Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [16]
“Why is that?”
“Every letter corresponds to a number. The normal mem is forty, but the final mem is six hundred. This has nothing to do with temurah, which teaches permutation; it involves, rather, gematria, which seeks sublime affinities between words and their numeric values. With the final mem the word “LMRBH” totals not two hundred and seventy-seven but eight hundred and thirty-seven, and thus is equivalent to ThThZL, or thath zal, which means ‘he who gives profusely.’ So you can see why all twenty-seven letters have to be considered: it isn’t just the sound that matters, but the number too. Which brings us to my calculation. There are more than four hundred billion billion billion billion possibilities. Have you any idea how long it would take to try them all out, using a machine? And I’m not talking about your miserable little computer. At the rate of one permutation per second, you would need seven billion billion billion billion minutes, or one hundred and twenty-three million billion billion billion hours, which is a little more than five million billion billion billion days, or fourteen thousand billion billion billion years, which comes to a hundred and forty billion billion billion centuries, or fourteen billion billion billion millennia. But suppose you had a machine capable of generating a million permutations per second. Just think of the time you’d save with your electronic wheel: you’d need only fourteen thousand billion billion millennia!
“The real and true name of God, the secret name, is as long as the entire Torah, and there is no machine in the world capable of exhausting all its permutations, because the Torah itself is a permutation with repetitions, and the art of temurah tells us to change not the twenty-seven letters of the alphabet but each and every character in the Torah, for each character is a letter unto itself, no matter how often it appears on other pages. The two hes in the name YHVH therefore count as two different letters. And if you want to Calculate all the permutations of all the characters in the entire Torah, then all the zeros in the world will not be enough for you. But go ahead, do what you can with your pathetic little accountant’s machine. A machine does exist, to be sure, but it wasn’t manufactured in your Silicon Valley: it is the holy cabala, or Tradition, and for centuries the rabbis have been doing what no computer can do and, let us hope, will never be able to do. Because on the day all the combinations are exhausted, the result should remain secret, and in any case the universe will have completed its cycle—and we will all be consumed in the dazzling glory of the great Metacyclosynchro-tron.”
“Amen,” Jacopo Belbo said.
Diotallevi was already driving him toward these excesses, and I should have kept that in mind. How often had I seen Belbo, after office hours, running programs to check Diotallevi’s calculations, trying to show him that at least Abu could give results in a few seconds, not having to work by hand on yellowing parchment or use antediluvian number systems that did not even include zero? But Abu gave his answers in exponential notation, so Belbo was unable to daunt Diotallevi with a screen full of endless zeros: a pale visual imitation of the multiplication of combinatorial universes, of the exploding swarm of all possible worlds.
After everything that had happened, it seemed impossible to me, I thought as I stared at the Rosicrucian engraving, that Belbo would not have returned to those exercises on the name of God in selecting a password. And if, as I guessed, he was also preoccupied with numbers like thirty-six and one hundred and twenty, they would enter into it, too. He would not have simply combined the four Hebrew letters, knowing that four Stones made only twenty-four