Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [182]
iceste est I ‘ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it li secunz joste iceus qui....pans
it al refuge
it a Nostre Dame de I’altre part de I’iau
it a I ‘ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste....la Grant Pute.
“Thirty-six years after the hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealed messages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsed knights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twenty years each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, this is the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate the bread, then at the Refuge, then at Our Lady Beyond the River, then at the House of the Pope-licans, then at the Stone. You see, in 1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, in fact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we must ask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you are an escaping Templar, where would you go to form the second group?’’
“H’m...If it’s true that those in the wain fled to Scotland....But why should they have gone to Scotland in particular to eat the bread?”
I was becoming a master of chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland. Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice. Saint John’s Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about Saint John’s Fire in Frazer’s Golden Bough.
I telephoned Lia. “Do me a favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about Saint John’s Fire.”
Lia was terrific at this sort of thing. She found the chapter at once. “What do you want to know? It’s a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all European countries. It’s celebrated at the moment when the sun is at its peak. Saint John was added to make the thing Christian...”
“Do they eat bread in Scotland?”
“Let me see...I don’t think so...Ah, here it is: they don’t eat bread for Saint John, but on the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires, originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in the Scottish highlands...”
“We’ve got it! What kind?”
“They knead a cake of flour and oats and toast it on embers...Then a rite follows that recalls ancient human sacrifices...The bread’s called bannock cakes...”
“What? Spell it!” She did, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morgan le Fay, and other endearments.
I tried to remember my thesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge in Scotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped the king win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them up as the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of Scotland.
I took a big English dictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok in Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind of cake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or other grain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn as the French Templars would have done when they sent news from Scotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get something like the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread. Those who ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of the bread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time had spread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal to England. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti’s from Pole to Palestine.
68
Let your garments be white...If it is dark, set many lights burning...Now begin combining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them until your heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the letters and to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heart is warm, when you see that through the combination of the letters you grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with the aid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence of the divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundity of your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higher angels, as if they were human beings beside you.
—Abulafia, Sefer Haie Olam
“It makes sense,