“The Jesuits,” Diotallevi said, “understood what neither the poor old Templars of Provins nor the Baconian camp had yet realized, namely, that the reconstruction of the map could be accomplished by ars combinatoria; in other words, with a method that foreshadowed our modern electronic brains. The Jesuits were the first to invent Abulafia! Father Kircher reread all the treatises on the combinatorial art, from Lullus on, and you see what he published in his Ars Magna Sciendi...”

“It looks like a crochet pattern to me,” Belbo said.

“No, gentlemen, these arc all the possible combinations. Factor analysis, that of the Sefer Yesirah. Calculation of permutations, the very essence of the temurah!”

This was certainly so. It was one thing to conceive Fludd’s vague project of identifying the map by beginning with a polar projection; it was quite another to figure out how many trials would be required in order to arrive at the correct solution. And, again, it was one thing to create an abstract model of all the possible combinations, and another to invent a machine able to carry them out. So both Kircher and his disciple Schott built mechanical devices, mechanisms with perforated cards, computers ante litteram. Binary calculators. Cabala applied to modern technology.

IBM: lesus Babbage Mundi, lesum Binarium Magnificamur. AMDG: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam? Not on your life! Ars Magna, Digitale Gaudium! IHS: lesus Hardware & Software!

89

In the bosom of the deepest darkness a society has been formed, a society of new beings, who know one another though they have never seen one another, who understand one another without explanations, who serve one another without friendship...From the Jesuit rule this society adopts blind obedience; from the Masons it takes the trials and the ceremonies, and from the Templars the subterranean mysteries and the great audacity. Has the Comte de Saint-Germain simply imitated Guillaume Postel, who desperately wanted people to believe him older than he was?

—Marquis de Luchet, Essai sur la secte des illumines, Paris, 1789,v and xii

The Jesuits knew that if you want to confound your enemies, the best technique is to create clandestine sects, wait for dangerous enthusiasms to precipitate, then arrest them all. In other words, if you fear a plot, organize one yourself; that way, all those who join it come under your control.

I remembered the reservation Aglie had expressed about Ramsay, the first to posit a direct connection between the Masons and the Templars; Aglie said that Ramsay had ties with Catholic circles. In fact, Voltaire had already denounced Ramsay as a tool of the Jesuits. Faced with the birth of English Freemasonry, the Jesuits in France responded with Scottish neo-Templarism.

Responding to this French plot, a certain Marquis de Luchet produced, in 1789, anonymously, Essai sur la secte des illumines, in which he lashed out against the Illuminati of every stripe, Bavarian or otherwise, priest-baiting anarchists and mystical neo-Templars alike, and he threw on the heap (incredible, how all the pieces of our mosaic were fitting together!) even-the Paulicians, even Postel and Saint-Germain. His complaint was that these forms of Templar mysticism were undermining the credibility of Masonry, which in contrast was a society of good and honest people.

The Baconians had invented Masonry to be like Rick’s in Casablanca, Jesuit Neo-Templarism had parried that move, and now Luchet was hired to bump off all the groups that weren’t Baconian.

At this point, however, we were confronted with another problem, which was too much for poor Aglie to handle. Why had de Maistre, who was the Jesuits’ man, gone to Wilhelmsbad to sow dissension among the neo-Templars a good seven years before the Marquis de Luchet appeared on the scene?

“Neo-Templarism was all right in the first half of the eighteenth century,” Belbo said, “and it was all wrong at the end of the century; first because it had been taken over by revolutionaries, for whom anything served, the Goddess Reason, the Supreme Being, even Cagliostro, provided they could cut off the king’s head, and second because the German princes were now putting their thumbs in the pie, especially Frederick of Prussia, and his aims surely didn’t correspond to those of the Jesuits. When mystical neo-Templarism, whoever invented it, began producing things like The Magic Flute, Loyola’s men naturally decided to wipe it out. It’s like high finance: you buy a company, you sell off its assets, you declare bankruptcy, you close it down, and you reinvest its capital. The important thing is the overall strategy, not what happens to the janitor. Or it’s like a used car: when it stops running, you send it to the junkyard.”

90

In the true Masonic code no other god will be found save Mani. He is the god of the cabalist Masons, of the ancient Rosicrucians, of the Martinis! Masons...All the outrages attributed to the Templars are precisely those attributed, before them, to the Manicheans.

—Abbe” Barruel, M&moires pour servir A I’histoire du jacobinisme, Hamburg, 1798, 2, xiii

The Jesuits’ strategy became clear to us when we discovered Barruel. Between 1797 and 1798, in response to the French Revolution, he writes his Memoires pour servir d I’histoire du ja-cobinisme, a real dime novel that begins, surprise surprise, with the Templars. After the burning of Molay, they transform themselves into a secret society to destroy monarchy and papacy and to create a world republic. In the eighteenth century they take over Freemasonry and make it their instrument. In 1763 they create a literary academy consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Con-dorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert, which meets in the house of Baron d’Holbach and in 1776, plot after plot, they bring about the birth of the Jacobins. But they are mere marionettes, their strings pulled by the real bosses, the Illuminati of Bavaria— regicides by vocation.

Junkyard? After having split Masonry in two with the help of Ramsay, the Jesuits were putting it together again in order to fight it head-on.

Barruel’s book had some influence^ in fact, in the French National Archives there were at least two reports ordered by Napoleon on the clandestine sects. These reports were drawn up by a certain Charles de Berkheim, who—in the best tradition of secret police—obtained his information from sources already published; he copied freely, first from the book by the Marquis de Luchet and then from Barruel’s.

Reading these horrifying descriptions of the Illuminati as well as the denunciation of a directorate of Unknown Superiors capable of ruling the world, Napoleon did not hesitate: he decided to join them. He had his brother Joseph named grand master of the Great Orient, and he himself, according to many sources, made contact with the Masons and became a very high official in their ranks. It is not known, however, in which rite. Perhaps, prudently, in all of them.

We had no idea what Napoleon knew, but we weren’t forgetting that he had spent time in Egypt, and God knows what sages he conversed with in the shadow of the pyramids (even a child could see that the famous forty centuries (here looking down on him were a clear reference to the Hermetic Tradition).

Napoleon must have known something, because in 1806 he convoked an assembly of French Jews. The official reasons were banal: an attempt to reduce usury, to assure himself of the loyalty of the Jewish population, to find new financing...None of which explains why he called that assembly the Grand San-hedrin, a name suggesting a directorate of superiors more or less unknown. The truth is that the shrewd Corsican had identified the representatives of the Jerusalemite branch, and was trying to unite the various scattered Templar groups.

“It’s no accident that in 1808 Marechal Ney’s troops are at Tomar. You see the connection?”

“We’re here to see connections.”

“Now Napoleon, about to defeat England, has almost all the European centers in his hand, and through the French Jews he has the Jerusalemites as well. What does he still lack?”

“The Paulicians.”

“Exactly. And we haven’t yet decided where they end up. But Napoleon provides us with a clue: he goes to look for them in Russia.”

Living for centuries in Slavic regions, the Paulicians naturally reorganize under the labels of various Russian mystic groups. One of the most influential advisers of Alexander I is Prince Galitzin, connected with sects of Martinist inspiration. And who do we find in Russia, a good ten years before Napoleon, as plenipotentiary of the House of Savoy, tying bonds with the mystic cenacles of St. Petersburg? De Maistre.

At this point de Maistre distrusts any organization of Illuminati; for him, they are no different from the men of the Enlightenment responsible for the bloodbath of the Revolution. During this period, in fact, repeating Barruel almost word for word, he talks of a satanic sect that wants to conquer the world, and probably he has Napoleon in mind. If our great reactionary is aiming, then, to seduce the Martinist groups, it is because he suspects that they, though drawing their inspiration from the same sources as French and German neo-Templarism, are the heirs of the one group not yet corrupted by Western thought: the Paulicians.

But apparently de Maistre’s plan does not succeed. In 1815 the Jesuits are expelled from St. Petersburg, and de Maistre returns to Turin.

“All right,” Diotallevi said, “we’ve found the Paulicians again. Let’s get rid of Napoleon, who obviously failed in his purpose—otherwise, on St. Helena, he could have made his enemies quake by merely snapping his fingers. What happens now among all these people? My head is splitting.”

“At least you still have a head.”

91

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

—Letter from Captain Simonini to Barruel, published in Lacivilta cattolica, October 21, 1882

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

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

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

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

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

92

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

—Sergei Nilus, Epilogue to the Protocols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

93

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

—Protocols, V

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

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

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

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

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

94

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

95

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

96

A cover is always necessary. In concealment lies a great part of our strength. Hence we must always hide ourselves under the name of another society.

—Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten-Orden, 1794, p. 165

At that same time, reading some pages of our Diabolicals, we found that the Comte de Saint-Germain, among his numerous disguises, had assumed the identity Rackoczi, at least according to the ambassador of Frederick II in Dresden. And the landgrave of Hesse, at whose residence Saint-Germain was supposed to have died, said that he was of Transylvanian origin and his name was Rago/ki. We had also to consider that Comenius dedicated his Pansophiae (a work surely born in the odor of Rosicrucian-ism) to a landgrave (another landgrave) named Ragovsky. A final touch to the mosaic: browsing at a bookstall in Piazza Castello, I found a German work on Masonry, anonymous, in which an unknown hand had added, on the flyleaf, a note to the effect that the text was the work of one Karl Aug. Ragotgky. Bearing in mind that Rakosky was the name of the mysterious individual who had perhaps killed Colonel Ardenti, we now could include in the Plan our Comte de Saint-Germain.

“Aren’t we giving that scoundrel too much power?” Diotal-levi asked, concerned.

“No, no,” Belbo replied, “we need him. Like soy sauce in Chinese dishes. If it’s not there, it’s not Chinese. Look at Aglie, who knows a thing or two: Did he take Cagliostro as his model? Or Willermoz? No. Saint-Germain is the quintessence of Homo Hermeticus.”

Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky: jovial, sly, feline, intelligent, and astute, a counterfeiter of genius. First a petty bureaucrat, later in contact with revolutionary groups, in 1879 he is arrested by the secret police and charged with having given refuge to terrorist companions after their attempted assassination of General Drentel. He becomes a police informer and (here we go!) joins the ranks of the Black Hundreds. In 1890 he discovers in Paris an organization that makes bombs for demonstrations in Russia; he arranges the arrest, back home, of seventy-three terrorists. Ten years later, it is discovered that the bombs were made by his own men.

In 1887 he circulates a letter by a certain Ivanov, a repentant revolutionary, who declares that the majority of the terrorists are Jews; in 1890, a “confession par un veillard ancien revolution-naire,” in which the exiled revolutionaries in London are accused of being British agents; and in 1892, a bogus text of Plekhanov, which accuses the leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party of having had that confession published.

In 1902 he forms a Franco-Russian anti-Semitic league. To ensure its success he uses a technique similar to that of the Ro-sicrucians: he declares that the league exists, so that people will then create it. But he uses another tactic, too: he cleverly mixes truth with falsehood, the truth apparently damaging to him, so that nobody will doubt the falsehood. He circulates in Paris a mysterious appeal to support the Russian Patriotic League, headquarters in Kharkov. In the appeal he attacks himself as the man who wants to make the league fail, and he expresses the hope that he, Rachkovsky, will change his mind. He accuses himself of relying on discredited characters like Nilus, and this is true.

Why can the Protocols be attributed to Rachkovsky?

Rachkovsky’s sponsor is Count Sergei Witte, a minister who desires to turn Russia into a modern country. Why the progressive Witte makes use of the reactionary Rachkovsky, God only knows; but at this point the three of us would have been surprised by nothing. Witte has a political opponent, Elie de Cyon, who has already attacked him publicly, making assertions that recall certain passages in the Protocols, except that in Cyon’s writings there are no references to the Jews, since he is of Jewish origin himself. In 1897, at Witte’s orders, Rachkovsky has Cyon’s villa at Territat searched, and he finds a pamphlet by Cyon drawn from Joly’s book (or Sue’s), in which the ideas of Machiavelli-Napoleon III are attributed to Witte. With his genius for falsification, Rachkovsky substitutes the Jews for Witte and has the text circulated. The name Cyon is perfect, suggesting Zion, and now everybody sees that an eminent Jewish figure is denouncing a Jewish plot. This is how the Protocols are born. The text falls into the hands of Juliana or Justine Glinka, who in Paris frequents Madame Blavatsky’s Parisian circle, and in her free time she spies on and denounces Russian revolutionaries in exile. This Glinka woman is undoubtedly an agent of the Paulicians, who are allied to the agrarians and therefore want to convince the tsar that Witte’s programs are part of the international Jewish plot. Glinka sends the document to General Orgeievsky, and he, through the commander of the imperial guard, sees that it reaches the tsar. Witte is in trouble.

So Rachkovsky, driven by his anti-Semitism, contributes to the downfall of his sponsor. And probably to his own. Because from that moment on we lose all trace of him. But Saint-Germain perhaps donned new disguises, moved on to new reincarnations. Nevertheless, our story was plausible, rational, because it was backed by facts, it was true—as Belbo said, true as the Bible.

Which reminded me of what De Angelis had told me about the synarchy. The fine thing about the whole story—our story, and perhaps also History itself, as Belbo hinted, with feverish eyes, as he handed me his file cards—was that groups locked in mortal combat were slaughtering one another, each in turn using the other’s weapons. “The first duty of a good spy,” I remarked, “is to denounce as spies those whom he has infiltrated.”

Belbo said: “I remember an incident in ***. At sunset, along a shady avenue, I always ran into this guy named Remo—or something like that—in a little black Balilla. Black mustache, curly black hair, black shirt, and black teeth, horribly rotten. And he would be kissing a girl. I was revolted by those black teeth kissing that beautiful blonde. I don’t even remember what her face was like, but for me she was virgin and prostitute, the eternal feminine. And great was my revulsion.” Instinctively he adopted a lofty tone to show irony, aware that he had allowed himself to be carried away by the innocent tenderness of the memory. “I asked myself why this Remo, who belonged to the Black Brigades, dared allow himself to be seen around like that, even in the periods when *** was not occupied by the Fascists. Someone whispered to me that he was a Fascist spy. However it was, one evening I saw him in the same black Balilla, with the same black teeth, kissing the same blonde, but now with a red kerchief around his neck and a khaki shirt. He had shifted to the Garibaldi Brigades. Everybody made a fuss over him, and he actually gave himself a nom de guerre: X9, like the Alex Raymond character whom I had read about in the Awenturoso comics. Bravo, X9, they said to him...And I hated him more than ever, because he possessed the girl by popular consent. Those who said he was a Fascist spy among the partisans were probably men who wanted the girl themselves, so they cast suspicion on X9...”

“And then what happened?”

“See here, Casaubon, why are you so interested in my life?”

“Because you make it sound like a folktale, and folktales are part of the collective imagination.”

“Good point. One morning, X9 was driving along, out of his territory; maybe he had a date to meet the girl in the fields, to go beyond their kissing and pawing and show her that his prick was not as rotten as his teeth—I’m sorry, I still can’t make myself love him. Anyway, the Fascists set a trap for him, captured him, took him into town, and at five o’clock the next morning, they shot him.”

A pause. Belbo looked at his hands, which he had clasped, as if in prayer. Then he held them apart and said, “That was the proof that he wasn’t a spy.”

“The moral of the story?”

“Who said stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die.”

97

I am that I am.

—Exodus 3:14

Ego sum qui sum. An axiom of hermetic philosophy.

—Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877, p. 1

“Who are you?” three hundred voices asked as one, while twenty swords flashed in the hands of the nearest ghosts...”I am that I am,” he said.

—Alexandre Dumas, Giuseppe Balsamo, ii

I saw Belbo the next morning. “Yesterday we sketched a splendid dime novel,” I said to him. “But maybe, if we want to make a convincing Plan, we should stick closer to reality.”

“What reality?” he asked me. “Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality. Maybe they’ve deceived us.”

“How?”

“Making us believe that on one hand there is Great Art, which portrays typical characters in typical situations, and on the other hand you have the thriller, the romance, which portrays atypical characters in atypical situations. No true dandy, I thought, would have made love to Scarlett O’Hara or even to Constance Bona-cieux or Princess Daisy. I played with the dime novel, in order to take a stroll outside of life. It comforted me, offering the unattainable. But I was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Wrong. Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.”

“The fact is, it’s easier for reality to imitate the dime novel than to imitate art. Being a Mona Lisa is hard work; becoming Milady follows our natural tendency to choose the easy way.”

Diotallevi, silent until now, remarked: “Or our Aglie, for example. He finds it easier to imitate Saint-Germain than Voltaire.”

“Yes,” Belbo said, “and women find Saint-Germain more interesting than Voltaire.”

Afterward, I found this file, in which Belbo translated our discussion into fictional form, amusing himself by reconstructing the story of Saint-Germain without adding anything of his own, only a few sentences here and there to provide transitions, in a furious collage of quotes, plagiarisms, borrowings, cliches. Once again, to escape the discomfort of History, Belbo wrote and reexamined life through a literary stand-in.

FILENAME: The Return of Saint-Germain

For five centuries now the avenging hand of the All-Powerful has driven me from deepest Asia all the way to this cold, damp land. I carry with me fear, despair, death. But no, I am the notary of the Plan, even if nobody else knows it. I have seen things far more terrible; preparing the night of Saint Bartholomew was more irksome than the thing I am now preparing to do. Oh, why do my lips curl in this satanic smile? I am that I am. If only that wretch Cagliostro had not usurped from me even this last privilege.

But my triumph is near. Soapes, when I was Kelley, told me everything in the Tower of London. The secret is to become someone else.

