us the light of his sixth Candelabrum...if only we could read everything in a single book and, reading it, understand and remember....How pleasant it would be if through song (the message read aloud!) we could transform rocks (lapis exillis!) into pearls and precious stones...” And there was further talk of arcane secrets, and of a government that was to be established in Europe, and of a “great work” to be achieved...

It was said that C. R. had gone to Spain (or Portugal?) and had shown the learned there “whence to draw the true indicia of future centuries,” but in vain. Why in vain? Was it because a group of German Templars at the beginning of the seventeenth century made public a very closely guarded secret, forced to come out into the open on account of a halt in the process of the transmission of the message?

The manifestoes undeniably tried to reconstruct the phases of the Plan as Diotallevi had summarized them. The first brother whose death was mentioned was Brother I. O., who had “come to the end” in England. So someone had arrived triumphantly at the first appointment. And a second line of succession was mentioned, and a third. Thus far all was apparently in order: the second line, the English one, met the third line, the French one, in 1584. Those writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century spoke only of what had happened to the first three groups. In the Chemical Wedding, written by Andreae in his youth, hence before the manifestoes (even if they appeared as early as 1614), three majestic temples were mentioned, the three places that must already have been known.

Yet, reading, I realized that while the two manifestoes did indeed speak later in the same terms as the Chemical Wedding, it was as if something upsetting had happened meanwhile.

For example, why such insistence on the fact that the time had come, the moment had come, though the enemy had employed all his tricks to keep the occasion from materializing? What occasion? It was said that C. R.’s final goal was Jerusalem, but he hadn’t been able to reach Jerusalem. Why not? The Arabs were praised because they exchanged messages, but in Germany the learned didn’t know how to assist one another. What did that mean? And there was a reference to “a larger group that wants the pasture all for itself.” Evidently some party, pursuing its private interests, was trying to upset the Plan, and evidently there had in fact been a serious setback.

The Fama said that at the beginning someone had worked out a magic writing (why of course, the message of Provins), but that the Clock of God struck every minute “whereas ours is unable to strike even the hours.” Who had missed the strokes of the divine clock, who had failed to arrive at a certain place at the right moment? There was a reference to an original group of brothers who could have revealed a secret philosophy but had decided, instead, to disperse throughout the world.

The manifestoes breathed uneasiness, uncertainty, bewilderment. The brothers of the first lines of succession had each arranged to be replaced “by a worthy successor,” but “they decided to keep secret....the place of their burial and even today we do not know where they are buried.”

What did this really refer to? What sepulcher was without an address? It was becoming obvious to me that the manifestoes were written because some information had been lost. An appeal was being made to anyone who happened to possess that information: He should come forward.

The end of the Fama was unequivocal: “Again we ask all the learned of Europe...to consider with kindly disposition our offer...to let us know their reflections...Because even if for the present we have not revealed our names....anyone who sends us his name will be able to confer with us personally, or— if some impediment exists—in writing.”

This was exactly what the colonel had intended to do by publishing his story: force someone to emerge from his silence.

There had been a gap, a hiatus, an unraveling. In the tomb of C. R., there was written not only post 120 annos patebo, to recall the schedule of the appointments, but also Nequaquam vacuum; not “The void does not exist,” but “The void should not exist.” A void had been created, and it had to be filled!

Once again I asked myself: Why were these things being said in Germany, where, if anything, the fourth line should simply wait with saintly patience for its own turn to come? The Germans couldn’t complain—in 1614—of a failed appointment in Marienburg, because the Marienburg appointment would not take place until 1704.

Only one conclusion was possible: the Germans were complaining because the preceding appointment had not taken place.

This was the key! The Germans (the fourth line) were lamenting the fact that the English (the second line) had failed to reach the French (the third line). Of course. In the text you could find allegories that were almost childishly transparent: the tomb of C. R. is opened and in it are found the signatures of the brothers of the first and second circles, but not of the third. The Portuguese and the English are there, but where are the French?

In other words, the English had missed the French. Yet the English, according to what we had established, were the only ones who had any idea where to find the French, just as the French were the only ones who had any idea where to find the Germans. So, even if the French found the Germans in 1704, they would have shown up minus two-thirds of what they were supposed to deliver.

The Rosicrucians came out into the open, accepting the known risks, because that was the only way to save the Plan.

We do not even know with certainty if the Brothers of the second line possessed the same knowledge as those of the first, or if they were given all the secrets.

—Fama Fraternitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1614

I told Belbo and Diotallevi. They agreed that the secret meaning of the manifestoes should be clear even to a Diabolical.

“Now it’s all clear,” Diotallevi said. “We were stuck on the notion that the Plan had been blocked at the passage from the Germans to the Paulicians, while in fact it had been blocked in 1584, at the passage from England to France.”

“But why?” Belbo asked. “What reason can there be that the English were unable to keep their appointment with the French in 1584? The English knew where the Refuge was.”

Seeking truth, he turned to Abulafia. As a test, he asked for two random entries. The output was:

Minnie Mouse is Mickey’s fiancee

Thirty days hath September April June and November

“Now, let’s see,” Belbo said. “Minnie has an appointment with Mickey, but by mistake she makes it for the thirty-first of September, and Mickey...”

