“Just think,” I said, “everything was already written, an open book, in the measurements of the Temple of Solomon, and the keepers of the secret were the Rosicrucians, who formed the Great White Fraternity—the Essenes, in other words, who, as is well known, let Jesus in on their secrets. And there you have the real reason why Jesus was crucified….”
“Of course, the Passion of Christ is an allegory, prefiguring the trial of the Templars.”
“Right. And Joseph of Arimathea takes, or takes back, the secret of Jesus to the land of the Celts. But obviously the secret is still incomplete; the Christian Druids know only a fragment of it, and that is the esoteric meaning of the Grail: there is something missing, but we don’t know what. The secret—what the Temple already said in full—is suspected only by a small group of rabbis who remained in Palestine. They entrust it to the occult Moslem sects, to the Sufis, the Ismailis, the Motakallimûn. And from them the Templars learn it.”
“At last, the Templars! I was beginning to worry,” Belbo said.
We were shaping the Plan, which, like soft clay, obeyed our thumbs, our narrative desires. The Templars had discovered the secret during those sleepless nights, embracing their saddle mates in the desert, where the implacable simoom was blowing. They had wrested it, bit by bit, from those who knew the powers of cosmic focus in the Black Stone of Mecca, the heritage of the Babylonian magi—for it was clear now that the Tower of Babel had been simply an attempt, however hasty and deservedly a failure because of the pride of its architects, to build the most powerful menhir of all.
But the Babylonians got their calculations wrong. As Father Kircher has demonstrated, had the tower reached its peak, its excessive weight would have made the earth’s axis rotate ninety degrees and maybe more, and our poor globe, instead of having an ithyphallic crown pointing upward, would have found itself with a sterile appendix, a limp mentula, a monkey tail flopping downward, a Shekhinah lost in the dizzying abyss of an antarctic Malkhut, a flaccid hieroglyph for penguins.
“So, in a word, what’s the secret discovered by the Templars?”
“Don’t rush me. We’re getting there. It took seven days to make the world. And now we’ll give it a try.”
The earth is a magnetic body; in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago.
—H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, New York, Boulton, 1877, I, p. xxiii
We gave it a try, ancl we succeeded.
The earth is a great magnet, and the force and direction of its currents are influenced by the celestial spheres, the cycle of the seasons, the precession of the equinoxes, the cosmic cycles. Thus the pattern of the currents changes. But it must change like hair, which, though it grows everywhere on the top and sides of the skull, nevertheless spirals out from a point toward the back, where it rebels most against the comb.
When that point has been identified, when the most powerful station has been established there, it will be possible to control, direct, command all the telluric currents of the planet. The Templars realized that the secret lay not only in possessing the global map of the currents, but also in knowing the critical point, the Omphalos, the Umbilicus Telluris, the Navel of the World, the Source of Command.
All alchemistic talk—the chthonic descent of the Black Work, the electric charge of the White—is only a metaphor, a metaphor clear to the initiated, for this age-old auscultation whose final result will be the Red: global knowledge, brilliant dominion over the planetary system of currents. The secret, the real secret, of alchemy and Templars is the search for the Wellspring of that internal rhythm, as sweet, awesome, and regular as the throbbing of the serpent Kundalini, still unknown in many of its aspects, yet surely as precise as a clock, for it is the rhythm of the one true Stone that fell in exile from heaven, the Great Mother Earth.
This was what Philip the Fair wanted to know. Hence the inquisitors’ sly insistence on the mysterious kiss in posteriori parte spine dorsi. They wanted the secret of Kundalini; who cares about sodomy.
“It’s perfect,” Diotallevi said. “But then, when you know how to direct the telluric currents, what do you do with them? Make beer?”
“Come on,” I said. “Haven’t you grasped the significance of this discovery? In the Telluric Navel you place the most powerful valve, which enables you to foresee rain and drought, to release hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, to split continents, sink islands (no doubt Atlantis disappeared in some such reckless experiment), raise mountain chains …
You realize the atomic bomb is nothing in comparison? Besides which, it also hurts the one who drops it. From your control tower you telephone, for example, the president of the United States, and you say to him: By tomorrow morning I want a dodecadillion dollars—or the independence of Latin America, or the state of Hawaii, or the destruction of your stockpile of nuclear weapons—or else the San Andreas Fault will crack definitively and Las Vegas will become a floating casino….”
