Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [216]
“And how do we know they made the discovery at Saint-Martin?”
“The fact that they chose Saint-Martin as their Refuge, that from the prior of Saint Albans, to Postel, to the Convention they kept it under their control, that after Foucault’s first experiments they installed the Pendulum there. Too many clues.”
“But still, the last meeting is in Jerusalem.”
“So? In Jerusalem they’ll put the message together, and that’s not a matter of a few minutes. Then they’ll prepare for a year, and the following June 23 all six groups will meet in Paris, to learn finally where the Umbilicus is, and then they’ll set to work to conquer the world.”
“But,” Belbo insisted, “there’s still something I can’t figure out. Although there’s this final revelation about the Umbilicus, all thirty-six must have known that before. The Pendulum had been used in cathedrals; so it wasn’t a secret. What would have prevented Bacon or Postel, or even Foucault—who must have been a Templar himself, seeing all the fuss he made over the Pendulum—from just putting a map of the world on the floor and orienting it by the cardinal points? We’re oif the track.”
“No, we’re not off the track,” I said. “The message reveals something that none of them could know: what map to use!”
83
A map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58
“You’re familiar with the situation of cartography at the time of the Templars,” I said. “In that century there were Arab maps that, among other things, put Africa at the top and Europe at the bottom; navigators’ maps, fairly accurate, all things considered; and maps mat by then were already three or four hundred years old but were still accepted in some schools. Mind you, to reveal the location of the Umbilicus they didn’t need an accurate map, in today’s sense. It had to be simply a map possessing this virtue: once oriented, it would show the Umbilicus at the point where the arc of the Pendulum is struck by the first ray of sun on June 24. Now listen carefully. Let’s suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the Umbilicus is in Jerusalem. Even with our modern maps, the position of Jerusalem depends on the projection used. And God knows what kind of map the Templars had. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not the Pendulum that’s calibrated according to the map; it’s the map that’s calibrated according to the Pendulum. You follow me? It could be the craziest map in the world, as long as, when placed beneath the Pendulum at the crack of dawn on the twenty-fourth of June, it shows the one and only spot that is Jerusalem.”
“This doesn’t solve our problem,” Diotallevi said.
“Of course not, and it doesn’t solve it for the invisible thirty-six either. Because if you don’t have the right map, forget it. Let’s take the case of a map oriented in the standard way, with east in the direction of the apse and west toward the nave, since that’s how churches are built. Now let’s say, at random, that on that fatal dawn the Pendulum is near the boundary of the southeast quadrant. If it were a clock, we’d say that the hour hand is at five-twenty-five. All right? Now look.”
I went to dig out a history of cartography.
“Here. Exhibit number 1: a twelfth-century map. It follows the T-structured maps: Asia is at the top with the Earthly Paradise; to the left, Europe; to the right, Africa; and here, beyond Africa, they Ve also put the Antipodes. Exhibit number 2: a map inspired by the Somnium Scipionis of Macrobius, and it survives in various versions into the sixteenth century. Africa’s a bit narrow, but that’s all right. Now look: orient the two maps in the same way, and you see that on the first map five-twenty-five corresponds to Arabia, and on the second map to New Zealand, since that’s where the second map has the Antipodes. You may know everything about the Pendulum, but if you don’t