“Hold it, everybody!” I said. “Minnie could have made a mistake only if her date with Mickey was for October 5, 1582!”

“Why?”

“The Gregorian reform of the calendar! Why, it’s obvious. In 1582 the Gregorian reform went into effect, correcting the Julian calendar; and to make things come out even, ten days in the month of October were abolished, the fifth to the fourteenth!”

“But the appointment in France is for 1584, Saint John’s Eve, June 23.”

“That’s right. But as I recall, the reform didn’t go into effect immediately everywhere.” I consulted the perpetual calendar we had on the shelf. “Here we are. The reform was promulgated in 1582, and the days between October 5 and October 14 were abolished, but this applied only to the pope. France adopted the new calendar in 1583 and abolished the tenth to the nineteenth of December. In Germany there was a schism: the Catholic regions adopted the reform in 1584, with Bohemia, but the Protestant regions adopted it in 1775, almost two hundred years later, and Bulgaria—and this is a fact to bear in mind—adopted it only in 1917! Now, let’s look at England...It adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. That’s to be expected: in their hatred of the papists, the Anglicans also held out for two centuries. So you see what happened. France abolished ten days at the end of 1583, and by June 1584 the French were all accustomed to it. But when it was June 23, 1584, in France, in England it was still June 13, and ask youself whether a good Englishman, Templar though he may have been, would have taken this into account. They drive on the left even today, and ignored the decimal system for ages...So, then, the English show up at the Refuge on what for them is June 23, except that for the French it’s already July 3. We can assume the appointment wasn’t to take place with fanfares; it would be a furtive meeting at a certain corner at a certain hour. The French go to the place on June 23; they wait a day, two days, three, seven, and then they leave, thinking that something has happened. Maybe they give up in despair on the very eve of July 3. The English arrive on the third and find nobody there. Maybe they also wait a week, and nobody shows. The two grand masters have missed each other.” “Sublime,” Belbo said. “That’s what happened. But why is it the German Rosicrucians who go public, and not the English?”

I asked for another day, searched my card files, and came back to the office glowing with pride. I had found a clue, an almost invisible clue, but that’s how Sam Spade works. Nothing is trivial or insignificant to his eagle eye. Toward 1584, John Dee, mage and cabalist, astrologer to the queen of England, was assigned to study the reform of the Julian calendar.

“The English Templars meet the Portuguese in 1464. After that date, the British Isles seem to be struck by a cabalistic fervor. Anyway, the Templars work on what they have learned, preparing for the next encounter. John Dee is the leader of this magic and hermetic renaissance. He collects a personal library of four thousand volumes, a library in the spirit of the Templars of Provins. His Monas Hieroglyphica seems directly inspired by the Tabula smaragdina, the bible of the alchemists. And what does John Dee do from 1584 on? He reads the Steganographia of Trithemius! He reads it in manuscript, of course, because it appeared in print for the first time only in the early seventeenth century. Dee, the grand master of the English group that suffered the failure of the missed appointment, wants to discover what happened, where the error lay. Since he is also a good astronomer, he slaps himself on the brow and says, ‘What an idiot I was!’ He starts studying the Gregorian reform, after he obtains an appanage from Elizabeth, to see how to rectify the mistake. But he realizes it’s too late. He doesn’t know whom to get in touch with in France. He has contacts, however, in the Mittel-europaische area. The Prague of Rudolf II is one big alchemist laboratory; so Dee goes to Prague and meets Khunrath, the author of Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, whose allegorical plates later influenced both Andreae and the Rosicrucian manifestoes. What sort of relationships does Dee establish? I don’t know. Shattered by remorse at having committed an irreparable error, he dies in 1608. Not to worry, though, because in London someone else is at work—a man who, everybody now agrees, was a Rosicrucian and who spoke of the Rosicrucians in his New Atlantis. I mean Francis Bacon.”

“Did Bacon really talk about them?” Belbo asked.

“Strictly speaking, no, but a certain John Heydon rewrote the New Atlantis under the title The Holy Land, and he put the Rosicrucians in it. But for us that makes no difference. Bacon didn’t mention them by name for obvious reasons of discretion, but it’s as if he did.”

“And a pox on doubters.”

“Right. It’s because of Bacon that attempts are made to strengthen relations between the English and German circles. In 1613 Elizabeth, daughter of James I, now reigning, marries Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. After the death of Rudolf II, Prague is no longer the ideal location; Heidelberg is. The wedding of the elector and the princess is a triumph of Templar allegories. In the course of the London festivities, Bacon himself is the impresario, and an allegory of mystical knighthood is performed, with an appearance of the knights on the top of a hill. It is obvious that Bacon is now Dee’s successor, grand master of the English Templar group...”

“And since he is clearly the author of the plays of Shakespeare, we should also reread the complete works of the bard, which certainly talk about nothing else but the Plan,” Belbo said. “Saint John’s Eve, a midsummer night’s dream.”

“June 23 is not midsummer.”

“Poetic license. I wonder why everybody overlooked these clues, these clear indications. It’s all so unbearably obvious.”

