“Did Bacon really talk about them?” Belbo asked.
“Strictly speaking, no, but a certain John Heydon rewrote the New Atlantis under the title The Holy Land, and he put the Rosicrucians in it. But for us that makes no difference. Bacon didn’t mention them by name for obvious reasons of discretion, but it’s as if he did.”
“And a pox on doubters.”
“Right. It’s because of Bacon that attempts are made to strengthen relations between the English and German circles. In 1613 Elizabeth, daughter of James I, now reigning, marries Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. After the death of Rudolf II, Prague is no longer the ideal location; Heidelberg is. The wedding of the elector and the princess is a triumph of Templar allegories. In the course of the London festivities, Bacon himself is the impresario, and an allegory of mystical knighthood is performed, with an appearance of the knights on the top of a hill. It is obvious that Bacon is now Dee’s successor, grand master of the English Templar group….”
“And since he is clearly the author of the plays of Shakespeare, we should also reread the complete works of the Bard, which certainly talk about nothing else but the Plan,” Belbo said. “Saint John’s Eve, a midsummer night’s dream.”
“June 23 is not midsummer.”
“Poetic license. I wonder why everybody overlooked these clues, these clear indications. It’s all so unbearably obvious.”
“We’ve been led astray by rationalist thought,” Diotallevi said. “I keep telling you.”
“Let Casaubon go on; it seems to me he’s done an excellent job.”
“Not much more to say. After the London festivities, the festivities begin in Heidelberg, where Salomon de Caus has built for the elector the hanging gardens of which we saw a dim reflection that night in Piedmont, as you’ll recall. And in the course of these festivities, an allegorical float appears, celebrating the bridegroom as Jason, and from the two masts of the ship re-created on the float hang the symbols of the Golden Fleece and the Garter. I hope you haven’t forgotten that the Golden Fleece and the Garter are also found on the columns of Tomar…. Everything fits. In the space of a year, the Rosicrucian manifestoes come out: the appeal that the English Templars, with the help of their German friends, are making to all Europe, to reunite the lines of the interrupted Plan.”
“But what exactly are they after?”
Nos inuisibles pretendus sont (à ce que l’on dit) au nombre de 36, separez en six bandes.
—Effroyables pactions faictes entre le diable & les pretendus Inuisibles, Paris, 1623, p. 6
“Maybe the manifestoes have a double purpose: to send an appeal to the French, and at the same time to collect the scattered pieces of the German group in the aftermath of the Lutheran Reformation. Germany, in fact, is where the biggest mess occurs. From the appearance of the manifestoes until about 1621, the Rosicrucians receive too many replies….”
I mentioned a few of the countless pamphlets that had appeared on the subject, the ones that had entertained me that night in Salvador with Amparo. “Possibly among all these there is one person who knows something, but he is lost in a sea of fanatics, enthusiasts, who take the manifestoes literally, perhaps also provocateurs, who want to block the operation, and impostors…. The English try to take part in the debate, to channel it. It’s no accident that Robert Fludd, another English Templar, in the space of a single year writes three works that point to the correct interpretation of the manifestoes….
But the response is by now out of control, the Thirty Years’ War has begun, the Elector Palatine has been defeated by the Spanish, the Palatinate and Heidelberg are sacked, Bohemia is in flames…. The English decide to return to France and try there. This is why in 1623 the Rosicrucians appear in Paris, giving the French more or less the same invitation they gave the Germans. And what do you read in one of the libels against the Rosicrucians in Paris, written by someone who distrusts them or wants to confuse things? That they are worshipers of the Devil, obviously, but since even in slander you can’t entirely erase the truth, it is hinted that they hold their meetings in the Marais.”
“So?”
“Don’t you know Paris? The Marais is the quarter of the Temple and, it so happens, the Jewish ghetto! What’s more, the libel says that the Rosicrucians are in contact with a sect of Iberian cabalists, the Alumbrados! But maybe the pamphlets against the Rosicrucians, under the guise of attacking the thirty-six invisibles, are actually trying to foster their identification…. Gabriel Naudé, Richelieu’s librarian, writes some Instructions à la France sur la vérité de l’histoire des Frères de la Rose-Croix.
