It is a remarkable coincidence that the 1623 Folio, known by the name of Shakespeare, contains exactly thirty-six plays….
—W. F. C. Wigston, Francis Bacon versus Phantom Captain Shakespeare: The Rosicrucian Mask, London, Kegan Paul, 1891, p. 353
When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us—and rightly—that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed. We consoled ourselves with the realization—unspoken, now, respecting the etiquette of irony—that we were parodying the logic of our Diabolicals.
But during the long intervals in which each of us collected evidence to produce at the plenary meetings, and with the clear conscience of those who accumulate material for a medley of burlesques, our brains grew accustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything with everything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit. I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
It’s the old story of spies: they infiltrate the secret service of the enemy, they develop the habit of thinking like the enemy, and if they survive, it’s because they’ve succeeded. And before long, predictably, they go over to the other side, because it has become theirs. Or take those who live alone with a dog.
They speak to him all day long; first they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dog understands them, he’s shy, he’s jealous, he’s hypersensitive; next they’re teasing him, making scenes, until they’re sure he’s become just like them, human, and they’re proud of it, but the fact is that they have become just like him: they have become canine.
Perhaps because I was in daily contact with Lia, and with the baby, I was, of the three, the least affected by the game. I was convinced I was its master; I felt as if I were again playing the agogo during the rite in Brazil: you stay on the side of those who control the emotions and not with those who are controlled by them. About Diotallevi, I didn’t know then; I know now. He was training himself viscerally to think like a Diabolical. As for Belbo, he was identifying at a more conscious level.
I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real. We were losing that mysterious and bright and most beautiful ability to say that Signor A has grown bestial—without thinking for a moment that he now has fur and fangs. The sick man, however, thinking “bestial,” immediately sees Signor A on all fours, barking or grunting.
In Diotallevi’s case—as we would have realized if we hadn’t been so excited ourselves—it began when he returned at the end of the summer. He seemed thinner, but it wasn’t that healthy thinness of someone who has spent a few weeks hiking in the mountains. His delicate albino skin now had a yellowish cast. Perhaps we thought, if we noticed at all, that he had spent his vacation poring over rabbinic scrolls. But our minds were on other things.
In the days that followed, we were able to account also for the camps opposed to the Baconian.
For example, current Masonic studies believe that the Illuminati of Bavaria, who advocated the destruction of nations and the destabilization of the state, inspired not only the anarchism of Bakunin but also Marxism itself. Puerile. The Illuminati were provocateurs; they were Baconians who had infiltrated the Teutonics.
Marx and Engels had something quite different in mind when they began their Manifesto of 1848 with the eloquent sentence “A specter is haunting Europe.” Why this Gothic metaphor? The Communist Manifesto is alluding sarcastically to the secret hunt for the Plan, which has agitated the continent for centuries.
The Manifesto suggests an alternative both to the Baconians and to the neo-Templars. Marx, a Jew, perhaps initially the spokesman for the rabbis of Gerona or Safed, tries to involve the entire Chosen People in the search. But then the project possesses him, and he identifies the Shekhinah—the exiled people in the Kingdom—with the proletariat, and thus, betraying the expectations of those who taught him, he turns all Messianic Judaism on its head. Templars of the world, unite! The map to the workers! Splendid! What better historical justification for Communism?
“Yes,” Belbo said, “but the Baconians also run into trouble along the way; don’t think they don’t. Some of them set out for the superhighway of science and end up in a blind alley. At the end of the dynasty, the Einsteins and the Fermis, after hunting for the secret in the heart of the microcosm, stumble upon the wrong invention: instead of telluric energy—clean, natural, sapiential—they discover atomic energy—technological, unnatural, polluted….”
“Space-time: the error of the West,” Diotallevi said.
“It’s the loss of the Center. Vaccine and penicillin as caricatures of the Elixir of Eternal Life,” I added.
