Foucault's Pendulum
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- For the experiment itself, see Foucault pendulum.
Foucault's Pendulum (original title: Il pendolo di Foucault) is a novel by Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988; the translation into English by William Weaver appeared a year later. It is full of obscure esoteric references to elements, such as the Kabbalah, alchemy and conspiracy theory. The novel is an encyclopedic work, with critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggesting that it needed an index. The name of the book derives from an actual pendulum designed by the French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, while also alluding to the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
It is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. Told in the form of a kind of satirical intellectual game, three friends create a fictitious plan (the "Plan") that stretches throughout history and combines elements from conspiracy theories. They feed the plan into a computer that in turn helps them formulate a new conspiracy theory, which is then believed to be true by adherents of the previous conspiracies, leading to disastrous consequences.
Plot
The book begins with the narrator, Casaubon (his name refers to classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, and as an example of Eco's beloved intertextuality, to the main character in George Eliot's Middlemarch, also a scholar) hiding in fear after closing time in the Parisian technical museum, Musée des Arts et Métiers. He believes that the Templars have kidnapped his friend Jacopo Belbo and are after him, too.
The story is then told in flashback.
In 1970s Milan, Casaubon is a student writing a thesis on the history of the Knights Templar and watching the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activities of the students around him. He encounters Belbo, who works as an editor in a publishing house. Belbo invites Casaubon to come and give his opinion as an expert on a book that has been submitted to him for publication about the Templars. Casaubon meets Belbo's colleague Diotallevi, a cabalist.
The book, by Colonel Ardenti, is patent nonsense that claims to have discovered, through a hidden coded manuscript, a secret plan of the medieval Templars to take over the world and in the process, revenge themselves for the death of their leaders when the order is disbanded by the King of France. Ardenti postulates that the Templars were the guardians of an energy secret: they knew about a secret, possibly radioactive energy source, the Holy Grail of legend.
After the French monarchy and the Catholic Church disband the Templars on the grounds of heresy, some knights escape and establish cells throughout the world. According to the Plan, the cells are set to meet at distinct long-term intervals at distinct places, passing on information about the Grail, and in the end are to reunite to rediscover its location — in order to achieve world domination. According to Ardenti's calculations, the Templars should have taken over the world in 1944; evidently the plan has been interrupted.
That evening Ardenti goes missing. A police inspector, De Angelis, interviews both Belbo and Casaubon. He hints his job as a political department investigator leads him to investigate people who claim to be linked to the Occult as well as revolutionaries.
After this experience Casaubon goes to Brazil for two years and encounters South American and Caribbean spiritualism. There he enters into a relationship with Amparo, a girl of mixed ancestry, and meets Agliè, an elderly man who implies he is the mystical Comte de Saint-Germain. Agliè has a seemingly infinite supply of knowledge about things concerning the Occult, given his status as the Comte de Saint-Germain. While in Brazil, Casaubon receives a mysterious letter from Belbo, concerning how he went to a meeting of occultists and once more ran into the Colonel's mysterious plan, recited by a young woman who was apparently in trance. Casaubon and Amparo later break their ties after an occult experience (Amparo going in a trance during an Umbanda rite).
On his return to Milan, Casaubon completes his thesis. He works as a researcher adept at finding connections between things; later he meets his partner, Lia, in a library, and they eventually have a son. He is hired by Belbo's boss, Mr. Garamond (his name refers to French publisher Claude Garamond), as a researcher to find illustrations for a history of metals the company is working on. Casaubon learns that as well as the respectable Garamond publishing house, Mr. Garamond also owns Manuzio (rendered "Manutius" in the English translation; inspired by Aldus Manutius), a vanity publisher that swindles incompetent authors out of large sums of money.
Garamond shortly starts two lines of occult books. One is intended for serious publication by Garamond; the other, 'Isis Unveiled' (a reference to the theosophical text by Blavatsky), is intended to be published by Manutius and bring in more vanity authors.
Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon quickly become submerged in occult manuscripts, drawing all sorts of ridiculous connections between historical events. They engage Agliè as a specialist reader.
The three editors start to develop their version of "The Plan" as part satire and part intellectual game. Starting from Ardenti's "secret manuscript", they develop an intricate web of mystical connections – trying to avoid making any connection that has not been made before by one of their authors, who they pejoratively refer to as the "Diabolicals". To help them develop this web of connections, they make use of Belbo's small personal computer/word processor, which he has nicknamed Abulafia. Belbo mainly used Abulafia for his voluminous and often-rambling personal writings (and the novel contains many excerpts of these, as Casaubon pages through its files), but as Belbo explains, it also shipped with a small program which could rearrange any typed-in lines of text, such as those of a poem, as a game/diversion (Compare with the game of Dissociated Press and Ramon Llull's Ars Magna).
