“All right,” I said, “let’s suppose a connection can be established. But how do we go from Saint Albans to the Pendulum?”

I was to learn how in the space of a few days.

“So then, the prior of Saint Albans is the abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, which therefore becomes a Templar center. Bacon, through his property, establishes a contact with the Druid followers of Saint Albans. Now listen carefully: as Bacon is beginning his career in England, Guillaume Postel in France is ending his.”

An almost imperceptible twitch on Belbo’s face. I recalled the dialog at Riccardo’s show: Postel made Belbo think of the man who, in his mind, had robbed him of Lorenza. But it was the matter of an instant.

“Postel studies Hebrew, tries to demonstrate that it’s the common matrix of all languages, translates the Zohar and the Bahir, has contacts with the cabalists, broaches a plan for universal peace similar to that of the German Rosicrucian groups, tries to convince the king of France to form an alliance with the sultan, visits Greece, Syria, Asia Minor, studies Arabic— in a word, he retraces the itinerary of Christian Rosencreutz. And it is no accident that he signs some writings with the name of Rosispergius, ‘he who scatters dew.’ Gassendi in his Examen Philosophiae Fluddanae says that Rosencreutz does not derive from rosa but from ros, dew. In one of his manuscripts he speaks of a secret to be guarded until the time is ripe, and he says: ‘That pearls may not be cast before swine.’ Do you know where else this gospel quotation appears? On the title page of The Chemical Wedding. And Father Marin Mersenne, in denouncing the Rosicrucian Fludd, says he is made of the same stuif as atheus magnus Postel. Furthermore, it seems Dee and Postel met in 1550, but perhaps they didn’t yet know that they were both grand masters of the Plan, scheduled to meet thirty years later, in 1584.

“Now, Postel declares—hear ye, hear ye—that, being a direct descendant of the oldest son of Noah, and since Noah is the founder of the Celtic race and therefore of the civilization of the Druids, the king of France is the only legitimate pretender to the title king of the world. That’s right, he talks about the King of the World—but three centuries before d’Alveydre. We’ll skip the fact that he falls in love with an old hag, Joanna, and considers her the divine Sophia; the man probably didn’t have all his marbles. But powerful enemies he did have; they called him dog, execrable monster, cloaca of all heresies, a being possessed by a legion of demons. All the same, even with the Joanna scandal, the Inquisition doesn’t consider him a heretic, only amens, a bit of a nut, let’s say. The truth is, the Church doesn’t dare destroy the man, because they know he’s the spokesman of some fairly powerful group. I would point out to you, Diotallevi, that Postel travels also in the Orient and is a contemporary of Isaac Luria. Draw whatever conclusions you like. Well, in 1564, the year in which Dee writes his Monas Hieroglyphica, Postel retracts his heresies and retires to...guess where? The monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs! What’s he waiting for? Obviously, he’s waiting for 1584.”

“Obviously,” Diotallevi said.

I went on: “Are we agreed, then? Postel is grand master of the French group, awaiting the appointment with the English. But he dies in 1581, three years before it. Conclusions: first, the 1584 mishap took place because at that crucial moment a keen mind was missing, since Postel would have been able to figure out what was going on in the confusion of the calendars; second, Saint-Martin was a place where the Templars were safe, always at home, where the man responsible for the third meeting immured himself and waited. Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the Refuge!”

“It all fits, like a mosaic.”

“Stick with me. At the time of the failed appointment Bacon is only twenty-three. But in 1621 he becomes Viscount St. Albans. What does he find in the ancestral possessions? A mystery. Note that this is the year he is accused of corruption and imprisoned for a while. He had unearthed something that caused fear in someone. In whom? This is when Bacon understood that Saint-Martin should be watched; he conceived the idea of putting his House of Solomon there, the laboratory in which, through experimental means, the secret could be discovered.”

“But,” Diotallevi asked, “how do we find the link between Bacon’s followers and the revolutionary groups of the late eighteenth century?”

“Could Freemasonry be the answer?” Belbo said.

“Splendid idea. Actually, Aglie suggested it to us that night at the castle.”

“We should reconstruct the events. What exactly was going on then in those circles?”

75

The only ones who elude....the eternal sleep....are those who in life are able to orient their mind toward the higher way. The initiates, the Adepts, are at the edge of that path. Having achieved memory, anamnesis, in the expression of Plutarch, they become free, they proceed without bonds. Crowned, they celebrate the “mysteries” and see on earth the throng of those who are not initiated and are not “pure,” those who are crushed and pushing one another in the mud and in the darkness.

—Julius Evola, La tradizione ermetica, Rome, Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971, p. Ill

Rashly I volunteered to do some quick research. I soon regretted it. I found myself in a morass of books, in which it was difficult to distinguish historical fact from hermetic gossip, and reliable information from flights of fancy. Working like a machine for a week/1 drew up a bewildering list of sects, lodges, conventicles. I occasionally shuddered on encountering familiar names I didn’t expect to come upon in such company, and there were chronological coincidences that I felt were curious enough to be noted down. I showed this document to my two accomplices.

1645 London: Ashmole founds Invisible College, Rosicrucian in inspiration.

1660 From the Invisible College is born the Royal Society; and from the Royal Society, as everyone knows, the Masons.

1666 Paris: founding of Academic Royal des Sciences.

1707 Birth of Claude-Louis de Saint-Germain, if he was really born.

1717 Creation of the Great Lodge in London.

1721 Anderson drafts the constitutions of English Masonry. Initiated in London, Peter the Great founds a lodge in Russia.

1730 Montesquieu, passing through London, is initiated.

1737 Ramsay asserts the Templar origin of Masonry. Origin of the Scottish rite, henceforth in conflict with the Great Lodge of London.

1738 Frederick, then crown prince of Prussia, is initiated. Later he is patron of Encyclopedists.

1740 Various lodges created in France around this year: Ecos-sais Fideles of Toulouse, Souverain ConseU Sublime, Mere Loge Ecossaise du Grand Globe Francais, College des Sublimes Princes du Royal Secret of Bordeaux, Cour des Souverains Commandeurs du Temple of Carcassonne, Philadelphes of Narbonne, Chapitre des Rose-Croix of Montpellier, Sublimes Elus de la Verite....

1743 First public appearance of Comte de Saint-Germain. In Lyon, the degree of chevalier kadosch originates, its task being to vindicate Templars.

1753 Willermoz founds lodge of Parfaite Amitie.

1754 Martinez Pasqualis founds Temple of the Elus Cohen (perhaps in 1760).

1756 Baron von Hund founds Templar Strict Observance, inspired, some say, by Frederick II of Prussia. For the first time there is talk of the Unknown Superiors. Some insinuate that the Unknown Superiors are Frederick and Voltaire.