By shrewd plotting I had Giuseppe Balsamo imprisoned in the fortress of San Leo, and I stole his secrets. Saint-Germain has vanished; now all believe I am the Conte di Cagliostro.

Midnight is struck by all the clocks of the city. What unnatural peace. This silence does not persuade me. A beautiful evening, though cold; the high moon casts an icy glow over the impenetrable alleys of old Paris. It is ten o’clock: the spire of the abbey of the Black Friars has just tolled eight, slowly. The wind with mournful creaks moves the iron weathercocks on the desolate expanse of rooftops. A thick blanket of clouds covers the sky.

Skipper, are we turning back? No. We’re sinking! Damnation, the Patna’s going to the bottom. Jump, Seven Seas Jim, jump! To be free of this anguish I’d give a diamond the size of a walnut. Luff the mainsail, take the tiller, the topgallant, whatever you like, curse you, it’s blowing up!

Horribly I clench the cloister of my teeth as a deathly pallor flushes my green, waxen face.

How did I come here, I who am the very image of revenge? The spirits of Hell will smile with contempt at the tears of the creature whose menacing voice so often made them tremble even in the womb of their fiery abyss.

Holla, lights!

How many steps did I come down to reach this den? Seven? Thirty-six? There is no stone I grazed, no step taken that did not hide a hieroglyph. When I have uncovered them all, the Mystery will be revealed at last to my faithful followers. The Message will be deciphered, its solution will be the Key, and to the initiate, but only to the initiate, the Enigma will then be revealed.

Between the Enigma and the deciphering of the Message, the step is brief, and from it, radiant, the Hierogram will emerge, upon which the Prayer of Interrogation will be defined. Then the Arcanum will be drawn aside, the veil, the Egyptian tapestry that covers the Pentacle. And thence to the light, to announce the Occult Meaning of the Pentacle, the Cabalistic Question to which only a few can reply, and to recite in a voice of thunder the Impenetrable Sign. Bent over it, the Thirty-six Invisibles will have to give the Answer, the uttering of the Rune whose Meaning is open only to the sons of Hermes. To them let the Mocking Seal be given, the Mask behind which is outlined the Countenance they seek to bare, the Mystic Rebus, the Sublime Anagram...

“Sator Arepo!” I shout in a voice to make a specter tremble. And Sator Arepo appears, abandoning the wheel he grips with the clever hands of a murderer. At my command, he prostrates himself. I recognize him, for I had already suspected his identity. He is Luciano, the handicapped shipping clerk, who the Unknown Superiors have decreed will be the executor of my evil and bloody task.

“Sator Arepo,” I ask mockingly, “do you know what is the Final Answer concealed behind the Sublime Anagram?”

* * *

“No, Count,” the imprudent one replies. “I wait to learn it from your lips.”

From my pale lips infernal laughter bursts and reechoes through the ancient vaults.

“Fool! Only the true initiate knows he does not know it!”

“Yes, master,” the maimed clerk replies stupidly. “As you wish. 1 am ready.”

We are in a squalid den in Clignancourt. This evening I must punish, first of all, you, who initiated me into the noble art of crime, who pretend to love me, and who, what is worse, believe you love me, along with the nameless enemies with whom you will spend the next weekend. Luciano, unwelcome witness of my humiliations, will lend me his arm—his one arm—then he, too, will die.

The room has a trapdoor over a ditch or chamber, a subterranean passage used since time immemorial for the storage of contraband goods, a place always dank because it is connected to the Paris sewers, that labyrinth of crime, and the ancient walls exude unspeakable miasmas, so that when with the help of Luciano, ever faithful in evil, I make a hole in the wall, water enters in spurts; it floods the cellar, the already rotting walls collapse, and the passage joins the sewers, and dead rats float past. The blackish surface that can be seen from above is now the vestibule to perdition: far, far off, the Seine, and then the sea...

A ladder hangs down, fixed to the upper edge of the trap. On this, at water level, Luciano takes his place, with a knife: one hand gripping the bottom rung, the other holding the knife, the third ready to seize the victim. “Now wait in silence,” I say to him, “and you will see.”

I have convinced you to destroy all men with a scar. Come with me, be mine forever, let us do away with those importunate presences. I know well that you do not love them—you told me as much—but we two will remain, we and the subterranean currents.

Now you enter, haughty as a vestal, hoarse and numb as a witch. O vision of hell that stirs my age-old loins and grips my bosom in the clutch of desire, O splendid half-caste, instrument of my doom! With talonlike hands I rip the shirt of fine batiste that adorns my chest, and with my nails I stripe my flesh with bleeding furrows, while a horrible burning sears my lips as cold as the scales of the Serpent. A hollow roar erupts from the black pit of my soul and bursts past the cloister of my fierce teeth—I, centaur vomited by the Tartar...But I suppress my cry and approach you with a horrid smile.

“My beloved, my Sophia,” I purr as only the secret chief of the Okhrana can purr. “I have been waiting for you; come, crouch with me in the shadows, and wait.” And you laugh a hoarse, slimy laugh, savoring in advance some inheritance, loot, a manuscript of the Protocols to sell to the tsar...How cleverly you conceal behind that angel face your demon nature, how modestly you sheathe your body in adrogynous blue jeans, and your T-shirt, diaphanous, still hides the infamous lily branded on your white flesh by the executioner of Lille!

* * *

The first dolt arrives, drawn by me into the trap. I can barely make out his features within the cloak that enfolds him, but he shows me the sign of the Templars of Provins. It is Soapes, the Tomar group’s assassin.

“Count,” he says to me, “the moment has come. For too many years we have wandered, scattered over the world. You have the final piece of the message. I have the one that appeared at the beginning of the Great Game. But this is another story. Let us join forces, and the others...”

I complete his sentence: “The others can go to hell. In the center of the room, brother, you will find a coffer; in the coffer is what you have been seeking for centuries. Do not fear the darkness; it does not threaten, but protects us.”

The dolt takes a few steps, groping. A thud, a splash. He has fallen through the trapdoor, but Luciano grabs him, wields the knife, the throat is quickly cut, the gurgle of blood mingles with the churning of the chthonian muck.

* * *

A knock at the door. “Is that you, Disraeli?”

“Yes,” answers the stranger, in whom my readers will have recognized the grand master of the English group, now risen to the pomp of power, but still not satisfied. He speaks: “My lord, it is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal that a great part of Europe is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads...”

“You said that in the Commons, on July 14, 1856. Nothing escapes me. Get to the point.”

The Baconian Jew mutters a curse. He continues: “There are too many. The Thirty-six Invisibles are now three hundred and sixty. Multiply that by two: seven hundred and twenty. Subtract the hundred and twenty years at the end of which the doors are opened, and you get six hundred, like the charge of Balaclava.”

Devilish man, the secret science of numbers holds no secrets for him. “Well?”

“We have gold, you have the map. Let us unite. Together we will be invincible.”

With a hieratic gesture, I point toward the spectral coffer that he, blinded by his desire, thinks he discerns in the shadows. He steps forward, he falls.

I hear the sinister flash of Luciano’s blade, and in the darkness I see the death rattle that glistens in the Englishman’s silent pupil. Justice is done.

* * *

I await the third, the French Rosicrucians’ man, Montfaucon de Villars, ready to betray the secrets of his sect.

“I am the Comte de Gabalis,” he introduces himself, the lying ninny.

I have only to whisper a few words, and he is impelled toward his destiny. He falls, and Luciano, greedy for blood, performs his task.

You smile with me in the shadows, and you tell me you are mine, that your secret will be my secret. Deceive yourself, yes, sinister caricature of the Shekhinah. Yes, I am your Simon; but wait, you still do not know the best of it. When you do know, you will have ceased knowing.

* * *

What to add? One by one, the others enter.

Padre Bresciani has informed me that, representing the German II-luminati, Babette d’lnterlaken will come, the great-granddaughter of Weishaupt, the grand virgin of Helvetic Communism, who grew up amid roues, thieves, and murderers. Expert in stealing impenetrable secrets, in opening dispatches of state without breaking the seals, in administering poisons as her sect orders her.

She enters then, the young agathodemon of crime, enfolded in a polar-bear fur, her long blond hair flowing from beneath the bold busby; her eyes haughty, sarcastic. With the usual fraud, I direct her toward her destruction.

Ah, irony of language—this gift nature has given us to keep silent the secrets of our spirit! The Daughter of Enlightenment falls victim to Darkness. I hear her spewing horrible curses, impenitent, as Luciano twists the knife three times in her heart. Deja vu....

* * *

It is the turn of Nilus, who for a moment thought to possess both the tsarina and the map. Filthy lewd monk, you wanted the Antichrist? He stands before you, but you do not know him. I send him on, blind, amid a thousand mystical flatteries, to the evil trap awaiting him. Luciano rips open his breast with a wound in the form of a cross, and he sinks into eternal sleep.

