Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [226]
“Naturally,” Belbo said. “It’s clear now that the Jerusalemite group had broken up into three branches. The first branch, through the Spanish and Provencal cabalists, went on to inspire the neo-Templar camp; the second was taken over by the Baconian wing, and they all became scientists and bankers. They’re the ones the Jesuits oppose so fiercely. But there is a third branch, and it established itself in Russia. The Russian Jews are generally small tradesmen and moneylenders, and for that reason are hated by the impoverished peasants; but since Jewish culture is a culture of the Book, and all Jews know how to read and write, they eventually swell the ranks of the liberal and revolutionary intelligentsia. The Paulicians, in contrast, are mystics, reactionaries, hand in glove with the landowners, and they have also infiltrated the court. Obviously, between them and the Jerusa-lemites there can be no traffic. So they are bent on discrediting the Jews, and through the Jews—this they learned from the Jesuits—they cause trouble for their adversaries abroad, both the neo-Templars and the Baconians.”
92
There can no longer be any doubt. With all the power and the terror of Satan, the reign of the triumphant King of Israel is approaching our unregenerate world; the King born from the blood of Zion, the Antichrist, approaches the throne of universal power.
—Sergei Nilus, Epilogue to the Protocols
The idea was acceptable. We had only to consider who had introduced the Protocols in Russia.
One of the most influential Martinists at the end of the century, Papus, dazzled Nicholas II during his visit to Paris, then went to Moscow, taking with him one Philippe Nizier Anselme Vachot. Possessed by the Devil at the age of six, healer at thirteen, magnetizer in Lyon, Philippe fascinated both Nicholas II and his hysterical wife. He was invited to court, named physician of the military academy of St. Petersburg, made a general and a councilor of state.
His enemies decided to diminish his influence by setting against him an equally charismatic figure. And Nilus was found.
Nilus was an itinerant monk who, in priestly habit, wandered in the forests (what else?) displaying a prophet’s great beard, two wives, a little daughter, an assistant (or lover, perhaps), all hanging on his every word. Half guru, the kind that runs off with the collection plate, and half hermit, the kind that yells that the end is near, he was in fact obsessed by the Antichrist.
The plan of Nilus’s supporters was to have him ordained, and then, after he married (what was another wife, more or less?) Elena Alexandrovna Ozerova, the tsarina’s maid of honor, to have him become the confessor of the sovereigns.
“I’m anything but a bloodthirsty man,” Belbo said, “but I begin to feel that the massacre of Tsarskoye Selo was perhaps a justifiable extermination of vermin.”
Anyway, Philippe’s supporters accused Nilus of leading a lewd life, and God knows they were right. Nilus had to leave the court, but at this point someone came to his aid, handing him the text of the Protocols. Since everybody got the Martinists (who derived from Saint Martin) mixed up with the Martinezists (followers of Martfnez Pasqualis, whom Aglie so dislikes), and since Pasqualis, according to a widespread rumor, was Jewish, by discrediting the Jews the Protocols also discredited the Martinists, and with the discrediting of the Martinists, Philippe was booted out.
Actually, a first, incomplete, version of the Protocols had already appeared in 1903, in Znamia, a St. Petersburg paper edited by a rabid anti-Semite named Kruscevan. In 1905, with the approval of the government censors, a complete text anonymously appeared, under the tide The Source of Our Evils, edited by one Boutmi, who with Kruscevan had founded the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black Hundreds, which enlisted common criminals to carry out pogroms and extremist right-wing acts