Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [147]
Then, as our Diabolicals came and went, the memory of Salon faded, was lost among his similars.
One day, Aglie came to the office to report on some manuscripts Belbo had sent him. His opinions were precise, severe, comprehensive. Aglie was clever; it didn’t take him long to figure out the Garamond-Manutius double game, and we now talked openly in front of him. He understood: he would destroy a text with a few sharp observations, then remark with smooth cynicism that it would be fine for Manutius.
I asked him what he could tell me about Agarttha and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.
“Saint-Yves d’Alveydre...” he said. “A bizarre man, beyond any doubt. From his youth he spent time with the followers of Fabre d’Olivet. He became a humble clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, but ambitious...We naturally took a dim view of his marriage to Marie-Victoire...”
Aglie couldn’t resist shifting to the first person, as if he were reminiscing.
“Who was Marie-Victoire? I love gossip,” Belbo said. “Marie-Victoire de Risnitch, very beautiful when she was the intimate of the empress Eugenic. But by the time she met Saint-Yves, she was over fifty. And he was in his early thirties. For her, a mesalliance, of course. What’s more, to give him a title, she bought some property—I can’t remember where—that had belonged to a certain Marquis d’Alveydre. So, while our unscrupulous character boasted of his title, in Paris they sang songs about the gigolo. Since he could now live off his income, he devoted himself to his dream, which was to find a political formula that would lead to a harmonious society. Synarchy, as opposed to anarchy. A European society governed by three councils, representing economic power, judicial power, and spiritual power—the Church and the scientists, in other words. An enlightened oligarchy that would eliminate class conflicts. We’ve heard worse.” “What about Agarttha?”
“Saint-Yves claimed to have been visited one day by a mysterious Afghan, a man named Hadji Scharipf, who can’t have been an Afghan, because the name is clearly Albanian...This man revealed to him the secret dwelling place of the King of the World, though Saint-Yves himself never used that expression he called it Agarttha, the place that cannot be found.” “Where did he write this?”
“In his Mission de I’lnde en Europe, a work that, incidentally, has influenced a great deal of contemporary political thought. In Agarttha there are underground cities, and below them, closer to the center, live the five thousand sages that govern it. The number five thousand suggests, of course, the hermetic roots of the Vedic language, as you gentlemen know. And each root is a magic hierogram connected to a celestial power and sanctioned by an infernal power. The central dome of Agarttha is lighted from above by something like mirrors, which allow the light from the planet’s surface to arrive only through the enharmonic spectrum of colors, as opposed to the solar spectrum of our physics books, which is merely diatonic. The wise ones of Agarttha study all holy languages in order to arrive at the universal language, which is Vattan. When they come upon mysteries too profound, they levitate, and would crack their skulls against the vault of the dome if their brothers did not restrain them. They forge the lightning bolts, they guide the cyclic currents of the interpolar and intertropical fluids, the interferential extensions in the different zones of the earth’s latitude and longitude. They select species and have created small animals with extraordinary psychic powers, animals which have a tortoise shell with a yellow cross, a single eye, and a mouth at either end. And polypod animals which can move in all directions. Agarttha is probably where the Templars found refuge after their dispersion, and where they perform custodial duties. Anything else?”
“But...was he serious?” I asked.
“I believe