Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [212]
I entered the hospital on unsteady legs, asked directions of people who didn’t know anything, twice ended up in the wrong ward. I shouted that they had to know where Lia was having the baby, and they told me to calm down, because here everybody was having a baby.
Finally—I don’t know how—I found myself in a room. Lia was pearly pale but smiling. Someone had lifted her hair and put it under a white cap. For the first time I saw Lia’s forehead in all its splendor. Next to her was the Thing.
“It’s Giulio,” she said.
My Rebis. I, too, had made him, and not with chunks of dead bodies or arsenic soap. He was whole, all his fingers and toes were in the right place.
I insisted on seeing all of him, his little cock, his big balls. Then I kissed Lia on her naked brow: “The credit is yours, darling; it all depends on the vessel.”
“Of course the credit is mine, you shit. I had to count all by myself.’’
“For me you are all that counts,” I told her.
81
The subterranean people have reached the highest knowledge...If our mad humankind should begin a war against them, they would be able to explode the whole surface of our planet...
—Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 1924, v
I stayed at home with Lia because, once she left the hospital and had to change the baby’s diapers, she cried and said she would never be able to cope. Somebody explained to us that this was normal: the excitement over the victory of birth is followed by a feeling of helplessness in the face of the immensity of the job. During those days, while I loafed around the house, useless and not qualified, of course, for breast-feeding, I spent long hours reading everything I had been able to find concerning telluric currents.
On my return, I sounded out Aglfe on them. He made a gesture of boredom. “Weak metaphors, referring to the secret of the serpent Kundalini. Chinese geomancy also sought in the earth the traces of the dragon. The telluric serpent simply stands for the occult serpent. The goddess reposes, coiled, and sleeps her eternal sleep. Kundalini throbs gently, binding heavy bodies to lighter bodies. Like a vortex or a whirlpool, like the first half of the syllable om.”
“But what secret cfoes the serpent refer to?” “To the telluric currents.” “What are the telluric currents?”
“A great cosmological metaphor, which refers to the serpent.” To hell with Aglie, I said to myself, I know more than that.
I read my notes to Belbo and Diotallevi, and we no longer had any doubt. At last we were in a position to supply the Templars with a decent secret. It was the most economical, the most elegant solution to the problem, and all the pieces of our millennial puzzle fit together.
So: the Celts knew about the telluric currents: they had learned the secret from the Atlantides, when the survivors of the submerged continent emigrated, some to Egypt, some to Brittany.
The Atlantides had learned it from those ancestors of ours who ventured forth from Avalon across the continent of Mu as far as the central desert of Australia—when all the continents were a single land mass, the wondrous Pangaea. If only we could still read (as the Aborigines can, but they remain silent) the mysterious alphabet carved on the great boulder Ayers Rock, we would have the Answer. Ayers Rock is the antipode of the great (unknown) mountain that is the Pole, the true, occult Pole, not the one that any bourgeois explorer can reach. As usual, and this should be obvious to anyone whose eyes have not been blinded by the false light of Western science, the Pole that we see is not the real Pole, for the real Pole is the one that cannot be seen, except by some adepts, whose lips are sealed.
The Celts, however, believed it was enough to discover the global configuration of the currents. That’s why they erected megaliths. The menhirs had sensitive devices, like electric valves, planted at the points where the currents branched and changed direction. The leys marked the routes of currents already identified. The dolmens were chambers of accumulated energy, where the Druids,