“We’ve been led astray by rationalist thought,” Diotallevi said. “I keep telling you.”

“Let Casaubon go on; it seems to me he’s done an excellent job.”

“Not much more to say. After the London festivities, the festivities begin in Heidelberg, where Salomon de Caus has built for the elector the hanging gardens of which we saw a dim reflection that night in Piedmont, as you’ll recall. And in the course of these festivities, an allegorical float appears, celebrating the bridegroom as Jason, and from the two masts of the ship recreated on the float hang the symbols of the Golden Fleece and the Garter. I hope you haven’t forgotten that the Golden Fleece and the Garter are also found on the columns of Tomar...Everything fits. In the space of a year, the Rosicrucian manifestoes come out: the appeal that the English Templars, with the help of their German friends, are making to all Europe, to reunite the lines of the interrupted Plan.” “But what exactly are they after?”

Nos inuisibles pretendus sont (a ce que Ton dit) au nombre de 36, separez en six bandes.

—Effroyables pactions faictes entre le diable & les pretendus Inuisibles, Paris, 1623, p. 6

“Maybe the manifestoes have a double purpose: to send an appeal to the French, and at the same time to collect the scattered pieces of the German group in the aftermath of the Lutheran Reformation. Germany, in fact, is where the biggest mess occurs. From the appearance of the manifestoes until about 1621, the Rosicrucians receive too many replies...”

I mentioned a few of the countless pamphlets that had appeared on the subject, the ones that had entertained me that night in Salvador with Amparo. “Possibly among all these there is one person who knows something, but he is lost in a sea of fanatics, enthusiasts, who take the manifestoes literally, perhaps also provocateurs, who want to block the operation, and impostors...The English try to take part in the debate, to channel it. It’s no accident that Robert Fludd, another English Templar, in the space of a single year writes three works that point to the correct interpretation of the manifestoes...But the response is by now out of control, the Thirty Years’ War has begun, the Elector Palatine has been defeated by the Spanish, the Palatinate and Heidelberg are sacked, Bohemia is in flames...The English decide to return to France and try there. This is why in 1623 the Rosicrucians appear in Paris, giving the French more or less the same invitation they gave the Germans. And what do you read in one of the libels against the Rosicrucians in Paris, written by someone who distrusts them or wants to confuse things? That they are worshipers of the Devil, obviously, but since even in slander you can’t entirely erase the truth, it is hinted that they hold their meetings in the Marais.”

“So?”

“Don’t you know Paris? The Marais is the quarter of the Temple and, it so happens, the Jewish ghetto! What’s more, the libel says that the Rosicrucians are in contact with a sect of Iberian cabalists, the Alumbrados! But maybe the pamphlets against the Rosicrucians, under the guise of attacking the thirty-six invisibles, are actually trying to foster their identification...Gabriel Naude, Richelieu’s librarian, writes some Instructions a la France sur la verite de I’histoire des Freres de la Rose-Crouc.What do these instructions say? Is Naude” a spokesman for the Templars of the third group, or is he an adventurer barging into a game that isn’t his? On the one hand, he dismisses the Rosicrucians as lunatic diabolists; on the other, he insinuates that there are still three Rosicrucian colleges in existence. And this would be true: after the third group, there are still three more. Naude gives some almost fairy-tale hints (one college is in India, on the floating islands), but he also says that one of them is in the underground of Paris.”

“And this explains the Thirty Years’ War?” Belbo asked.

“Beyond any doubt,” I said. “Richelieu receives privileged information from Naude; he wants to have a finger in this pie, but he gets it all wrong, tries armed intervention, and makes matters even worse. There are two other events that shouldn’t be overlooked. In 1619 a chapter of the Knights of Christ meets in Tomar, after forty-six years of silence. It had met in 1573, only eleven years before 1584, probably to prepare, along with the English, the Paris journey, but after the business of the Rosicrucian manifestoes it meets again, to decide what line to take, whether to join the English operation or try a different path.”

“Yes,” Belbo said, “these are now people lost in a maze: some choose one path, some another; some shout for help, and there’s no telling if the replies they hear are other voices or the echo of their own...They all are groping. And what are the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites doing in the meantime?”

“If we only knew,” Diotallevi said. “But consider, too, that this is the period when Lurianic cabala spreads and the talk about the Breaking of the Vessels begins...And the idea that the Torah is an incomplete message. There is a Polish Hasidic document that says: If another event takes place, other combinations of letters will be born. But remember this: the cabalists aren’t happy that the Germans chose to jump the gun. The proper succession and order of the Torah have remained hidden, and they are known only by the Holy One, praised be He. But you make me talk nonsense. If cabala becomes involved in the Plan....”

“If the Plan exists, it must involve everything. Either it explains all or it explains nothing,” Belbo said. “But Casaubon mentioned a clue.”

“Yes. Actually, it’s a series of clues. Even before that 1584 meeting fails, John Dee has begun devoting himself to the study of maps and the promotion of naval expeditions. And who is his associate? Pedro Nunes, the royal cosmographer of Portugal...Dee has a hand in the voyages to discover the Northwest Passage to Cathay; he invests money in the expedition of a certain Frobisher, who ventures toward the Pole and returns with an Eskimo, whom everybody takes for a Mongol. Dee fires up Francis Drake and encourages him to make his voyage around the world. However, he wants the explorers to sail east, because the East is the source of all occult knowledge, and at the departure of one expedition—I forget which—he summons the angels.”

