Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [180]
“Then the meaning of Shell is qelippot? We’d better not use it anymore. From now on, only Virgin’s Milk...”
“We’ll check. It could be a trick of the Seven Sisters, lower emanations trying to control the process of creation...In any case, after expansion, behold the great divine release, the exhaust. The piston rises again to the upper neutral position and expels the formless matter, now combusted. Only if this process of purification succeeds can the new cycle begin. Which, if you think about it, is also the Neoplatonic mechanism of Exodus and Parodos, miraculous dialectic of the Way Up and the Way Down.”
“Quantum mortalia pectora ceacae noctis habent! And the sons of matter never realized it!”
“They never saw the connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.”
“For tomorrow, I’ll prepare a mystical interpretation of the phone book.”
“Ever ambitious, our Casaubon. Mind you, there you’ll have to solve the unfathomable problem of the One and the Many. Better succeed slowly. Start, instead, with the washing machine.”
“That’s too easy. The alchemistic transformation from black to whiter than white.”
67
Da Rosa, nada digamos agora....
—Sampayo Bruno, Os Cavalheiros do Amor, Lisbon, Guimaraes, 1960, p. 155
When you assume an attitude of suspicion, you overlook no clue. After our fantasy on the power train and the Tree of the Sefirot, I was prepared to see symbols in every object I came upon.
I had kept in touch with my Brazilian friends, and in Portugal just then, at Coimbra, a conference was being held on Lusitanian culture. More out of a wish to see me again than out of respect for my expertise, my Rio friends managed to have me invited. Lia didn’t go with me; she was in her seventh month, and though her pregnancy had changed her slender figure only slightly, transforming her into a Flemish madonna, she preferred to stay home.
I spent three merry evenings with my old comrades. As we were returning by bus to Lisbon, an argument developed about whether we should stop at Fatima or Tomar. Tomar was the castle to which the Portuguese Templars had withdrawn after the king and the pope saved them from trial and ruin by transforming them into the Order of the Knights of Christ. I couldn’t miss a Templar castle, and luckily the rest of the party was not enthusiastic about Fatima.
If I could have invented a Templar castle, it would have been Tomar. You reach it by ascending a fortified road that flanks the outer bastions, which have cruciform slits, and you breathe Crusader air from the first moment. The Knights of Christ prospered for centuries in that place. Tradition has it that both Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus belonged to that order, and in fact it devoted itself to the conquest of the seas—making the fortune of Portugal. The knights’ long and happy existence there had caused the castle to be rebuilt and extended through the centuries, so to its medieval part were joined Renaissance and Baroque wings. I was moved as I entered the church of the Templars, which had an octagonal rotunda reproducing that of the Holy Sepulcher, and I was surprised to see that the Templars’ crosses had different forms, depending on their location. It was a problem I had encountered before, when I went through the confused iconography on the subject. Whereas the cross of the Knights of Malta had remained more or less the same, the Templar cross had been influenced by periods and local traditions. That’s why Templar-hunters, finding any kind of cross in a place, immediately think they’ve discovered a trace