This is the program they use to create the "connections" which inspire their Plan, using it to randomly select words from the Diabolicals' manuscripts, mixed with logical operators ("What follows is not true", "If", "Then", etc.), truisms (such as "The Templars have something to do with everything") and "neutral data" (such as "Minnie Mouse is Mickey Mouse's fiancé"), and create sentences, paragraphs, even texts long enough for book publication, though they first have to dispel the worries of Mr. Garamond.
The first attempt, after a liberal interpretation of the results ("[C]ompiling the truth is the initiate's right", in the words of Belbo), ends up recreating the Mary Magdalene conspiracy theory central to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Casaubon points this out (without naming the book), and jokingly suggests Belbo to look for occult connections in non-obvious contexts to produce something truly new, for example between the Kabbalah and a car's spark plugs (Belbo actually does, and after some research concludes that the powertrain is a metaphor for the Tree of life). The three are nevertheless positively impressed, and continue resorting to Abulafia whenever they reach a dead-end. "The Plan" is thus as much a compendium of lunatic ravings as it is pure fabrication inspired by random juxtaposition of concepts.
"The Plan" slowly evolves and many of its details change as the story progresses, but basically the final version involves the Knights Templar discovering secret energy flows named telluric currents during the Crusades. The telluric currents affect the geophysical movement of plate tectonics. The currents' mother lode is the so-called umbilicus mundi, or "navel of the world". By placing a special valve in the umbilicus mundi, they would be able to control the currents. This would give them the power to disturb and interfere with life anywhere on Earth, with vast blackmailing possibilities against entire nations. However, they cannot utilize the currents due to insufficient technology.
The discovery is purposely hidden away and the Knights Templar trigger their own destruction, while at the same time hiding independent cells in several corners of Europe, as well as in the Middle East. Going from Ardenti's original plan, each cell is given part of the Templar "Plan" and information about the discovery. After many years of meeting at different places at distinct intervals, where the cells pass on their part of the Plan to the next one, completing it piece by piece like a puzzle, they are to reunite and rediscover the location of the umbilicus to finally exploit the telluric currents and take over the world. The crucial instruments involved in finding the location are a special map and the Foucault pendulum.
However, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar disrupts the time table and the groups lose track of each other, creating several secret societies in order to search for each other throughout history.
While the Plan is total nonsense and Ardenti's text is, in all likelihood, a mundane laundry list (as Lia suggests, encouraging him to remove himself from the plan due to the effect it seems to have on him), the editors get more and more involved in it. Diotallevi is diagnosed with cancer, an incident he claimed is punishment for his deep involvement in the Plan, how they mocked something larger than them all, and Belbo retreats into the Plan to avoid confronting his personal life.
The three send Agliè their chronology of secrets societies in the Plan, as if it were from a manuscript they had been presented with. It includes Templars, Rosicrucians, Paulicians and Synarchists, but they also invent a fictional secret society, the Tres (Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici, Latin for the nonsensical "Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth"). The Tres is introduced in an attempt to trick Agliè, though upon reaching his office, he claims he has a vague memory of them. They believe Tres is fictional, but it was a word mentioned to Casaubon by the policeman De Angelis at a chance encounter, in which De Angelis actually inquires of Casaubon if he has ever heard of it.
Then Belbo goes to Agliè and tells him about the Plan, as if it were serious research, and that he is in possession of a secret Templar map. Agliè becomes frustrated with Belbo's refusal to let him see the (non-existent) map. He sets Belbo up as a terrorist suspect in order to force him to come to Paris. It emerges that Agliè has cast himself as the head of a secret spiritual brotherhood, which includes Mr. Garamond and many of the Diabolical authors.
Casaubon follows Belbo after hearing a call for help, leading to the scene at the start of the novel. Before this, he tries to get help from De Angelis, but the brotherhood has blackmailed him into not interfering. At the appointed hour, people gather around the pendulum for an arcane ritual. During this, Casaubon sees several ectoplasmic forms appear, one of which claims to be the real Comte de Saint-Germain, discrediting Agliè in front of his followers. Belbo is brought out to be questioned.
Agliè's group are, or have deluded themselves to be, the Tres society in the Plan, and are angry that Belbo knows more about the Plan than they do. They try to force him to reveal the secrets he knows. Refusing to satisfy them or reveal that the Plan was a nonsensical concoction, Belbo is hanged by wire connected to the Foucault pendulum.