* * *

I must overcome the ancestral distrust in the last, the Elder of Zion, who claims to be Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, immortal like me. He is suspicious as he smiles unctuously, his beard still steeped in the blood of the tender Christian creatures he habitually slaughters in the cemetery of Prague. But I will be as clever as a Rachkovsky, cleverer. I hint that the coffer contains not only a map but also uncut diamonds. I know the fascination uncut diamonds have for this deicide race. He approaches his destiny, dragged by his greed, and it is his own God, cruel and vengeful, that he curses as he dies, pierced like Hiram, but it is difficult for him to curse even now, because his God’s name cannot be uttered.

* * *

In my delusion, I thought I had concluded the Great Work.

As if struck by a gust of wind, once again the door opens, and a figure appears, a livid face, numbed fingers devoutly held to the chest, a hooded gaze: he cannot conceal his identity, for he wears the black habit of his black Society. A son of Loyola!

“Cre’tineau!” I cry, misled.

He raises his hand in a hypocritical gesture of benediction. “I am not I am that I am,” he says to me with a smile that contains nothing human.

It is true: this has always been the Jesuits’ method. Sometimes they deny their own existence, and sometimes they proclaim the power of their order to intimidate the uninitiated.

“We are always other than what you think, sons of Belial,” that seducer of sovereigns says now. “But you, O Saint-Germain....”

“How do you know who I really am?” I ask, alarmed.

He sneers. “We met in other times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed of Postel, when under the name of Abbe d’Herblay I led you to end one of your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille. (Oh, how I still feel on my face the iron mask to which the Society, with Colbert’s help, had sentenced me!) We met when I spied on your secret talks with d’Holbach and Condorcet...”

“Rodin!” I exclaim, thunderstruck.

“Yes, Rodin, the secret general of the Jesuits! Rodin, whom you will not trick into falling through the trapdoor, as you did with the others. Know this, O Saint-Germain: there is no crime, no evil machination that we did not invent before you, to the greater glory of that God of ours who justifies the means! How many crowned heads have we made tumble into the night that has no morning, or into snares more subtle, to achieve dominion over the world! And now, when we are within sight of the goal, you would prevent us from laying our rapacious hands on the secret that for five centuries has moved the history of the world?”

Rodin, speaking in this way, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all the execrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of the Renaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. I see clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood, a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads around him.

How to strike this last enemy? To my aid comes an unexpected intuition...an intuition that can come only to one from whom the human soul, for centuries, has kept no inviolable secret place.

“Look at me,” I say. “I, too, am a Tiger.”

With one move I thrust you into the middle of the room, I rip from you your T-shirt, I tear the belt of the skin-tight armor that conceals the charms of your amber belly. Now, in the pale lights of the moon that seeps through the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful than the serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin and prostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked woman is an armed woman.

The Egyptian klaft descends over your thick hair, so black it seems blue; your breast throbs beneath the filmy muslin. The gold uraeus, arched and stubborn, with emerald eyes, flashes on your head its triple tongue of ruby. And oh, your tunic of black gauze with silver glints, your girdle embroidered in sinister rainbows, with black pearls! Your swelling pubis shaved so that for your lovers you are sleek as a statue! Your nipples gently touched by the brush of your Malabar slave girl, who has dipped it into the same carmine that bloodies your lips, inviting as a wound!

Rodin is now panting. The long abstinences of a life spent in a dream of power have only prepared him all the more for enslavement to uncontrollable desire. Faced by this queen, beautiful and shameless, her eyes black as the Devil’s, her rounded shoulders, scented hair, white and tender skin, Rodin is seized by the possibility of unknown caresses, ineffable voluptuousness; his flesh yearns as a sylvan god yearns when gazing on a naked nymph mirrored in the water that has already doomed Narcissus. Against the light I see him stiffen, as one petrified by Medusa, sculpted by the desire of a repressed virility now at its sunset. The obsessive flame of lust surges through his body; he is like an arrow aimed at its target, a bow drawn to the breaking point.

Suddenly he falls to the floor and crawls before this apparition, his hand extended like a claw to implore a sip of balm. , “Oh, how beautiful you are,” he groans, “with those little vixen teeth that gleam when you part your red and swollen lips....your green emerald eyes that flash, then fade...Oh, demon of lust!”

He’s not all that wrong, the wretch, as you now move your hips, sheathed in their blue denim, and thrust forward your groin to drive the pinball to its supreme folly.

“Vision,” Rodin says, “be mine; for just one instant crown with pleasure a life spent in the hard service of a jealous divinity, assuage with one lubricious embrace the eternity of flame to which your sight now plunges me. I beseech you, brush my face with your lips, you Antinea, you Mary Magdalene, you whom I have desired in the presence of saints dazed in ecstasy, whom I have coveted during my hypocritical worship of virginity. O Lady, fair art thou as the sun, white as the moon; lo I deny both God and the saints, and the Roman pontiff himself—no, more, I deny Loyola and the criminal vow that binds me to my Society. A kiss, one kiss, then let me die!”

On numbed knees he crawls, his habit pulled up over his loins, his hand outstretched toward unattainable happiness. Suddenly he falls back, his eyes bulging, his features convulsed, like the unnatural shocks produced by Volta’s pile on the face of a corpse. A bluish foam purples his lips; from his mouth comes a strangled hissing, like a hydrophobe’s, for when it reaches its paroxysmal phase, as Charcot rightly puts it, this terrible disease, which is satyriasis, the punishment of lust, impresses the same stigmata as rabid madness.

It is the end. Rodin bursts into insane laughter, then crumples to the floor, lifeless, the living image of cadaveric rigor.

In a single moment he went mad and died in mortal sin.

I push the body toward the trapdoor, careful not to dirty my patent-leather boots on the greasy soutane of my last enemy.

There is no need for Luciano’s dagger, but the assassin can no longer control his actions, his bestial compulsion to murder over and over. Laughing, he stabs a lifeless, dead cadaver.

* * *

Now I move with you to the trap’s rim, I stroke your throat as you lean forward to enjoy the scene, I say to you, “Are you pleased with your Rocambole, my inaccessible love?”

And as you nod lasciviously and sneer, drooling into the void, I slowly tighten my fingers.

“What are you doing, my love?”

“Nothing, Sophia. I am killing you. I am now Guiseppe Balsamo and have no further need of you.”

The harlot of the Archons dies, drops to the water. With a thrust of his knife, Luciano seconds the verdict of my merciless hand, and I say to him: “Now you can climb up again, my trusty one, my black soul.” As he climbs, his back to me, I insert between his shoulder blades a thin stiletto with a triangular blade that leaves hardly a mark. Down he plunges; I close the trapdoor: it is done. I abandon the sordid room as eight bodies float toward the Chatelet by conduits known only to me.

I return to my small apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honore”, I look at myself in the mirror. There, I say to myself, I am the King of the World. From my hollow spire I rule the universe. My power makes my head spin. I am a master of energy. I am drunk with command.

* * *

Alas, life’s vengeance is not slow in coming. Months later, in the deepest crypt of the castle of Tomar, I—now master of the secret of the subterranean currents and lord of the six sacred places of those who had been the Thirty-six Invisibles, last of the last Templars and Unknown Superior of all Unknown Superiors—should win the hand of Cecilia, the androgyne with eyes of ice, from whom nothing now can separate me. I have found her again, after the centuries that intervened since she was stolen from me by the man with the saxophone. Now she walks on the back of the bench as on a tightrope, blue-eyed and blond; nor do I know what she is wearing beneath the filmy tulle that bedecks her.

The chapel has been hollowed from the rock; the altar is surmounted by a canvas depicting the torments of the damned in the bowels of Hell. Some hooded monks stand tenebrously at my side, but I am not disturbed, I am fascinated by the Iberian imagination...

Then—O horror—the canvas is raised, and behind it, the admirable work of some Arcimboldo of caves, another chapel appears, exactly like this one. There before the altar Cecilia is kneeling, and beside her—icy sweat beads my brow, my hair stands on end—whom do I see, mockingly displaying his scar? The Other, the real Giuseppe Balsamo. Someone has freed him from the dungeon of San Leo!

And I? It is at this point that the oldest of the monks raises his hood, and I recognize the ghastly smile of Luciano, who—God knows how-escaped my stiletto, the sewers, the bloody mire that should have dragged his corpse to the silent depths of the ocean. He has gone over to my enemies in his rightful thirst for revenge.

The monks slough off their habits; they are head to toe in armor, a flaming cross on their snow-white cloaks. The Templars of Provins!

They seize me, turn me around, toward an executioner standing between two deformed assistants. I am bent over, and with a searing brand I am made the eternal prey of the jailer as the evil smile of Baphomet is impressed forever on my shoulder. Now I understand: I am to replace Balsamo at San Leo—or, rather, to resume the place that was assigned to me for all eternity.

