We really should have wondered why Agliè spent hours and hours on the Manutius address file. Selecting the SFAs to invite to join the list of authors for Isis Unveiled should not have taken that much time. Yet he went on writing, contacting, making appointments.
But we actually fostered his autonomy. The situation suited Belbo. More Agliè in Via Marchese Gualdi meant less Agliè in Via Sincero Renato. Thus, when Lorenza Pellegrini made one of her sudden appearances, and Belbo, with unconcealed excitement, became pathetically radiant, there was less likelihood that “Simon” would barge in ruinously.
I wasn’t displeased, either, since by now I had lost interest in Isis Unveiled and was more and more involved in my history of magic. Feeling I had learned from the Diabolicals everything there was to learn, I let Agliè handle the contacts (and contracts) with the new authors.
Nor did Diotallevi object. In general, the world seemed to matter less and less to him. Now that I think back, I realize that he continued losing weight in a troubling way. At times I would see him in his office bent over a manuscript, his eyes vacant, his pen about to drop from his hand. He wasn’t asleep; he was exhausted.
There was another reason we accepted the increasing rarity of Agliè’s appearances, and their brevity—for he would simply hand back to us the manuscripts he had rejected, then vanish into the corridor. The fact was, we didn’t want him to hear our discussions. If anyone had asked us why, we would have said it was out of delicacy, or embarrassment, since we were parodying the metaphysics in which he somehow believed.
But it was really distrust on our part; we were slowly assuming the natural reserve of those who possess a secret, we were putting Agliè in the role of the profane masses as we took more and more seriously the thing we had invented. Perhaps, too, as Diotallevi said in a moment of good humor, now that we had a real Saint-Germain, we didn’t need an imitation.
Agliè didn’t seem to take offense at our reserve. He would greet us, then leave us, with a politeness that bordered on hauteur.
One Monday morning I arrived at work late, and Belbo eagerly asked me to come to his office, calling Diotallevi, too. “Big news,” he said. But before he could begin, Lorenza arrived. Belbo was torn between his joy at this visit and his impatience to tell what he had discovered. A moment later, there was a knock, and Agliè stuck his head in. “I don’t want to disturb you. Please don’t get up. I haven’t the authority to intrude on such a consistory. I only wanted to tell our dearest Lorenza that I’m in Signor Garamond’s office. And I hope I have at least the authority to summon her for a sherry at noon, in my office.”
In his office! This time Belbo lost self-control. To the extent, that is, that he could lose it. He waited for Agliè to leave, then muttered through clenched teeth: “Ma gavte la nata.”
Lorenza, still showing her pleasure at the invitation, asked Belbo what that meant.
“It’s Turin dialect. It means, literally, ‘Be so kind as to remove the cork.’ A pompous, self-important, overweening individual is thought to hold himself the way he does because of a cork stuck in his sphincter ani, which prevents his vaporific dignity from being dispersed. The removal of the cork causes the individual to deflate, a process usually accompanied by a shrill whistle and the reduction of the outer envelope to a poor fleshless phantom of its former self.”
“I didn’t know you could be so vulgar.”
“Now you know.”
Lorenza went out, pretending to be annoyed. I knew this distressed Belbo all the more: real anger would have reassured him, but a pretense of irritation only confirmed his fear that, from Lorenza, the display of any passion was always staged, theatrical.
He said then, with grim determination, “To business.” Meaning: Let’s proceed with the Plan, seriously.
“I don’t much want to,” Diotallevi said. “I don’t feel well. I have a pain here”—he touched his stomach—“I think it’s gastritis.”
“Ridiculous,” Belbo said to him. “I don’t have gastritis…. What could give you gastritis? Mineral water?”
“Could be,” Diotallevi said with a wan smile. “Last night I overdid it. I’m accustomed to still Fiuggi, and I drank some fizzy San Pellegrino.”
“You must be careful. Such excesses could kill you. But to business, gentlemen. I’ve been dying to tell you for two days now…. Finally, I know why the Thirty-six Invisibles were unable, for centuries, to work out the form of the map. John Dee got it wrong; the geography has to be done over. We live inside a hollow earth, enclosed by the terrestrial surface. Hitler realized this.”
