Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [82]
Suddenly it all seemed to come together: Satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple of Jerusalem, African witchcraft for the sub-proletarians of the Brazilian Northeast, the message-of Provins with its hundred and twenty years, and the hundred and twenty years of the Rosicrucians.
I felt like a walking blender mixing strange concoctions of different liquors. Or maybe I had caused some kind of short circuit, tripping over a varicolored tangle of wires that had been entwining themselves for a long, long time. I bought the book on the Rosicrucians, thinking that if I spent a few hours in these bookstores, I would meet at least a dozen Colonel Ardentis and brainwashed psychics.
I went home and officially informed Amparo that the world was full of unnatural characters. She promised me solace, and we ended the day naturally.
That was late 1975. I decided to put resemblances aside and concentrate on my work. After all, I was supposed to be teaching Italian culture, not the Rosicrucians.
I devoted myself to Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to cabala and magic.
After two years spent with Neoplatonists who chanted formulas designed to convince nature to do things she had no intention of doing, I received news from Italy. It seems my old classmates—or some of them, at least—were now shooting people who didn’t agree with them, to convince the stubborn to do things they had no intention of doing.
I couldn’t understand it. Now part of the Third World, I made up my mind to visit Bahia. I set off with a history of Renaissance culture and the book on the Rosicrucians, which had remained on a shelf, its pages uncut.
26
All the traditions of the earth must be seen as deriving from a fundamental mother-tradition that, from the beginning, was entrusted to sinful man and to his first offspring.
—Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, De I’esprit des chases, Paris, Laran, 1800, II, “De l’esprit des traditions en general”
And I saw Salvador: Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the “black Rome,” with three hundred and sixty-five churches, which stand out against the line of hills or nestle along the bay, churches where the gods of the African pantheon are honored.
Amparo knew a primitive artist who painted big wooden panels crammed with Biblical and apocalyptic visions, dazzling as a medieval miniature, with Coptic and Byzantine elements. Naturally he was a Marxist; he talked about the coming revolution, but he spent his days dreaming in the sacristies of the sanctuary of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim: a triumph of horror vacui, scaly with ex-votos that hung from the ceiling and encrusted the walls, a mystical assemblage of silver hearts, wooden arms and legs, images of wondrous rescues from glittering storms, waterspouts, maelstroms. He took us to the sacristy of another church, which was full of great furnishings redolent of jacaranda. “Who is that a painting of?” Amparo asked the sacristan. “Saint George?”
The sacristan gave us a knowing look. “They call him Saint George,” he said, “and if you don’t call him that, the pastor gets angry. But he’s Oxossi.”
For two days the painter led us through naves and cloisters hidden behind decorated fagades like silver plates now blackened and worn. Wrinkled, limping famuli accompanied us. The sacristies were sick with gold and pewter, heavy chests, precious frames. Along the walls, in crystal cases, life-size images of saints towered, dripping blood, their open wounds spattered with ruby droplets; Christs writhed in pain, their legs red. In a glow of late-Baroque gold, I saw angels with Etruscan faces, Romanesque griffins, and Oriental sirens peeping out from the capitals.
I moved along ancient streets, enchanted by names that sounded like songs: Rua da Agonia, Avenida dos Amores, Tra-vessa de Chico Diabo. Our visit to