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Foucault’s Pendulum
I’d reject this one, even if he pays. Celtism and Aryanism, Kaly-yuga, the decline of the West, and SS spirituality. I may be paranoid, but he sounds like a Nazi to me.”
“For Garamond, that isn’t necessarily a drawback.”
“No, but there’s a limit to everything. Here’s a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.”
“Not the Seven Dwarfs, the Nibelungs.”

“The dwarfs it mentions are the Little People of Ireland. The bad guys are the fairies, but the Little People are good, just mischievous.”
“Put it aside. What about you, Casaubon? What have you found?”

“A text on Christopher Columbus: it analyzes his signature and finds in it a reference to the pyramids. Columbus’s real aim was to reconstruct the Temple of Jerusalem, since he was grand master of the Templars-in-exile. Being a Portuguese Jew and therefore an expert cabalist, he used talismanic spells to calm storms and overcome scurvy. I didn’t look at any texts on the cabala, because I assumed Diotallevi was checking them.”

“The Hebrew letters are all wrong, photocopied from dream books.”

“Remember, we’re choosing texts for Isis Unveiled. Let’s steer clear of philology. If the Diabolicals like to take their Hebrew letters from dream books, let them do it. The problem I have is all the submissions on the Masons. Signor Garamond told me to be very careful there; he doesn’t want to get mixed up in polemics among the various rites. But I wouldn’t neglect this manuscript about Masonic symbolism in the grotto of Lourdes.

Or this one about a mysterious gentleman, probably the Comte de Saint-Germain, an intimate friend of Franklin and Lafayette, who appeared at the moment of the creation of the flag of the United States. It explains the meaning of the stars very well, but becomes confused on the subject of the stripes.”
“The Comte de Saint-Germain!” I said. “Well, well!”

“You know him?”
“If I said yes, you wouldn’t believe me. Forget it. Now here, gentlemen, is a four-hundred-page monstrosity decrying the errors of modern science. The atom, a Jewish lie. The error of Einstein and the mystical secret of energy. The illusion of Galileo and the immaterial nature of the moon and the sun.”
“In that line,” Diotallevi said, “what I liked most is this review of Fortian sciences.”
“What are they?”

“Named after Charles Hoy Fort, who gathered an immense collection of inexplicable bits of news. A rain of frogs in Birmingham, footprints of a fabulous animal in Devon, mysterious steps and sucker marks on the ridges of some mountains, irregularities in the precession of the equinoxes, inscriptions on meteorites, black snow, rains of blood, winged creatures at an altitude of eight thousand meters above Palermo, luminous wheels in the sea, fossils of giants, a shower of dead leaves in France, precipitations of living matter in Sumatra, and, naturally, all the signs marked on Machu Picchu and other peaks in South America that bear witness to the landing of powerful spacecraft in prehistoric times. We are not alone in the universe.”

“Not bad,” Belbo said. “But what particularly intrigues me are these five hundred pages on the pyramids. Did you know that the pyramid of Cheops sits right on the thirtieth parallel, which is the one that crosses the greatest stretch of land above sea level? That the geometric ratios found in the pyramid of Cheops are the same ones found at Pedra Pintada in Amazonia? That Egypt possessed two plumed serpents, one on the throne of Tutankhamen and the other on the pyramid of Saqqara, and the latter serpent points to Quetzalcoatl?”
“What does Quetzalcoatl have to do with Amazonia, if he’s part of the Mexican pantheon?” I asked.

“Well, maybe I missed a connection. But for that matter, how do you explain the fact that the statues of Easter Island are megaliths exactly like the Celtic ones? Or that a Polynesian god called Ya is clearly the Yod of the Jews, as is the ancient Hungarian Io-v’, the great and good god? Or that an ancient Mexican manuscript shows the earth as a square surrounded by sea, and in its center is a pyramid that has on its base the inscription Aztlan, which is close to Atlas and Atlantis? Why are pyramids found on both sides of the Atlantic?”

“Because it’s easier to build pyramids than spheres. Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon.”
“I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment,” Diotallevi said.

