Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

  "All right," Bramanti said angrily. "I admit I may have been careless, but this doesn't entitle him to threaten me with sorcery!"

  "Mais voyons! It was a metaphor! You are the one who, in return, caused me to have the envoûtement!"

  "Oh, of course, my brothers and I have time to waste, sending little devils around! We practice Dogma and the Ritual of High Magic: we are not witch doctors!"

  "Monsieur le Comte, I appeal to you. Signor Bramanti is notoriously in touch with the abbé Boutroux, and you well know that this priest is said to have the crucifix tattooed on the sole of his foot so that he may tread on Our Lord, or, rather, on his ... Bon, I meet seven days ago this supposed abbé at the Du Sangrcal Bookshop, you know; he smiles at me, very slimy, as is his custom, and he says to me, 'Well, we'll be hearing from each other one of these evenings.' What does it mean, one of these evenings? It means that, two evenings after, the visits begin. I am going to bed and I feel chocs strike my face, fluid chocs, you know; those emanations are easily recognized."

  "You probably rubbed the soles of your slippers on the carpet."

  "Yes, yes, then why were the bibelots flying? Why did one of my alembiques strike my head, and my plaster Baphomet, it falls to the floor, and that a memento of my late father, and on the wall three writings appear in red, ordures I cannot repeat, hein? You know well that no more than a year ago the late Monsieur Gros accused that abbé there of making the cataplasms with fecal matter, forgive the expression, and the abbé condemned him to death, and two weeks later the poor Monsieur Gros, he dies mysteriously. This Boutroux handles poisons, the jury d'honneur summoned by the Martinists of Lyon said so...."

  "Slander," Bramanti growled.

  "Ah, that then! A trial in matters of this sort is always circumstantial...."

  "Yes, but nobody at the trial mentioned the fact that Monsieur Gros was an alcoholic in the last stages of cirrhosis."

  "Do not be enfantine! Sorcelery proceeds by natural ways; if one has a cirrhosis, they strike one in the cirrhosis. That is the ABC of black magic...."

  "Then all those who die of cirrhosis have the good Boutroux to blame. Don't make me laugh!"

  "Then tell me, please, what passed in Lyon in those two weeks.... Deconsecrated chapel, host with Tetragrammaton, your Boutroux with a great red robe with the cross upside down, and Madame Olcott, his personal voyante, among other things, with the trident that appears on her brow and the empty chalices that fill with blood by themselves, and the abbé who crached in the mouth of the faithful....Is that true or is it not?"

  "You've been reading too much Huysmans, my friend!" Bramanti laughed. "It was a cultural event, a pageant, like the celebrations of the school of Wicca and the Druid colleges!"

  "Ouais, the carnival of Venise..."

  We heard a scuffle, as if Bramanti was attempting to strike his adversary and Agliè was restraining him. "You see? You see?" the Frenchman said in a falsetto. "But guard yourself, Bramanti, and ask your friend Boutroux what happened to him). You don't know yet, but he's in the hospital. Ask him who broke his figure! Even if I do not practice that goety of yours, I know a little of it myself, and when I realized that my house was inhabited, I drew on the parquet the circle of defense, and since I do not believe, but your diablotines do, I removed the Carmelite scapular and made the contresign, the envoûtement retourné, ah oui. Your abbé passed a mauvais moment!"

  "You see? You see?" Bramanti was panting. "He's the one casting spells!"

  "Gentlemen, that's enough," Agliè said politely but firmly. "Now listen to me. You know how highly I value, on a cognitive level, these reexaminations of obsolete rituals, and for me the Luciferine Church and the Order of Satan are equally to be respected above and beyond their demonological differences. You know my skepticism in this matter. But, in the end, we all belong to the same spiritual knighthood, and I urge you to show a minimum of solidarity. After all, gentlemen, to involve the Prince of Darkness in a personal spat! How very childish! Come, come, these are occultists' tales. You arc behaving like vulgar Freemasons. To be frank, yes, Boutroux is a dissident, and perhaps, my dear Bramanti, you might suggest to him that he sell to some junk dealer all that paraphernalia of his, like the props for a production of Boito's Mefistofele...."