But they will recognize me, I tell myself, and somebody will surely come to my aid—my accomplices, at least—a prisoner cannot be replaced without anybody’s noticing, these are no longer the days of the Iron Mask...Fool! In a flash I understand, as the executioner forces my head over a copper basin from which greenish fumes are rising: vitriol!

A cloth is placed over my eyes, my face is thrust into the devouring liquid, a piercing unbearable pain, the skin of my cheeks shrivels, my nose, mouth, chin, a moment is all it takes, and as I am pulled up again by the hair, my face is unrecognizable—paralysis, pox, and indescribable absence of a face, a hymn to hideousness. I will go back to the dungeon like those fugitives who, to avoid recapture, had the courage to disfigure themselves.

Ah, I cry, defeated, and as the narrator says, one word escapes my shapeless lips, a sigh, an appeal: Redemption!

But Redemption from what, old Rocambole? You knew better than to try to be a protagonist! You have been punished, and with your own arts. You mocked the creators of illusion, and now—as you see—you write using the alibi of a machine, telling yourself you are a spectator, because you read yourself on the screen as if the words belonged to another, but you have fallen into the trap: you, too, are trying to leave footprints on the sands of time. You have dared to change the text of the romance of the world, and the romance of the world has taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a plot not of your making.

You would have done better to remain among your islands, Seven Seas Jim, and let her believe you were dead.

98

The National Socialist party did not tolerate secret societies, because it was itself a secret society, with its grand master, its racist gnosis, its rites and initiations.

—Rene Alleau, Les sources occultes du nazisme. Paris, Grasset 1969, p. 214

It was around this time that Aglie slipped through our fingers. That was the expression Belbo used, with a tone of excessive indifference. I attributed the indifference once again to jealousy. Silently obsessed by Aglie’s power over Lorenza, aloud he wisecracked about the power Aglie was gaining at Garamond.

Perhaps it was our own fault. Aglie had begun seducing Garamond almost a year earlier, from the time of the alchemistie party in Piedmont. Soon after that, Garamond entrusted the SFA file to him, for him to recruit new victims to flesh out the Isis Unveiled catalog; by now, Garamond consulted him on every decision, and no doubt gave him a monthly check. Gudrun, who carried out periodic expeditions to the end of the corridor and beyond the glass door that gave access to the padded world of Manutius, told us from time to time, in a worried voice, that Aglie had practically established himself in the office of Signora Grazia; he dictated letters to her, escorted new visitors into Gar-amond’s office, and, in short—and here Gudrun’s indignation robbed her of even more vowels—acted as if he owned the place. We really should have wondered why Aglie spent hours and hours on the Manutius address file. Selecting the SFAs to invite to join the list of authors for Isis Unveiled should not have taken that much time. Yet he went on writing, contacting, making appointments.

But we actually fostered his autonomy. The situation suited Belbo. More Aglie in Via Marchese Gualdi meant less Aglie in Via Sincere Renato. Thus, when Lorenza Pellegrini made one of her sudden appearances, and Belbo, with unconcealed excitement, became pathetically radiant, there was less likelihood that “Simon” would barge in ruinously.

I wasn’t displeased, either, since by now I had lost interest in Isis Unveiled and was more and more involved in my history of magic. Feeling I had learned from the Diabolicals everything there was to learn, I let Aglie handle the contacts (and contracts) with the new authors.

Nor did Diotallevi object. In general, the world seemed to matter less and less to him. Now that I think back, I realize that he continued losing weight in a troubling way. At times I would see him in his office bent over a manuscript, his eyes vacant, his pen about to drop from his hand. He wasn’t asleep; he was exhausted.

There was another reason we accepted the increasing rarity of Aglie’s appearances, and their brevity—for he would simply hand back to us the manuscripts he had rejected, then vanish into the corridor. The fact was, we didn’t want him to hear our discussions. If anyone had asked us why, we would have said it was out of delicacy, or embarrassment, since we were parodying the metaphysics in which he somehow believed. But it was really distrust on our part; we were slowly assuming the natural reserve of those who possess a secret, we were putting Aglie in the role of the profane masses as we took more and more seriously the thing we had invented. Perhaps, too, as Diotallevi said in a moment of good humor, now that we had a real Saint-Germain, we didn’t need an imitation.

Aglie didn’t seem to take offense at our reserve. He would greet us, then leave us, with a politeness that bordered on hauteur.

One Monday morning I arrived at work late, and Belbq eagerly asked me to come to his office, calling Diotallevi, too. “Big news,” he said. But before he could begin, Lorenza arrived. Belbo was torn between his joy at this visit and his impatience to tell what he had discovered. A moment later, there was a knock, and Aglie stuck his head in. “I don’t want to disturb you. Please don’t get up. I haven’t the authority to intrude on such a consistory. I only wanted to tell our dearest Lorenza that I’m in Signor Garamond’s office. And I hope I have at least the authority to summon her for a sherry at noon, in my office.”

In his office! This time Belbo lost self-control. To the extent, that is, that he could lose it. He waited for Aglie to leave, then muttered through clenched teeth: “Ma gavte la nata.”

Lorenza, still showing her pleasure at the invitation, asked Belbo what that meant.

“It’s Turin dialect. It means, literally, ‘Be so kind as to remove the cork.’ A pompous, self-important, overweening individual is thought to hold himself the way he does because of a cork stuck in his sphincter ani, which prevents his vaporific dignity from being dispersed. The removal of the cork causes the individual to deflate, a process usually accompanied by a shrill whistle and the reduction of the outer envelope to a poor flesh-less phantom of its former self.”

“I didn’t know you could be so vulgar.”

‘‘ Now you know.”

Lorenza went out, pretending to be annoyed. I knew this distressed Belbo all the more: real anger would have reassured him, but a pretense of irritation only confirmed his fear that, from Lorenza, the display of any passion was always staged, theatrical.

He said then, with grim determination, “To business.” Meaning: Let’s proceed with the Plan, seriously.

“I don’t much want to,” Diotallevi said. “I don’t feel well. I have a pain here,”—he touched his stomach—”I think it’s gastritis.”

“Ridiculous,” Belbo said to him. “/don’t have gastritis...What could give you gastritis? Mineral water?”

“Could be,” Diotallevi said with a wan smile. “Last night I overdid it. I’m accustomed to still Fiuggi, and I drank some fizzy San Pellegrino.”

“You must be careful. Such excesses could kill you. But to business, gentlemen. I’ve been dying to tell you for two days now...Finally, I know why the Thirty-six Invisibles were unable, for centuries, to work out the form of the map. John Dee got it wrong; the geography has to be done over. We live inside a hollow earth, enclosed by the terrestrial surface. Hitler realized this.”

99

Nazism was the moment when the spirit of magic seized the helm of material progress. Lenin said Communism was socialism plus electricity. In a sense, Hitlerism was Guenonism plus armored divisions.

—Pauwels and Bergier, Le matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, 2, vii

Now Belbo had managed to work Hitler into the Plan. “It’s all there, black on white. The founders of Nazism were involved in Teutonic neo-Templarism.”

“An airtight case.”

“I’m not inventing, Casaubon, for once I’m not inventing!”

“Take it easy. When did we ever invent anything? We’ve always started with objective data, with information in the public domain.”

“This time, too. In 1912 a Germanenorden group is formed, proposing the tenet of Aryan superiority. In 1918 a certain Baron von Sebottendorf founds a related group, the Thule Gesellschaft, a secret society, yet another variation on the Templar Strict Observance, but with strong racist, pan-German, neo-Aryan tendencies. And in ‘33 Sebottendorf writes that he had sown what Hitler reaped. Furthermore, it is in Thule Gesellschaft circles that the hooked cross appears. And who was among the first to join the Thule? Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s evil genius! Then Rosenberg! Then Hitler himself! And note that in his cell in Spandau even today, as you’ve surely read in the papers, Hess studies the esoteric sciences. Sebottendorf in ‘24 writes a pamphlet on alchemy, and remarks that the first experiments in atomic fission demonstrate the truths of the Great Work. He also writes a novel on the Ros-icrucians! Later he edits an astrological magazine, Astrologische Rundschau, and Trevor-Roper tells us that the Nazi chiefs, Hitler first among them, never made a move without having a horoscope cast. In 1943 a group of psychics is consulted to discover where Mussolini is being held prisoner. In other words, the whole Nazi leadership is connected with Teutonic neo-occultism.”

Belbo seemed to have got over the incident with Lorenza, and I built a fire under him to get on with his theory. “We can look at Hitler’s power as a rabble-rouser also from this point of view,” I said. “Physically, he was a toad, he had a shrill voice. How could such a man whip crowds into a frenzy? He must have possessed psychic powers. Perhaps, instructed by some Druid from his hometown, he knew how to establish contact with the subterranean currents. Perhaps he was a living valve, a biological menhir transmitting the currents to the faithful in the Nuremberg stadium. For a while it worked for him; then his batteries ran down.”

100

To All the World: I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid, concentric spheres; one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees.