“And what does this mean?”

“Dee, I think, isn’t really interested so much in the actual discovery of places, as in their cartographic depiction, and for this reason he consults Mercator and Ortelius, the great cartographers. It’s as if the fragments of the message in his possession have convinced him that the final whole will be a map, and he is attempting to discover it on his own. Indeed, I’ll say more, like Signer Garamond. Is it really likely that a scholar of his standing would have missed the discrepancy between the calendars? Perhaps Dee wants to reconstruct the message himself, without the other groups. Perhaps he thinks the message can be reconstructed by magic or scientific means, instead of waiting for the Plan to be achieved. Impatience, greed. The bourgeois conqueror is born, and the principle of solidarity that sustained the spiritual knighthood is breaking down. If this was Dee’s idea, you can imagine what Bacon thought. From Dee on, the English try to discover the message by using all the secrets of the new learning.”

“And the Germans?”

“The Germans....We’d better have them stick to the path of Tradition. That way we can explain at least two centuries of their history of philosophy. Anglo-Saxon empiricism versus romantic idealism...”

“Chapter by chapter, we are reconstructing the history of the world,” Diotallevi said. “We are rewriting the Book. I like it, I really like it.”

Another curious case of cryptography was presented to the public in 1917 by one of the best Bacon scholars, Dr. Alfred von Weber Ebenhoff of Vienna. Employing the same systems previously applied to the works of Shakespeare, he began to examine the works of Cervantes...Pursuing the investigation, he discovered overwhelming material evidence: the first English translation of Don Quixote bears corrections in Bacon’s hand. He concluded that this English version was the original of the novel and that Cervantes had published a Spanish translation of it.

—J. Duchaussoy, Bacon, Shakespeare ou Saint-Germain?, Paris, La Colombe, 1962, p. 122

It seemed obvious to me that in the days that followed Jacopo Belbo immersed himself in historical works on the Rosy Cross period. But when he reported his findings, he gave us only the bare outline of his fantasies, from which we drew valuable suggestions. I know now that in fact he was creating a far richer narrative on Abulafia, one in which a wild play of quotations mingled with his private myths. The opportunity of combining fragments of other stories spurred him to write his own. He never mentioned this to us. I still think he was, quite courageously, testing his talent in the realm of fiction. Or else he was defining himself in the Great Story he was distorting like any ordinary Diabolical.

FILENAME: The Cabinet of Dr. Dee

For a long time I forgot I was Talbot. From the time, at least, of my decision to call myself Kelley. All I had done, really, was to falsify some documents, like everybody else. The queen’s men were merciless. To cover what’s left of my poor severed ears I am forced to wear this pointed black cap, and people murmur that I am a sorcerer. So be it. Dr. Dee, with a similar reputation, flourishes.

I went to see him in Mortlake. He was examining a map. He was evasive, the diabolical old man. Sinister glints in his shrewd eyes. His bony hand stroking his little goatee.

“It’s a manuscript of Roger Bacon,” he said to me, “and was lent me by the Emperor Rudolf. Do you know Prague? I advise you to visit it. You may find something there that will change your life. Tabula locorum rerum et thesaurorum absconditorum Menabani...”

Stealing a glance, I saw something written in a secret alphabet. But the doctor immediately hid the manuscript under a pile of other yellowed pages. How beautiful to live in a period where every page, even if it has just come from the papermaker’s workshop, is yellowed.

I showed Dr. Dee some of my efforts, mainly my poems about the Dark Lady—radiant image of my childhood, dark because reclaimed by the shadow of time and snatched from my possession—and a tragic sketch, the story of Seven Seas Jim, who returns to England in the train of Sir Walter Ralegh and learns that his father has been murdered by his own incestuous brother. Henbane.

“You’re gifted, Kelley,” Dee said to me. “And you need money. There’s a young man, the natural son of someone you couldn’t dare imagine, and I want to help him climb the ladder of fame and honors. He has little talent. You will be his secret soul. Write, and live in the shadow of his glory. Only you and I, Kelley, will know that the glory is yours.”

So for years I’ve been turning out work for the queen and for all England that goes under the name of this pale youth. If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of a Dwarfe. I was thirty, and I will allow no man to say that thirty is the most beautiful time of life.

“William,” I said to him, “let your hair grow down over your ears: it’s becoming.” I had a plan (to take his place?).

Can one live in hatred of this Spear-shaker, who in reality is oneself? That sweet thief which sourly robs from me. “Calm down, Kelley,” Dee says to me. “To grow in the shadows is the privilege of those who prepare to conquer the world. Keepe a Lowe Profyle. William will be one of our covers.” And he informed me—oh, only in part—of the Cosmic Plot. The secret of the Templars. “And the stakes?” I asked.

“Ye Globe.”

