Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [181]
Our guide took us to see the Manueline window, the janela par excellence, a filigree, a collage of marine and submarine troves, seaweeds, shells, anchors, capstans, and chains, celebrating the knights’ achievements on the oceans. The window was framed by two towers, which were decorated with carvings of the insigne of the Garter. What was the symbol of an English order doing in a Portuguese fortified monastery? The guide couldn’t say; but a little later, on another side, the northeast, I believe, he showed us the insigne of the Golden Fleece. I couldn’t help thinking of the subtle game of alliances that had united the Garter to the Golden Fleece, the Fleece to the Argonauts, the Argonauts to the Grail, and the Grail to the Templars. Remembering Colonel Ardenti’s narrative and a few pages from the Diabolicals’ manuscripts, I started when our guide showed us into a side room whose ceiling was gripped by keystones. They were rosettes, but on some of them was carved a bearded caprine face: Baphomet...
We went down into a crypt. After seven steps, a bare stone floor led to the apse, where an altar could stand, or the chair of the grand master. You reached it by passing beneath seven keystones, each in the form of a rose, one larger than the next, with the last set over a well. The Cross and the Rose, in a Templar monastery, and in a room surely built before the Rosicrucian manifestoes...I put some questions to the guide. He smiled. “If you knew how many students of the occult sciences come here on pilgrimages....It’s said that this was the initiation chamber.”
Entering by chance a room not yet restored, which contained a few pieces of dusty furniture, I found the floor cluttered with great cardboard boxes. Rummaging at random, I uncovered some fragments of volumes in Hebrew, presumably from the seventeenth century. What were the Jews doing in Tomar? The guide told me that the knights had maintained friendly relations with the local Jewish community. He had me look out the window and showed me a little garden designed like an elegant French maze—the work, he told me, of an eighteenth-century Jewish architect: Samuel Schwarz.
The second appointment in Jerusalem....And the first at the Castle? Wasn’t that how the message of Provins went? By God, the Castle of the Ordonation mentioned in Ingolf’s document was not the Monsalvat of chivalric novels, the Avalon of the Hyperboreal. No. What castle would the Templars of Provins, more used to directing commandaries than to reading romances of the Round Table, have chosen for their first meeting place? Why, Tomar, the castle of the Knights of Christ, a place where survivors of the order enjoyed complete freedom, unchanged guarantees, and where they could be in contact with the agents of the second group!
I left Tomar and Portugal with my mind ablaze. No longer was I laughing at the’message Ardenti had shown us. The Templars, when they became a secret order, worked out a Plan that was to last six hundred years and conclude in our century. The Templars were serious men. If they talked about a castle, they meant a real castle. The Plan began at Tomar. And what would the ideal route have been, the sequence of the other five meetings? Places where the Templars could count on friendship, protection, complicity. The colonel spoke of Stonehenge, Avalon, Agarttha...Nonsense. The message had to be completely re-studied.
Of course—I reminded myself on my way home—the idea is not to discover the Templars’ secret, but to construct it.
Belbo seemed disturbed at the thought of going back to the document left by the colonel, and he found it only after digging reluctantly in a lower drawer. But, I saw, he had kept it. Together we reread the Provins message, after so many years.
It began with the message coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisibles separez en six bandes. And then:
a la....Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6...entiers avec saiel
p....les blancs mantiax
r...5...chevaliers de Pruins pour la....j. nc.
6 foil 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a...720 a...