Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [186]
“After all, they were Germans,” I said. “I’ll read the Rosi-crucian manifestoes.”
“But you said the manifestoes were fake,” Belbo said.
“So? What we’re putting together is fake.”
“True,” he said. “I was forgetting that.”
69
Elles deviennent le Diable: debiles, timorees, vaillantes a des heures exceptionnelles, sanglantes sans cesse, lacrymantes, caressantes, avec des bras qui ignorent les lois....Fi! Fi! Elles ne valent rien, elles sont faites d’un cote, d’un os courbe, d’une dissimulation rentree...Elles baisent le serpent...
—Jules Bois, Le satanisme et la magie, Paris, Chailley, 1895,
He was forgetting that, yes. The following file, brief and dazed, surely belongs to this period.
FILENAME: Ennoia
You arrived at the house suddenly with your grass. I didn’t want any, I won’t allow any vegetable substance to interfere with the functioning of my brain (I’m lying, I smoke tobacco, drink distillations of grain). The few times, in the early sixties, when somebody forced me to share in the circulation of a joint, with that cheap slimy paper impregnated with saliva, and the last drag using a pin, I wanted to laugh.
But yesterday it was you offering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way of offering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the way nobody’s danced for years, and—the shame of it—while Mahler’s Fourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creature were yeasting, with the sweet and wrinkled face of an old nanny goat, a serpent rising from the depths of my loins, and I worshiped you as a very old and universal aunt. Probably I went on holding my body close to yours, but I felt also that you were in flight, ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked doors, moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly, Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.
Was it not you I sought all along? I am here, always waiting for you. Did I lose you, each time, because I didn’t recognize you? Did I lose you, each time, because I did recognize you but was afraid? Lose you because each time, recognizing you, I knew I had to lose you?
But where did you end up last night? I woke this morning with a headache.
70
Let us remember well, however, the secret references,to a period of 120 years that brother A...., the successor of D and last of the second line of succession—who lived among many of us—addressed to us, we of the third line of succession...
—Fama Fratemitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1614
First thing, I read through the two manifestoes of the Rosicrucians, the Fama and the Confessio. I also took a look at the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz by Johann Valentin Andreae, because Andreae was the presumed author of the manifestoes.
The two manifestoes appeared in Germany between 1614 and 1615, thus about thirty years after the 1584 meeting between the French and English Templars and almost a century before the French were to meet with the Germans.
I read, not to believe what the manifestoes said, but to look beyond them, as if the words meant something else. To help them mean something else, I knew I should skip some passages and attach more importance to some statements than to others. But this was exactly what the Diabolicals and their masters were teaching us. If you move in the refined time of revelation, do not follow the fussy, philistine chains of logic and their monotonous sequentiality.
Taken literally, these two texts were a pile of absurdities, riddles, contradictions. Therefore they could not be saying what they seemed to be saying, and were neither a call to profound spiritual reformation nor the story of poor Christian Rosen-creutz. They were a coded message to be read by superimposing them on a grid, a grid that left certain spaces free while covering others. Like the coded message of Provins, where only the initial letters counted. Having no grid, I had to assume the existence of one. I had to read with mistrust.
The manifestoes spoke of the