For a long time I went to bed early, but one evening at midnight I rummaged in Dee’s private strongbox and discovered some formulas and tried summoning angels as he does on nights of full moon. Dee found me sprawled, in the center of the circle of the Macrocosm, as if struck by a lash. On my brow, the Pentacle of Solomon. Now I must pull my cap even farther down, half over my eyes.

“You don’t know how to do it yet,” Dee said to me. “Watch yourself, or I’ll have your nose cut off, too. I will show you fear in a handful of dust...”

He raised a bony hand and uttered the terrible word: Garamond! I felt myself burn with an inner flame. I fled (into the night).

It was a year before Dee forgave me and dedicated to me his Fourth Book of Mysteries, “post reconciliationem kellianam.”

That summer I was seized by abstract rages. Dee summoned me to Mortlake. There were William and I, Spenser, and a young aristocrat with shifty eyes, Francis Bacon. He had a delicate, lively, hazel Eie.

Dr. Dee said it was the Eie of a Viper. Dee told us more about the Cosmic Plot. It was a matter of meeting the Prankish wing of the Templars in Paris and putting together two parts of the same map. Dee and Spenser were to go, accompanied by Pedro Nunes. To me and Bacon he entrusted some documents, which we swore to open only in the event that they failed to return.

They did return, exchanging floods of insults. “It’s not possible,” Dee said. “The Plan is mathematical; it has the astral perfection of my Monas Hieroglyphica. We were supposed to meet the Franks on Saint John’s Eve.”

Innocently I asked: “Saint John’s Eve by their reckoning or by ours?”

Dee slapped himself on the brow, spewing out horrible curses. “O,” he said, “from what power hast thou this powerful might?” The pale William made a note of the sentence, the cowardly plagiarist. Dee feverishly consulted lunar tables and almanacs. “ ‘Sblood! ‘Swounds! How could I have been such a dolt?” He insulted Nunes and Spenser. “Do I have to think of everything? Cosmographer, my foot!” he screamed at Nunes. And then: “Amanasiel Zorobabel!” And Nunes was struck in the stomach as if by an invisible ram; he blanched, drew back a few steps, and slumped to the ground.

“Fool,” Dee said to him.

Spenser was pale. He said, with some effort: “We can cast sortie bait. I am finishing a poem. An allegory about the queen of the fairies. What if I put in a knight of the Red Cross? The real Templars will recognize themselves, will understand that we know, will get in touch with us...”

“I know you,” Dee said. “Before you finish your poem and people find out about it, a lustrum will pass, maybe more. Still, the bait idea isn’t bad.”

“Why not communicate with them through your angels, Doctor?” I asked.

“Fool,” he said to me. “Haven’t you read Trithemius? The angels of the addressee intervene only to clarify a message if one is received. My angels are not couriers on horseback. The French are lost. But I have a plan. I know’ how to find some of the German line. I must go to Prague.”

We heard a noise, a heavy damask curtain was raised, we glimpsed a diaphanous hand, then She appeared, the Haughty Virgin.

“Your Majesty,” we said, kneeling.

“Dee,” she said. “I know everything. Do not think my ancestors saved the knights in order to grant them dominion over the world. I demand, you hear me, I demand that the secret be the property of the Crown only.”

“Your Majesty, I want the secret at all costs, and I want it for the Crown. But I must find the other possessors; it is the shortest way. When they have foolishly confided in me what they know, it will not be hard to eliminate them. Whether with a dagger or with arsenic water.”

On the face of the Virgin Queen a ghastly smile appeared. “Very well then, my good Dee,” she said. “I do not ask much, only Total Power. For you, if you succeed, the garter. For you, William”—and she addressed the little parasite with lewd sweetness—”another garter, and another golden fleece. Follow me.”

I murmured into William’s ear: “I perforce am thine, and all that is in me...” William rewarded me with a look of unctuous gratitude and followed the queen, disappearing beyond the curtain. Je tiens la

* * *

I was with Dr. Dee in the Golden City. We went along narrow and evil-smelling passageways not far from the cemetery of the Jews, and Dee told me to be careful. “If the news of the failed encounter has spread,” he said, “the other groups will even now be acting on their own. I fear the Jews; the Jerusalemites have too many agents here in Prague...”

It was evening. The snow glistened, bluish. At the dark entrance to the Jewish quarter clustered the little stands of the Christmas market, and in their midst, decked in red cloth, was the obscene stage of a puppet theater lit by smoky torches. We passed beneath an arch of dressed stone, near a bronze fountain from whose grille long icicles hung, and there another passage opened. On old doors, gilded lion’s heads sank their teeth into bronze rings. A slight shudder ran along the walls, inexplicable sounds came from the low roofs, rattlings from the drainpipes. The houses betrayed a ghostly life of their own, a hidden life...An old usurer, wrapped in a worn coat, brushed us in passing, and I thought I heard him murmur, “Beware Athanasius Per-nath...” Dee murmured back, “I fear quite another Athanasius...” And suddenly we were in the Alley of the Goldsmiths.

