It began with the message coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisibles separez en six bandes. And then:
a la ... Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6 ... entiers avec saiel
p ... les blancs mantiax
r ... s ... chevaliers de Pruins pour la ... j.nc.
6 foiz 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a ... 120 a...
iceste est l'ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it li secunz joste iceus qui ... pans
it a I refuge
it a Nostre Dame de l'altre part de l'iau
it a l'ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste ... La Grant Pute.
"Thirty-six years after the hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealed messages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsed knights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twenty years each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, this is the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate the bread, then at the Refuge, then at Our Lady Beyond the River, then at the House of the Popelicans, then at the Stone. You see, in 1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, in fact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we must ask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you are an escaping Templar, where would you go to form the second group?"
"H'm ... If it's true that those in the wain fled to Scotland ... But why should they have gone to Scotland in particular to eat the bread?"
I was becoming a master of chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland. Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice. Saint John's Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about Saint John's Fire in Frazer's Golden Bough.
I telephoned Lia. "Do me a favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about Saint John's Fire."
Lia was terrific at this sort of thing. She found the chapter at once. "What do you want to know? It's a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all European countries. It's celebrated at the moment when the sun is at its peak. Saint John was added to make the thing Christian...."
"Do they eat bread in Scotland?"
"Let me see....I don't think so.... Ah, here it is: they don't eat bread for Saint John, but on the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires, originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in the Scottish highlands...."
"We've got it! What kind?"
"They knead a cake of flour and oats and toast it on embers.... Then a rite follows that recalls ancient human sacrifices.... The bread's called bannock cakes...."
"What? Spell it!" She did, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morgan le Fay; and other endearments.
I tried to remember my thesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge in Scotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped the king win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them up as the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of Scotland.
I took a big English dictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok in Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind of cake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or other grain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn as the French Templars would have done when they sent news from Scotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get something like the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread. Those who ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of the bread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time had spread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal to England. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti's from Pole to Palestine.
68
Let your garments be white....If it is dark, set many lights burning.... Now begin combining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them until your heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the letters and to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heart is warm, when you see that through the combination of the letters you grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with the aid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence of the divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundity of your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higher angels, as if they were human beings beside you.
—Abulafia, Sefer Ilaie Olam
"It makes sense," Belbo said. "And in that case, where would the Refuge be?"
"The six groups settle in six places, but only one place is called the Refuge. Odd. This must mean that in the other places, like Portugal and Britain, the Templars can live undisturbed, although under another name, whereas in the Refuge they are completely hidden. I would say it is where the Templars of Paris went after they left the Temple. To me it seems economical for the route to go to England from France, but why not assume that the Templars took an even more economical course and set up a refuge in a secret and protected place in Paris itself? Being sound politicians, they reasoned that in two hundred years the situation would change and they would be able to act in the light of day, or almost."
"Paris it is. And the fourth place?"
"The colonel was thinking of Chartres, but if we make Paris the third place, we can't put down Chartres as the fourth, because obviously the Plan has to involve all the centers of Europe. Besides, we're leaving the mystical trail to work out a political trail. The pattern appears to be a sine wave, so we should go to the north of Germany. 'Beyond the water,' that is, beyond the Rhine, there's a city—not a church—of Our Lady. Near Danzig, there's a city of the Virgin—in other words, Marienburg."
"Why meet at Marienburg?"
"Because it was the seat of the Teutonic Knights! Relations between the Templars and the Teutonics hadn't been poisoned like those between the Templars and the Hospitalers, who had waited like vultures for the suppression of the Temple in order to seize its wealth. The Teutonics were created in Palestine by German emperors as a counterbalance to the Templars, but they were soon called north to stem the invasion of Prussian barbarians. They succeeded so well that in the space of two centuries they became a state that spread out over all the Baltic lands. They moved between Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia. They founded Königsberg. They were defeated only once, by Aleksandr Nevski in Estonia. About the time the Templars were arrested in Paris, the Teutonics established the capital of their realm at Marienburg. If there was any spiritual knighthood plan of world conquest, the Templars and the Teutonics had divided the spheres of influence between them."
"You know what?" Belbo said. "I'm with you. Now the fifth group. Where are these Popelicans?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You disappoint me, Casaubon. Maybe we should ask Abulafia."