“But Las Vegas is in Nevada.”
“Doesn’t matter. When you control the telluric currents, you can snip off Nevada, too, and Colorado. Then you telephone the Supreme Soviet and you say: Comrades, by Monday I want all the caviar of the Volga, and I want Siberia as my frozen-food locker; otherwise I’ll suck the Urals under, I’ll make the Caspian overflow, I’ll cut loose Lithuania and Estonia and sink them in the Philippine Trench.”
“Yes,” Diotallevi said. “The power would be immense. The earth could be rewritten like the Torah. Japan lands in the gulf of Panama.”
“Panic on Wall Street.”
“Forget about Star Wars. Forget about transforming base metal into gold. You aim the right current, stir up the bowels of the earth, and make them do in ten seconds what it used to take them billions of years to do, and the whole Ruhr becomes a diamond mine. Eliphas Levi said the knowledge of the universe’s tides and currents holds the secret of human omnipotence.”
“That must be so,” Belbo said. “It’s like transforming the whole world into an orgone box. It’s obvious. Reich was definitely a Templar.”
“Everyone was, except us. Thank God we’ve caught on. Now we’re a step ahead of them.”
But what stopped the Templars, once they knew the secret? The problem was how to exploit it. Between knowing and know-how there was a gap. So, instructed by the diabolical Saint Bernard, the Templars replaced the menhirs, poor Celtic valves, with Gothic cathedrals, far more sensitive and powerful, their subterranean crypts containing black virgins, in direct contact with the radioactive strata; and they covered Europe with a network of receiver-transmitter stations communicating to one another the power and the direction, the flow and the tension, of the telluric currents.
“I say they located the silver mines in the New World, caused eruptions of silver there, and then, controlling the Gulf Stream, shifted that precious metal to the Portuguese coast. Tomar was the distribution center; the Foret d’Orient, the chief storehouse. This was the origin of their wealth. But this was peanuts. They realized that to exploit their secret fully they would have to wait for a technological advance that would take at least six hundred years.”
Thus the Templars organized the Plan in such a way that only their successors, at the moment when they would be able to make proper use of what they knew, would learn the location of the Umbilicus Telluris. But how did the Templars distribute the pieces of the revelation to the thirty-six scattered throughout the world? How could a straightforward message have that many parts? And why would they need such a complicated message just to say that the Umbilicus was, for example, in Baden-Baden, or Tralee, or Chattanooga?
A map? But a map would be marked with an X at the point of the Umbilicus. Whoever held the piece with the X would know everything and not need the other pieces. No; it had to be more involved. We racked our brains for several days, until Belbo decided to resort to Abulafia. And the reply was:
Guillaume Postel dies in 1581.
Bacon is Viscount St. Albans.
In the Conservatoire is Foucault’s Pendulum.
The time had come to find a function for the Pendulum.
I was able, in few days, to suggest a rather elegant solution. A Diabolical had submitted to us a text on the hermetic secret of cathedrals. According to this author, the builders of Chartres one day left a plumb line hanging from the keystone of a vault, and from that had easily deduced the rotation of the earth. Hence the motive for the trial of Galileo, Diotallevi remarked: the Church had caught a whiff of Templar about him.
No, Belbo said; the cardinals who condemned Galileo were Templar adepts infiltrating Rome. They wanted to shut up that damned Tuscan quickly, that traitor Templar who in his vanity was about to spill the beans four hundred years before the date of the Plan’s fulfillment.
This explained why beneath the Pendulum those master masons had drawn a labyrinth, a stylized image of the system of subterranean currents. We sought an illustration of the labyrinth of Chartres: a solar clock, a compass card, a vein system, a sleepy sinusoidal trail of the Serpent. A global chart of the telluric tides.
“All right, let’s assume