“Or like that other Templar, Freud,” Belbo said, “who instead of probing the labyrinths of the physical underground, probed those of the psychic underground, as if everything about them hadn’t already been said, and better, by the alchemists.”
“But you’re the one,” Diotallevi objected, “who is trying to publish the books of Dr. Wagner. For me, psychoanalysis is for neurotics.”
“Yes, and the penis is nothing but a phallic symbol,” I concluded. “Come, gentlemen, let’s not digress. And let’s not waste time. We still don’t know where to put the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites.”
But before we were able to answer this question, we came upon another group, one that, not part of the thirty-six invisibles, had nevertheless entered the game at quite an early stage, somewhat upsetting its designs, causing confusion: the Jesuits.
The Baron Hundt, Chevalier Ramsay… and numerous others who founded the grades in these rites, worked under instructions from the general of the Jesuits…. Templarism is Jesuitism.
—Letter to Madame Blavatsky from Charles Southeran, 32 ∴ A and P.R. 94 ∴ Memphis, K.R. , K. Kadosch, M.M. 104, Eng., etc. Initiate of the English Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, January 11, 1877; from Isis Unveiled, 1877, vol. ii, p. 390
We had run into them too often, from the time of the first Rosicrucian manifestoes on. As early as 1620, in Germany, the Rosa Jesuitica appears, reminding us that the symbolism of the rose was Catholic and Marian before it was Rosicrucian, and the hint is made that the two orders are in league, that Rosicrucianism is only a reformulation of the Jesuit mystique for consumption in Reformation Germany.
I remembered what Salon had said about Father Kircher’s rancorous attack on the Rosicrucians—right in the middle of his discourse on the depths of the terraqueous globe.
“Father Kircher,” I said, “is a central character in this story. Why would this man, who so often showed a gift for observation and a taste for experiment, drown these few good ideas in thousands of pages overflowing with incredible hypotheses?
He was in correspondence with the best English scientists. Each of his books deals with typical Rosicrucian subjects, ostensibly to contest them, actually to espouse them, offering his own Counter Reformation version.
In the first edition of the Fama, Herr Haselmayer, condemned to the galleys by the Jesuits because of his reforming ideas, hastens to say that the Rosicrucians are the true Jesuits. Very well. Kircher writes his thirty-odd volumes to argue that the Jesuits are the true Rosicrucians. The Jesuits are trying to get their hands on the Plan. Kircher wants to study those pendulums himself, and he does, in his own way. He invents a planetary clock that will give the exact time in all the headquarters of the Society of Jesus scattered throughout the world.”
“But how did the Jesuits know of the Plan, when the Templars let themselves be killed rather than reveal it?” Diotallevi asked.
It was no good answering that the Jesuits always know everything. We needed a more seductive explanation.
We quickly found one. Guillaume Postel again. Leafing through the history of the Jesuits by Cretineau-Joly (and how we chuckled over that unfortunate name), we learned that in 1554 Postel, in a fit of mystical fervor and thirst for spiritual regeneration, joined Ignatius Loyola in Rome.
Ignatius welcomed him with open arms, but Postel was unable to part with his manias, his cabalism, his ecumenicalism, and the Jesuits couldn’t accept these things, especially one mania that Postel absolutely refused to abandon: the idea that the King of the World was the king of France. Ignatius may have been a saint, but he was also Spanish.
So at last a rupture came about; Postel left the Jesuits—or the Jesuits kicked him out. But since he had been a Jesuit, even if only briefly, he had sworn obedience perinde ac cadaver to Saint Ignatius, and therefore must have revealed to him his mission. “Dear Ignatius,” he must have said, “in receiving me you receive also the secret of the Templar Plan, whose unworthy representative I am in France, and indeed, while we are all awaiting the third centenary meeting in 1584, we might as well await it ad majorem Dei gloriam.”
So the Jesuits, thanks to Postel’s moment of weakness, come to know the secret of the Templars. This knowledge must be exploited. Saint Ignatius goes to his