There, in the gloom of another alley—and the ears I no longer have, at this memory, quiver under my worn cap—a giant loomed up before us, a horrible gray creature with a dull expression, his body sheathed in bronze verdigris, leaning on a gnarled and knobby stick of white wood. The apparition gave off an intense odor of sandalwood. Mortal horror magically coalesced in that being that confronted me, yet I could not take my eyes off the nebulous globe that sat atop his shoulders, and in it discerned, barely, the rapacious face of an Egyptian ibis, and behind that face, more faces, incubi of my imagination and my memory. The outlines of the ghost, in the darkness of that alley, dilated, contracted, as in a slow, nonliving respiration....And—oh, horror!— instead of feet, I saw, as I stared at him, on the snow two shapeless stumps whose flesh, gray and bloodless, was rolled up, as if in concentric swellings.

My voracious memories....

“The golem!” Dee cried, raising both arms to heaven. His black coat with broad sleeves fell to the ground, as if to create a cingulum, an umbilical cord between the aerial position of the hands and the surface, or the depths, of the earth. “Jezebel, Malkuth, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!” he said. And suddenly the golem dissolved like a sand castle struck by a gust of wind. We were blinded by the particles of its clay body, which tore through the air like atoms, until finally at our feet was a little pile of ashes. Dee bent down, searched in the ashes with his bony fingers, and drew out a scroll, which he hid in his bosom.

From the shadows then rose an old rabbi, with a greasy hat that greatly resembled my cap. “Dr. Dee, I presume,” he said.

“Here Comes Everybody,” Dee replied humbly. “Rabbi Allevi, what a pleasant surprise...”

The man said, “Did you happen to see a creature roaming these parts?”

“A creature?” Dee said, feigning amazement. “What sort of creature?”

“Come off it, Dee,” Rabbi Allevi said. “It was my golem.”

“Your golem? I know nothing about a golem.”

“Take care, Dr. Dee!” Rabbi Allevi said, livid. “You’re playing a dangerous game, you’re out of your league.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rabbi Allevi,” said Dee. “We’re here to make a few ounces of gold for the emperor. We’re not a couple of cheap necromancers.”

“Give me back the scroll, at least,” Rabbi Allevi begged.

“What scroll?” Dee asked, with diabolical ingenuousness.

“Curse you, Dr. Dee,” said the rabbi. “And verily I say unto thee, thou shall not see the dawn of the new century.” And he went off into the night, murmuring strange words without consonants. Oh, Language Diabolical and Holy.

Dee was huddled against the damp wall of the alley, his face ashen, his hair bristling on his head. “I know Rabbi Allevi,” he said. “I will die on August 5, 1608, of the Gregorian calendar. So now, Kelley, you must help me to carry out my plan. You are the one who will have to bring it to fulfillment. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy. Remember,” he said. But I would remember in any case, and William with me. And against me.

* * *

He said no more. The pale fog that rubs its back against the panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its back against the panes, licked with its tongue the street corners. We were now in another alley; whitish vapors came from the grilles at ground level, and through them you could glimpse squalid dens with tilting walls, defined by gradations of misty gray. I saw, as he came groping down a stairway (the steps oddly orthogonal), the figure of an old man in a worn frock coat and a top hat. And Dee saw him. “Caligari!” he exclaimed. “He’s here, too, in the house of Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante! We have to get moving.”

Quickening our steps, we arrived at the door of a hovel in a poorly lit alley, sinister and Semitic.

We knocked, and the door opened as if by magic. We entered a spacious room: there were seven-branched candelabra, tetragrams in relief, Stars of David like monstrances. Old violins, the color of the veneer on certain old paintings, were piled in the entrance on a refectory table of anamorphic irregularity. A great crocodile hung, mummified, from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the dim glow of a single torch, or of many, or of none. In the rear, before a kind of curtain or canopy under which stood a tabernacle, kneeling in prayer, ceaselessly and blasphemously murmuring the seventy-two names of God, was an old man. I knew, by a sudden stroke of nous, that this was Heinrich Khunrath.

“Come to the point, Dee,” he said, turning and breaking off his prayer. “What do you want?” He resembled a stuffed armadillo, an ageless iguana.

“Khunrath,” Dee said, “the third encounter did not take place.”

Khunrath exploded in a horrible curse: “Lapis exillis! Now what?”

“Khunrath,” Dee said, “you could throw out some bait; you could put me in touch with the German line.”

“Let me see,” Khunrath said. “I could ask Maier, who is in touch with many people at the court. But you will tell me the secret of Virgin’s Milk, the Most Secret Oven of the Philosophers.”

Dee smiled. Oh the divine smile of that Sophos! He concentrated then as if in prayer, and said in a low voice: “When you wish to translate into water or Virgin’s Milk a sublimate of Mercury, place the Thing duly pulverized over the lamina between the little weights and the goblet. Do not cover it but see that the hot air strikes the naked matter, administer it to the fire of three coals, and keep it alive for eight solar days, then remove it and pound it well on marble until it is a fine paste. This done, put it inside a glass alembic and distill it in a Balneum Mariae over a cauldron of water set in such a way that it does not touch the water below by the space of two fingers but remains suspended in air, and at the same time light the fire beneath the Balneum. Then, and only then, though the Silver does not touch the water, finding itself in this warm and moist womb, will it change to liquid.”

