Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [179]
“You don’t say.”
“I am not the one who says; it is the thing itself that says. The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot.”
“But the positions don’t coincide.”
“Who says they don’t? Diotallevi’s explained to us that in certain versions Tiferet isn’t the sixth Sefirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth.”
“Fiat.”
“But let’s pursue the dialectic of the tree. At the summit is the engine, Omnia Movens, of which more later: this is the Creative Source. The engine communicates its creative energy to the two front or higher wheels: the Wheel of Intelligence and the Wheel of Knowledge.”
“If the car has front-wheel drive.”
“The good thing about the Belboth tree is that it allows metaphysical alternatives. So we have the image of a spiritual cosmos with front-wheel-drive, where the engine, in front, transmits its wishes to the higher wheels, whereas in the materialistic version we have a degenerate cosmos in which motion is imparted by the engine to the two lower wheels: from the depths, the cosmic emanation releases the base forces of matter.”
“What about an engine in back, rear-wheel drive?”
“Satanic. Higher and lower coincide. God is identified with the motion of crude matter. God as an eternally frustrated aspiration to divinity. The result of th Breaking of the Vessels.”
“Not the Breaking of the Muffler?”
“That occurs in aborted universes, where the noxious breath of the Archons spreads through the ether. But we mustn’t digress. After the engine and two wheels comes the clutch, the Sefirah of grace that establishes or interrupts the flow of love that binds the rest of the tree of the Supernal Energy. A disk, a mandala that caresses another mandala. Then the coffer of change—the gear box, or transmission, as the positivists call it, which is the principle of Evil, because it allows human will to speed up or slow down the constant process of emanation. For this reason, an automatic transmission costs more, for there it is the tree itself that decides, in accordance with its own Sovereign Equilibrium. Then comes the universal joint, the axle, the drive shaft, the differential—note the opposition/repetition of the quaternion of cylinders in the engine, because the differential (Minor Keter) transmits motion to the earthly wheels. Here the function of the Sefirah of difference is obvious, as, with a majestic sense of beauty, it distributes the cosmic forces to the Wheel of Glory and the Wheel of Victory, which in an unaborted universe (front-wheel drive) are subordinate to the motion imparted by the higher wheels.”
“A coherent exegesis. And the heart of the engine, seat of the One, the Crown?”
“You have but to look with the eyes of an initiate. The supreme engine lives by an alternation of intake and exhaust. A complex, divine respiration, a cycle initially based on two units called cylinders (an obvious geometrical archetype), which then generate a third, and finally gaze upon one another in mutual love and bring forth the glory of a fourth. In the cycle of the first cylinder (none is first hierarchically, but only through the miraculous alternation of position), the piston (etymology: Pistis Sophia) descends from the upper neutral position to the lower neutral position as the cylinder fills with energy in the pure state. I’m simplifying, because here angelic hierarchies come into play, the valves, which, as my handbook says, ‘allow the opening and closing of the apertures that link the interior of the cylinders to the induction pipes leading out of the carburetor.’ The inner seat of the engine can communicate with the rest of the cosmos only through this mediation, and here I believe is revealed—I am reluctant to utter heresy—the original limit of the One, which, in order to create, somehow depends on the Great Eccentrics. A closer reading of the