Foucault's Pendulum
Foucault's Pendulum (original title: Il pendolo di Foucault) is a novel by Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988; the translation into English by William Weaver appeared a year later. It is full of obscure esoteric facts about things like Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theory. It is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. Told in the form of a kind of intellectual game, three friends compile a fictitious plan (the "Plan") which stretches throughout history and hopes to combine all conspiracy theories. They feed the plan into a computer that in turn spits out an entirely new, and coincidentally real, conspiracy theory. Ardenti's find which inspires the Plan and its multiple possible interpretations play a role similar to that of the parchments in the Rennes-le-Château conspiracy theories. The novel is an encyclopedic work, moving critic and novelist Anthony Burgess to comment that it needed an index.
Foucault's Pendulum has lately been called a thinking person's The Da Vinci Code (which it predated by over a decade). The name of the book derives from an actual pendulum designed by the French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.
References
The following conspiracies and secret societies appear in Foucault's Pendulum:
- The Knights Templar (the main characters)
- The Rosicrucians
- The Gnostics
- The Freemasons
- The Alchemists
- The Bavarian Illuminati
- The Elders of Zion
- Opus Dei
Plot
The book begins with the narrator, Casaubon (the name is inspired by classical scholar Meric Casaubon), hiding in fear after closing time in the Parisian technical museum, Musée des Arts et Métiers. He believes that the Templars have kidnapped his friend Jacopo Belbo and are after him, too.
The story is then told in flashback.
In 1970s Milan, Casaubon is a student writing a thesis on the history of the Knights Templar and watching the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activities of the students around him. He encounters Belbo, who works as an editor in a publishing house. Belbo invites Casaubon to come and give his opinion as an expert on a book that has been submitted to him for publication about the Templars. Casaubon meets Belbo's colleague Diotallevi, a cabalist.
The book, by Colonel Ardenti, is patent nonsense, claiming to have discovered a secret plan by the medieval Templars to revenge themselves for the death of their leaders when the order was disbanded by the French King.
That evening Ardenti goes missing. A police inspector, De Angelis, interviews both Belbo and Casaubon. He hints his job as a political department investigator leads him to investigate people who claim to be linked to the Occult as well as revolutionaries.
After this experience Casaubon goes to Brazil for two years and encounters South American and Caribbean spiritualism. There he meets Agliè, an elderly man who implies he is the reincarnation of the mystical Comte de Saint-Germain. Agliè has a seemingly infinite supply of knowledge about things concerning the Occult, given his status as the Comte de Saint-Germain. While in Brazil, Casaubon receives a mysterious letter from Belbo, concerning how he went to a meeting of occultists and once more ran into the Colonel's mysterious plan, recited by a young woman who was apparently in trance.
On his return to Milan, Casaubon completes his thesis. He is hired by Belbo's boss, Mr. Garamond (see the well-known Garamond typeface), as a researcher to find illustrations for a history of metals the company is working on. Casaubon learns that as well as the respectable Garamond publishing house, Mr. Garamond also owns Manuzio (inspired by Aldus Manutius), a vanity publisher that swindles incompetent authors out of large sums of money.
Garamond shortly starts two lines of occult books. One is intended for serious publication by Garamond; the other, 'Isis Unveiled', is intended to be published by Manutius and bring in more vanity authors.
Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon quickly become submerged in occult manuscripts, drawing all sorts of ridiculous connections between historical events. They engage Agliè as a specialist reader.
The three editors start to develop 'The Plan' as part satire and part intellectual game. Starting from Ardenti's 'secret manuscript', they develop an intricate web of mystical connections – trying to avoid making any connection that has not been made before by one of their authors, who they refer to as the 'Diabolicals'. They use a massive computer that randomly selects words from the Diabolicals manuscripts and creates sentences, paragraphs, even texts long enough for book publication, though they first have to dispel the worries of Mr. Garamond.
"The Plan" involves the Knight Templars having discovered a secret energy source during the crusades, probably related to the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail (or both), which makes it possible to control energy flows named telluric currents (here resembling Odic force, Earth radiation, Mana, Qi, etc.) and thus the geophysical movement of plate tectonics. This power makes it possible to disturb and interfere with life anywhere on Earth with vast blackmailing possibilities against entire states. One instrument involved in finding where the energy flows is the Foucault pendulum.
The discovery is purposefully hidden away and the Knights Templar trigger their own destruction, while at the same time hiding independent cells in several corners of Europe. These cells are set up to meet at distinct long-term intervals, and in the end reunite and recover the hidden energy source in order to achieve world domination.
However, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar disrupts the time table and the groups lose track of each other, creating several secret societies in order to search for each other throughout history.
While the Plan is total nonsense and Ardenti's text is, in all likelihood, a laundry list (as Casaubon's wife Lia suggests encouraging him to remove himself from the plan due to the effect it seems to have on him), the editors get more and more involved in it. Diotallevi is diagnosed with cancer, an incident he claimed is punishment for his deep involvement in the Plan, how they mocked something larger than them all, and Belbo retreats into the Plan to avoid confronting his personal life.
The three send Agliè their chronology of secrets societies in the Plan, as if it were from a manuscript they had been presented with. They add one more secret society, Tres, alongside Templars, Rosicrucians, Paulicians and Synarchists, in an attempt to trick Agliè, though upon reaching his office, he claims he has a vague memory of them. They believe Tres is fictional, but it was a word mentioned to Casaubon by the policeman De Angelis at a chance encounter, in which De Angelis actually inquires of Casaubon if he has ever heard of it.
Then Belbo goes to Agliè and tells him about the Plan, as if it were serious research, and that he is in possession of a secret Templar map. Agliè becomes frustrated with Belbo's refusal to let him see the (non-existent) map. He sets Belbo up as a terrorist suspect in order to force him to come to Paris. It emerges that Agliè has cast himself as the head of a secret spiritual brotherhood, which includes Mr. Garamond and many of the Diabolical authors.
Casaubon follows Belbo after hearing a call for help, leading to the scene at the start of the novel.
Agliè's group are, or have deluded themselves to be, the Tres society in the Plan, and are angry that Belbo knows more about the Plan than they do. They try to force him to reveal the secrets he knows. Refusing to satisfy them or reveal that the Plan was a nonsensical concoction, Belbo is hanged by wire connected to the Foucault pendulum.
Casaubon then flees through the Paris sewers and the novel ends with him meditating on the events of the book.
After going through a general overview of western mystical philosophy Eco settles on one particular notion that is important - and that is Occam's Razor: the idea that, if there is more than one explanation for something, the simplest one is the most likely. The Plan is, of course, completely based on links that according to the Razor would be disregarded. For example, the suggestion that Adolf Hitler was secretly a Templar (or assassin or whichever anti-semitic secret society Eco quotes) is of course nonsense - the simpler explanation is that Hitler was a man angry about Germany's economic and political situation, and this rage caused him to write Mein Kampf - the Templars don't come into it. This way of thinking is completely forgotten when The Plan takes over, and it takes the dying Diotallevi and Lia to bring Casaubon down to earth.
Interestingly, William of Baskerville, the central character of Eco's earlier novel The Name of the Rose, is based in part on William of Ockham, for whom the principle of Occam's Razor is named.
Initial quotation
The book begins with a long quote in Hebrew, which comes from page seven of Philip Gruberger's book The Kabbalah: A Study of the Ten Luminous Emanations from Rabbi Isaac Luria with the Commentaries Sufficient for the Beginner Vol. II, published in Jerusalem by the Research Center of Kabbalah in 1973. The quotation translates into English as follows:
- When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around.
See also