1758 Saint-Germain arrives in Paris and offers his services to the king as chemist, an expert in dyes. He spends time with Madame Pompadour.

1759 Presumed formation of Conseil des Empereurs d’Orient et d’Occident, which three years later is said to have drawn up the Constitutions et Reglement de Bordeaux, from which Ancient and Accepted Scottish rite probably originates (though this does not appear officially until 1801).

1760 Saint-Germain on ambiguous diplomatic mission in Holland. Forced to flee, arrested in London, released. Dom J. Pernety founds Illuminati of Avignon. Martinez Pasqualis founds Chevaliers Macons Elus de 1’Univers.

1762 Saint-Germain in Russia.

1763 Casanova meets Saint-Germain, as Surmont, in Belgium. Latter turns coin into gold. Willermoz founds Souverain Chapitre des Chevaliers de 1’Aigle Noire Rose-Croix.

1768 Willermoz joins Pasqualis’s Elus Cohen. Apocryphal publication in Jerusalem of Les plus secrets mysteres des hauls grades de la mafonnerie devoilee, ou le vrai Rose-Croix: it says that the lodge of the Rosicrucians is on Mount Heredon, sixty miles from Edinburgh. Pasqualis meets Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, later known as Le Philosophe Inconnu. Dom Pernety becomes librarian of king of Prussia.

1771 The Due de Chartres, later known as Philippe-Egalite’, becomes grand master of the Grand Orient (then, the Grand Orient de France) and tries to unify all the lodges. Scottish rite lodge resists.

1772 Pasqualis leaves for Santo Domingo, and Willermoz and Saint-Martin establish Tribunal Souverain, which becomes Grand Loge Ecossaise.

1774 Saint-Martin retires, to become Philosophe Inconnu, and as delegate of Templar Strict Observance goes to negotiate with Willermoz. A Scottish Directory of the Province of Auvergne is born. From this will be born the Rectified Scottish rite.

1776 Saint-Germain, under the name Count Welldone, presents chemical plans to Frederick II. Societe des Phila-thetes is born, to unite all hermeticists. Lodge of the Neuf Soeurs has as members Guillotin and Cabanis, Voltaire and Franklin. Adam Weishaupt founds Illuminati of Bavaria. According to some, he is initiated by a Danish merchant, Kolmer, returning from Egypt, who is probably the mysterious Altotas, master of Cagliostro.

1778 Saint-Germain, in Berlin, meets Dom Pernety. Willermoz founds Ordre des Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cite Sainte. Templar Strict Observance and Grand Orient agree to accept the Rectified Scottish rite.

1782 Great conference of all the initiatory lodges at Wil-helmsbad.

1783 Marquis Thome founds the Swedenborg rite.

1784 Saint-Germain presumably dies while in the service of the landgrave of Hesse, for whom he is completing a factory for making dyes.

1785 Cagliostro founds Memphis rite, which later becomes the Ancient and Primitive rite of Memphis-Misraim; it increases the number of high degrees to ninety. Scandal of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, orchestrated by Cagliostro. Dumas describes it as Masonic plot to discredit the monarchy. The Dluminati of Bavaria are suppressed, suspected of revolutionary plotting.

1786 Mirabeau is initiated by the Illuminati of Bavaria in Berlin. In London a Rosicrucian manifesto appears, attributed to Cagliostro. Mirabeau writes a letter to Cagliostro and to Lavater.

1787 There are about seven hundred lodges in France. Weishaupt publishes his Nachtrag, which describes the structure of a secret organization in which each adherent knows only his immediate superior.

1789 French Revolution begins. Crisis in the French lodges.

1794 On 8 Vende’miaire, Deputy Gregoire presents to the Convention the project for a Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. It is installed in Saint-Martin-des-Champs in 1799, by the Council of Five Hundred. The Duke of Brunswick urges lodges to dissolve because a poisonous subversive sect has now corrupted them all.

1798 Arrest of Cagliostro in Rome.

1804 Announcement in Charleston of official foundation of Ancient and Accepted Scottish rite, with number of degrees increased to 33.

1824 Document from court of Vienna to French government denounces secret associations like the Absolutes, the Independents, the Alta Vendita Carbonara.

1835 The cabalist Oettinger claims to meet Saint-Germain in Paris.

1846 Viennese writer Franz Graffer publishes account of a meeting of his brother with Saint-Germain between 1788 and 1790. Saint-Germain received his visitor while leafing through a book by Paracelsus.

1865 Foundation of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (other sources give 1860, 1866, or 1867    Bulwer-Lytton, author of the Rosicrucian novel Zanoni, joins.

1868 Bakunin founds International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, inspired, some say, by the Illuminati of Bavaria.

1875 Elena Petrovna Blavatsky, with Henry Steel Olcott, founds Theosophical Society. Her Isis Unveiled appears. Baron Spedalieri proclaims himself a member of Grand Lodge of the Solitary Brothers of the Mountain, Prater Illuminatus of the Ancient and Restored Order of the Manicheans and of the Martinists.

1877 Madame Blavatsky speaks of the theosophical role of Saint-Germain. Among his incarnations are Roger and Francis Bacon, Rosencreutz, Proclus, Saint Alban. Grand Orient of France eliminates invocation to the Great Architect of the Universe and proclaims absolute freedom of conscience. Breaks ties with Grand Lodge of England and becomes firmly secular and radical.

1879 Foundation of Societas Rosicruciana in the USA.

1880 Beginning of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s activity. Leopold Engler reorganizes the Illuminati of Bavaria.

1884 Leo XIII, with the encyclical Humanum Genus, condemns Freemasonry. Catholics desert it; rationalists flock to it.

1888 Stanislas de Guaita founds Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn founded in England, with eleven degrees, from neophyte to ipsissimus. Its imperator is McGregor Mathers, whose sister marries Bergson.

1890 Joseph P61adan, called Josephin, leaves Guaita and founds the Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, proclaiming himself Sar Merodak. Conflict between Rosicrucians of Guaita’s order and those of Peladan’s is called the War of the Two Roses.

1891 Papus publishes his Traite methodique de science oc-culte.

1898 Aleister Crowley initiated into Golden Dawn. Later founds Order of Thelema.

1907 From the Golden. Dawn is born the Stella Matutina, which Yeats joins.

1909 In the United States, H. Spencer Lewis “reawakens” the Anticus Mysticus Ordo Rosae Crucis and in 1916, in a hotel, successfully transforms a piece of zinc into gold. Max Heindel founds the Rosicrucian Fellowship. At uncertain dates follow Lectorium Rosicrucianum, Freres Alnes de la Rose-Croix, Fraternitas Hermetica, Tern-plum Rosae-Crucis.

