Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [213]
But there was more to the problem than that. The other branch of the Atlantidean emigration realized as much. The occult knowledge of the Egyptians passed from Hermes Trismegistus to Moses, who took care not to pass it on to his band of tatterdemalions, their craws still stuffed with manna; to them he offered the Ten Commandments, which was as much as they could comprehend. The higher truth is aristocratic; Moses encoded it in the Pentateuch. The cabalists understood this.
“Just think,” I said, “everything was already written, an open book, in the measurements of the Temple of Solomon, and the keepers of the secret were the Rosicrucians, who formed the Great White Fraternity—the Essenes, in other words, who, as is well known, let Jesus in on their secrets. And there you have the real reason why Jesus was crucified...”
“Of course, the Passion of Christ is an allegory, prefiguring the trial of the Templars.”
“Right. And Joseph of Arimathea takes, or takes back, the secret of Jesus to the land of the Celts. But obviously the secret is still incomplete; the Christian Druids know only a fragment of it, and that is the esoteric meaning of the Grail: there is something missing, but we don’t know what. The secret—what the Temple already said in full—is suspected only by a small group of rabbis who remained in Palestine. They entrust it to the occult Moslem sects, to the Sufis, the Ismailis, the Motak-allimun. And from them the Templars learn it.”
“At last, the Templars! I was beginning to worry,” Belbo said.
We were shaping the Plan, which, like soft clay, obeyed our thumbs, our narrative desires. The Templars had discovered the secret during those sleepless nights, embracing their saddle mates in the desert, where the implacable simoom was blowing. They had wrested it, bit by bit, from those who knew the powers of cosmic focus in the Black Stone of Mecca, the heritage of the Babylonian magi—for it was clear now that the Tower of Babel had been simply an attempt, however hasty and deservedly a failure because of the pride of its architects, to build the most powerful menhir of all. But the Babylonians got their calculations wrong. As Father Kircher has demonstrated, had the tower reached its peak, its excessive weight would have made the earth’s axis rotate ninety degrees and maybe more, and our poor globe, instead of having an ithyphallic crown pointing upward, would have found itself with a sterile appendix, a limp mentula, a monkey tail flopping downward, a Shekhinah lost in the dizzying abyss of an antarctic Malkhut, a flaccid hieroglyph for penguins.
“So, in a word, what’s the secret discovered by the Templars?”
“Don’t rush me. We’re getting there. It took seven days to make the world. And now we’ll give it a try.”
82
The earth is a magnetic body; in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago.
—H. P. Blavatsky Isis Unveiled, New York, Boulton, 1877, I, p. xxiii
We gave it a try, and we succeeded.
The earth is a great magnet, and the force and direction of its currents are influenced by the celestial spheres, the cycle of the seasons, the precession of the equinoxes, the cosmic cycles. Thus the pattern of the currents changes. But it must change like hair, which, though it grows everywhere on the top and sides of the skull, nevertheless spirals out from a point toward the back, where it rebels most against the comb. When that point has been identified, when the most powerful station has been established there, it will be possible to control, direct, command all the telluric currents of the planet. The Templars realized that the secret lay not only in possessing the global map of the currents, but also in knowing the critical