Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [221]
For example, current Masonic studies believe that the Illu-minati of Bavaria, who advocated the destruction of nations and the destabilization of the state, inspired not only the anarchism of Bakunin but also Marxism itself. Puerile. The Illuminati were provocateurs; they were Baconians who had infiltrated the Teutonics. Marx and Engels had something quite different in mind when they began their Manifesto of 1848 with the eloquent sentence “A specter is haunting Europe.” Why this Gothic metaphor? The Communist Manifesto is alluding sarcastically to the secret hunt for the Plan, which has agitated the continent for centuries. The Manifesto suggests an alternative both to the Baconians and to the neo-Templars. Marx, a Jew, perhaps initially the spokesman for the rabbis of Gerona or Safed, tries to involve the entire Chosen People in the search. But then the project possesses him, and he identifies the Shekhinah—the exiled people in the Kingdom—with the proletariat, and thus, betraying the expectations of those who taught him, he turns all Messianic Judaism on its head. Templars of the world, unite! The map to the workers! Splendid! What better historical justification for Communism?
“Yes,” Belbo said, “but the Baconians also run into trouble along the way; don’t think they don’t. Some of them set out for the superhighway of science and end up in a blind alley. At the end of the dynasty, the Einsteins and die Fermis, after hunting for the secret in the heart of the microcosm, stumble upon the wrong invention: instead of telluric energy—clean, natural, sapiential—they discover atomic energy—technological, unnatural, polluted...”
“Space-time: the error of the West,” Diotallevi said.
“It’s the loss of the Center. Vaccine and penicillin as caricatures of the Elixir of Eternal Life,” I added.
“Or like that other Templar, Freud,” Belbo said, “who instead of probing the labyrinths of the physical underground, probed those of the psychic underground, as if everything about them hadn’t already been said, and better, by the alchemists.”
“But you’re the one,” Diotallevi objected, “who is trying to publish the books of Dr. Wagner. For me, psychoanalysis is for neurotics.”
“Yes, and the penis is nothing but a phallic symbol,” I concluded. “Come, gentlemen, let’s not digress. And let’s not waste time. We still don’t know where to put the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites.”
But before we were able to answer this question, we came upon another group, one that, not part of the thirty-six invisibles, had nevertheless entered the game at quite an early stage, somewhat upsetting its designs, causing confusion: the Jesuits.
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The Baron Hundt, Chevalier Ramsay....and numerous others who founded the grades in these rites, worked under instructions from the general of the Jesuits...Templarism is Jesuitism.
—Letter to Madame Blavatsky from Charles Southeran, 32 .’. A and P.R. 94 .’. Memphis, K.R. , K. Kadosch, M.M. 104, Eng., etc. Initiate of the English Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, January 11, 1877; from /sis Unveiled, 1877, vol. ii, p. 390
We had run into them too often, from the time of the first Ro-sicrucian manifestoes on. As early as 1620, in Germany, the Rosa Jesuitica appears, reminding us that the symbolism of the rose was Catholic and Marian before it was Rosicrucian, and the hint is made that the two orders are in league, that Rosicru-cianism is only a reformulation of the Jesuit mystique for consumption in Reformation Germany.
I remernbered what Salon had said about Father Kircher’s rancorous attack on the Rosicrucians—right in the middle of his discourse on the depths of the terraqueous globe.
“Father Kircher,” I said, “is a central character in this story. Why would this man, who so often showed a gift for observation and a taste for experiment, drown these few good ideas in thousands of pages overflowing with incredible hypotheses? He was in correspondence with the best English scientists. Each of his books deals with typical Rosicrucian subjects,