1912 Annie Besant, disciple of Madame Blavatsky, founds, in London, Order of the Temple of the Rose-Cross.

1918 Thule Society is born in Germany.

1936 In France Le Grand Prieure des Gaules is born. In the “Cahiers de la fraternite polaire,” Enrico Contardi-Rhodio tells of a visit from Comte de Saint-Germain.

“What does all this mean?” Diotallevi said.

“Don’t ask me. You wanted data? Help yourself. This is all I know.”

“We’ll have to consult Aglie. I doubt that even he knows all these organizations.”

“Want to bet? They’re his daily bread. But we can put him to the test. Let’s add a sect that doesn’t exist. Founded recently.”

I recalled the curious question of De Angelis, whether I had ever heard of the Tres. And I said: “Tres.”

“What’s that?” Belbo asked.

“If it’s an acrostic, there has to be a subtext,” Diotallevi said. “Otherwise my rabbis would not have been able to use the no-tarikon. Let’s see...Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. That suit you?”

We liked the name, and put it at the bottom of the list.

“With all these conventicles, inventing one more was no mean trick,’’ Diotallevi said in a sudden fit of vanity.

76

If it were then a matter of defining in one word the dominant characteristic of French Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, only one would do: dilettantism.

—Rene   Le   Forestier,    La   Franc-Mayonnerie   Templiere   et Occultiste, Paris, Aubier, 1970, 2

The next evening, we invited Aglie to Pilade’s. Though the bar’s new customers had gone back to jackets and ties, the presence of our guest, in blue chalk-stripe suit and snow-white shirt, tie fastened with a gold pin, caused eyebrows to be raised. Luckily, at six o’clock Pilade’s was fairly empty.

Aglie confused Pilade by ordering a cognac by its brand name. Pilade had it, of course, but the bottle had stood enthroned on the shelf behind the zinc counter, untouched, for years.

Aglie studied the liquor in his glass against the light, then warmed it with his hands, displaying gold cuff links that were vaguely Egyptian in style.

We showed him the list, telling him we had compiled it from the manuscripts of the Diabolicals.

“The fact that the Templars were connected with the early lodges of the master masons established during the construction of Solomon’s Temple is certain,” he said. “And it is equally certain that these associates, on occasion, recalled the murder of the Temple’s architect, Hiram, a sacrificial victim. The masons vowed to avenge him. After their persecution then, many knights of the Temple must have joined those artisan confraternities, fusing the myth of avenging Hiram with the determination to avenge Jacques de Molay. In the eighteenth century, in London, there were lodges of genuine masons, and they were called operative lodges. Then, gradually, some idle but thoroughly respectable gentlemen were determined to join operative masonry, so it became symbolic, philosophical masonry.

“In this atmosphere a certain Desaguliers, popularizer of Newton, encouraged a Protestant pastor, Anderson, to draft the constitutions of a lodge of Mason brothers, deist in persuasion, and Anderson began speaking of the Masonic confraternities as corporations dating back four thousand years, to the founders of the Temple of Solomon. These are the reasons for the Masonic masquerade: the apron, the trowel, the T square. Masonry became fashionable, attracting the aristocracy with the genealogical tables it hinted at, but it appealed even more to the bourgeoisie, who now not only could hobnob with the nobles but were actually permitted to wear a short sword. In the wretched modern world at its birth, the nobles need a place where they can come into contact with the new producers of capital, and the new producers of capital are looking to be ennobled.”

“But the Templars seem to have emerged later.”

“The one who first established a direct relation with the Templars, Ramsay, I’d prefer not to discuss. I suspect he was put up to it by the Jesuits. His preaching led to the birth of the Scottish wing of Masonry.’’

“Scottish?”

“The Scottish rite was a Franco-German invention. London Masonry had established three degrees: apprentice, fellow craft, and master. Scottish Masonry multiplied the degrees because doing so meant multiplying the levels of initiation and secrecy. The French, congenitally foolish, love secrecy...”

“But what was the secret?”

“There was no secret, obviously. But if there had been one— or if they had possessed it—its complexity would have justified the number of degrees of initiation. Ramsay multiplied-the degrees to make others believe he had a secret. You can imagine the thrill of those solid tradesmen now at last able to become princes of vengeance...”

Aglie was prodigal with Masonic gossip. And in the course of his talk, as was his custom, he slipped gradually into first-person recollection.

“In those days, in France, they were already writing couplets about the new fashion, the Frimacons. The lodges, multiplying, attracted monsignors, friars, barons, and shopkeepers, and the members of the royal family became grand masters. The Templar Strict Observance of that Hund character received Goethe, Lessing, Mozart, Voltaire. Lodges sprang up among the military; in the regimental mess they plotted to avenge Hiram and discussed the coming revolution. For others, Masonry was a societe de plaisir, a club, a status symbol. You could find a bit of everything there: Cagliostro, Mesmer, Casanova, Baron d’Holbach, d’Alembert...Encyclopedists and alchemists, libertines and hermetics. At the outbreak of the Revolution, members of the same lodge found themselves on opposite sides, and it seemed that the great brotherhood would never recover from this crisis...”

“Wasn’t there a conflict between the Grand Orient and the Scottish lodge?”

“Only verbally. For example: the lodge of the Neuf Soeurs welcomed Franklin, whose goals, naturally, were secular; he was interested only in supporting his American revolution...But at the same time, one of its grand masters was the Comte de Milly, who was seeking the elixir of longevity. Since he was an imbecile, in the course of his experiments he poisoned himself and died. Or take Cagliostro: on the one hand, he invented Egyptian rites; on the other, he was implicated in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a scandal devised by the rising bourgeoisie to discredit the ancien regime. And Cagliostro was indeed involved! Just try to imagine the sort of people one had to live with...”

“It must have been hard,” Belbo said, with comprehension.

“But who,” I asked, “are these barons von Hund who seek the Unknown Superiors....?”

“New groups sprang up at the time of the necklace farce, altogether different in nature. To gain adepts, they identified themselves with the Masonic lodges, but actually they were pursuing more mystical ends. It was at this point that the debate about the Unknown Superiors took place. Hund, unfortunately, wasn’t a serious person. At first he led his adepts to believe that the Unknown Superiors were the Stuarts. Then he said that the aim of the order was to rescue the original possessions of the Templars, and he scraped together funds from all sides. Unsatisfied with the proceeds, he fell into the hands of a man named Starck, who claimed to have learned the secret of making gold from the authentic Unknown Superiors, who were in Petersburg. Hund and Starck were surrounded by theosophists, cheap alchemists, last-minute Rosicrucians. All together, they elected as grand master a thoroughly upright man, the Duke of Brunswick. He immediately realized that he was in the worst possible company. One of the members of the Strict Observance, the landgrave of Hesse, summoned the Comte de Saint-Germain, believing this gentleman could produce gold for him. And why not? In those days the whims of the mighty had to be indulged. But the landgrave also believed himself to be Saint Peter. I assure you, gentlemen: once, when Lavater was the landgrave’s guest, he had a dreadful time with the Duchess of Devonshire, who thought she was Mary Magdalene.”

