answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which is about people who start believing in occult stuff. … But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy, and other occult practices explored in the novel. … No. In Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.

Eco was indebted to Danilo Kiš’s story “The Book of Kings and Fools” in The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983) for the portrayal of Sergei Nilus. The Boston Globe claimed that “one can trace a lineage from Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum”. The Illuminatus! Trilogy was written 13 years before Foucault’s Pendulum. George Johnson wrote on the similarity of the two books that “both works were written tongue in cheek, with a high sense of irony.” Both books are divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth.

Foucault’s Pendulum also bears a number of similarities to Eco’s own experiences and writing. The character of Belbo was brought up in the region of Piedmont in Northern Italy. Eco refers to his own visit to a Candomblé ceremony in Brazil in an article compiled in Faith in Fakes, reminiscent of the episode in the novel. He also describes French ethnologist Roger Bastide who bears a resemblance to the character of Agliè. Eco’s novel was also a direct inspiration on Charles Cecil during the development of Revolution Software’s highly successful point and click adventure game Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, in which an American tourist and a French journalist must thwart a conspiracy by a shadowy cabal who model themselves on the Knights Templar.

Stanley Kubrick sought the rights to adapt Foucault’s Pendulum into a film, however Eco declined due to his dissatisfaction with the 1986 film adaptation of his earlier novel The Name of the Rose. Additionally, Eco sought the role of screenwriter but Kubrick was unwilling to cooperate. Following Kubrick’s death, Eco stated that he regretted his initial decision.