Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [99]
“You tell me.”
“The Great White Fraternity—whether you call them Rosicrucians or the spiritual knighthood of which the Templars are a temporary incarnation—is a cohort of a few, a very few, elect wise men who journey through human history in order to preserve a core of eternal knowledge. History does not happen randomly. It is the work of the Masters of the World, whom nothing escapes. Naturally, the Masters of the World protect themselves through secrecy. And that is why anyone who says he is a master, a Rosicrucian, a Templar is lying. They must be sought elsewhere.”
“Then the story goes on endlessly.”
“Exactly. And it demonstrates the shrewdness of the Masters.”
“But what do they want people to know?”
“Only that there’s a secret. Otherwise, if everything is as it appears to be, why go on living?”
“And what is the secret?”
“What the revealed religions have been unable to reveal. The secret lies beyond.”
33
The visions are white, blue, white, pale red. In the end they mingle and are all pale, the color of the flame of a white candle; you will see sparks, you will feel gooseflesh all over your body. This announces the beginning of the attraction exerted on the one who fulfills the mission.
—Papus, Marlines de Pasqually, Paris, Chamuel, 1895, p. 92
The promised evening arrived. Aglie picked us up just as he had in Salvador. The tenda where the session, or gira, was to take place was in a fairly central district, if you can speak of a center in a city whose tongues of land stretch through hills and lick the sea. Seen from above, illuminated in the evening, the city looks like a head with patches of alopecia areata.
“Remember, mis is an umbanda tonight, not a candomble. The participants will be possessed not by orixas, but by the eguns, spirits of the departed. And by Exu, the African Hermes you saw in Bahia, and his companion, Pompa Gira. Exu is a Yoruba divinity, a demon inclined to mischief and joking, but there was a trickster god in Amerind mythology, too.”
“And who are the departed?”
“Pretos velhos and caboclos. The pretos velhos are old African wise men who guided their people at the time of deportation, like Rei Congo and Pai Agostinho...They are the memory of a milder phase of slavery, when the blacks, no longer animals, became family friends, uncles, grandfathers. The caboclos, on the other hand, are Indian spirits, virgin forces representing the purity of original nature. In the umbanda the African orixas stay in the background, completely syncretized with Catholic saints, and these beings alone intervene. They are the ones who produce the trance. At a certain point in the dance, the medium, the cavalo, is penetrated by a higher being and loses all awareness of self. He continues to dance until the divine being has left him, and he emerges feeling better. Clean, purified.”
“Lucky mediums,” Amparo said.
“Lucky indeed,” Aglie said. “They attain contact with mother earth. These worshipers have been uprooted, flung into the horrible melting pot of the city, and, as Spengler said, at a time of crisis the mercantile West turns once more to the world of the earth.”
We arrived. The tenda looked like an ordinary building from the outside. Here, too, you entered through a little garden, more modest than the one in Bahia, and at the door of the barracao, a kind of storehouse, was a little statue of Exu, already surrounded by propitiatory offerings.
Amparo drew me aside as we went in. “IVe figured it out,” she said. “That tapir at the lecture talked about the Aryan age, remember? And this one talks about the decline of the West. Blut und Boden, blood and earth. It’s pure Nazism.”
“It’s not that simple, darling. This is a different continent.”
“Thanks for the news. The Great White Fraternity! You eat your God for dinner.”
“It’s the Catholics who do that. It’s not the same thing.”
“It is too. Weren’t you listening? Pythagoras, Dante, the Virgin Mary, and the Masons. Always out to screw us. Make um-banda, not love.”
“You’re the one who’s syncretized. Come on, let’s have a look. This,