“But what about this Willermoz and this Martinez Pasqualis, who founded one sect after another?’’

“Pasqualis was an old pirate. He practiced theurgical operations in a secret chamber, and angelic spirits appeared to him in the form of luminous trails and hieroglyphic characters. Wilier- : moz took him seriously, because he himself was an enthusiast, honest but naive. Fascinated by alchemy, Willermoz dreamed of a Great Work to which the elect should devote themselves: to discover the point of alliance of the six noble metals through studying the measurements comprised in the six letters of the original name of God, which Solomon had allowed his elect to know.”    !

“And then?”

“Willermoz founded many orders and joined many lodges at the same time, as was the custom in those days, always seeking the definitive revelation, always fearing it was hidden elsewhere—which indeed is the case. That is, perhaps, the only truth...So he joined the Elus Cohen of Pasqualis. But in ‘72 Pasqualis disappeared, sailed for Santo Domingo, and left everything up in the air. Why did he leave? I suspect he came into possession of a secret he didn’t want to share. In any case, re-quiescat; he disappeared on that dark continent, into well-deserved darkness.”

“And Willermoz?”

“In that year we had all been shaken by the death of Sweden-borg, a man who could have taught many things to the ailing West, had the West listened to him. But now the century began its headlong race toward revolutionary madness, following the ambitions of the Third Estate.It was then that Willermoz heard about Hund’s rite of the Strict Observance and was fascinated by it. He was told that a Templar who reveals himself—by founding a public association, say—is not a Templar. But the eighteenth century was an era of great credulity. Willermoz ereated, with Hund, the various alliances that appear on your list, until Hund was unmasked—I mean, until they discovered he was the sort who runs off with the cash box—and the Duke of Brunswick expelled him from the organization.”

Aglid cast another glance at the list. “Ah, yes, Weishaupt. I nearly forgot. The Illuminati of Bavaria: with a name like that, they attracted, at the beginning, a number of generous minds. But Weishaupt was an anarchist; today we’d call him a Communist, and if you gentlemen only knew the things they raved about in that ambience—coups d’etat, dethroning sovereigns, bloodbaths....Mind you, I admired Weishaupt a great deal—not for his ideas, but for his extremely clearheaded view of how a secret society should function. It’s possible to have a splendid organizational talent but quite confused ideas.

“In short, the Duke of Brunswick, seeing the confusion around      | him left by Hund, realized that at this juncture there were three conflicting currents in the German Masonic world: the sapiential-occultist camp, including some Rosicrucians; the rationalist camp; and the anarchist-revolutionary camp of the Illuminati of Bavaria. He proposed that the various orders and rites meet at Wilhelmsbad for a ‘convent,’ as they were called then, an Estates-General, you might say. The following questions had to be answered: Does the order truly originate from an ancient society, and if so, which? Are there really Unknown Superiors, keepers of the ancient Tradition, and if so, who are they? What are the true aims of the order? Is the chief aim to restore the order of the Templars? And so forth, including the problem of whether the order should concern itself with the occult sciences. Willermoz joined in, enthusiastic, hoping to find at last the answers to the questions he had been asking himself all his life...And here the de Maistre affair began.”

“Which de Maistre?” I asked. “Joseph or Xavier?”

“Joseph.”

“The reactionary?”

“If he was reactionary, he wasn’t reactionary enough. A curious man. Consider: this devout son of the Catholic Church, just when the first popes were beginning to issue bulls against Masonry, became a member of a lodge, assuming the name Josephus a Floribus. He approached Masonry in 1773, when a papal brief condemned the Jesuits. Of course it was the Scottish lodges that de Maistre approached, since he was not a bourgeois follower of the Enlightenment; he was an Illuminate.”

Aglie sipped his cognac. From a cigarette case of almost white metal he took out some cigarillos of an unusual shape. “A tobacconist in London makes them for me,” he said, “like the cigars you found at my house. Please....They’re excellent...”He spoke with his eyes lost in memory.

“De Maistre...a man of exquisite manners; to listen to him was a spiritual pleasure. He gained great authority in occult circles. And yet, at Wilhelmsbad he betrayed our expectations. He sent a letter to the duke, in which he firmly renounced any Templar affiliation, abjured the Unknown Superiors, and denied the utility of the esoteric sciences. He rejected it all out of loyalty to the Catholic Church, but he did so with the arguments of a bourgeois Encyclopedist. When the duke read the letter to a small circle of intimates, no one wanted to believe it. De Maistre now asserted that the order’s aim was nothing but spiritual regeneration and that the ceremonials and the traditional rites served only to keep the mystical spirit alive. He praised all the new Masonic symbols, but said that an image that represented several things no longer represented anything. Which—you’ll forgive me—runs counter to the whole hermetic tradition, for the more ambiguous and elusive a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. Otherwise, what becomes of the spirit of Hermes, god of a thousand faces?

“Apropos of the Templars, de Maistre said that the order of the Temple had been created by greed, and greed had destroyed it, and that was that. The Savoyard could not forget, you see, that the order had been destroyed with the consent of the pope. Never trust Catholic legitimists, no matter how ardent their hermetic vocation. De Maistre’s dismissal of the Unknown Superiors was also laughable: the proof that they do not exist is that we have no knowledge of them. We could not have knowledge of them, of course, or they would not be unknown. Odd, how a believer of such fiber could be impermeable to the sense of mystery. Then de Maistre made his final appeal: Let us return to the Gospels and abandon the follies of Memphis. He was simply restating the millennial line of the Church.

“You can understand the atmosphere in which the Wilhelms-bad meeting took place. With the defection of an authority like de Maistre, Willermoz would be in the minority; at most, a compromise could be reached. The Templar rite was maintained; any conclusion about the origins of the order was postponed; in short, the convent was a failure. That was the moment the Scottish branch missed its opportunity; if things had gone differently, the history of the following century might have been different.”

“And afterward?” I asked. “Was nothing patched together again?”

