Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [96]
“It did happen that way. You should read some Feuerbach, instead of those junk books of yours.”
“Amparo, the sun’s coming up.”
“We must be crazy.”
“Rosy-fingered dawn gently caresses the waves...”
“Yes, go on. It’s Yemanja. Listen! She’s coming.”
“Show me your ludibria...”
“Oh, the Tintinnabulum!”
“You are my Atalanta Fugiens...”
“Oh, my Turris Babel...”
“I want the Arcana Arcanissima, the Golden Fleece, pale et rose comme un coquillage marin...”
“Sssh...Silentium post clamores,” she said.
31
It is probable that the majority of the supposed Rosy Crosses, generally so designated, were in reality only Rosicrucians...Indeed, it is certain that they were in no way members, for the simple fact that they were members of such associations. This may seem paradoxical at first, and contradictory, but is nevertheless easily comprehensible...
—Ren6 Guenon, Aperfu sur I’initiation, Paris, Editions Traditi onelles, 1981, XXXVIII, p. 241
We returned to Rio, and I went back to work. One day I read in an illustrated magazine that there was an Order of the Ancient and Accepted Rosy Cross in the city. I suggested to Amparo that we go and take a look, and reluctantly she came along.
The office was in a side street; its plate-glass window contained plaster statuettes of Cheops, Nefertiti, the Sphinx.
There was a plenary session scheduled for that very afternoon: “The Rosy Cross and the Umbanda.” The speaker was one Professor Bramanti, Referendary of the Order in Europe, Secret Knight of the Grand Priory in Partibus of Rhodes, Malta, and Thessalonica.
We decided to go in. The room, fairly shabby, was decorated with Tantric miniatures depicting die serpent Kundalini, the one the Templars wanted to reawaken with the kiss on the behind. All things considered, I thought, it had hardly been worth crossing the Atlantic to discover a new world: I could have found the same things at the Picatrix office.
Professor Bramanti sat behind a table covered with a red cloth, facing a rather sparse and sleepy audience. He was a corpulent gentleman who might have been described as a tapir if it hadn’t been for his bulk. He was already talking when we came in. His style was pompous and oratorical. He couldn’t have started long before, however, because he was still discussing the Rosicru-cians during the eighteenth dynasty, under the reign of Ah-mose I.
Four Veiled Masters, he said, kept watch over the race that twenty-five thousand years before the foundation of Thebes had originated the civilization of the Sahara. The pharaoh Ahmose, influenced by them, established the Great White Fraternity, guardian of the antediluvian wisdom the Egyptians still retained. Bramanti claimed to have documents (naturally, inaccessible to the profane) that dated back to the sages of the Temple of Karnak and their secret archives. The symbol of the rose and the cross had been conceived by the pharaoh Akhenaton. Someone has the papyrus, Bramanti said, but don’t ask me who.
The Great White Fraternity was ultimately responsible for the education of: Hermes Trismegistus (who influenced die Italian Renaissance just as much as he later influenced Princeton gno-sis), Homer, the Druids of Gaul, Solomon, Solon, Pythagoras, Plotinus, the Essenes, the Therapeutae, Joseph of Arimathea (who took the Grail to Europe), Alcuin, King Dagobert, Saint Thomas, Bacon, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Jakob Bohme, Debussy, Einstein. (Amparo whispered that he seemed to be missing only Nero, Cambronne, Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and Buster Kea-ton.)
As for the influence of the original Rosy^ Cross on Christianity, Bramanti pointed out, for those who hadn’t got their bearings, that it was no accident that Jesus had died on a cross.
The sages of the Great White Fraternity were also the founders of the first Masonic lodge, back in the days of King Solomon. It was clear, from his works, that Dante had been a Rosicrucian