—J. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry, April 10, 1818; quoted in Sprague de Camp and Ley, Lands Beyond, New York, Rinehart, 1952,

“Congratulations, Casaubon. In your innocence you hit upon the truth. Hitler’s one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohl-weltlehre.”

“I’m leaving. I’ve got gastritis,” Diotallevi said.

“Wait. We’re getting to the best part. The earth is hollow: we don’t live outside it, on the convex crust, but inside, on the concave surface. What we think is the sky is actually a gaseous mask, with points of brilliant light, which fills the interior of our globe. All astronomical measurements have to be reinterpreted. The sky is not infinite: it’s circumscribed. The sun, if it really exists, is no bigger than it looks, a mere crumb having a diameter of thirty centimeters at the center of the earth. The Greeks had already suspected as much.”

“You made this up,” Diotallevi said wearily.

“I did not! Somebody had the idea at the beginning of the last century, an American, a man named Symmes. Then, at the end of the century, another American—name of Teed— revived the notion, supported by alchemistic experiments and a reading of Isaiah. After the First World War, the hollow-earth theory was perfected by a German—I forget his name—who founded the Hohlweltlehre movement. Hitler and his cronies discovered that Hohlweltlehre corresponded exactly to their principles, and they even, according to one report, misaimed some of the V-ls because they calculated their trajectories on the basis of a concave, not a convex, surface. Hitler at this point was convinced that the King of the World was himself and that the Nazi General Staff members were the Unknown Superiors. Where does the King of the World live? Beneath; not above.

“This hypothesis inspired Hitler to change the whole direction of German research toward the concept of the final map, the interpretation of the Pendulum! The six Templar groups had to be reassembled; everything had to be begun again from the beginning. Consider the logic of Hitler’s conquests...First, Danzig, to have under his control the classical places of the Teutonic group. Next he conquered Paris, to get his hands on the Pendulum and the Eiffel Tower, and he contacted the syn-archic groups and put them into the Vichy government. Then he made sure of the neutrality—in effect, the cooperation—of the Portuguese group. His fourth objective was, of course, England; but we know that wasn’t easy. Meanwhile, with the African campaigns, he tried to reach Palestine, but here again he failed. Then he aimed at the dominion of the Paulician territories, by invading the Balkans and Russia.

“When Hitler had four-sixths of the Plan in his hands, he sent Hess on a secret mission to England to propose an alliance. The Baconians, however, refused. He had another idea: those who were holding the most important part of the secret must be his eternal enemies the Jews. He didn’t look for them in Jerusalem, where few were left. The Jerusalemite group’s piece of the message wasn’t in Palestine anyway; it was in the possession of a group of the Diaspora. And so the Holocaust is explained.”

“How is that?”

“Just think for a moment. Suppose you wanted to commit genocide...”

“Excuse me,” Diotallevi said, “but this is going too far. My stomach hurts. I’m going home.”

“Wait, damn it. When the Templars were disemboweling the Saracens, you enjoyed yourself, because it was so long ago. Now you’re being delicate, like a petty intellectual. We’re remaking history; we can’t be squeamish.”

We let him continue, subdued by his vehemence.

“The striking thing about the genocide of the Jews is the lengthiness of the procedures. First they’re kept in camps and starved, then they’re stripped naked, then the showers, then the scrupulous piling up of the corpses, and the sorting and storing of clothes, the listing of personal effects...None of this makes sense if it was just a question of killing them. It makes sense if it was a question of looking for something, for a message that one of those millions of people—the Jerusalemite representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles—was hiding in the hem of a garment, or in his mouth, or had tattooed on his body...Only the Plan explains the inexplicable bureaucracy of this genocide! Hitler was searching the Jews for the clue that would allow him to determine, with the Pendulum, the exact point under the earth’s concave vault where the telluric currents converged.

“And now you see the beauty of the idea. The telluric currents become equated with the celestial currents. The hollow-earth theory gives new life to the age-old hermetic intuition, namely, that what lies beneath is equal to what lies above! The Mystic Pole coincides with the Heart of the Earth. The secret pattern of the stars is nothing other than the secret pattern of the subterranean passages of Agarttha. There is no longer any difference between heaven and hell, and the Grail, the lapis exillis, is the lapis ex coelis, the philosopher’s stone, the terminal, the limit, the chthonian uterus of the empyrean! And if Hitler can identify that point in the hollow center of the earth, which is also the exact center of the sky, he will be Master of the World, whose king he is by right of race. And that’s why, to the very end, in the depths of his bunker, he thought he could still control the Mystic Pole.”

“Stop,” Diotallevi said. “Enough is enough. I’m sick.”

“He’s really sick. It’s not an ideological protest,” I said.

Belbo finally understood. Concerned, he went to Diotallevi, who was leaning against the desk, apparently on the verge of fainting. “Sorry, my friend. I got carried away. You’re sure it’s not anything I said? We’ve joked together for twenty years, you and I. Maybe you do have gastritis. Look, try a Merankol tablet and a hot-water bottle. Come, I’ll drive you home. Then you’d better call a doctor, have yourself looked at.”

Diotallevi said he could take a taxi home, he wasn’t at death’s door yet. He just had to lie down. Yes, he would call a doctor, he promised. And it wasn’t the Holocaust business that had upset him; he had been feeling bad since the previous evening. Belbo, relieved, went with him to the taxi.

When he came back, he looked worried. “Now that I think about it, Diotallevi hasn’t been himself for several weeks. Those circles under his eyes....It’s not fair; I should have died of cirrhosis ten years ago, and here I am, the picture of health, whereas he lives like an ascetic and has gastritis or maybe worse. If you ask me, it’s an ulcer. To hell with the Plan. We’re not living right.”

“A Merankol will fix him up,” I said.

“Yes, and a hot-water bottle on his stomach. Let’s hope he acts sensibly.”

101

Qui operator in Cabala...si errabit in opere aut non purificatus accesserit, deuorabitur ab Azazale.

—Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones Magicae

Diotallevi’s condition took a decided turn for the worse in late November. He called the office to say he was going into the hospital. The doctor had told him there was nothing to worry about, but it would be a good idea to have some tests.

Belbo and I somehow connected Diotallevi’s illness with the Plan, which perhaps we had carried too far. It was irrational, but we felt guilty. This was the second time I seemed to be Belbo’s partner in crime. Once, we had remained silent together, withholding information from De Angelis; and now we had talked too much. We told each other this was silly, but we couldn’t shake off our uneasiness. And so, for a month or more, we did not discuss the Plan.

Meanwhile, after he had been out for two weeks or so, Dio-tallevi dropped by to tell us, in a nonchalant tone, that he had asked Garamond for sick leave. A treatment had been recommended to him. He didn’t go into details, but it involved his reporting to the hospital every two or three days, and it would leave him somewhat weak. I didn’t see how he could get much weaker; his face now was as white as his hair.

“And forget about those stories,” he said. “They’re bad for the health, as you’ll see. It’s the Rosicrucians’ revenge.”

“Don’t worry,” Belbo said to him, smiling. “We’ll make life really unpleasant for those Rosicrucians, and they’ll leave you alone. Nothing to it.” And he snapped his fingers.

The treatment lasted until the beginning of the new year. I was absorbed by my history of magic—the real thing, serious stuff, I said to myself, not our nonsense. Garamond came by at least once a day to ask for news of Diotallevi. “And please, gentlemen, let me know if any need arises, any problem, any circumstance in which I, the firm, can do something for our admirable friend. For me, he’s like a son—more, a brother— and thank heaven this is a civilized country, whatever people may say; we have a public health system we can be proud of.”

Aglie expressed concern, asked for the name of the hospital, and telephoned its director, a dear friend (who, moreover, happened to be the brother of an SEA with whom Aglie was on excellent terms). Diotallevi would be treated with special consideration.

Lorenza showed up often to ask for news. This should have made Belbo happy, but he took it as another indication that his prognosis was not good. Lorenza was there, but still elusive, because she wasn’t there for him.

Shortly before Christmas, I’d caught a snatch of their conversation. Lorenza was saying to him: “The snow is just right, and they have charming little rooms. You can do cross-country skiing, can’t you?” I concluded that they would be spending New Year’s Eve together. But one day after Epiphany, when Lorenza appeared in the corridor, Belbo said to her, “Happy New Year,” and dodged her attempt to give him a hug.

102

Leaving this place, we came to a settlement known as Milestre....where it is said that one known as the Old Man of the Mountain dwelled...And he built, over high mountains surrounding a valley, a very thick and high wall, in a circuit of thirty miles, and it was entered by two doors, and they were hidden, cut into the mountain.

—Odorico da Pordenone, De rebus incognitis, Impressus Esauri, 1513, xxi, p. 15

One day, at the end of January, as I was walking along Via Marchese Gualdi, where I had parked my car, I saw Salon coming out of Manutius. “A little chat with my friend Aglie,” he said to me.

