Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [174]
“But rivers...”
“Rivers are worshiped not because they’re horizontal, but because there’s water in them, and you don’t need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body...Anyway, that’s how we’re put together, all of us, and that’s why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they’re shown an alchemist’s oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist’s oven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror.”
“You always tell me the truth. You see my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want to discover all the secret archetypes of the body.” That evening we inaugurated the expression “discovering archetypes” to indicate our moments of greatest intimacy.
I was half-asleep when Lia touched my shoulder. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
I should have listened to Lia. She spoke with the wisdom of life and birth. Venturing into the underground passages of Agart-tha, into the pyramid of Isis Unveiled, we had entered Gevurah, the Sefirah of fear, the moment in which wrath manifests itself in the world. I had let myself be seduced by the thought of Sophia. Moses Cordovero says that the Female is to the left, and all her attributes point to Gevurah....unless the Male, using these attributes, adorns his Bride, and causes her to move to the right, toward good. Every desire must remain within its limits. Otherwise Gevurah becomes Judgment, the dark appearance, the universe of demons.
To discipline desire....This I had done in the tenda de um-banda. I had played the agogd, I had taken an active part in the spectacle, and I had escaped the trance. I had done the same with Lia: I had regulated desite out of homage to the Bride, and I had been rewarded in the depths of my loins; my seed had been blessed.
But I was not to persevere. I was to be seduced by the beauty of Tiferet.
TIFERET
64
To dream of living in a new and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead live elsewhere, nor is it known where.
—Gerolamo Cardano, Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, p. 58
While Gevurah is the Sefirah of awe and evil, Tiferet is the Sefirah of beauty and harmony. As Diotallevi said: It is the light of understanding, the tree of life; it is pleasure, hale appearance. It is the concord of Law and Freedom.
And that year was for us the year of pleasure, of the joyful subversion of the great text of the universe, in which we celebrated the nuptials of Tradition and the Electronic Machine. We created, and we delighted in our creation. It was the year in which we invented the Plan.
For me at least, it was truly a happy year. Lia’s pregnancy proceeded tranquilly, and between Garamond and my agency I was beginning to make a comfortable living. I kept my office in the old factory building, but we remodeled Lia’s apartment.
The wonderful adventure of metals was now in the hands of the compositors and proofreaders. That was when Signor Garamond had his brainstorm: “An illustrated history of magic and the hermetic sciences. With the material that comes in from the Diabolicals, with the expertise you three have acquired, with the advice of that incredible man Aglie, we can put together a big volume, four hundred