Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [224]
The Baconians had invented Masonry to be like Rick’s in Casablanca, Jesuit Neo-Templarism had parried that move, and now Luchet was hired to bump off all the groups that weren’t Baconian.
At this point, however, we were confronted with another problem, which was too much for poor Aglie to handle. Why had de Maistre, who was the Jesuits’ man, gone to Wilhelmsbad to sow dissension among the neo-Templars a good seven years before the Marquis de Luchet appeared on the scene?
“Neo-Templarism was all right in the first half of the eighteenth century,” Belbo said, “and it was all wrong at the end of the century; first because it had been taken over by revolutionaries, for whom anything served, the Goddess Reason, the Supreme Being, even Cagliostro, provided they could cut off the king’s head, and second because the German princes were now putting their thumbs in the pie, especially Frederick of Prussia, and his aims surely didn’t correspond to those of the Jesuits. When mystical neo-Templarism, whoever invented it, began producing things like The Magic Flute, Loyola’s men naturally decided to wipe it out. It’s like high finance: you buy a company, you sell off its assets, you declare bankruptcy, you close it down, and you reinvest its capital. The important thing is the overall strategy, not what happens to the janitor. Or it’s like a used car: when it stops running, you send it to the junkyard.”
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In the true Masonic code no other god will be found save Mani. He is the god of the cabalist Masons, of the ancient Rosicrucians, of the Martinis! Masons...All the outrages attributed to the Templars are precisely those attributed, before them, to the Manicheans.
—Abbe” Barruel, M&moires pour servir A I’histoire du jacobinisme, Hamburg, 1798, 2, xiii
The Jesuits’ strategy became clear to us when we discovered Barruel. Between 1797 and 1798, in response to the French Revolution, he writes his Memoires pour servir d I’histoire du ja-cobinisme, a real dime novel that begins, surprise surprise, with the Templars. After the burning of Molay, they transform themselves into a secret society to destroy monarchy and papacy and to create a world republic. In the eighteenth century they take over Freemasonry and make it their instrument. In 1763 they create a literary academy consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Con-dorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert, which meets in the house of Baron d’Holbach and in 1776, plot after plot, they bring about the birth of the Jacobins. But they are mere marionettes, their strings pulled by the real bosses, the Illuminati of Bavaria— regicides by vocation.
Junkyard? After having split Masonry in two with the help of Ramsay, the Jesuits were putting it together again in order to fight it head-on.
Barruel’s book had some influence^ in fact, in the French National Archives there were at least two reports ordered by Napoleon on the clandestine sects. These reports were drawn up by a certain Charles de Berkheim, who—in the best tradition of secret police—obtained his information from sources already published; he copied freely, first from the book by the Marquis de Luchet and then from Barruel’s.
Reading these horrifying descriptions of the Illuminati as well as the denunciation of a directorate of Unknown Superiors capable of ruling the world, Napoleon did not hesitate: he decided to join them. He had his brother Joseph named grand master of the Great Orient, and he himself, according to many sources, made contact with the Masons and became a very high official in their ranks. It is not known, however, in which rite. Perhaps, prudently, in all of them.
We had no idea what Napoleon knew, but we weren’t forgetting that he had spent time in Egypt, and God knows what sages he conversed with in the shadow of the pyramids (even a child could see that the famous forty centuries (here looking down on him were a clear reference