Friend? As I seemed to recall from the Piedmont party, Aglie was not fond of him. Was Salon snooping around Manutius, or was Aglie using him for some contact or other?

Salon didn’t give me time to ponder this; he suggested a drink, and we ended up at Pilade’s. I had never seen Salon in this part of town, but he greeted old Pilade as if they had known each other for years. We sat down. He asked me how my history of magic was progressing. So he knew about that, too. I prodded him about the hollow-earth theory and about Sebottendorf, the man Belbo had mentioned.

He laughed. “You people certainly draw your share of madmen. I’m not familiar with this business of the earth being hollow. As for Sebottendorf, now there was a character...He gave Himmler and company some ideas that were suicidal for the German people.”

“What ideas?”

“Oriental fancies. That man, wary of the Jews, ended up worshiping the Arabs and the Turks. Did you know that on Himm-ler’s desk, along with Mein Kampf, there was always the Koran? Sebottendorf, fascinated in his youth by an occult Turkish sect, began studying Islamic gnosis. He said Fiihrer but thought Old Man of the Mountain. When they all got together and founded the SS, they had in mind an organization like the Assassins...Ask yourself why Germany and Turkey, in the First World War, were allies.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I told you, I think, that my poor father worked for the Okh-rana. Well, I remember in those days how the tsarist police were concerned about the Assassins. Rachkovsky got wind of it first...But they gave up that trail, because if the Assassins were involved, then the Jews couldn’t be, and the Jews were the danger. As always. The Jews went back to Palestine and made those others leave their caves. But the whole thing is complicated, confused. Let’s leave it at that.”

He seemed to regret having said so much, and hastily took his leave. Then another thing happened. I’m now sure I didn’t dream it, but that day I thought it was a hallucination: as I watched Salon walk away from the bar, I saw him meet a man at the corner, an Oriental.

In any case, Salon had said enough to start my imagination working again. The Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins were no strangers to me: I had mentioned them in my thesis. The Templars were accused of being in collusion with them. How could we have overlooked this?

So I began exercising my mind again, and my fingertips, going through old card files, and an idea came to me, an idea so spectacular that I couldn’t restrain myself.

The next morning I burst into Belbo’s office. “They got it all wrong. We got it all wrong.”

“Take it easy, Casaubon. What are you talking about? Oh, my God, the Plan.” Then he hesitated. “You probably don’t know. There’s bad news about Diotallevi. He won’t speak. I called the hospital, but they refuse to give me the particulars because I’m not a relative. The man doesn’t have any relatives, so who is there to act on his behalf? I don’t like this reticence. A benign growth, they say, but the therapy wasn’t enough. He should .go back into the hospital for a month or so, and minor surgery may be indicated...In other words, those people aren’t telling me the whole story, and I like this situation less and less.”

I didn’t know what to say. Embarrassed by my triumphal entry, I started leafing through papers. But Belbo couldn’t resist. He was like a gambler who’s been shown a pack of cards. “What the hell,” he said. “Life goes on, unfortunately. What did you find?”

“Well, Hitler goes to all that trouble with the Jews, but he accomplishes nothing. Occultists throughout the world, for centuries, have studied Hebrew, rummaged in Hebrew texts, and at most they can draw a horoscope. Why?”

“H’m....Because the Jerusalemites’ fragment of the message is still hidden somewhere. Though the Paulicians’ fragment never turned up either, as far as we know...”

“That’s an answer worthy of Aglie, not of us. I have a better one. The Jews have nothing to do with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Jews have nothing to do with the Plan. They can’t. Picture the situation of the Templars, first in Jerusalem, then in their commanderies in Europe. The French knights meet the Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italians, the English: they all have contacts with the Byzantine area, and in particular they combat the Turk, an adversary with whom they fight but also maintain a gentlemanly relationship, a relationship of equals. Who were the Jews at that time, in Palestine? A religious and racial minority tolerated by the condescending Arabs but treated very badly by the Christians. We must remember that in the course of the various Crusades the ghettos were sacked as i matter of course and there were massacres all around. Is it conceivable that the Templars, snobs that they were, would exchange mystical information with the Jews? Never. And in the European commanderies, the Jews were considered usurers, were despised, people to be exploited, not trusted. We’re talking about an alliance of knights, about a spiritual knighthood: would the Templars of Provins allow second-class citizens to join that? Out of the question.”

“But what about all that Renaissance magic, and the study of cabala....?”

“That was only natural. By then we’re close to the third meeting; they’re champing at the bit, looking for shortcuts; Hebrew is a sacred and mysterious language; the cabalists have been busy on their own and to other ends. The Thirty-six scattered around the world get the idea that a mysterious language might conceal God knows what secrets. It was Pico della Mirandola who said that nulla nomina, ut significativa et in quantum nomina sunt, in magico opere virtutem habere non possunt, nisi sint Hebraica. Pico della Mirandola was a cretin.”

“Bravo! Now you’re talking!”

“Furthermore, as an Italian, he was excluded from the Plan. ATiat did he know? So much the worse for Agrippa, Reuchlin, and their pals, who fell for that red herring. I’m reconstructing the story of a red herring, a false trail: is that clear? We let ourselves be influenced by Diotallevi, who was always cabaliz-ing. He cabalized, so we put the Jews in the Plan. If he had been a scholar of Chinese culture, would we have put the Chinese in the Plan?”

“Maybe we would have.”

“Anyway, let’s not rend our garments; we were led astray by everyone. They all, from Postel on, probably, made this mistake. Two hundred years after Provins, they were convinced that the sixth group was the Jerusalemites. It wasn’t.”

“Look, Casaubon, we were the ones who revised Ardenti’s theory, we were the ones who said that the appointment at the rock didn’t mean Stonehenge but the Rock in the Mosque of Omar.”

“And we were wrong. There are other rocks. We should have thought of a place founded on rock, on a mountain, a stone, a spur, a cliff...The sixth group waits in the fortress of Ala-mut.”

103

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

—Hasan as-Sabbah, Sargozasht is-Sayyidna

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

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

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

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

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

There Sabbah surrounded himself with his devotees, the fidalyln or fedayeen, those faithful unto death; and he used them to carry out his political assassinations, to be instruments of the jihad hafi, the secret holy war. The fedayeen later gained an unfortunate reputation under the name Assassins—not a lovely word now, but for them it was splendid, the emblem of a race of warrior monks who greatly resembled the Templars; a spiritual knighthood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

104

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

—Kamal Jumblatt, Interview in Le Jour, March 31, 1967

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

—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, frontispiece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s not go too far. I’d leave that last point hanging.”

“Like the Pendulum.”

“If you like. We can’t just say whatever enters our heads.”

“No, no. Strict scholarship, above all.”

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

105

Claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens.

—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, iii, 453

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

FILENAME: And what if it’s true?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only a bad Demiurge makes us feel good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

106

List No. 5

6 undershirts

6 shorts

6 handkerchiefs

has always puzzled scholars, principally because of the total absence of socks.

—Woody Alien, “The Metterling List,” Getting Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p. 8

It was during those days, no more than a month ago, that Lia decided a vacation would do me good. “You look tired,” she said. Maybe the Plan had worn me out. For that matter, the baby, as its grandparents said, needed clean air. Some friends lent us a house in the mountains.

We didn’t leave at once. There were things to attend to in Milan, and Lia said that nothing was more restful than taking a little vacation in the city when you knew you’d soon be going off on your real vacation.

Now, for the first time, I talked to Lia about the Plan. Until then she had been too busy with the baby. She knew vaguely that Belbo, Diotallevi, and I were working on some puzzle, and that it occupied whole days and nights, but I hadn’t said anything to her about it, not since the day she preached me that sermon about the psychosis of resemblances. Maybe I was ashamed.

I described the whole Plan to her, down to the smallest details, and told her about Diotallevi’s illness, feeling guilty, as if I had done something wrong. I tried to present the Plan for what it was: a display of bravura.

Lia said: “Pow, I don’t like your story.”

“It isn’t beautiful?”

“The sirens were beautiful, too. Listen, what do you know about your unconscious?’’

“Nothing. I’m not even sure I have one.”

“There. Imagine that a Viennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the whole business of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had never dreamed and little Hanses he had never met... And what happened? Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to become neurotic in earnest. And thousands more ready to make money treating them.”

“Lia, you’re paranoid.”

“Me? You!”

“Maybe we’re both paranoid, but you have to grant me this: we started with the Ingolf document. It’s natural, when one comes across a message of the Templars, to want to decipher it. Maybe we exaggerated a little, to make fun of the decipherers of messages, but there was a message to begin with.”

“All you know is what that Ardenti told you, and from your own description he’s an out-and-out fraud. Anyway, I’d like to see this message for myself.’’

Nothing easier; I had it in my files.

Lia took the paper, looked at it front and back, wrinkled her nose, brushed the hair from her eyes to see the first, the coded, part better. She said: “Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough for you?”