“Master,” said Khunrath, sinking to his knees and kissing the bony, diaphanous hand of Dr. Dee. “Master, so I will do. And you will have what you wish. Remember these words: the Rose and the Cross. You will hear talk of them.”

Dee wrapped himself in his cloaklike coat, and only his eyes, glistening and malign, could be seen. “Come, Kelley,” he said. “This man is now ours. And you, Khunrath, keep the golem well away from us until our return to London. And then, let all Prague burn as a sole pyre.”

He started to go off. Crawling, Khunrath seized him by the hem of his coat. “One day, perhaps, a man will come to you. He will want to write about you. Be his friend.”

“Give me the Power,” Dee said with an unspeakable expression on his fieshless face, “and his fortune is assured.”

We went out. Over the Atlantic a low-pressure air mass was advancing in an easterly direction toward Russia.

“Let’s go to Moscow,” I said to him.

“No,” he said. “We’re returning to London.”

“To Moscow, to Moscow,” I murmured crazily. You knew very well, Kelley, that you would never go there. The Tower awaited you.

* * *

Back in London, Dee said, “They’re trying to reach the solution before we do. Kelley, you must write something for William....something diabolically insinuating about them.”

Belly of the demon, I did it, but William ruined the text, shifting everything from Prague to Venice. Dee flew into a rage. But the pale, shifty William felt protected by his royal concubine. And still he wasn’t satisfied. As I handed over to him, one by one, his finest sonnets, he asked me, with shameless eyes, about Her, about You, my Dark Lady. How horrible to hear your name on that mummer’s lips! (I didn’t know that he, his soul damned to duplicity and to the vicarious, was seeking her for Bacon.) “Enough,” I said to him. “I’m tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for yourself.”

“I can’t,” he answered with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. “He won’t let me.”

“Who? Dee?”

“No, Verulam. Don’t you know he’s now the one in charge? He’s forcing me to write works that later he’ll claim as his own. You understand, Kelley? I’m the true Bacon, and posterity will never know. Oh, parasite! How I hate that firebrand of hell!”

“Bacon’s a pig, but he has talent,” I said. “Why doesn’t he write his own stuff?”

He didn’t have the time. We realized this only years later, when Germany was invaded by the Rosy Cross madness. Then, from scattered references, certain phrases, putting two and two together, I saw that the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes was really he. He wrote under the pseudonym of Johann Valentin Andreae!

Now, in the darkness of this cell where I languish, more clearheaded than Don Isidro Parodi, I know for whom Andreae was writing. I was told by Soapes, my companion in imprisonment, a former Portuguese Templar. Andreae was writing a novel of chivalry for a Spaniard, who was languishing meanwhile in another prison. I don’t know why, but this project served the infamous Bacon, who wanted to go down in history as the secret author of the adventures of the knight of La Man-cha. Bacon asked Andreae to pen for him, in secret, a novel whose hidden author he would then pretend to be, enjoying in the shadows (but why? why?) another man’s triumph.

But I digress. I am cold in this dungeon and my thumb hurts. I am writing, in the dim light of a dying lamp, the last works that will pass under William’s name.

Dr. Dee died, murmuring, “Light, more light!” and asking for a toothpick. Then he said, “Qualis Artifex Pereo!” It was Bacon who had him killed. Before the queen died, for years unhinged of mind and heart, Verulam managed to seduce her. Her features then were changed; she was reduced to the condition of a skeleton. Her food was limited to a little white roll and some soup of chicory greens. At her side she kept a sword, and in moments of wrath she would thrust it violently into the curtains and arras that covered the walls of her refuge. (And what if there were someone behind there, listening? How now! A rat? Good idea, old Kelley, must make note of it.) With the poor woman in this condition, it was easy for Bacon to make her believe he was William, her bastard—presenting himself at her knees, she being now blind, covered in a sheep’s skin. The Golden Fleece! They said he was aiming at the throne, but I knew he was after something quite different, control of the Plan. That was when he became Viscount St. Albans. His position strengthened, he eliminated Dee.

* * *

The queen is dead, long live the king...Now, I was an embarrassing witness. He led me into an ambush one night when at last the Dark Lady could be mine and was dancing in my arms with abandon under the influence of a grass capable of producing visions, she, the eternal Sophia, with her wrinkled face like an old nanny goat’s...He entered with a handful of armed men, made me cover my eyes with a cloth. I guessed at once: vitriol! And how he laughed. And she! How you laughed, Pinball Lady— and gilded honor shamefully misplaced and maiden virtue rudely strum-peted—while he touched her with his greedy hands and you called him Simon—and kissed his sinister scar....

“To the Tower, to the Tower.” Verulam laughed. Since then, here I lie, with this human wraith who says he is Soapes, and the jailers know me only as Seven Seas Jim. I have studied thoroughly, and with ardent zeal, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and, unfortunately, also theology. Here I am, poor madman, and I know as much as I did before.

* * *

Through a slit of a window I witnessed the royal wedding, the knights with red crosses cantering to the sound of a trumpet. I should have been there playing the trumpet, for Cecilia, but once again the prize had been taken from me. It was William playing. I was writing in the shadows, for him.

