Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [223]
We quarreled at length over my proposal and finally decided, unanimously, that the original hypothesis was better: The Rosicrucians were the bait cast, for the French, by the Baconians and the Germans. But the Jesuits, as soon as the manifestoes appeared, caught on. And they immediately joined in the game, to muddy the waters. Obviously, the Jesuits’ aim was to prevent the English and German groups from meeting with the French; and to that end any trick would do, no matter how dirty.
Meanwhile, they recorded events, gathered information, and put it all—where? In Abulafia, Belbo joked. But Diotallevi, who had been gathering information himself, said it was no joke. Surely the Jesuits were constructing an immense, tremendously powerful computer that would draw a conclusion from this patiently accumulated, age-old brew of truth and falsehood.
“The Jesuits,” Diotallevi said, “understood what neither the poor old Templars of Provins nor the Baconian camp had yet realized, namely, that the reconstruction of the map could be accomplished by ars combinatoria; in other words, with a method that foreshadowed our modern electronic brains. The Jesuits were the first to invent Abulafia! Father Kircher reread all the treatises on the combinatorial art, from Lullus on, and you see what he published in his Ars Magna Sciendi...”
“It looks like a crochet pattern to me,” Belbo said.
“No, gentlemen, these arc all the possible combinations. Factor analysis, that of the Sefer Yesirah. Calculation of permutations, the very essence of the temurah!”
This was certainly so. It was one thing to conceive Fludd’s vague project of identifying the map by beginning with a polar projection; it was quite another to figure out how many trials would be required in order to arrive at the correct solution. And, again, it was one thing to create an abstract model of all the possible combinations, and another to invent a machine able to carry them out. So both Kircher and his disciple Schott built mechanical devices, mechanisms with perforated cards, computers ante litteram. Binary calculators. Cabala applied to modern technology.
IBM: lesus Babbage Mundi, lesum Binarium Magnificamur. AMDG: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam? Not on your life! Ars Magna, Digitale Gaudium! IHS: lesus Hardware & Software!
89
In the bosom of the deepest darkness a society has been formed, a society of new beings, who know one another though they have never seen one another, who understand one another without explanations, who serve one another without friendship...From the Jesuit rule this society adopts blind obedience; from the Masons it takes the trials and the ceremonies, and from the Templars the subterranean mysteries and the great audacity. Has the Comte de Saint-Germain simply imitated Guillaume Postel, who desperately wanted people to believe him older than he was?
—Marquis de Luchet, Essai sur la secte des illumines, Paris, 1789,v and xii
The Jesuits knew that if you want to confound your enemies, the best technique is to create clandestine sects, wait for dangerous enthusiasms to precipitate, then arrest them all. In other words, if you fear a plot, organize one yourself; that way, all those who join it come under your control.
I remembered the reservation Aglie had expressed about Ramsay, the first to posit a direct connection between the Masons and the Templars; Aglie said that Ramsay had ties with Catholic circles. In fact, Voltaire had already denounced Ramsay as a tool of the Jesuits. Faced with the birth of English Freemasonry, the Jesuits in France responded with Scottish neo-Templarism.
Responding to this French plot, a certain Marquis de Luchet produced, in 1789, anonymously, Essai sur la secte des illumines, in which he lashed out against the Illuminati of every stripe, Bavarian or otherwise, priest-baiting anarchists and mystical neo-Templars alike, and he threw on the heap (incredible, how all the pieces of our mosaic were fitting together!) even-the