“Let me continue. The cult of Ra doesn’t appear in Egyptian religion before the New Empire, and therefore it comes from the Celts. Remember Saint Nicholas and his sleigh? In prehistoric Egypt the ship of the Sun was a sleigh. Since there was no snow in Egypt, the sleigh’s origin must have been Nordic….”
I couldn’t let that pass: “Before the invention of the wheel, sleighs were used also on sand.”

“Don’t interrupt. The book says that first you identify the analogies and then you find the reasons. And it says that, in the end, the reasons are scientific. The Egyptians knew electricity. Without electricity they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did. A German engineer placed in charge of the sewers of Baghdad discovered electric batteries still operating that dated back to the Sassanids. In the excavations of Babylon, accumulators were found that had been made four thousand years ago. And, finally, the Ark of the Covenant (which contained the Tables of the Law, Aaron’s rod, and a pot of manna from the desert) was a kind of electric strongbox capable of producing discharges on the order of five hundred volts.”
“I saw that in a movie.”

“So what? Where do you think scriptwriters get their ideas? The ark was made of acacia wood sheathed in gold inside and out—the same principle as electric condensers, two conductors separated by an insulator. It was encircled by a garland, also of gold, and set in a dry region where the magnetic field reached five hundred to six hundred volts per vertical meter. It’s said that Porsena used electricity to free his realm from the presence of a frightful animal called Volt.”
“Which is why Alessandro Volta chose that exotic pseudonym. Before, his name was simply Szmrszlyn Khraznapahwshkij.”

“Be serious. Also, besides the manuscripts, I have letters that offer revelations on the connections between Joan of Arc and the Sibylline Books, between Lilith the Talmudic demon and the hermaphroditic Great Mother, between the genetic code and the Martian alphabet, between the secret intelligence of plants, cosmology, psychoanalysis, and Marx and Nietzsche in the perspective of a new angelology, between the Golden Number and the Grand Canyon, Kant and occultism, the Eleusian mysteries and jazz, Cagliostro and atomic energy, homosexuality and gnosis, the golem and the class struggle. In conclusion, a letter promising a work in eight volumes on the Grail and the Sacred Heart.”
“What’s its thesis? That the Grail is an allegory of the Sacred Heart or that the Sacred Heart is an allegory of the Grail?”

“He wants it both ways, I think. In short, gentlemen, I don’t know what course to follow. We should sound out Signor Garamond.”
So we sounded him out. He said that, as a matter of principle, nothing should be thrown out, and we should give everyone a hearing.
“But most of this stuff,” I argued, “repeats things you can find on any station newsstand. Even published authors copy from one another, and cite one another as authorities, and all base their proofs on a sentence of Iamblicus, so to speak.”

“Well,” Garamond said, “would you try to sell readers something they knew nothing about? The Isis Unveiled books must deal with the exact same subjects as all the others. They confirm one another; therefore they’re true. Never trust originality.”
“Very well,” Belbo said, “but we can’t tell what’s obvious and what isn’t. We need a consultant.”
“What sort of consultant?”

“I don’t know. He must be less credulous than a Diabolical, but he must know their world. And then tell us what direction we should take in Hermetics. A serious student of Renaissance Hermeticism…”
“And the first time you hand him the Grail and the Sacred Heart,” Diotallevi said, “he storms out, slamming the door.”
“Not necessarily.”

“I know someone who would be just right,” I said. “He’s certainly erudite; he takes these things fairly seriously, but with elegance, even irony, I’d say. I met him in Brazil, but he should be in Milan now. I must have his phone number somewhere.”

“Contact him,” Garamond said. “Tentatively. It depends on the cost. And try also to make use of him for the wonderful adventure of metals.”
Agliè seemed happy to hear from me again. He inquired after the charming Amparo, and when I hinted that was over, he apologized and made some tactful remarks about how a young person could always begin, with ease, a new chapter in his life. I mentioned an editorial project. He showed interest, said he would be glad to meet us, and set a time, at his house.

From the birth of Project Hermes until that day, I had enjoyed myself heedlessly at the expense of many people. Now, They were preparing to present the bill. I was as much of a bee as the ones we wanted to attract; and, like them, I was being quickly lured to a flower, though I didn’t yet know what that flower was.

During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you

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I’d reject this one, even if he pays. Celtism and Aryanism, Kaly-yuga, the decline of the West, and SS spirituality. I may be paranoid, but he sounds like a Nazi