“I’ll tell you how to avenge yourself,” Soapes whispered, and that day he revealed to me what he truly is: a Bonapartist abbe buried in this dungeon for centuries.

“Will you get out?” I asked him.

“If....” he began to reply, but then was silent. Striking his spoon on the wall, in a mysterious alphabet that, he confided in me, he had received from Trithemius, he began transmitting messages to the prisoner in the next cell. The count of Monsalvat.

* * *

Years have gone by. Soapes never stops striking the wall. Now I know for whom and to what end. His name is Noffo Dei. This Dei (through what mysterious cabala do Dei and Dee sound so alike?), prompted by Soapes, has denounced Bacon. What he said, I do-jpot know, but a few days ago Verulam was imprisoned. Accused of sodomy, because, they said (I tremble at the thought that it might be true), you, the Dark Lady, Black Virgin of Druids and of Templars, are none other....none other than the eternal androgyne created by the knowing hands of....of....? Now, now I know...of your lover, the Comte de Saint-Germain! But who is Saint-Germain if not Bacon himself? (Soapes knows all sorts of things, this obscure Templar of many lives...)

* * *

Verulam has been released from prison, has regained through his magic arts the favor of the monarch. Now, William tells me, he spends his nights along the Thames, in Pilad’s Pub, playing that strange machine invented for him by an Italian from Nola whom he then had burned at the stake in Rome. It is an astral device, which devours small mad spheres that race through infinite worlds in a sparkle of angelic light. Verulam gives obscene blows of triumphant bestiality with his groin against the frame, miming the events of the celestial orbs in the domain of the decans in order to understand the ultimate secrets of the Great Establishment and the secret of the New Atlantis itself, which he calls Gottlieb’s, parodying the sacred language of the manifestoes attributed to Andreae...Ah! I cry, now lucidly aware, but too late and in vain, as my heart beats conspicuously beneath the laces of my corset: this is why he took away my trumpet, amulet, talisman, cosmic bond that could command demons. What will he be plotting in the House of Solomon? It’s late, I repeat to myself, by now he has been given too much power.

* * *

They say Bacon is dead. Soapes assures me it is not true. No one has seen the body. He is living under a false name with the landgrave of Hesse; he is now initiated into the supreme mysteries and hence immortal, ready to continue his grim battle for the triumph of the Plan—in his name and under his control.

After this alleged death, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, which the bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in Sonnet III, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: “To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand...”

“I never wrote that,” I told him. And it was true...It’s obvious: Bacon inserted those words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in dyes...I believe that in the future he will try to make people believe he wrote William’s works himself. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!

* * *

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long? I feel weary, sick. William is expecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at the Globe.

Soapes is writing. I look over his shoulder. An incomprehensible message: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s....” He hides the page, looks at me, sees me paler than a ghost, reads Death in my eyes. He whispers to me, “Rest. Never fear. I’ll write for you.”

And so he is doing, mask behind a mask. I slowly fade, and he takes from me even the last light, that of obscurity.

Though his will be good, his spirit and his prophecies are illusions of the Devil...They are capable of deceiving many curious people and of causing great harm and scandal to the Church of Our Lord God.

—Opinion on Guillaume Postel sent to Ignatius Loyola by the Jesuit fathers Salmeron, Lhoost, and Ugoletto, May 10, 1545

Belbo, detached, told us what he had concocted, but he didn’t read his pages to us and eliminated all personal references. Indeed, he led us to believe that Abulafia had supplied him with the connections. The idea that Bacon was the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes he had already come upon somewhere or other. But one thing in particular struck me: that Bacon was Viscount St. Albans.

It buzzed in my head; it had something to do with my old thesis. I spent that night digging in my card file.

“Gentlemen,” I said to my accomplices with a certain solemnity the next morning, “we don’t have to invent connections. They exist. When, in 1164, Saint Bernard launched the idea of a council at Troyes to legitimize the Templars, among those charged to organize everything was the prior of Saint Albans. Saint Alban was the first English martyr, who evangelized the British Isles. He lived in Verulamium, which became Bacon’s property. He was a Celt and unquestionably a Druid initiate, like Saint Bernard.”

“That’s not very much,” Belbo said.

“Wait. This prior of Saint Albans was abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey where the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers was later installed!”

Belbo reacted. “My God!”

“And that’s not all,” I said. “The Conservatoire was conceived as homage to Bacon. On 25 Brumaire of the year 111, the Convention authorized its Comite d’lnstruction Publique to have the complete works of Bacon printed. And on 18 Vendemiaire of the same year the same Convention had passed a law providing for the construction of a house of arts and trades that would reproduce the House of Solomon as described by Bacon in his New Atlantis, a place where all the inventions of mankind are collected.”

“And so?” Diotallevi asked.

“The Pendulum is in the Conservatoire,” Belbo said. And from Diotallevi’s reaction I realized that Belbo had told him about Foucault’s Pendulum.

“Not so fast,” I said. “The Pendulum was invented and installed only in the last century. We should skip it.”

“Skip it?” Belbo said. “Haven’t you ever seen the Monad Hieroglyph of John Dee, the talisman that is supposed to concentrate all the wisdom of the universe? Doesn’t it look like a pendulum?”