  "Ha, c'est bien dit, ça," the Frenchman snickered. "C'est de la brocanterie...."

  "Let's try to see this in perspective. There has been a debate on what we will call liturgical formalisms, tempers have flared, but we mustn't make mountains out of molehills. Mind you, my dear Pierre, I am not for one moment denying the presence in your house of alien entities; it's the most natural thing in the world, but with a little common sense it could all be explained as a poltergeist."

  "Yes, I wouldn't exclude that possibility," Bramanti said. "The astral conjuncture at this time..."

  "Well then! Come, shake hands, and a fraternal embrace."

  We heard murmurs of reciprocal apologies. "You know yourself," Bramanti was saying, "sometimes to identify one who is truly awaiting initiation, it is necessary to indulge in a bit of folklore. Even those merchants of the Great Orient, who believe in nothing, have a ceremony."

  "Bien entendu, le rituel, ah ça..."

  "But these are no longer the days of Crowley. Is that clear?" Agliè said. "I must leave you now. I have other guests."

  We quickly went back to the sofa and waited for Agliè with composure and nonchalance.

  47

  Our exalted task then is to find order in these seven measures, a pattern that is distinct and will keep always the sense alert and the memory clear.... This exalted and incomparable configuration not only performs the function of preserving entrusted things, words, and arts ... but in addition it gives us true knowledge....

  —Giulio Gamillo Delminio, L'idea del Theatro, Florence, Torrentino, 1550, Introduction

  A few minutes later, Agliè came in. "Do forgive me, dear friends, I had to deal with a dispute that was regrettable, to say the least. As my friend Casaubon knows, I consider myself a student of the history of religions, and for this reason people not infrequently come to me for illumination, relying perhaps more on my common sense than on my learning. It's odd how, among the adepts of sapiential studies, eccentric personalities are sometimes found....I don't mean the usual seekers after transcendental consolation, I don't mean the melancholy spirits, but men of profound knowledge and great intellectual refinement who nevertheless indulge in nocturnal fantasies and lose the ability to distinguish between traditional truth and the archipelago of the prodigious. The people with whom I spoke just now were arguing about childish conjectures. Alas, it happens in the best families, as they say. But do come into my little study, please, where we can converse in more comfortable surroundings."

  He raised the leather curtain and showed us into the next room. "Little study" is not how I would have described it; it was spacious, with walls of exquisite antique shelving crammed with handsomely bound books all of venerable age. What impressed me more than the books were some small glass cases filled with objects hard to identify—they looked like stones. And there were little animals, whether stuffed, mummified, or delicately reproduced I couldn't say. Everything was bathed in a diffuse crepuscular light that came from a large double-mullioned window at the end, with leaded diamond panes of transparent amber. The light from the window blended with that of a great lamp on a dark mahogany table covered with papers. It was one of those lamps sometimes found on reading tables in old libraries, with a dome of green glass that could cast a white oval on the page while leaving the surroundings in an opalescent penumbra. This play of two sources of light, both unnatural, somehow enlivened the polychrome of the ceiling. The ceiling was vaulted, supported on all four sides by a decorative fiction: little brick-red columns with tiny gilded capitals. The many trompe l'ocil images, divided into seven areas, enhanced the effect of depth, and the whole room had the feeling of a mortuary chapel, impalpably sinful, melancholy, sensual.

  "My little theate
r," Agliè said, "in the style of those Renaissance fantasies where visual encyclopedias were laid out, sylloges of the universe. Not so much a dwelling as a memory machine. There is no image that, when combined with the others, does not embody a mystery of the world. You will notice that line of figures there, painted in imitation of those in the palace of Mantua: they are the thirty-six decans, the Masters of the Heavens. And respecting the tradition, after I found this splendid reconstruction—the work of an unknown artist—I went about acquiring the little objects in the glass cases, which correspond to the images on the ceiling. They represent the fundamental elements of the universe: air, water, earth, and fire. Hence the presence of this charming salamander, the masterwork of a taxidermist friend, and this delicate reproduction in miniature, a rather late piece, of the aeolipile of Hero, in which the air contained in the sphere, were I to activate this little alcohol stove, warming it, would escape from these lateral spouts and thereby cause rotation. A magic instrument. Egyptian priests used it in their shrines, as so many texts inform us. They exploited it to claim a miracle, which the masses venerated, while the true miracle is the golden law that governs this secret and simple mechanism of the elements earth and fire. Here is learning that our ancients possessed, as did the men of alchemy, but that the builders of cyclotrons have lost. And so I cast my gaze on my theater of memory, this child of so many vaster theaters that beguiled the great minds of the past, and I know. I know better than the so-called learned. As it is below, so it is above. And there is nothing more to know."

