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By Root 779 0

know what map to use, you’re lost. So the message contained instructions, elaborately coded, on where to find the right map, which may have been specially drawn for the occasion. The message told where to look, in what manuscript, in what library, abbey, castle. It’s even possible that Dee or Bacon or someone else reconstructed the message. Who knows? The message said the map was at X, but in the meantime, with everything that was going on in Europe, the abbey that housed the map burned down, or the map was stolen, hidden God knows where. Maybe someone has the map but doesn’t know the use of it, or knows it’s valuable but doesn’t know why, and he’s going around the world looking for a buyer. Imagine all the confusion of offers, false trails, messages that say other things but are understood to refer to the map, and messages that indeed refer to the map but are read as if hinting at, say, the production of gold. No doubt some people attempt to reconstruct the map purely on the basis of conjectures.”

“What sorts of conjectures?”

“Well, for example, micro-macrocosmic correspondences. Here’s another map. You know where it comes from? It appears in the second treatise of the Utriusque Cosmi Historia of Robert Fludd. Fludd is the Rosicrucians’ man in London, don’t forget. Now what does our man do, our Robertus de Fluctibus, as he liked to style himself? He offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole, naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map specially conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It’s obvious, undeniable; I can’t imagine why somebody hasn’t already seen—”

“The fact is, the Diabolicals are very, very slow,” Belbo said.

“The fact is, we are the only worthy heirs of the Templars. But, to continue. You recognize the design. It’s a mobile rotula, like the ones Trithemius used for his coded messages. This isn’t a map, then; it’s a design for a machine to produce variations of maps, until the right map is found! And Fludd says as much in the caption: This is the sketch for an instrumentum, it still needs work.”

“But wasn’t Fludd the one who persisted in denying the rotation of the earth? How could he think of the Pendulum?’’

“We’re dealing with initiates. An initiate denies what he knows, denies knowing it, to conceal it.”

“This,” Belbo said, “would explain why Dee paid so much attention to those royal cartographers. It was not to discover the ‘true’ form of the earth, but to reconstruct, among all the mistaken maps, the one right map, the one of use to him.”

“Not bad, not bad at all,” Diotallevi said. “To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”

84

The chief occupation of this Assembly—and, in my opinion, the most useful—should be to work on natural history following the plans of Verulam.

—Christian Huygens, Letter to Colbert, Oeuvres Completes, La Haye, 1888-1950, vi, pp. 95-96

The vicissitudes of the six groups were not confined to the search for the map. In the first two pieces of the message, those in the hands of the Portuguese and the English, the Templars probably referred to a pendulum, but ideas about pendulums were still hazy. It’s one thing to swing some lead on a length of cord and quite another to construct a mechanism precise enough to be hit by a ray of the sun at an exact time and place. This is why the Templars calculated for six centuries. The Baconian wing set immediately to work, and tried to draw to its side all the initiates, whom it made desperate eiforts to reach.

It is no coincidence that Salomon de Caus, the Rosicrucians’ man, writes for Richelieu a treatise on solar clocks. And afterward, from Galileo on, there is furious research devoted to pendulums. The pretext is to figure out how to use them for determining longitudes, but in 1681, when Huygens discovers that a pendulum accurate in Paris is slow in Cayenne, he immediately realizes that this discrepancy is due to the variation