It is no coincidence that Salomon de Caus, the Rosicrucians’ man, writes for Richelieu a treatise on solar clocks. And afterward, from Galileo on, there is furious research devoted to pendulums. The pretext is to figure out how to use them for determining longitudes, but in 1681, when Huygens discovers that a pendulum accurate in Paris is slow in Cayenne, he immediately realizes that this discrepancy is due to the variation in centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the earth.
And after he publishes his Horologium Oscillatorium, in which he elaborates on Galileo’s intuitions about the pendulum, who summons him to Paris? Colbert, the same man who summons to Paris Salomon de Caus to work on the tunnels beneath the city!
In 1661, when the Accademia del Cimento foreshadows the conclusions of Foucault, Leopold of Tuscany dissolves it in the space of five years, and immediately afterward receives from Rome, as a secret reward, a cardinal’s hat.
But there is more. In the centuries that follow, the hunt for the Pendulum continues. In 1742 (a year before the first documented appearance of the Comte de Saint-Germain!), a certain Mairan presents a paper on pendulums at the Académie Royale des Sciences. In 1756 (the year the Templar Strict Observance originates in Germany!), a certain Bouguer writes Sur la direction qu ’affectent tous les fils à plomb.
I found phantasmagorical titles, like that by Jean Baptiste Biot in 1821: Recueil d’observations géodésiques, astronomiques et physiques, exécutées par ordre du Bureau des Longitudes de France, en Espagne, en France, en Angleterre et en Ecosse, pour déterminer la variation de la pésanteur et des degrès terrestres sur le prolongement du méridien de Paris. In France, Spain, England, and Scotland!
And referring to the meridian of Saint-Martin! And what about Sir Edward Sabine, who in 1823 publishes An Account of Experiments to Determine the Figure of the Earth by Means of the Pendulum Vibrating Seconds in Different Latitudes? And the mysterious Graf Feodor Petrovich Litke, who in 1836 publishes the results of his research into the behavior of the pendulum in the course of a voyage around the world? This under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The Russians, too?
And what if in the meantime a group, no doubt of Baconian descent, decides to discover the secret of the currents without map or pendulum, relying instead on the source, the respiration of the Serpent? Salon’s hunch was right, for it was more or less at the time of Foucault that the industrial world, creature of the Baconian camp, began digging underground systems in the heart of the great cities of Europe.
“It’s true,” Belbo said, “the nineteenth century is obsessed with the underground—Jean Valjean, Fantomas and Javert, Rocambole, all that coming and going in sewers and tunnels. My God, now that I think of it, all of Verne is an occult revelation of the mysteries of the underground! The voyage to the center of the earth, twenty thousand leagues under the sea, the caverns of the Mysterious Island, the immense underground realm of the Black Indies! If we drew a diagram of his extraordinary travels, we would be sure to obtain, finally, a sketch of the coils of the Serpent, a chart of the leys drawn for each continent. Verne explores the network of the telluric currents from above and below.”
I collaborated. “What’s the name of the hero of the Black Indies? John Garral. Close to Grail.”
“We’re not ivory-tower eggheads; we’re men with our feet on the ground. Verne gives even more explicit signals. Robur le Conquérant, R. C., Rosy Cross. And Robur read backward is Rubor, the red of the rose.”
Phileas Fogg. A name that is also a signature: Eas, in Greek, has the sense of the global (it is therefore the equivalent of pan, of poly,) and Phileas is the same as Polyphile. As for Fogg, it is the English for brouillard … and no doubt Verne belonged to “Le Brouillard.” He was even kind enough to indicate the relationship between this society and the Rose+Cross, because what, enfin, is our noble traveler Phileas Fogg if not a Rose+ Cross?…And further, doesn’t he belong to the Reform Club, whose initials, R. C., designate the reforming Rose+Cross? And this Reform Club stands in Pall Mall, suggesting once again the Dream of Polyphile.