  He offered us Cuban cigars, curiously shaped—not straight, but contorted, curled—though they were thick. We uttered cries of admiration. Diotallevi went over to the shelves.

  "Oh," Agliè said, "a minimal library, as you see, barely two hundred volumes; I have more in my family home. But, if I may say so, all these have some merit, some value. And they are not arranged at random. The order of the subjects follows that of the images and the objects."

  Diotallevi timidly reached out as if to touch a volume. "Help yourself," Agliè said. "That is the Oedypus Aegyptiacus of Athanasius Kircher. As you know, he was the first after Horapollon to try to interpret hieroglyphics. A fascinating man. I wish this study of mine were like his museum of wonders, now presumed lost, scattered, because one who knows not how to seek will never find....A charming conversationalist. How proud he was the day he discovered that this hieroglyph meant 'The benefices of the divine Osiris are provided by sacred ceremonies and by the chain of spirits....' Then that mountebank Champollion came along, a hateful man, believe me, childishly vain, and he insisted that the sign corresponded only to the name of a pharaoh. How ingenious the moderns are in debasing sacred symbols. The work is actually not all that rare: it costs less than a Mercedes. But look at this, a first edition, 1595, of the Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae of Khunrath. It is said there are only two copies in the world. This is the third. And this volume is a first edition of the Telluris Theoria Sacra of Bur-netius. I cannot look at the illustrations in the evening without feeling a wave of mystical claustrophobia. The profundities of our globe ... Unsuspected, are they not? I see that Dr. Diotallevi is fascinated by the Hebrew characters of Vigenere's Traicté des Chiffres. Then look at this: a first edition of the Kabbala denudata of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. The book was translated into English—in part and badly—at the beginning of this century by that wretch McGregor Mathers.... You must know something of that scandalous conventicle that so fascinated the British esthetes, the Golden Dawn. Only from that band of counterfeiters of occult documents could such an endless series of debasements spring, from the Stella Matutina to the satanic churches of Aleister Crowley, who called up demons to win the favors of certain gentlemen devoted to the vice anglais. If you only knew, dear friends, the sort of people one has to rub elbows with in devoting oneself to such studies. You will see for yourselves if you undertake to publish in this field."

  Belbo seized this opportunity to broach the subject. He explained that Garamond wished to bring out, each year, a few books of an esoteric nature.

  "Ah, esoteric." Agliè smiled, and Belbo blushed.

  "Should we say ... hermetic?"

  "Ah, hermetic." Agliè smiled.

  "Well," Belbo said, "perhaps I am using the wrong word, but surely you know the genre."

  Agliè smiled again. "It is not a genre. It is knowledge. What you wish to do is publish a survey of knowledge that has not been debased. For you it may be simply an editorial choice, but for me, if I am to concern myself with it, it will be a search for truth, a queste du Graal."

  Belbo warned that just as the fisherman who casts his net could pull in empty shells and plastic bags, so Garamond Press might receive many manuscripts of dubious value, and that we were looking for a stern reader who would separate the wheat from the chaff, while also taking note of any curious by-products, because there was a friendly publishing firm that would be happy if we redirected less worthy authors to it.... Naturally, a suitable form of compensation would be worked out.