Casaubon then flees through the Paris sewers and the novel ends with him meditating on the events of the book, apparently waiting for the Tres to capture him.
Quotations
The book begins with a long quote in Hebrew, which comes from page seven of Philip Gruberger's book The Kabbalah: A Study of the Ten Luminous Emanations from Rabbi Isaac Luria with the Commentaries Sufficient for the Beginner Vol. II, published in Jerusalem by the Research Center of Kabbalah in 1973. The quotation translates into English as follows:
- When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around.
Commentary
Unlike most other mystery authors, Eco uses the mysterious as a background for a psychological development of the heroes (notably for Belbo but also for Amparo in chapter "Hesed"). Amparo, being an utterly materialistic (even "marxistic") girl, undergoes crisis when presented with the Mystery. Belbo is ridden by echoes of his past "failures" (in his perception) and strife for something bigger than life.
Interestingly enough, Mr. Garamond, whose primary business is selling dreams (through his vanity press outlet), comes to believe the fantasy world his authors weave. It is possible though, that he had always been a "Diabolical", and founded his publishing business to fish for information.
Trivia
Foucault's Pendulum has lately been called a "thinking person's Da Vinci Code," referring to the bestselling novel by American Dan Brown that followed it by more than a decade. A parchment that inspires the Plan and its multiple possible interpretations (mundane or otherwise) plays a role similar to that of the parchments in the Rennes-le-Château conspiracy theories, made famous by the Code and, before that, the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and other similar books. In contrast to Brown's book, however, which postulates these theories as true, Eco's work is about, among other things, the futility of conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. So the phrase used to link Eco's book to Brown's implies that the latter is for people who do not think. The plot and structure of Foucault's Pendulum are also reminiscent of that of the American "popular fiction" series, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, published 13 years earlier; it is unclear if Eco was aware of the earlier work before he conceived the idea.
References
The following are some of the secret and not-so-secret groups and beliefs appear in Foucault's Pendulum:
- The Knights Templar (the main players)
- The Rosicrucians
- The Gnostics
- The Freemasons
- The Bavarian Illuminati
- The Elders of Zion
- The Assassins of Alamut
- The Cabalists
- The Cathars
- The Jesuits
- An obscure one-time reference to the fictional Cthulhu cult through a quote from The Satanic Rituals - "I'a Cthulhu! I'a S'ha-t'n!". The words closed a ritual composed by Michael Aquino. Originally just "I'a Cthulhu!", Anton LaVey added "I'a S'ha-t'n!" to give it a "Satanic touch" ([reference])
The text of \"the Plan\"
- The original text is in fourteenth-century French ("..." indicates illegible text due to decay: )
- 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.
- 6 foil 6 en 6 places
- chascune foil 20 a . . . 720 a . . .
- al donjon it premiers
- it li secunz joste iceus qui . . . pans
- it al refuge
- it a Nostre Dame de l'altre pan de l'iau
- it a l'ostel des popelicans
- it a la pierre
- 3 foiz 6 avant la feste . . . to Grant Pute.
- Colonel Ardenti reconstructs and translates the text thus, as a secret plan:
- THE (NIGHT OF) SAINT JOHN
- 36 (YEARS) P(OST) HAY WAIN
- 6 (MESSAGES) INTACT WITH SEAL
- F(OR THE KNIGHTS WITH) THE WHITE CLOAKS [TEMPLARS]
- R(ELAP)S(I) OF PROVINS FOR (VAIN)JANCE [REVENGE]
- 6 TIMES 6 IN SIX PLACES
- EACH TIME 20 Y(EARS MAKES) 120 Y(EARS)
- THIS IS THE PLAN
- THE FIRST GO TO THE CASTLE
- IT(ERUM) [AGAIN AFTER 120 YEARS] THE SECOND JOIN THOSE (OF THE) BREAD
- AGAIN TO THE REFUGE
- AGAIN TO OUR LADY BEYOND THE RIVER
- AGAIN TO THE HOSTEL OF THE POPELICANS
- AGAIN TO THE STONE
- 3 TIMES 6 [666] BEFORE THE FEAST (OF THE) GREAT WHORE.
- Using a tourist guidebook, Lia, Casaubon's partner, reconstructs and translates it thus, as a merchant's list of the day's orders (the reader who knows French will hopefully understand the irony):
- 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 of Notre–Dame, across the river
- item to the old building of the Cathars (another name for Popelicans)
- item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde.
- And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whores’ street.
See also
- List of esoteric subjects in Foucault's Pendulum
- The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Notes
External links
- [List of Eco's fiction with short introductions]
- [Digital Illustrations based on the book by artist Fabio Arciniegas]
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