What do these instructions say? Is Naudé a spokesman for the Templars of the third group, or is he an adventurer barging into a game that isn’t his? On the one hand, he dismisses the Rosicrucians as lunatic diabolists; on the other, he insinuates that there are still three Rosicrucian colleges in existence. And this would be true: after the third group, there are still three more. Naudé gives some almost fairy-tale hints (one college is in India, on the floating islands), but he also says that one of them is in the underground of Paris.”
“And this explains the Thirty Years’ War?” Belbo asked.
“Beyond any doubt,” I said. “Richelieu receives privileged information from Naudé; he wants to have a finger in this pie, but he gets it all wrong, tries armed intervention, and makes matters even worse. There are two other events that shouldn’t be overlooked. In 1619 a chapter of the Knights of Christ meets in Tomar, after forty-six years of silence. It had met in 1573, only eleven years before 1584, probably to prepare, along with the English, the Paris journey, but after the business of the Rosicrucian manifestoes it meets again, to decide what line to take, whether to join the English operation or try a different path.”
“Yes,” Belbo said, “these are now people lost in a maze: some choose one path, some another; some shout for help, and there’s no telling if the replies they hear are other voices or the echo of their own…. They all are groping. And what are the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites doing in the meantime?”
“If we only knew,” Diotallevi said. “But consider, too, that this is the period when Lurianic cabala spreads and the talk about the Breaking of the Vessels begins…. And the idea that the Torah is an incomplete message. There is a Polish Hasidic document that says: If another event takes place, other combinations of letters will be born. But remember this: the cabalists aren’t happy that the Germans chose to jump the gun. The proper succession and order of the Torah have remained hidden, and they are known only by the Holy One, praised be He. But you make me talk nonsense. If cabala becomes involved in the Plan…”
“If the Plan exists, it must involve everything. Either it explains all or it explains nothing,” Belbo said. “But Casaubon mentioned a clue.”
“Yes. Actually, it’s a series of clues. Even before the 1584 meeting fails, John Dee has begun devoting himself to the study of maps and the promotion of naval expeditions. And who is his associate? Pedro Nunes, the royal cosmographer of Portugal….
Dee has a hand in the voyages to discover the Northwest Passage to Cathay; he invests money in the expedition of a certain Frobisher, who ventures toward the Pole and returns with an Eskimo, whom everybody takes for a Mongol. Dee fires up Francis Drake and encourages him to make his voyage around the world. However, he wants the explorers to sail east, because the East is the source of all occult knowledge, and at the departure of one expedition—I forget which—he summons the angels.”
“And what does this mean?”
“Dee, I think, isn’t really interested so much in the actual discovery of places, as in their cartographic depiction, and for this reason he consults Mercator and Ortelius, the great cartographers. It’s as if the fragments of the message in his possession have convinced him that the final whole will be a map, and he is attempting to discover it on his own. Indeed, I’ll say more, like Signor Garamond.
Is it really likely that a scholar of his standing would have missed the discrepancy between the calendars? Perhaps Dee wants to reconstruct the message himself, without the other groups. Perhaps he thinks the message can be reconstructed by magic or scientific means, instead of waiting for the Plan to be achieved. Impatience, greed. The bourgeois conqueror is born, and the principle of solidarity that sustained the spiritual knighthood is breaking down. If this was Dee’s idea, you can imagine what Bacon thought. From Dee on, the English try to discover the message by using all the secrets of the new learning.”
“And the Germans?”
“The Germans … We’d better have them stick to the path of Tradition. That way we can explain at least two centuries of their history of philosophy. Anglo-Saxon empiricism versus romantic idealism…”
“Chapter by chapter, we are reconstructing the history of the world,” Diotallevi said. “We are rewriting the Book. I like it, I really like it.”
Another curious case of cryptography was presented to the public in 1917 by one of the best Bacon scholars, Dr. Alfred von Weber Ebenhoff of Vienna. Employing the same systems previously applied to the works of Shakespeare, he began to examine the works of