Nazism was the moment when the spirit of magic seized the helm of material progress. Lenin said Communism was socialism plus electricity. In a sense, Hitlerism was Guenonism plus armored divisions.
—Pauwels and Bergier, Le matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, 2, vii
Now Belbo had managed to work Hitler into the Plan. “It’s all there, black on white. The founders of Nazism were involved in Teutonic neo-Templarism.”
“An airtight case.”
“I’m not inventing, Casaubon, for once I’m not inventing!”
“Take it easy. When did we ever invent anything? We’ve always started with objective data, with information in the public domain.”
“This time, too. In 1912 a Germanenorden group is formed, proposing the tenet of Aryan superiority. In 1918 a certain Baron von Sebottendorf founds a related group, the Thule Gesellschaft, a secret society, yet another variation on the Templar Strict Observance, but with strong racist, pan-German, neo-Aryan tendencies. And in ’33 Sebottendorf writes that he had sown what Hitler reaped. Furthermore, it is in Thule Gesellschaft circles that the hooked cross appears. And who was among the first to join the Thule? Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s evil genius! Then Rosenberg! Then Hitler himself!
And note that in his cell in Spandau even today, as you’ve surely read in the papers, Hess studies the esoteric sciences. Sebottendorf in ’24 writes a pamphlet on alchemy, and remarks that the first experiments in atomic fission demonstrate the truths of the Great Work. He also writes a novel on the Rosicrucians! Later he edits an astrological magazine, Astrologische Rundschau, and Trevor-Roper tells us that the Nazi chiefs, Hitler first among them, never made a move without having a horoscope cast. In 1943 a group of psychics is consulted to discover where Mussolini is being held prisoner. In other words, the whole Nazi leadership is connected with Teutonic neooccultism.”
Belbo seemed to have got over the incident with Lorenza, and I built a fire under him to get on with his theory. “We can look at Hitler’s power as a rabble-rouser also from this point of view,” I said. “Physically, he was a toad, he had a shrill voice. How could such a man whip crowds into a frenzy? He must have possessed psychic powers. Perhaps, instructed by some Druid from his hometown, he knew how to establish contact with the subterranean currents. Perhaps he was a living valve, a biological menhir transmitting the currents to the faithful in the Nuremberg stadium. For a while it worked for him; then his batteries ran down.”
To All the World: I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid, concentric spheres; one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees.
—J. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry, April 10, 1818; quoted in Sprague de Camp and Ley, Lands Beyond, New York, Rinehart, 1952, x
“Congratulations, Casaubon. In your innocence you hit upon the truth. Hitler’s one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.”
“I’m leaving. I’ve got gastritis,” Diotallevi said.
“Wait. We’re getting to the best part. The earth is hollow: we don’t live outside it, on the convex crust, but inside, on the concave surface. What we think is the sky is actually a gaseous mass, with points of brilliant light, which fills the interior of our globe. All astronomical measurements have to be reinterpreted.
The sky is not infinite: it’s circumscribed. The sun, if it really exists, is no bigger than it looks, a mere crumb having a diameter of thirty centimeters at the center of the earth. The Greeks had already suspected as much.”
“You made this up,” Diotallevi said wearily.
“I did not! Somebody had the idea at the beginning of the last century, an American, a man named Symmes. Then, at the end of the century, another American—name of Teed—revived the notion, supported by alchemistic experiments and a reading of Isaiah. After the First World War, the hollow-earth theory was perfected by a German—I forget his name—who founded the Hohlweltlehre movement.
Hitler and his cronies discovered that Hohlweltlehre corresponded exactly to their principles, and they even, according to one report, misaimed some of the V-is because they calculated their trajectories on the basis of a concave, not a convex, surface. Hitler at this point was convinced that the King of the World was himself and that the Nazi General Staff members were the Unknown Superiors.
Where does the King of the World live? Beneath; not above. “This hypothesis inspired Hitler to change the whole direction of German research toward the concept of the final map, the interpretation
