by Umberto Eco
The reason for the great popularity of the Rosicrucians is that they announced a secret but talked about everything, bar the nature of the secret.
Connected in some way with the Rosicrucian tradition, symbolic masonry arose in the seventeenth century. With Anderson’s Constitution, this movement sought to legitimize itself by tracing its origins to the builders of the Temple of Solomon. In the following years, with the so-called Scottish rite, the relationship between the builders of the Temple and the Templars, whose secret tradition was to come to modern Freemasonry through the mediation of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, was added to the origin myth. In support of this theory many Masonic organizations—almost always in conflict with the Grand Lodge of London—chose symbols and rites that might emphasize the link with the Templar and Rosicrucian traditions. And so the degrees of initiation (which had to correspond to degrees of knowledge of the secret and which were originally three) swelled to thirty-three. See, for example, the series of high degrees of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraim founded by Cagliostro:
Knight of the Planispheres, Prince of the Zodiac, Sublime Hermetic Philosopher, Supreme Commander of the Stars, Sublime Pontifex of Isis, Prince of the Sacred Hill, Philosopher of Samothrace, Titan of the Caucasus, Child of the Golden Lyre, Knight of the True Phoenix, Knight of the Sphinx, Sublime Sage of the Labyrinths, Mystic Guardian of the Sanctuary, Architect of the Mysterious Tower, Sublime Prince of the Sacred Curtain, Interpreter of the Hieroglyphics, Orphic Doctor, Guardian of the Three Fires, Guardian of the Incommunicable Name, Beloved Shepherd of the Oasis of Mysteries, Doctor of the Sacred Fire, Knight of the Luminous Triangle.
The degrees represent successive phases in the initiation to the Masonic Secret. The author of one of the finest definitions of the Masonic Secret was Giacomo Casanova:
Those who enter Freemasonry only to ferret out the secret may find themselves disappointed: they may indeed happen to live for fifty years as Master Masons without succeeding. The mystery of Freemasonry is by its nature inviolable: the Freemason knows it only by intuition, not by having learned it.… When he has known it, he takes good care not to share the discovery with anyone, not even his best Mason friend, because if the latter has been unable to penetrate the mystery, neither will he be able to profit from it if he learns it from others.… What happens in the Lodge must remain secret, but whoever is so indiscreet and unscrupulous as to reveal it does not reveal its essence: how could he, if he does not know it? If he knows it, he would not reveal it.
The initiatory secret, therefore, cannot be revealed and so it cannot be betrayed.
Giuliano Di Bernardo, former Grand Master of the Gran Loggia Regolare d’Italia, has expatiated upon the Masonic secret. An expert on logic, he is not inclined to occult interpretations of Masonic symbolism. In his Filosofia della massoneria he writes:
There are … those who seek esoteric truths [in the symbols], the secrets of alchemy, the philosopher’s stone: in such cases, the symbols are inadequate and barely express a semblance of the deep meanings of the esoteric life. These and other interpretations of Masonic symbolism are erroneous and therefore incapable of grasping its true nature, which can be thus enunciated: in Freemasonry, the symbols express only one secret, which is the initiatory one.… Those incapable of understanding this will always be in the situation of the uninitiated person who, on chancing to enter the Masonic temple, observes objects that are not familiar to him, such as a setsquare, a compass, a hammer, a book, etc., but without understanding their symbolic significance. In order to interpret what he sees he needs Masonic light, which can only be granted to him by initiation. Then, and only then will he have understood the Masonic secret.… If the secret is revealed and is destructured from its symbolism, the foundation of Freemasonry is immediately destroyed. A Freemasonry without its initiatory foundation is nothing but an ordinary society with philanthropic aims.
As if to say (I interpret) that Freemasonry without the secret is merely another Rotary Club. Naturally, and for obvious reasons, Di Bernardo’s book does not say what the Masonic secret is.
From the eighteenth century onwards, as a consequence of the concealment of the secret and the invisibility of the secret society, we come to the myth of the Unknown Superiors, who controlled the destiny of the world. In 1789, the Marquis de Luchet (in his Essai sur la secte des illuminés) warned: “In the bosom of the deepest darkness there has formed a society of new beings who know one another without ever having seen one another.… This society has adopted the blind obedience of the Jesuit rule, the trials and external ceremonies of Freemasonry, and the subterranean mysteries and incredible audacity of the Templars.”
Between 1797 and 1798, in response to the French Revolution, Abbé Barruel had written his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, in which we are told how, after being destroyed by Philip the Fair, the Templars had transformed themselves into a secret society for the destruction of the monarchy and the papacy. In the eighteenth century they took over Freemasonry and created a sort of academy whose diabolical members were Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert—and it was from this coterie that the Jacobins originated. But the Jacobins themselves were controlled by an even more secret society, the Illuminati of Bavaria, regicides by vocation. The French revolution was the final result of this conspiracy.