“What was there to patch—to use your word?...._ Three years later, an evangelical preacher who had joined the Illuminati of Bavaria, a certain Lanze, died in a wood, struck by lightning. Instructions of the order were found on him, the Bavarian government intervened, it was discovered that Weishaupt was plotting against the state, and the order was suppressed the following year. And further: Weishaupt’s writings were published, containing the alleged projects of the Illuminati, and for a whole century they discredited all French and German neo-Templarism...It’s possible that Weishaupt’s Illuminati were really on the side of Jacobin Masonry and had infiltrated the neo-Templar branch to destroy it. It was probably not by chance that this evil breed had attracted Mirabeau, the tribune of the Revolution, to its side. May I say something in confidence?”

“Please.”

“Men like me, interested in joining together again die fragments of a lost Tradition, are bewildered by an event like Wil-helmsbad. Some guessed and remained silent; some knew and lied. And then it was too late: first the revolutionary whirlwind, ! then the uproar of nineteenth-century occultism...Look I at your list: a festival of bad faith and credulity, petty spite, ! reciprocal excommunications, secrets that circulated on every I tongue. The theater of occultism.”

“Occultists seem fickle, wouldn’t you say?” Belbo remarked. “You must be able to distinguish occultism from esotericism. Esotericism is the search for a learning transmitted only through symbols, closed to the profane. The occultism that spread in the nineteenth century was the tip of the iceberg, the little that surfaced of the esoteric secret. The Templars were initiates, and the proof of that is that when subjected to torture, they died to save their secret. It is the strength with which they concealed it that makes us sure of their initiation, and that makes us yearn j to know what they knew. The occultist is an exhibitionist. As P61adan said, an initiatory secret revealed is of no use to anyone. Unfortunately, Peladan was not an initiate, but an occultist. The nineteenth century was the century of informers. Everybody rushed to publish the secrets of magic, theurgy, cabala, tarot. And perhaps they believed in it.”

Aglie continued looking over our list, with an occasional I snicker of commiseration. “Elena Petrovna. A good woman, at j heart, but she never said a thing that hadn’t already been written ; everywhere...Guaita, a drug-addict bibliomane. Papus: What a character!” Then he stopped abruptly. “Tres....Where does I this come from? Which manuscript?”

Good, I thought, he’s noticed the interpolation. I answered vaguely: “Well, we put together the list from so many texts. Most of them have already been returned. They were plain rubbish. Do you recall, Belbo, where this Tres comes from?” “I don’t think I do. Diotallevi?” “It was days ago...Is it important?” “Not at all,” Aglie said. “It’s just that I never heard of it before. You really can’t tell me who mentioned it?” We were terribly sorry, we didn’t remember. Aglie took his watch from his vest. “Heavens, I have another engagement. You gentlemen will forgive me.”

He left, and we stayed on, talking.

“It’s all clear now. The English Templars put forth the Masonic proposal in order to make all the initiates of Europe rally around the Baconian plan.”

“But the plan only half-succeeds. The idea of the Baconians is so fascinating that it produces results contrary to their expectations. The so-called Scottish line sees the new conventicle as a way to re-establish the succession, and it makes contact with the German Templars.”

“To Aglie, what happened made no sense. But it’s obvious— to us, now. The various national groups entered the lists, one against the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if Martfnez Pasqualis was an agent of the Tomar group. The English rejected the Scottish; then there were the French, obviously divided into two groups, pro-English and pro-German. Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of different groups-God knows where the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were— met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece of the secret from the others.”

“Masonry was like Rick’s in Casablanca,” Belbo said. “Which turns upside down the common view that it is a secret society.”

“No, no, it’s a free port, a Macao. A facade. The secret is elsewhere.”

“Poor Masons.”

Progress demands its victims. But you must admit we are uncovering an immanent rationality of history.”

“The rationality of history is the result of a good recombining of the Torah,” Diotallevi said. “And that’s what we’re doing, and blessed be the name of the Most High.”

“All right,” Belbo said. “Now the Baconians have Saint-Martin-des-Champs, while the Franco-Roman neo-Templar line is breaking down into a hundred sects...And we still haven’t decided what this secret is all about.”

“That’s up to you two,” Diotallevi said.

“Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don’t come out honorably, we’ll all look silly.”

“Silly to whom?”

“Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth.”

“Quid est veritas?” Belbo asked.

“Us,” I said.

77

This herb is called Devilbane by the Philosophers. It has been demonstrated that only its seed can expel devils and their hallucinations...When given to a young woman who was tormented by a devil during the night, this herb made him flee.

—Johannes de Rupescissa, Tractatus de Quinta Essentia, 11

During the next few days, I neglected the Plan. Lia’s pregnancy was coming to term, and whenever possible I stayed with her. I was anxious, but she calmed me, saying the time had not yet come. She was taking a course in painless childbirth, and I was trying to follow her exercises. Lia had rejected science’s offer to tell us the baby’s sex in advance. She wanted to be surprised. Accepting this eccentricity on her part, I touched her belly and did not ask myself what would come out. We called it the Thing.

I asked how I could take part in the birth. “It’s mine, too, this Thing,” I said. “I don’t want to be one of those movie fathers, pacing up and down the corridor, chain-smoking.”

“Pow, there’s only so much you can do. The moment comes when it’s all up to me. Besides, you don’t smoke. Surely you’re not going to start smoking just for this occasion.”

“What’ll I do, then?”

“You’ll take part before and afterward. Afterward, if it’s a boy, you’ll teach him, guide him, give him a fine old Oedipus complex in the usual way, with a smile you’ll play out the ritual parricide when the time comes—no fuss—and at some point you’ll show him your squalid office, the card files, the page proofs of the wonderful adventure of metals, and you’ll say to him, ‘My son, one day all this will be yours.’ “

“And if it’s a girl?”

“You’ll say to her, ‘My daughter, one day all this will be your no-good husband’s.’ “

“And what do I do before?”

“During labor, between one wave of pain and the next, you have to count, because as the interval grows shorter, the moment approaches. We’ll count together, and you’ll set the rhythm for me, like rowers in a galley. It’ll be as if you, too, were coaxing the Thing out from its dark lair. Poor little Thing....Feel it. Now it’s so cozy there in the dark, sucking up humors like an octopus, all free, and then—wham—it pops out into the daylight, blinks, and says, Where the hell am I?”

“Poor little Thing. And it hasn’t even met Signer Garamond. Come on, let’s rehearse the counting part.”

We counted in the darkness, holding hands. I daydreamed. The Thing, with its birth, would give reality and meaning to all the old wives’ tales of the Diabolicals. Poor Diabolicals, who spent their nights enacting chemical weddings with the hope that eighteen-karat gold would result and wondering if the philosopher’s stone was really the lapis exillis, a wretched terra-cotta grail—and my grail was in Lia’s belly.

“Yes,” Lia said, running her hand over her swelling, taut vessel, “here is where your good primal matter is steeping.

