Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [241]
“This hypothesis inspired Hitler to change the whole direction of German research toward the concept of the final map, the interpretation of the Pendulum! The six Templar groups had to be reassembled; everything had to be begun again from the beginning. Consider the logic of Hitler’s conquests...First, Danzig, to have under his control the classical places of the Teutonic group. Next he conquered Paris, to get his hands on the Pendulum and the Eiffel Tower, and he contacted the syn-archic groups and put them into the Vichy government. Then he made sure of the neutrality—in effect, the cooperation—of the Portuguese group. His fourth objective was, of course, England; but we know that wasn’t easy. Meanwhile, with the African campaigns, he tried to reach Palestine, but here again he failed. Then he aimed at the dominion of the Paulician territories, by invading the Balkans and Russia.
“When Hitler had four-sixths of the Plan in his hands, he sent Hess on a secret mission to England to propose an alliance. The Baconians, however, refused. He had another idea: those who were holding the most important part of the secret must be his eternal enemies the Jews. He didn’t look for them in Jerusalem, where few were left. The Jerusalemite group’s piece of the message wasn’t in Palestine anyway; it was in the possession of a group of the Diaspora. And so the Holocaust is explained.”
“How is that?”
“Just think for a moment. Suppose you wanted to commit genocide...”
“Excuse me,” Diotallevi said, “but this is going too far. My stomach hurts. I’m going home.”
“Wait, damn it. When the Templars were disemboweling the Saracens, you enjoyed yourself, because it was so long ago. Now you’re being delicate, like a petty intellectual. We’re remaking history; we can’t be squeamish.”
We let him continue, subdued by his vehemence.
“The striking thing about the genocide of the Jews is the lengthiness of the procedures. First they’re kept in camps and starved, then they’re stripped naked, then the showers, then the scrupulous piling up of the corpses, and the sorting and storing of clothes, the listing of personal effects...None of this makes sense if it was just a question of killing them. It makes sense if it was a question of looking for something, for a message that one of those millions of people—the Jerusalemite representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles—was hiding in the hem of a garment, or in his mouth, or had tattooed on his body...Only the Plan explains the inexplicable bureaucracy of this genocide! Hitler was searching the Jews for the clue that would allow him to determine, with the Pendulum, the exact point under the earth’s concave vault where the telluric currents converged.
“And now you see the beauty of the idea. The telluric currents become equated with the celestial currents. The hollow-earth theory gives new life to the age-old hermetic intuition, namely, that what lies beneath is equal to what lies above! The Mystic Pole coincides with the Heart of the Earth. The secret pattern of the stars is nothing other than the secret pattern of the subterranean passages of Agarttha. There is no longer any difference between heaven and hell, and the Grail, the lapis exillis, is the lapis ex coelis, the philosopher’s stone, the terminal, the limit, the chthonian uterus of the empyrean! And if Hitler can identify that point in the hollow center of the earth, which is also the exact center of the sky, he will be Master of the World, whose king he is by right of race. And that’s why, to the very end, in the depths of his bunker, he thought he could still control the Mystic Pole.”
“Stop,” Diotallevi said. “Enough