Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

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

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

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

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

  "So, in a word, what's the secret discovered by the Templars?"

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

  82

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

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

  We gave it a try, and we succeeded.

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

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

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

  ***

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

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

  "But Las Vegas is in Nevada."

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

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

  "Panic on Wall Street."

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

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

  "Everyone was, except us. Thank God we've caught on. Now we're a step ahead of them."

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

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

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

  A map? But a map would be marked with an X at the point of the Umbilicus. Whoever held the piece with the X would know everything and not need the other pieces. No; it had to be more involved. We racked our brains for several days, until Belbo decided to resort to Abulafia. And the reply was:

  Guillaume Postel dies in 1581.

  Bacon is Viscount St. Albans.

  In the Conservatoire is Foucault's Pendulum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "...which can only be the dawn of June 24, Saint John's day, feast of the summer solstice..."

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

  "Perfect," Belbo said. "But suppose it's overcast?"

  "They wait until the following year."

  "I'm sorry, but..." Bclbo said. "The last meeting is to be in Jerusalem. Shouldn't the Pendulum be hanging from the top of the dome of the Mosque of Omar?"

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

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

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

  "But still, the last meeting is in Jerusalem."

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

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

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

  83

  A map is not the territory.

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

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

  "This doesn't solve our problem," Diotallevi said.

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

  I went to dig out a history of cartography.

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

  "What sorts of conjectures?"

  "Well, for example, micro-macrocosmic correspondences. Here's another map. You know where it comes from? It appears in the second treatise of the Utriusque Cosmi Historia of Robert Fludd. Fludd is the Rosicrucians' man in London, don't forget. Now what does our man do, our Robertus dc Fluctibus, as he liked to style himself? He offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole, naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map specially conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It's obvious, undeniable; I can't imag
ine why somebody hasn't already seen—"

  "The fact is, the Diabolicals are very, very slow," Belbo said.

  "The fact is, we are the only worthy heirs of the Templars. But, to continue. You recognize the design. It's a mobile rotula, like the ones Trithemius used for his coded messages. This isn't a map, then; it's a design for a machine to produce variations of maps, until the right map is found! And Fludd says as much in the caption: This is the sketch for an instrumentum, it still needs work."

  "But wasn't Fludd the one who persisted in denying the rotation of the earth? How could he think of the Pendulum?"

  "We're dealing with initiates. An initiate denies what he knows, denies knowing it, to conceal it."

  "This," Belbo said, "would explain why Dee paid so much attention to those royal cartographers. It was not to discover the 'true' form of the earth, but to reconstruct, among all the mistaken maps, the one right map, the one of use to him."

  "Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."

  84

  The chief occupation of this Assembly—and, in my opinion, the most useful—should be to work on natural history following the plans of Verulam.

  —Christian Huygens, Letter to Colbert, Oeuvres Complètes, La Haye, 1888—1950, vi, pp. 95–96

  The vicissitudes of the six groups were not confined to the search for the map. In the first two pieces of the message, those in the hands of the Portuguese and the English, the Templars probably referred to a pendulum, but ideas about pendulums were still hazy. It's one thing to swing some lead on a length of cord and quite another to construct a mechanism precise enough to be hit by a ray of the sun at an exact time and place. This is why the Templars calculated for six centuries. The Baconian wing set immediately to work, and tried to draw to its side all the initiates, whom it made desperate efforts to reach.