Barruel’s book contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806, Barruel received a letter from a certain captain Simonini, reminding him how Freemasonry was founded by the Jews and that they had infiltrated all secret societies. Hence, and this is another story that we cannot deal with now, the birth of the Jewish conspiracy myth that was eventually to lead to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, abundant traces of which, unfortunately, can still be found today on many internet sites.
There are, however, some today who still think that secret groups covertly dominate the development of world events and all you need do is go on the internet to find various discussions on the Trilateral, the Bilderberg Group, or the Davos meetings, as if politicians, industrialists, and bankers could not meet privately whenever they wish, to decide on economic strategies that are unfortunately before everyone’s eyes—and as if speculation about derivatives were not enough to explain the ruin of many small savers, but it was necessary to discover a more hidden plan.
On the internet you can find references to other disturbing secrets, such as the insinuation that Pope Francis, through the backing of Cardinal Martini, has links with Masonic groups.
The conspiracy syndrome developed with greater imagination in the case of the destruction of the the World Trade Center, a plot variously attributed to Bush’s secret plans, to the Jews, and so on.
If you make a search on the internet you will find that New York City has 11 letters, Afghanistan has 11 letters, Ramsin Yuseb, the terrorist who had threatened to destroy the Towers, has 11 letters, George W. Bush has 11 letters, the twin towers formed an 11, New York is the eleventh state of the United States, the first plane to crash into one of the towers was flight number 11, this flight carried 92 passengers and 9 + 2 make 11, flight 77 which also crashed into the towers carried 65 passengers and 6 + 5 = 11, the date 9 / 11 is the same as the American emergency number, 911, the sum of whose digits gives 11. The total number of victims in all the hijacked planes was 254, the sum of whose digits gives 11, September 11 is the 254th day of the annual calendar and 2 plus 5 plus 4 make 11. And so on and cabalistically so forth.
What are the objections to these apparently prodigious coincidences?
New York has 11 letters if you add City, Afghanistan has 11 letters although the hijackers were not Afghans but men hailing from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, Ramsin Yuseb has 11 letters only if you deliberately use a certain transliteration, but if Yuseb had been transliterated as Yussef the game would not work, George W. Bush has 11 letters only if you include his middle initial, the Twin Towers form an 11 but also a 2 in Roman numerals, Fl
ight 77 did not hit one of the towers but the Pentagon and did not carry 65 but 59 passengers, the total number of victims was not 254 but 265, and so on.
Again, on the internet, it is explained that if you write the flight number of the first plane that crashed into the first tower (Q33NY, incidentally the initials of New York), space this formula out and ask the computer to transcribe it, not in a normal font like Times or Garamond but in those more or less cabalistic signs called Wingdings, you get amazing secret messages.
The only problem is that neither of the planes that crashed into the towers had the flight number Q33NY, and it was necessary to invent those initials to obtain the alleged secret message.
Then there are so-called secrets that are very disappointing once revealed. This is the case with the third secret of Fatima, which, delivered in an envelope sealed in 1944 by Sister Lucia, was to be revealed only after 1960. Pope John XXIII and his successors did not consider it appropriate to divulge its contents, but they were eventually made public in 2000 by order of John Paul II. It seems that only Benedict XVI already knew the message, and he showed a certain common sense in advising that it should remain where it was because it contained nothing interesting. But the allure of the secret had grown beyond measure. Once the message was opened it was seen to contain descriptions that were definitely tragic, but inspired by the images of some Iberian-flavored Book of Revelation, and any prophetic content it had lay in the fact that in subsequent years (but also in the years before it was written, in Spain—a stone’s throw from Sister Lucia’s homeland) some very ugly things would happen, but these were known about or could be imagined without having seen the Virgin Mary.
Unlike many lovers of the cryptic who would have sought to find hidden meanings in the message, including alleged relationships between the secrets of Fatima and the secrets of Medjugorje, the future Pope Benedict—then Cardinal-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—while immediately warning that a private vision is not a matter of faith, and that an allegory is not a prophecy, explicitly pointed out the analogies with The Book of Revelation.“The conclusion of the ‘secret’ evokes images which Sister Lucia may have seen in devotional books,” he noted, “and whose content derives from ancient notions of faith.” So, in a chapter significantly titled “The Anthropological Structure of Private Revelations,” he wrote that the visionary “sees with his concrete possibilities, with the modalities accessible to him of representation and knowledge.” And this, in simple terms, means that Sister Lucia had seen in ecstasy what she had read in the books in her convent and in texts two thousand years old. The content of the third secret of Fatima had already been on sale for a very long time in all specialist religious bookshops, including the Pia Società San Paolo.