“Those people you saw at the castle, what did they think happened in the vessel?”

“Oh, they thought that melancholy was grumbling in it, sul-ftirous earth, black lead, oil of Saturn, a Styx of purifications, distillations, pulverizations, ablutions, b’quefactions, submersions, terra foetida, stinking sepulcher...”

“What are they, impotent? Don’t they know that in the vessel our Thing ripens, all white and pink and beautiful?”

“They know, but for them your dear little belly is also a metaphor, full of secrets...”

“There are no secrets, Pow. We know exactly how the Thing is formed, its little nerves and muscles, its little eyes and spleens and pancreases...”

“Oh my God, more than one spleen? What is it, Rosemary’s baby?”

“I was speaking in general. But of course we’ll have to be ready to love it even if it has two heads.”

“Of course! I’ll teach it to play duets: trumpet and clarinet...No, then it would need four hands, and that’s too many. But, come to think about it, he’d make a great pianist. A concerto for two left hands? Nothing to it! Brr....But then, my Diabolicals also know that on that day, in the hospital, there will be born the Great Work, the White, the Rebis, the androgyne...”

“That’s all we need. Listen. We’ll call him Giulio, or her Giulia, after my grandfather. What do you say?”

“I like it. Good.”

If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia, and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go ask that old fool de Maistre.

But no. We, the sardonic, insisted on playing games with the Diabolicals, on showing them that if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all.

Serves you right, I said to myself that other evening. Now here you are, waiting for what will happen under Foucault’s Pendulum.

78

Surely this monstrous hybrid comes not from a mother’s womb but from an Ephialtes, an Incubus, or some other horrendous demon, as though spawned in a putrid and venomous fungus, son of Fauns and Nymphs, more devil than man.

—Athanasius   Kircher,   Mundus   Subterraneus,   Amsterdam, Jansson, 1665, II, pp. 279-280

That day, I wanted to stay home—I had a presentiment—but Lia told me to stop acting the prince consort and go to work. “There’s time, Pow; it won’t be born yet. I have to go out, too. Run along.”

I had almost reached my office when Signer Salon’s door opened. The old man appeared in his yellow apron. I couldn’t avoid greeting him, and he asked me to come inside. I had never seen his laboratory.

It must have been an apartment once, but Salon had had all the dividing walls demolished, and what I saw was a cave, vast, hazy. For some obscure architectural reason, this wing of the building had a mansard roof, and the light entered obliquely. I don’t know whether the glass panes were dirty or frosted, or if Salon had installed shades to keep out the direct sun, or if it was the heap of objects on all sides proclaiming a fear of spaces left empty, but the light in the cave was late dusk. The room was divided by old pharmacy shelves in which arches opened to passages, junctions, perspectives. The dominant color was brown: the objects, the shelves, the tables, the diffuse blend of daylight and the patchy illumination from old lamps. My first impression was of having entered an instrument maker’s atelier, abandoned from the time of Stradivarius, with years of accumulated dust on the striated bellies of the lutes.

Then, as my eyes gradually adjusted, I saw that I was in a petrified zoo. A bear cub with glassy eyes climbed an artificial bough; a dazed and hieratic owl stood beside me; on the table in front of me was a weasel—or marten or skunk; I couldn’t tell. Behind it was a prehistoric animal, feline, its bones showing. It might have been a puma, a leopard, or a very big dog. Part of the skeleton had already been covered with straw and paste, and it was all supported by an iron armature.

“The Great Dane of a rich lady with a soft heart,” Salon said with a snicker, “who wants to remember it as it was in the days of their conjugal life. You see? You skin the animal, on the inside of the skin you smear arsenic soap, then you soak and bleach the bones...Look at that shelf and you’ll see a great collection of spinal columns and rib cages. A lovely ossuary, don’t you think? You connect the bones with wire, reconstruct the skeleton, mount it on an armature. To stuif it, I use hay, papier-mache, or plaster. Finally you fit the skin back on. I repair the damage done by death and corruption. This owl—doesn’t it seem alive to you?”

From then on, every live owl would seem dead to me, consigned by Salon to a sclerotic eternity. I regarded the face of that embalmer of animal pharaohs, his bushy eyebrows, his gray cheeks, and I could not decide whether he was a living being or a masterpiece of his own art.

The better to look at him, I took a step backward, and felt something graze my nape. I turned with a shudder and saw I had set a pendulum in motion.

A great disemboweled bird swayed, following the movement of the lance that pierced it. The weapon had entered the head, and through the open breast you could see it pass where the heart and gizzard had once been, then branch out to form an upside-down trident. One, thicker prong went through the now-emptied belly and pointed toward the ground like a sword, while the two other prongs entered the feet and emerged symmetrically from the talons. The bird swung, and the three points cast their shadow on the floor, a mystic sign.

“A fine specimen of the golden eagle,” Salon said. “But I still have a few days’ work to do on it. I was just choosing the eyes.” He showed me a box full of glass corneas and pupils, as if the executioner of Saint Lucy had collected the trophies of his entire career. “It’s not always easy, as it is with insects, where all you need is a box and a pin. This, for example, has to be treated with formalin.”

I smelled its morgue odor. “It must be an enthralling job,” I said. And meanwhile I was thinking of the living creature that throbbed in Lia’s belly. A chilling thought seized’ me. If the Thing dies, I said to myself, I want to bury it. I want it to feed the worms underground and enrich the earth. That’s the only way I’ll feel it’s still alive...

Salon was still talking. He took a strange specimen from one of the shelves. It was about thirty centimeters long. A dragon, a reptile with black membranous wings, a cock’s crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny sawlike teeth. “Handsome, isn’t he? My own composition. I used a salamander, a bat, snake’s scales...A subterranean dragon. I was inspired by this...”

He showed me, on another table, a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with leather ties. “It cost me a fortune. I’m not a bibliophile, but this was something I had to have. It’s the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665. Here’s the dragon. Identical, don’t you think? It lives in the caves of volcanoes, that good Jesuit said, and he knew everything about the known, the unknown, and the nonexistent...”

“You think always of the underground world,” I said, recalling our conversation in Munich and the words I had overheard through the Ear of Dionysius.

He opened the volume to another page, to an image of the globe, which looked like an anatomical organ, swollen and black, covered by a spider web of luminescent, serpentine veins. “If Kircher was right, there are more paths in the heart of the earth than there are on the surface. Whatever takes place in nature derives from the heat and steam below...”

I thought of the Black Work, of Lia’s belly, of the Thing that was struggling to break out of its sweet volcano.

“...and whatever takes place in the world of men is planned below.”

“Does Padre Kircher say that, too?”