“More than enough. Give me two days to think about it.” When Lia asks for two days to think about something, she’s determined to show me I’m stupid. I always accuse her of this, and she answers: “If I know you’re stupid, that means I love you even if you’re stupid. You should feel reassured.”

For two days we didn’t mention the subject again. Anyway, she was almost always out of the house. In the evening I watched her huddled in a corner, making notes, tearing up one sheet of paper after another.

When we got to the mountains, the baby scratched around all day in the grass, Lia fixed supper, and ordered me to eat, because I was thin as a rail. After supper, she asked me to fix her a double whiskey with lots of ice and only a splash of soda. She lit a cigarette, which she does only at important moments, told me to sit down, and then explained.

“Listen carefully, Pow, because I’m going to demonstrate toyou that the simplest explanation is always the best. Colonel Ardenti told you Ingolf found a message in Provins. I don’t doubt that at all. Yes, Ingolf went down into the well and really did find a case with this text in it,” and she tapped the French lines with her finger. “We are not told that he found a case studded with diamonds. All the colonel said was that according to Ingolf’s notes the case was sold. And why not? It was an antique; he may have made a little cash, but we are not told that he lived off the proceeds for the rest of his life. He must have had a small inheritance from his father.”

“And why should the case be ordinary?”

“Because the message is ordinary. It’s a laundry list. Come on, let’s read it again.”

a la... Saint Jean

36 p charrete de fein

6”...entiers avec saiel

p... les blancs mantiax

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

6foiz 6 en 6 places

chascune foiz 20 a...120 a...

iceste est I’ordonation

al donjon li premiers

it li secunz joste iceus qui... pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame d I ‘altre part d I ‘iau

it a I ‘ostel des popelicans

it a la pierre

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

“A laundry list?”

“For God’s sake, didn’t it ever occur to you to consult a tourist guide, a brief history of Provins? You discover immediately that the Grange-aux-Dimes, where the message was found, was a gathering place for merchants. Provins was a center for fairs in Champagne. And the Grange is on rue St.-Jean. In Provins they bought and sold everything, but lengths of cloth were particularly popular, draps—or dras, as they wrote it then—and every length was marked by a guarantee, a kind of seal. The second most important product of Provins was roses, red roses that the Crusaders had brought from Syria. They were so famous that when Edmund of Lancaster married Blanche d’Artois and took the title Comte de Champagne, he added the red rose of Provins to his coat of arms. Hence, too, the war of the roses, because the House of York had a white rose as its symbol.”

“Who told you all this?”

“A little book of two hundred pages published by the Tourist Bureau of Provins. I found it at the French Center. But that’s not all. In Provins there’s a fort known as the Donjon, which speaks for itself, and there is a Porte-aux-Pains, an Eglise du Refuge, various churches dedicated to Our Lady of this and that, a rue de la Pierre-Ronde, where there was a pierre de cens, a stone on which the count’s subjects set the coins of their tithes. And then a rue des Blancs-Manteaux and a street called de la Grand-Pute-Muce, for reasons not hard to guess. It was a street of brothels.”

“And what about the popelicans?”

“In Provins there had been some Cathars, who later were duly burned, and the grand inquisitor himself was a converted Cathar, Robert le Bougre. So it is hardly strange that a street or an area should be called the place of the Cathars even if the Cathars weren’t there anymore.”

“Still, in 1344...”

“But who said this document dates from 1344? Your colonel read ‘36 years after the hay wain,’ but in those days a p made in a certain way, with a tail, meant post, but a p without the tail meant pro. The author of this text is an ordinary merchant who made some notes on business transacted at the Grange, or, rather, on the rue St.-Jean—not on the night of Saint Jean—and he recorded a price of thirty-six sous, or crowns, or whatever denomination it was for one or each wagon of hay.’’

“And the hundred and twenty years?”

“Who said anything about years? Ingolf found something he transcribed as ‘120 a’...What is an ‘a’? I checked a list of the abbreviations used in those days and found that for denier or dinarium odd signs were used; one looks like a delta, another looks like a theta, a circle broken on the left. If you write it carelessly and in haste, as a busy merchant might, a fanatic like Colonel Ardenti could take it for an a, having already read somewhere the story of the one hundred and twenty years. You know where better than I. He could have read it in any history of the Rosicrucians. The point is, he wanted to find something resembling ‘post 120 annos patebo.’ And then what does he do? He finds ‘it’ repeated several times and he reads it as iterum. But the abbreviation for iterum was itm, whereas ‘it’ means item, which means likewise, and is in fact used for repetitious lists. Our merchant is calculating how much he’s going to make on the orders he’s received, and he’s listing the deliveries he has to make. He has to deliver some bouquets of roses of Provins, and that’s the meaning of ‘r...s...chevaliers de Pruins.’ And where the colonel read ‘vainjance’ (because he had the kadosch knights on his mind), you should read ‘jonchee.’ The roses were used to make either hats or floral carpets on feast days. So here is how your Provins message should read:

“In Rue Saint Jean:

36 sous for wagons of hay.

Six new lengths of cloth with seal

to rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

Crusaders’ roses to make a jonchee:

six bunches of six in the six following places,

each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all.

Here is the order:

the first to the Fort

item the second to those in Porte-aux-Pains

item to the Church of the Refuge

item to the Church ofNotre Dame, across the river

item to the old building of the Cathars

item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde.

And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whores’ street.

“Because they, too, poor things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making themselves nice little hats of roses.” “My God,” I said. “I think you’re right.” “Of course I’m right. It’s a laundry list, I tell you.” , “Wait a minute. This may very well be a laundry list, but the first message really is in code, and it talks about thirty-six invisibles.”

“True. The French text I polished off in an hour, but the other one kept me busy for two days. I had to examine Trithemius, at both the Ambrosiana and the Trivulziana, and you know what the librarians there are like: before they let you put your hands on an old book, they look at you as if you were planning to eat it. But the first message, too, is a simple matter. You should have discovered this yourself. To begin with, are you sure that ‘Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes’ is in the same French as our merchant’s? Yes; this expression was used in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, when the Rosicrucians appeared in Paris. But then you reasoned the way your Diabolicals do: If the message is encoded according to the method of Trithemius, it means that Trithemius copied from the Templars, and since it quotes a sentence that was current in Rosicrucian circles, it means that the plan attributed to the Rosicrucians was none other than the plan of the Templars. Try reversing the argument, as any sensible person would: Since the message is written in Tri-themius’s code, it was written after Trithemius, and since it quotes an expression that circulated among the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians, it was written after the seventeenth century. So, at this point, what is the simplest hypothesis? Ingolf finds the Provins message. Since, like the colonel, he’s an enthusiast of hermetic messages, he sees thirty-six and one hundred and twenty and thinks immediately of the Rosicrucians. I      And since he’s also an enthusiast of cryptography, he amuses !      himself by putting the Provins message into code, as an exercise, i      So he translates his fine Rosicrucian sentence using a Trithemius cryptosystem.”

“An ingenious explanation. But it’s no more valid than the colonel’s.”

“So far, no. But suppose you make one conjecture, then a second and a third, and they all support one another. Already you’re more confident that you’re on the right track, aren’t you? I began with the suspicion that the words used by Ingolf were not the ones taken from Trithemius. They’re in the same cabalistic Assyro-Babylonian style, but they’re not the same. Yet, if Ingolf had wanted words beginning with the letters that interested him, in Trithemius he could have found as many as he liked. Why didn’t he use those words?” “Well, why didn’t he?”

“Maybe he needed specific letters also in the second, third, and fourth positions. Maybe our ingenious Ingolf wanted a multicoded message; maybe he wanted to be smarter than Trithemius. Trithemius suggests forty major cryptosystems: in one, only the initial letters count; in another, the first and third letters; in another, every other initial letter, and so on, until, with a little I effort, you can invent a hundred more systems on your own. As I for the ten minor cry ptosy stems, the colonel considered only the first wheel, which is the easiest. But the following ones work on the principle of the second wheel. Here’s a copy of it for you. Imagine that the inner circle is mobile and you can turn it so that the letter A coincides with any letter of the outer circle. You will have one system where A is written as X, another where A is U, and so on... With twenty-two letters on each circle, you can produce not ten but twenty-one cryptosystems. The twenty-second is no good, because there A is A...”

“Don’t tell me that for each letter of each word you tried all twenty-one systems....”

“I had brains on my side, and luck. Since the shortest words have six letters, it’s obvious that only the first six are important and the rest are just for looks. Why six letters? Suppose Ingolf coded the first letter, then skipped one, then coded the third, then skipped two and coded the sixth. For the first letter I used wheel number 1, for the third letter I used wheel number 2, and got a sentence. Then I tried wheel number 3 for the sixth letter, and got a sentence again. I’m not saying Ingolf didn’t use other letters, too, but three positive results are enough for me. If you want to, you can take it further.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense. What came out?”

“Look at the message again. I’ve underlined the letters that count.