A Secret Revealed Is Worthless
As a Rosicrucian occultist like Joséphin Péladan once said, an initiation secret revealed is worthless. Yet people are eager for secrets, and those who are believed to possess a secret that has not yet been revealed always acquire a form of power, because goodness knows what he or she might disclose one day. It has always been a principle of the police and secret services of half the world that the more things you know, or demonstrate that you know, the more your power grows. It does not matter whether something is true or not. What matters is to make people believe that you possess a secret. And it spells ruin for a secret service when government files are opened or some agency like WikiLeaks violates them. Then it turns out that the secret reports of the services and the embassies were usually made up of folders in which press cuttings had been transcribed, stuff that circulated freely before spies and agents turned them into confidential revelations, and that—from the ambassador down to the lowliest office boy—it was not really worth paying them a salary, because all they were good for was a cut and paste job.
So how can we maintain the power that derives from the possession of a secret, while preventing the so-called secret from becoming public? You must boast about an empty secret. Having a secret and not revealing it does not mean lying, if anything it is an extreme form of reserve. But to say you have a secret, while there is none, is to lie about the secret. Georg Simmel has pointed out that this happens with children, where “it is often a matter of pride and boasting when one child says to another ‘I know something you don’t know’, and this is widely expressed as a means of downgrading the other, even when … there is no secret.”
Children’s pseudo-secrets have an effect only on other children, but the pseudo-secret of many initiatic groups (and many secret services) has an effect on those adults who are eager to penetrate secrets and are therefore always ready to admit that there actually are secrets.
Perhaps some will know that I dealt with the syndrome of the empty secret in my novel Foucault’s Pendulum, where three friends who are playful scholarly types, or scholarly playful types, invent a universal plan taking their cue from all the rubbish on the shelves of occult bookshops (the kind of stuff that Dan Brown’s characters draw on, though not in jest, in The Da Vinci Code). The three friends do not know what the ultimate secret of the plan may be, and indeed they have fun by leaving it unspecified, but a pack of full-time professional occultists takes them seriously and, in the tempestuous finale, Jacopo Belbo is hanged on Foucault’s pendulum. But even before this, fascinated by his empty secret—and by now wholly absorbed in his game—he writes on his computer.
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.… 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.
And after the death of Belbo, his friend Casaubon, the narrator of the novel, notes in dismay:
We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but … identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion. But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it’s as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist. Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map. We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration. What frustration? Belbo’s last file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame.… You don’t complain about being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can’t control; you aren’t responsible for the fact that your feet are not very prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don’t grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time. It’s because of the Envious Angels. The same applies to everyday life. Take stock-market crashes. They happen because each individual makes a wrong move, and all the wrong moves put together create panic. Then whoever lacks steady nerves asks himself: Who’s behind this plot, who’s benefiting? He has to find an enemy, a plotter, or it will be, God forbid, his fault. If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot.
But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model.… God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand. A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret exist? Yes, provided it is never known. Known, it will only disappoint us. Hadn’t Agliè spoken of the yearning for mystery that stirred the age of the Antonines? Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only ha
d to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right words at the right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of wine into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it. Was that a paltry riddle? And then he led the Church fathers to ponder and proclaim that God was One and Triune and that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, but that the Son did not proceed from the Father and the Spirit. Was that some easy formula for hylics? And yet they, who now had salvation within their grasp—do-it-yourself salvation—turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge, of which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it.
* * *
Someone—Rubinstein, maybe—once said, when asked if he believed in God: “Oh, no, I believe … in something much bigger.” … But everything is not a bigger secret. There are no “bigger secrets,” because the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret. A secret that keeps slipping.… The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infinite onion, which has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Initiation travels an endless Möbius strip. The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him.… Belbo had claimed to possess a secret, and because of this he had gained power over Them.… And the more Belbo refused to reveal it, the bigger They believed the secret to be; the more he vowed he didn’t possess it, the more convinced They were that he did possess it, and that it was a true secret, because if it were false, he would have revealed it. Through the centuries the search for this secret had been the glue holding Them all together, despite excommunications, internecine fighting, coups de main. Now They were on the verge of knowing it. But They were assailed by two fears: that the secret would be a disappointment, and that once it was known to all, there would be no secret left. Which would be the end of Them. Agliè then thought: If Belbo spoke, all would know, and he, Agliè, would lose the mysterious aura that granted him charisma and power.… Thus he forced Belbo to raise the tone of his refusal and to say no definitively. The others, out of the same fear, preferred to kill him. They might be losing the map—they would have centuries to continue the search for it—but they were preserving the vigor of their base, slobbering desire.
