Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [133]
“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 ca...”
“But these are no longer the days of Crowley. Is that clear?” Aglie said. “I must leave you now. I have other guests.”
We quickly went back to the sofa and waited for Aglie 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 Camillo Delminio, L’idea del Theatre, Florence, Torrentino, 1550, Introduction
A few minutes later, Agile 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 1’oeil 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 theater,” Aglie said, “in the style of those Renaissance fantasies where visual encyclopedias were laid out, syl-loges 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