Foucault's Pendulum demonstrates the earth's rotation around a fixed point. From this premise Umberto Eco created an intricate novel, part thriller, part history of occultism.
The book begins with Casaubon hiding in a statue in the Conservatoire in Paris, watching the arcs of Foucault's pendulum and remembering the events that led him to this point.
At the centre of the story are three friends and colleagues, Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi. They work together as editors in a publishing company that specialises in the esoteric. Casaubon previously wrote a thesis on the Templar Knights and is recruited when an author, Ardenti, offers a manuscript detailing a secret plan of the Templars based on a short document he obtained. When Ardenti goes missing, presumed dead, the trio believe that it was because the author may have known too much.
The Plan begins as a game. The three editors, surrounded by magical texts and hermetic histories, want to discover new connections to explain the world. It ends with the three at the centre of a conspiracy of their own making. Diotallevi is convinced that his terminal cancer is a result of the cells of his body rearranging themselves at random as he rearranged texts. As a Cabalist scholar he believes in the power of words. His life is spent finding all the combinations of the name of God as a path to enlightenment. “As we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That is why I'm dying.” In comparison the others are more pragmatic, and it is the collision of the outside world and the inner narrative they created that leads to their undoing. Like Foucault's pendulum we are all the fixed points of our lives and the world changes around us, and so by creating The Plan and revealing parts of it to the diabolicals, it is made real.
But what does it mean? Esoteric texts, now published freely in the 20th century, are coded to ensure non initiates cannot understand or use them. To seek the truth we go beneath the first layer of language to discover other meanings, metaphorical or numerical in origin. In Foucault's Pendulum the editors reread Shakespeare as if it was written by a mystic to explain the secrets of the Templars and the Rosy Cross. Not only Shakespeare gets this treatment and by searching for patterns, the editors find them. Using a computer to provide indisputable facts at random they find new connections and create meanings from those connections. “Wanting connections, we found connections – always, everywhere and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else.”
The novel draws the reader into the mad “logic” of the conspiracy theorist. At the same time as warning of the dangers of such liberal interpretations of evidence, the novel wallows in them. All information is treated as equally important by Casaubon, and everything means something else. As Casaubon says of life and the world, it might well be “a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
It is very human to want to see a greater plan at work in the world. Not only does it make our own failings more comfortable, but it also sets a context for our lives and what might come after. Thus God or the Great Architect or whatever we choose to call Him helps us make sense of the chaos. The book itself is structured in ten parts that represent the Sephirot on the Cabalist Tree of Life, starting at the top with Keter and ending with Malkhut (Earth). The structure represents a cosmic design that is reflected in the plot with the Plan. In Casaubon's words, “to give shape to the shapelessness.” But the story reminds us that our interpretations of text or the world are not impartial. We create narratives by choosing what is important.
Ardenti - “Everything depends on how you draw the lines. You can make a wain or a bear, whatever you like, and it's hard to tell whether a given star is part of a given constellation or not.” Belbo - “You just have to decide which stars to omit.”
This is shown clearly with the different interpretations of the original notes left to Ardenti. For one it can be very ordinary - Lia's delivery itinerary, while for another it can be extraordinary - Ardenti's Templar plan for world domination. The novel doesn't posit which interpretation, if either, are correct and in fact through the editors' game they reveal a new interpretation that could explain world events in a way that would make them less random and far more organised, a search by secret societies for a lost truth. Embroiled in these mysteries the editors lose their perspective and reason. They “were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.”
There is another reading that the book seems to encourage. It is set in Milan in the 1970's – 1980's a time when there are revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements abound, external to the magical texts the editors become obsessed with. The history of the Templars and Western Esoterica is decidedly fascist, and bringing in the rise of the Nazis into the Plan echoes this culture of White Supremacy in an overt way. A character Casaubon is involved with in Brazil, Amparo a Marxist, is possessed during a ritual dance. She is furious with herself - “I don't believe in it. I didn't want to... I'm still a slave.” Unlike the Templars, she feels used by the energies she channelled rather than the master of them.
It's a fascinating but confusing book. I suspect that some knowledge of the occult is a prerequisite to be able to follow the information presented within. It mocks and embraces the “diabolicals'” attempts to interpret historical events simultaneously. Casaubon's journey from the rational to the paranoid becomes our journey and we are left feeling smothered by all we have read. Don't expect an easy, fun read. It's complex and entangled, like the serpent Kundalini, the telluric currents and the underside of the Eiffel Tower. However, it's a powerful read if you feel you can handle its contradictions.
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