“No. He concerns himself only with nature...But it is odd that the second part of this book is on alchemy and the alchemists, and that precisely here, you see, there is an attack on the Rosicrucians. Why attack the Rosicrucians in a book on the underground world? Our Jesuit knew a thing or two; he knew that the last Templars had taken refuge in the underground kingdom ofAgarttha...”

“And they’re still there, it seems,” I ventured.

“They’re still there,” Salon said. “Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us, right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who directed the excavations?”

“Expert engineers, I’d say.”

“Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books....How many Jews are there among your authors?”

“We don’t ask our authors to fill out racial forms,” I replied stiffly.

“You mustn’t think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends...I have in mind a certain kind of Jew....”

“What kind?”

“I know what kind...”

79

He opened his coffer. In indescribable disorder it contained collars, rubber bands, kitchen utensils, badges of different technical schools, even the monogram of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. On everything, in his madness, he saw the seal of the Antichrist, in the form of two linked triangles.

—Alexandre Chayla, “Serge A. Nilus et les Protocoles,” La Tribune Juive, May 14, 1921, p.3

“You see,” Salon went on, “I was born in Moscow. And it was in Russia, when I was a youth, that people discovered the secret Jewish documents that said, in so many words, that to control governments it was necessary to work underground. Listen.” He picked up a little notebook, in which he had copied out some quotations. “ ‘Today’s cities have metropolitan railroads and underground passages: from these we will blow up all the capitals of the world.’ Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Document Number Nine!”

It occurred to me that the collection of spinal columns, the box with the eyes, the skins stretched over armatures came from some extermination camp. But no, I was dealing with an elderly man nostalgic about the old days of Russian anti-Semitism. “If I follow you, then, there’s a conventicle of Jews—some Jews, not all—who are plotting something. But why underground?”

“That’s obvious! Any plotter must plot underground, not in the light of day. This has been known from the beginning of time. Dominion over the world means dominion over what lies beneath it. The subterranean currents.”

I remembered a question of Agile’s in his study, and then the Druidesses in Piedmont, who called on telluric currents.

“Why did the Celts dig sanctuaries in the heart of the earth, making tunnels that communicated with a sacred well?” Salon continued. “The well goes down into radioactive strata, as everyone knows. How was Glastonbury built? And isn’t the island of Avalon where the myth of the Grail originated? And who invented the Grail if not a Jew?”

The Grail again, my God. But what grail? There was only one grail: my Thing, in contact with the radioactive strata of Lia’s womb, and perhaps now swimming happily toward the mouth of that well, perhaps now preparing to come out, and here I was among stuffed owls, among a hundred dead and one pretending to be alive.

“All Europe’s cathedrals are built where the Celts had their menhirs. Why did the Celts set these stones in the ground, considering the effort it cost them?”

“Why did the Egyptians go to so much trouble to erect the pyramids?”

“There you are. Antennas, thermometers, probes, needles like the ones Chinese doctors use, stuck into the body’s nodal points. At the center of the earth is a nucleus of fusion, something similar to the sun—indeed, an actual sun around which things revolve, describing different paths. Orbits of telluric currents. The Celts knew where they were, and how to control them. And Dante? What about Dante? What was he trying to tell us with the account of his descent into the depths? You understand me, dear friend?”

I didn’t like being his dear friend, but I went on listening to him. Giulio/Giulia, my Rebis planted like Lucifer at the center of Lia’s womb, but he/she, the Thing, would be upside down, would be struggling upward, and would somehow emerge. The Thing was created to emerge upward from the viscera, and not make its entrance with head bowed, in sticky secrecy.

Salon by now was lost in a monologue he seemed to repeat from memory. “You know what the English leys are? If you fly over England in a plane, you’ll see that all the sacred places are joined by straight lines, a grid of lines interwoven across the whole country, still visible because they suggested the lines of later roads...”

“The sacred places were connected by roads, and people simply tried to make roads as straight as possible.”

“Indeed? Then why do birds migrate along these lines? Why do flying saucers follow them? It’s a secret that was lost after the Roman invasion, but there are those who still know it...”

“The Jews,” I suggested.

“They also dig. The first alchemistic principle is VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapi-dem.”

Lapis exillis. My Stone that was slowly coming out of exile, from the sweet oblivious hypnotic exile of Lia’s vessel; my Stone, beautiful and white, not seeking further depths, but seeking the surface...I wanted to rush home to Lia, to wait with her, hour by hour, for the appearance of the Thing, the triumph of the surface regained. Salon’s den had the musty smell of tunnels. Tunnels were the origin that had to be abandoned; they were not the destination. And yet I followed Salon, and new, malicious ideas for the Plan whirled in my head. While I awaited the one Truth of this sublunar world, I racked my brain to construct new falsehoods; blind as the animals underground.

I stirred. I had to get out of the tunnel. “I must go,” I said. “Perhaps you can suggest some books on this subject.”

“Ha! Everything they’ve written about is false, false as the soul of Judas. What I know I learned from my father...”

“A geologist?”

“Oh no,” Salon said, laughing, “no, not at all. My father-nothing to be ashamed of; water under the bridge—worked for the Okhrana. Directly under the chief, the legendary Rachkov-ski.”

Okhrana, Okhrana? Something like the KGB? The tsarist secret police, wasn’t it? And who was Rachkovski? Wasn’t there someone who had a similar name? By God, the colonel’s mysterious visitor, Count Rakosky....No, enough of this. No more coincidences. I didn’t stuff dead animals; I created living animals.

80

When White arrives in the matter of the Great Work, Life has conquered Death, the King is resuscitated, Earth and Water have become Air, it is the domain of the Moon, their Child is born...Then Matter achieves such a degree of fixity that Fire can no longer destroy it...When the artist sees perfect whiteness, the Philosophers say the books must be torn up, for they are now useless.

—Dom J. Pernety, Dictionnaire mytho-hermetique, Paris, Bauche, 1758, “Blancheur”

I mumbled some excuse, in haste. I believe I said, “My girlfriend’s having a baby tomorrow.” Salon haltingly offered me congratulations, as if not sure who the father was. I ran home, to breathe some clean air.

Lia wasn’t in. On the kitchen table, a piece of paper: “Darling, the waters have broken. Couldn’t get you at the office. Taking a taxi to the hospital. Come. I feel alone.”

A moment of panic. I had to be there to count with Lia. I should have been in the office, reachable. It was my fault: the Thing would be born dead, Lia would die with it, Salon would stuff them both.

I entered the hospital on unsteady legs, asked directions of people who didn’t know anything, twice ended up in the wrong ward. I shouted that they had to know where Lia was having the baby, and they told me to calm down, because here everybody was having a baby.

