“The place is beyond discussion: Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the Refuge.”
“Yes,” Belbo replied, “but let’s suppose that at the stroke of midnight the Pendulum swings from Copenhagen to Capetown. Where is the Umbilicus? In Denmark or in South Africa?”
“A good observation,” I said. “But our Diabolical tells us also that in Chartres there is a fissure in a stained-glass window of the choir, and at a given hour of the day a sunbeam enters through the crack and always hits the same place, always the same stone of the floor.
I don’t remember what conclusion he draws from this, but in any event it’s a great secret. So here’s the mechanism: in the choir of Saint-Martin there is a window that has an uncolored spot near the juncture of two lead cames. It was carefully calculated, and probably for six hundred years someone has always taken care to keep it as it is. At sunrise on a given day of the year…”
“…which can only be the dawn of June 24, Saint John’s day, feast of the summer solstice…”
“…yes, on that day and at that hour, the first pure ray of sun that comes through the windows strikes the floor beneath the Pendulum, and the Pendulum’s intersection of the ray at that instant is the precise point on the map where the Umbilicus is to be found!”
“Perfect,” Belbo said. “But suppose it’s overcast?”
“They wait until the following year.”
“I’m sorry, but…” Belbo said. “The last meeting is to be in Jerusalem. Shouldn’t the Pendulum be hanging from the top of the dome of the Mosque of Omar?”
“No,” I said. “At certain places on the globe the Pendulum completes its circle in thirty-six hours; at the North Pole it takes twenty-four hours; at the Equator the cycle doesn’t vary with the season. So the location matters. If the Templars made their discovery at Saint-Martin, their calculation is valid only in Paris; in Palestine, the Pendulum would mark a different curve.”
“And how do we know they made the discovery at Saint-Martin?”
“The fact that they chose Saint-Martin as their Refuge, that from the prior of Saint Albans, to Postel, to the Convention they kept it under their control, that after Foucault’s first experiments they installed the Pendulum there. Too many clues.”
“But still, the last meeting is in Jerusalem.”
“So? In Jerusalem they’ll put the message together, and that’s not a matter of a few minutes. Then they’ll prepare for a year, and the following June 23 all six groups will meet in Paris, to learn finally where the Umbilicus is, and then they’ll set to work to conquer the world.”
“But,” Belbo insisted, “there’s still something I can’t figure out. Although there’s this final revelation about the Umbilicus, all thirty-six must have known that before. The Pendulum had been used in cathedrals; so it wasn’t a secret. What would have prevented Bacon or Postel, or even Foucault—who must have been a Templar himself, seeing all the fuss he made over the Pendulum—from just putting a map of the world on the floor and orienting it by the cardinal points? We’re off the track.”
“No, we’re not off the track,” I said. “The message reveals something that none of them could know: what map to use!”
A map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58
“You’re familiar with the situation of cartography at the time of the Templars,” I said. “In that century there were Arab maps that, among other things, put Africa at the top and Europe at the bottom; navigators’ maps, fairly accurate, all things considered; and maps that by then were already three or four hundred years old but were still accepted in some schools. Mind you, to reveal the location of the Umbilicus they didn’t need an accurate map, in today’s sense. It had to be simply a map possessing this virtue: once oriented, it would show the Umbilicus at the point where the arc of the Pendulum is struck by the first ray of sun on June 24.
Now listen carefully. Let’s suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the Umbilicus is in Jerusalem. Even with our modern maps, the position of Jerusalem depends on the projection used. And God knows what kind of map the Templars had. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not the Pendulum that’s calibrated according to the map; it’s the map that’s calibrated according to the Pendulum. You follow me? It could be the craziest map in the world, as long as, when placed beneath the Pendulum at the crack of dawn on the twenty-fourth of June, it shows the one and only spot that is Jerusalem.”
“This doesn’t solve our problem,” Diotallevi said.
“Of course not, and it doesn’t solve it for the invisible thirty-six either. Because if you don’t have the right map, forget it. Let’s take the case of a map oriented in the standard way, with east in the direction of the apse and west toward the nave, since that’s how churches are built. Now let’s say, at random, that on that fatal dawn the Pendulum is near the boundary of the southeast quadrant. If it were a clock, we’d say that the hour hand is at five-twenty-five. All right? Now look.”
I went to dig out a history of cartography.
“Here. Exhibit number 1: a twelfth-century map. It follows the T-structured maps: Asia is at the top with the Earthly Paradise; to the left, Europe; to the right, Africa; and here, beyond Africa, they’ve also put the Antipodes. Exhibit number 2: a map inspired by the Somnium Scipionis of Macrobius, and it survives in various versions into the sixteenth century. Africa’s a bit narrow, but that’s all right. Now look: orient the two maps in the same way, and you see that on the first map five-twenty-five corresponds to Arabia, and on the second map to New Zealand, since that’s where the second map has the Antipodes.
You may know everything about the Pendulum, but if you don’t know what map to use, you’re lost. So the message contained instructions, elaborately coded, on where to find the right map, which may have been specially drawn for the occasion. The message told where to look, in what manuscript, in what library, abbey, castle. It’s even possible that Dee or Bacon or someone else reconstructed the message. Who knows? The message said the map was at X, but in the meantime, with everything that was going on in Europe, the abbey that housed the map burned down, or the map was stolen, hidden God knows where.
Maybe someone has the map but doesn’t know the use of it, or knows it’s valuable but doesn’t know why, and he’s going around the world looking for a buyer. Imagine all the confusion of offers, false trails, messages that say other things but are understood to refer to the map, and messages that indeed refer to the map but are read as if hinting at, say, the production of gold. No doubt some people attempt to reconstruct the map purely on the basis of conjectures.”
“What sorts of conjectures?”
“Well, for example, micro-macrocosmic correspondences. Here’s another map. You know where it comes from? It appears in the second treatise of the Utriusque Cosmi Historia of Robert Fludd. Fludd is the Rosicrucians’ man in London, don’t forget. Now what does our man do, our Robertus de Fluctibus, as he liked to style himself? He offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole, naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone.
This is a map specially conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It’s obvious, undeniable; I can’t imagine why somebody hasn’t already seen—”
“The fact is, the Diabolicals are very, very slow,” Belbo said.
“The fact is, we are the only worthy heirs of the Templars. But, to continue. You recognize the design. It’s a mobile rotula, like the ones Trithemius used for his coded messages. This isn’t a map, then; it’s a design for a machine to produce variations of maps, until the right map is found! And Fludd says as much in the caption: This is the sketch for an instrumentum, it still needs work.”
“But wasn’t Fludd the one who persisted in denying the rotation of the earth? How could he think of the Pendulum?”
“We’re dealing with initiates. An initiate denies what he knows, denies knowing it, to conceal it.”
“This,” Belbo said, “would explain why Dee paid so much attention to those royal cartographers. It was not to discover the ‘true’ form of the earth, but to reconstruct, among all the mistaken maps, the one right map, the one of use to him.”
“Not bad, not bad at all,” Diotallevi said. “To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”
The chief occupation of this Assembly—and, in my opinion, the most useful—should be to work on natural history following the plans of Verulam.
—Christian Huygens, Letter to Colbert, Oeuvres Complètes, La Haye, 1888–1950, vi, pp. 95–96
The vicissitudes of the six groups were not confined to the search for the map. In the first two pieces of the message,
