“Which would suggest that the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany and Bulgaria. When was that to take place?”
“In 1824,” Diotallevi said.
“Why’s that?”
Diotallevi quickly sketched the following diagram:
PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCE GERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM
1344 1464 1584 1704 1824 1944
“In 1344 the first grand masters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribed places. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grand masters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixth master of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In 1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master. The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with the Paulicians fails, it must fail in 1824.”
“Let’s assume it fails,” I said. “But I don’t understand why such shrewd men, when they had four-sixths of the message in their hands, weren’t able to reconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fell through, they didn’t get in touch with the next group.”
“Casaubon,” Belbo said, “do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If they wanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years, they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knows where to find the master of the following group, but not where to find the others, and none of the later groups know where to find the masters of the preceding groups.
If the Germans lose the Bulgarians, they’ll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and the Jerusalemites won’t know where anyone else is. As for reconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends on how the message has been divided. Certainly not in logical sequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message is incomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can’t make any use of it.”
“Just think,” Diotallevi said. “If the Bulgarian meeting didn’t take place, Europe today is the theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not finding one another, while each group knows that one small piece of information might be enough to make it master of the world. What’s the name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe a Plot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battle to reconstruct a lost message. We don’t see them, but, invisible, they act all around us.”
The same idea then occurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and we quickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discovered that at least two expressions in the Provins message—the reference to thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and the hundred-and-twenty-year deadline—also appeared in the debate on the Rosicrucians.
“After all, they were Germans,” I said. “I’ll read the Rosicrucian manifestoes.”
“But you said the manifestoes were fake,” Belbo said.
“So? What we’re putting together is fake.”
“True,” he said. “I was forgetting that.”
Elles deviennent le Diable: débiles, timorées, vaillantes à des heures exceptionnelles, sanglantes sans cesse, lacrymantes, caressantes, avec des bras qui ignorent les lois … Fi! Fi! Elles ne valent rien, elles sont faites d’un côté, d’un os courbe, d’une dissimulation rentrée…. Elles baisent le serpent….
—Jules Bois, Le satanisme et la magie, Paris, Chailley, 1895, p. 12
He was forgetting that, yes. The following file, brief and dazed, surely belongs to this period.
FILENAME: Ennoia
You arrived at the house suddenly with your grass. I didn’t want any, I won’t allow any vegetable substance to interfere with the functioning of my brain (I’m lying, I smoke tobacco, drink distillations of grain). The few times, in the early sixties, when somebody forced me to share in the circulation of a joint, with that cheap slimy paper impregnated with saliva, and the last drag using a pin, I wanted to laugh.
But yesterday it was you offering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way of offering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the way nobody’s danced for years, and—the shame of it—while Mahler’s Fourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creature were yeasting, with the sweet and wrinkled face of an old nanny goat, a serpent rising from the depths of my loins, and I worshiped you as a very old and universal aunt. Probably I went on holding my body close to yours, but I felt also that you were in flight, ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked doors, moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly, Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.
Was it not you I sought all along? I am here, always waiting for you. Did I lose you, each time, because I didn’t recognize you? Did I lose you, each time, because I did recognize you but was afraid? Lose you because each time, recognizing you, I knew I had to lose you?
But where did you end up last night? I woke this morning with a headache.
Let us remember well, however, the secret references to a period of 120 years that brother A…, the successor of D and last of the second line of succession—who lived among many of us—addressed to us, we of the third line of succession….
—Fama Fraternitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1614
First thing, I read through the two manifestoes of the Rosicrucians, the Fama and the Confessio. I also took a look at the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz by Johann Valentin Andreae, because Andreae was the presumed author of the manifestoes.
The two manifestoes appeared in Germany between 1614 and 1615, thus about thirty years after the 1584 meeting between the French and English Templars and almost a century before the French were to meet with the Germans.
I read, not to believe what the manifestoes said, but to look beyond them, as if the words meant something else. To help them mean something else, I knew I should skip some passages and attach more importance to some statements than to others. But this was exactly what the Diabolicals and their masters were teaching us. If you move in the refined time of revelation, do not follow the fussy, philistine chains of logic and their monotonous sequentiality.
Taken literally, these two texts were a pile of absurdities, riddles, contradictions. Therefore they could not be saying what they seemed to be saying, and were neither a call to profound spiritual reformation nor the story of poor Christian Rosencreutz. They were a coded message to be read by superimposing them on a grid, a grid that left certain spaces free while covering others. Like the coded message of Provins, where only the initial letters counted. Having no grid, I had to assume the existence of one. I had to read with mistrust.
The manifestoes spoke of the Plan of Provins—there could be no doubt about that. In the grave of C. R. (allegory of the Grange-aux-Dimîs, the night of June 23, 1344) a treasure had been placed for posterity to discover, a treasure “hidden … for one hundred and twenty years.” It was not money; that much was clear. Not only was there a polemic against the unrestrained greed of the alchemists, but the text said openly that what had been promised was a great historical change.
And if the reader failed to understand that, the second manifesto said that there could be no ignoring an offer that concerned the miranda sextae aetatis (the wonders of the sixth and final appointment!), and it repeated: “If only it had pleased God to bring down to us the light of his sixth Candelabrum … if only we could read everything in a single book and, reading it, understand and remember … How pleasant it would be if through song (the message read aloud!) we could transform rocks (lapis exillis!) into pearls and precious stones….” And there was further talk of arcane secrets, and of a government that was to be established in Europe, and of a “great work” to be achieved….
It was said that C. R. had gone to Spain (or Portugal?) and had shown the learned there “whence to draw the true indicia of future centuries,” but in vain. Why in vain? Was it because a group of German Templars at the beginning of the seventeenth century made public a very closely guarded secret, forced to come out into the open on account of a halt in the process of the transmission of the message?
The manifestoes undeniably tried to reconstruct the phases of the Plan as Diotallevi had summarized them. The first brother whose death was mentioned was Brother I. O., who had “come to the end” in England. So someone had arrived triumphantly at the first appointment. And a second line of succession was mentioned, and a third. Thus far all was apparently in order: the second line, the English one, met the third line, the French one, in 1584. Those writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century spoke only of what had happened to the first three groups. In the Chemical Wedding, written by Andreae in his youth, hence before the manifestoes (even if they appeared as early as 1614), three majestic temples were mentioned, the three places that must already have been known.
Yet, reading, I realized that while the two manifestoes did indeed speak later in the same terms as the Chemical Wedding, it was as if something upsetting had happened meanwhile.
For example, why such insistence on the fact that the time had come, the moment had come, though the enemy had employed all his tricks to keep the occasion from