Finally—I don’t know how—I found myself in a room. Lia was pearly pale but smiling. Someone had lifted her hair and put it under a white cap. For the first time I saw Lia’s forehead in all its splendor. Next to her was the Thing.

“It’s Giulio,” she said.

My Rebis. I, too, had made him, and not with chunks of dead bodies or arsenic soap. He was whole, all his fingers and toes were in the right place.

I insisted on seeing all of him, his little cock, his big balls. Then I kissed Lia on her naked brow: “The credit is yours, darling; it all depends on the vessel.”

“Of course the credit is mine, you shit. I had to count all by myself.’’

“For me you are all that counts,” I told her.

81

The subterranean people have reached the highest knowledge...If our mad humankind should begin a war against them, they would be able to explode the whole surface of our planet...

—Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 1924, v

I stayed at home with Lia because, once she left the hospital and had to change the baby’s diapers, she cried and said she would never be able to cope. Somebody explained to us that this was normal: the excitement over the victory of birth is followed by a feeling of helplessness in the face of the immensity of the job. During those days, while I loafed around the house, useless and not qualified, of course, for breast-feeding, I spent long hours reading everything I had been able to find concerning telluric currents.

On my return, I sounded out Aglfe on them. He made a gesture of boredom. “Weak metaphors, referring to the secret of the serpent Kundalini. Chinese geomancy also sought in the earth the traces of the dragon. The telluric serpent simply stands for the occult serpent. The goddess reposes, coiled, and sleeps her eternal sleep. Kundalini throbs gently, binding heavy bodies to lighter bodies. Like a vortex or a whirlpool, like the first half of the syllable om.”

“But what secret cfoes the serpent refer to?” “To the telluric currents.” “What are the telluric currents?”

“A great cosmological metaphor, which refers to the serpent.” To hell with Aglie, I said to myself, I know more than that.

I read my notes to Belbo and Diotallevi, and we no longer had any doubt. At last we were in a position to supply the Templars with a decent secret. It was the most economical, the most elegant solution to the problem, and all the pieces of our millennial puzzle fit together.

So: the Celts knew about the telluric currents: they had learned the secret from the Atlantides, when the survivors of the submerged continent emigrated, some to Egypt, some to Brittany.

The Atlantides had learned it from those ancestors of ours who ventured forth from Avalon across the continent of Mu as far as the central desert of Australia—when all the continents were a single land mass, the wondrous Pangaea. If only we could still read (as the Aborigines can, but they remain silent) the mysterious alphabet carved on the great boulder Ayers Rock, we would have the Answer. Ayers Rock is the antipode of the great (unknown) mountain that is the Pole, the true, occult Pole, not the one that any bourgeois explorer can reach. As usual, and this should be obvious to anyone whose eyes have not been blinded by the false light of Western science, the Pole that we see is not the real Pole, for the real Pole is the one that cannot be seen, except by some adepts, whose lips are sealed.

The Celts, however, believed it was enough to discover the global configuration of the currents. That’s why they erected megaliths. The menhirs had sensitive devices, like electric valves, planted at the points where the currents branched and changed direction. The leys marked the routes of currents already identified. The dolmens were chambers of accumulated energy, where the Druids, with geomantic tools, attempted to map, by extrapolation, the global design. The cromlechs and Stonehenge were micro-macrocosmic observatories from which they studied the pattern of the constellations in order to divine the pattern of the currents—because, as the Tabula Smaragdina tells us, what is above is isomorphic to what is below.

But there was more to the problem than that. The other branch of the Atlantidean emigration realized as much. The occult knowledge of the Egyptians passed from Hermes Trismegistus to Moses, who took care not to pass it on to his band of tatterdemalions, their craws still stuffed with manna; to them he offered the Ten Commandments, which was as much as they could comprehend. The higher truth is aristocratic; Moses encoded it in the Pentateuch. The cabalists understood this.

“Just think,” I said, “everything was already written, an open book, in the measurements of the Temple of Solomon, and the keepers of the secret were the Rosicrucians, who formed the Great White Fraternity—the Essenes, in other words, who, as is well known, let Jesus in on their secrets. And there you have the real reason why Jesus was crucified...”

“Of course, the Passion of Christ is an allegory, prefiguring the trial of the Templars.”

“Right. And Joseph of Arimathea takes, or takes back, the secret of Jesus to the land of the Celts. But obviously the secret is still incomplete; the Christian Druids know only a fragment of it, and that is the esoteric meaning of the Grail: there is something missing, but we don’t know what. The secret—what the Temple already said in full—is suspected only by a small group of rabbis who remained in Palestine. They entrust it to the occult Moslem sects, to the Sufis, the Ismailis, the Motak-allimun. And from them the Templars learn it.”

“At last, the Templars! I was beginning to worry,” Belbo said.

We were shaping the Plan, which, like soft clay, obeyed our thumbs, our narrative desires. The Templars had discovered the secret during those sleepless nights, embracing their saddle mates in the desert, where the implacable simoom was blowing. They had wrested it, bit by bit, from those who knew the powers of cosmic focus in the Black Stone of Mecca, the heritage of the Babylonian magi—for it was clear now that the Tower of Babel had been simply an attempt, however hasty and deservedly a failure because of the pride of its architects, to build the most powerful menhir of all. But the Babylonians got their calculations wrong. As Father Kircher has demonstrated, had the tower reached its peak, its excessive weight would have made the earth’s axis rotate ninety degrees and maybe more, and our poor globe, instead of having an ithyphallic crown pointing upward, would have found itself with a sterile appendix, a limp mentula, a monkey tail flopping downward, a Shekhinah lost in the dizzying abyss of an antarctic Malkhut, a flaccid hieroglyph for penguins.

“So, in a word, what’s the secret discovered by the Templars?”

“Don’t rush me. We’re getting there. It took seven days to make the world. And now we’ll give it a try.”

82

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

—H. P. Blavatsky   Isis Unveiled, New York, Boulton, 1877, I, p. xxiii

We gave it a try, and we succeeded.

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

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

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

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

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

“But Las Vegas is in Nevada.”

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

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

“Panic on Wall Street.”

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

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

“Everyone was, except us. Thank God weVe caught on. Now we’re a step ahead of them.”

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

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

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

In the Conservatoire is Poucault’s Pendulum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“...which can only be the dawn of June 24, Saint John’s day, feast of the summer solstice...”

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

“Perfect,” Belbo said. “But suppose it’s overcast?”

“They wait until the following year.”

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

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

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

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

“But still, the last meeting is in Jerusalem.”

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

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

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

83

A map is not the territory.

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

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

“This doesn’t solve our problem,” Diotallevi said.

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

I went to dig out a history of cartography.

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

“What sorts of conjectures?”