—Michel Lamy, Jules Verne, initié et initiateur, Paris, Payot, 1984, pp. 237–238
The reconstruction took us days and days. We would interrupt our work to confide in one another the latest connection. We read everything we could lay our hands on—encyclopedias, newspapers, cartoon strips, publishers’ catalogs—and read it squinting, seeking possible shortcuts. At every bookstall we stopped and rummaged; we sniffed newsstands, stole abundantly from the manuscripts of our Diabolicals, rushed triumphantly into the office, slamming the latest find on a desk.
As I recall those weeks, everything seems to have taken place at a frenzied pace, as in a Keystone Kops film, all jerks and jumps, with doors opening and closing at supersonic speed, cream pies flying, dashes up flights of steps, up and down, back and forth, old cars crashing, shelves collapsing in grocery stores amid avalanches of cans, bottles, soft cheeses, spurting siphons, exploding flour sacks.
Yet the intermissions, the idle moments—the rest of life going on around us—I remember as a story in slow motion, the Plan taking gradual shape with the discipline of gymnastics, or like the slow rotation of the discus thrower, the cautious sway of the shot-putter, the long tempos of golf, the senseless waits of baseball. But whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections—always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else….
I said nothing about it to Lia, to avoid irritating her, and I even neglected Giulio. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the realization, for example, that René des Cartes could make R. C. and that he had been overenergetic in seeking and then denying having found the Rosicrucians. Why all that obsession with Method? Because it was through Method that you arrived at the solution to the mystery that was fascinating all the initiates of Europe….
And who had celebrated the enchantment of Gothic? René de Chateaubriand. And who, in Bacon’s time, wrote Steps to the Temple? Richard Crashaw. And what about Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, René Char, Raymond Chandler? And Rick of Casablanca?
This science, which was not lost, at least as far as its practice was concerned, was taught to the cathedral builders by the monks of Cîteaux…. They were known, in the last century, as Compagnons du Tour de France. It was to them that Eiffel turned to build his tower.
—L. Charpentier, Les mystères de la cathédrale de Chartres, Paris, Laffont, 1966, pp. 55–56
Now we had the entire modern age filled with industrious moles tunneling through the earth, spying on the planet from below. But there had to be something else, another venture the Baconians had set in motion, whose results, whose stages were before everyone’s eyes, though no one had noticed them…. The ground had been punctured and the deep strata tested, but the Celts and the Templars had not confined themselves to digging wells; they had planted their stations and aimed them straight at the heavens, to communicate from megalith to megalith, and to catch the influences of the stars.
The idea came to Belbo during a night of insomnia. He leaned out the window and saw in the distance, above the roofs of Milan, the lights of the steel tower of the Italian Radio, the great city antenna. A moderate, prudent Babel. And he understood.
“The Eiffel Tower,” he said to us the next morning. “Why didn’t we think of it before? The metal megalith, the menhir of the last Celts, the hollow spire taller than all Gothic spires.
What need did Paris have of this useless monument? It’s the celestial probe, the antenna that collects information from every hermetic valve stuck into the planet’s crust: the statues of Easter Island; Machu Picchu; the Statue of Liberty, conceived first by the initiate Lafayette; the obelisk of Luxor; the highest tower of Tomar; the Colossus of Rhodes, which still transmits from the depths of a harbor that no one can find; the temples of the Brahman jungle; the turrets of the Great Wall; the top of Ayers Rock; the spires of Strasbourg, which so delighted the initiate Goethe; the faces of Mount Rushmore—how much the initiate Hitchcock understood!—and the TV antenna of the Empire State Building. And tell me to what empire this creation of American initiates refers if not the empire of Rudolf of Prague! The Eiffel Tower picks up signals from underground and compares them with what comes from the sky.
And who is it who gave us the first, terrifying movie image of the Tour Eiffel? René Clair, in Paris qui dort. René Clair, R. C.”
The entire history of science had to be reread. Even the space race became comprehensible, with those crazy satellites
