Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [120]
Is this possible? To spend a life punishing people who will never know they have been punished? So you wanted to be a Homer, eh? Take that, wretch, and that!
I hate anyone who tries to see me as an illusion of passion.
41
When it is recalled that Daath is situated at the point where the abyss bisects the Middle Pillar, and that up the Middle Pillar lies the Path of the Arrow, the way by which consciousness goes when the psychic rises on the planes, and that here also is Kundalini, we see that in Daath is the secret of both generation and regeneration, the key to the manifestation of all things through the differentiation into pairs of Opposites and their union in a Third.
—Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, London, Fraternity ofthe Inner Light, 1957, 7.19
In any case I wasn’t supposed to concern myself with Manutius; my job was the wonderful adventure of metals. I began by exploring the Milan libraries. I started with textbooks, made a bibliography on file cards, and from there I went back to the original sources, old or new, looking for decent pictures. There’s nothing worse than illustrating a chapter on space travel with a photograph of the latest American satellite. Signer Garamond had taught me that it needs, at the very least, an angel by Dore.
I reaped a harvest of curjous reproductions, but they weren’t enough. To choose the right picture for an illustrated book, you have to reject at least ten others.
I got permission to go to Paris for four days. Not much time to visit all the archives. Lia came with me. We arrived Thursday and had return reservations for the Monday-evening train, and I scheduled the Conservatoire for Monday, a mistake, because I found out the Conservatoire was closed Mondays. Too late. I left Paris crestfallen.
Belbo was vexed, but I had collected plenty of interesting things, and we went to show them to Signer Garamond. He leafed through the reproductions, many of them in color, then looked at the bill and let out a whistle. “My dear friend,” he said, “our work is a mission, true, we toil in the fields of culture, ca va sans dire, but we’re not the Red Cross—more, we’re not UNICEF. Was it necessary to buy all this material? I mean, I see here a mustachioed gentleman in his underwear who looks like d’Artagnan, surrounded by abracadabras and capricorns. Who is he? Mandrake?”
“Primitive medicine. Influence of the zodiac on the different parts of the body, with the corresponding curative herbs. And minerals, including metals. The doctrine of the cosmic signatures. Those were times when the boundary between magic and science was rather ill-defined.”
“Interesting. But what does this title page mean? Philosophia Moysaica. What’s Moses got to do with it? Isn’t that being a little too primitive?”
“It’s the dispute over unguentum armarium, otherwise known as weapon salve. Illustrious physicians spent fifty years arguing whether this salve could heal wounds by being smeared on the weapon that had dealt the blow.’’
“Incredible. And that’s science?”
“Not in today’s sense of the word. But they considered this seriously, because they had just discovered the marvels of the magnet, the magic possibility of action at a distance...These men were wrong, but later, Volta and Marconi were not. What are electricity and radio if not action at a distance?”
“Well, well. Bravo, Casaubon. Science and magic going arm in arm, eh? Great idea. Let’s pursue this. Throw out some of those revolting generators and put in a few more Mandrakes. Perhaps a summoning of the Devil, say, on a gold background.”
“I wouldn’t want to go too far. This is the wonderful adventure of metals. Oddities work only when they’re to the point.”
“The wonderful adventure of metals must be, most of all, the story of science’s mistakes. Stick in the catchy oddity, and in the caption say it’s wrong. In the meantime, the reader’s hooked,