  "Thank heavens I am what is called a man of means. Even a shrewd man of means. If, in the course of my explorations, I come upon another copy of Khunrath, or another handsome stuffed salamander, or a narwhal's horn (which I would be ashamed to display in my collection, though the Treasure of Vienna exhibits one as a unicorn's horn), with a brief and agreeable transaction I can earn more than you would pay me in ten years of consultancy. I will look at your manuscripts in the spirit of humility. I am convinced that even in the most commonplace text I will find a spark, if not of truth, at least of bizarre falsehood, and often the extremes meet. I will be bored only by the ordinary, and for that boredom you will compensate me. Depending on the boredom I have undergone, I will confine myself to sending you, at the end of the year, a little note, and I will keep my request within the confines of the symbolical. If you consider it excessive, you will just send me a case of fine wine."

  Belbo was nonplussed. He was accustomed to dealing with consultants who were querulous and starving. He opened the briefcase he had brought with him and drew out a thick manuscript.

  "I wouldn't want you to be overoptimistic. Look at this, for example. It seems to me typical."

  Agliè took the manuscript: "The Secret Language of the Pyramids ... Let's see the index.... Pyramidion ... Death of Lord Carnarvon ... Testimony of Herodotus..." He looked up. "You gentlemen have read it?"

  "I skimmed through it," Belbo said.

  Agliè returned the manuscript to him. "Now tell me if my summary is correct." He sat down behind the desk, reached into the pocket of his vest, drew out the pillbox I had seen in Brazil, and turned it in his thin, tapering fingers, which earlier had caressed his favorite books. He raised his eyes toward the figures on the ceiling and recited, as if from a text he had long known by heart:

  "The author of this book no doubt reminds us that Piazzi Smyth discovered the sacred and esoteric measurements of the pyramids in 1864. Allow me to round off to whole numbers; at my age the memory begins to fail a bit.... Their base is a square; each side measures two hundred and thirty-two meters. Originally the height was one hundred and forty-eight meters. If we convert into sacred Egyptian cubits, we obtain a base of three hundred and sixty-six; in other words, the number of days in a leap year. For Piazzi Smyth, the height multiplied by ten to the ninth gives the distance between the earth and the sun: one hundred and forty-eight million kilometers. A good estimate at the time, since today the calculated distance is one hundred and forty-nine and a half million kilometers, and the moderns are not necessarily right. The base divided by the width of one of the stones is three hundred and sixty-five. The perimeter of the base is nine hundred and thirty-one meters. Divide by twice the height, and you get 3.14, the number π. Splendid, no?"

  Belbo smiled and looked embarrassed. "Incredible! Tell me how you—"

  "Let Dr. Agliè go on, Jacopo," Diotallevi said.

  Agliè thanked him with a nod. His gaze wandered the ceiling as
he spoke, but it seemed to me that the path his eyes followed was neither idle nor random, that they were reading, in those images, what he only pretended to be digging from his memory.

  48

  Now, from apex to base, the volume of the Great Pyramid in eubic inches is approximately 161,000,000,000. How many human souls, then, have lived on the earth from Adam to the present day? Somewhere between 153,000,000,000 and 171,900,000,000.

  —Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, London, Isbister, 1880, p. 583

  "I imagine your author holds that the height of the pyramid of Cheops is equal to the square root of the sum of the areas of all its sides. The measurements must be made in feet, the foot being closer to the Egyptian and Hebrew cubit, and not in meters, for the meter is an abstract length invented in modern times. The Egyptian cubit comes to 1.728 feet. If we do not know the precise height, we can use the pyramidion, which was the small pyramid set atop the Great Pyramid, to form its tip. It was of gold or some other metal that shone in the sun. Take the height of the pyramidion, multiply it by the height of the whole pyramid, multiply the total by ten to the fifth, and we obtain the circumference of the earth. What's more, if you multiply the perimeter of the base by twenty-four to the third divided by two, you get the earth's radius. Further, the area of the base of the pyramid multiplied by ninety-six times ten to the eighth gives us one hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and ten thousand square miles, which is the surface area of the earth. Am I right?"

  Belbo liked to convey amazement with an expression he had learned in the cinematheque, from the original-language version of Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney: "I'm flabbergasted!" This is what he said now. Agliè also knew colloquial English, apparently, because he couldn't hide his satisfaction at this tribute to his vanity. "My friends," he said, "when a gentleman, whose name is unknown to me, pens a compilation on the mystery of the pyramids, he can say only what by now even children know. I would have been surprised if he had said anything new."