Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [150]
There was a pause—he was hesitating, I think. Then, from his pocket, he produced a notebook the size of a missal. “Look, Casaubon, you see some strange people as part of your job. You go to the library and look up even stranger books. Help me. What do you know about synarchy?”
“Now you’re embarrassing me. Almost nothing. I heard it mentioned in connection with Saint-Yves; that’s all.”
“What are they saying about it, around?”
“If they’re saying anything, I haven’t heard. To be frank, it sounds like fascism to me.”
“Actually, many of its theses were picked up by Action Francaise. If that were the whole story, I’d be okay. I find a group that talks about synarchy and I can give it a political color. But in my reading, I’ve learned that in 1929 a certain Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo founded a group called Polaris, which was inspired by the myth of the King of the World. They proposed a synarchic project: social service opposed to capitalist profit, the elimination of the class struggle through cooperatives...It sounds like a kind of Fabian socialism, a libertarian and communitarian movement. Note that both Polaris and the Irish Fabians were accused of being involved in a syn-archic plot led by the Jews. And who accused them? The Revue Internationale des societes secretes, which talks about a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot. Many of its contributors belonged to a secret right-wing organization called La Sapiniere. And they say that all these revolutionary groups are only the front for a diabolical plot hatched by an occultist cenacle. Now you’ll say: All right, Saint-Yves ended up inspiring reformist groups, but these ! days the right lumps everything together and sees it all as a demo-pluto-social-Judaic conspiracy. Mussolini did the same thing. But why accuse them of being controlled by an occultist cenacle? According to the little I know—take Picatrix, for example—those occultism people couldn’t care less about the workers’ movement.” “So it seems also to me, O Socrates. So?” “Thanks for the Socrates. But now we’re coming to the good part. The more I read on the subject, the more I get confused. In the forties various self-styled synarchic groups sprang up; they talked about a new European order led by a government of wise men, above party lines. And where did these groups meet? In Vichy collaborationist circles. Then, you say, we got it wrong; synarchy is right-wing. But hold on! Having read this far, I begin to see that there is one theme that finds them all in agreement: Synarchy exists and secretly rules the world. But here comes the ‘but’...” “But?”
“But on January 24, 1937, Dmitri Navachine, Mason and Martinist (I don’t know what Martinist means, but I think it’s one of those sects), economic adviser of the Front Populaire, after having been director of a Moscow bank, was assassinated by the Organisation secrete d’action revolutionnaire et nationale, better known as La Cagoule, financed by Mussolini. It was said then that La Cagoule was guided by a secret synarchy and that Navachine was killed because he had discovered its mysteries. A document originating from left-wing circles during the Occupation denounced a synarchic Pact of the Empire, which was responsible for the French defeat, a pact that was a manifestation of Portuguese-style fascism. But then it turned out that the pact was drawn up by Du Mas and Canudo and contained ideas they had published and publicized everywhere. Nothing secret about it. But these ideas were revealed as secret, extremely secret, in 1946 by one Husson, who denounced a revolutionary synarchic pact of the left, as he wrote in his Synarchie, panorama de 25 annees d’activite occulte, which he signed...wait, let me find it...Geoffrey de Charnay.” “Fine!” I said. “Charnay was a companion of Molay, the grand master of the Templars. They died together at the stake. Here we have a neo-Templar attacking synarchy from the right. But synarchy is born at Agarttha, which is the refuge of the Templars!”
“What did I tell you? You