"No. Abulafia can only connect facts, not create them. The Popelicans are a fact, not a connection, and facts are the province of Sam Spade. Give me a few days."
"I'll give you two weeks," Belbo said. "If, within two weeks, you don't hand the Popelicans over to me, you'll buy me a bottle of twelve-year-old Ballantine's."
Beyond my means. A week later I delivered the Popelicans to my greedy partners.
"It's all clear. Now follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to Byzantium, when various movements of Manichean inspiration have already spread throughout the Mediterranean. We begin with the Archontics, founded in Armenia by Peter of Capharbarucha—and you have to admit that's a pretty grand name. Anti-Semitic, the Archontics identify the Devil with Sabaoth, the god of the Jews, who lives in the seventh heaven. To reach the Great Mother of Light in the eighth heaven, it is necessary to reject both Sabaoth and baptism. All right?"
"Consider them rejected," Belbo said.
"But the Archontics are still nice kids at heart. In the fifth century the Massalians come along, and actually they survive until the eleventh century, in Thrace. The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they have dealings with the in
fernal powers, and in fact some texts call them Borborites, from borboros, filth, because of the unspeakable things they do."
"What do they do?"
"The usual unspeakable things. Men and women hold in the palm of their hand, and raise to heaven, their own ignominy, namely, sperm or menstruum, then eat it, calling it the Body of Christ. And if by chance a woman is made pregnant, at the opportune moment they stick a hand into her womb, pull out the embryo, throw it into a mortar, mix in some honey and pepper, and gobble it up."
"How revolting, honey and pepper!" Diotallevi said.
"So those are the Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latter-day Gnostics, therefore dualists, who worshiped the Great Mother Barbelo, and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics, or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect, the Rotary Club of the whole business. But maybe the Stratiotics were only the Hylics of the Mithraists."
"Sounds a bit confused," Belbo said.
"Naturally. None of these people left records. The only things we know about them come to us from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. I'm just trying to show you what a mess the Middle East was at the time. And to set the stage for the Paulicians. These are the followers of a certain Paul, joined by some iconoclasts expelled from Albania. From the eighth century on, the Paulicians grow rapidly, the sect becomes a community, the community a force, a political power, and the emperors of Byzantium, beginning to get worried, send the imperial armies against them. The Paulicians extend as far as the confines of the Arab world; they spread toward the Euphrates, and northward as far as the Black Sea. They establish colonies more or less everywhere, and we find them as late as the seventeenth century, when they are converted by the Jesuits, and some communities still exist today in the Balkans or thereabouts. Now, what do the Paulicians believe in? In God, One and Three, except that the Demiurge defiantly created the world, with the unfortunate results visible to all. The Paulicians reject the Old Testament, refuse the sacraments, despise the Cross, and don't honor the Virgin, because Christ was incarnated directly in heaven and passed through Mary as through a pipe. The Bogomils, who are partly derived from them, say that Christ went in one ear of Mary and came out the other, without her even noticing. The Paulicians are also accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing children's blood in their bread and the Eucharistic wine."
"Like everybody else."
"Those were the days when, for a heretic, going to Mass was a torment. Might as well become Moslem. Anyway, that's the sort of people they were. And I'm telling you about them because, when the dualist heretics spread through Italy and Provence, they are called—to indicate that they're like the Paulicians—Popelicans, Publicans, Populicans, who gallice etiam dicuntur ab aliquis popelicant!"
"So there they are."
"Yes, finally. The Paulicians continue into the ninth century, driving the Byzantine emperors crazy until Emperor Basil vows that if he gets his hands on their leader, Chrysocheir, who invaded the church of Saint John of God at Ephesus and watered his horse at the holy-water fonts..."
"A familiar nasty habit," Belbo said.
"...he'll shoot three arrows into his head. He sends the imperial army after Chrysocheir; they capture him, cut off his head, send it to the emperor, who places it on a table—or a trumeau, on a little porphyry-column—and shoots three arrows, wham wham wham, into it, probably an arrow for each eye and the third for the mouth."
"Nice folks," Diotallevi said.
"They didn't do it to be mean," Belbo said. "It was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon: our Diotallevi doesn't understand theological fine points."
"To conclude: the Crusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them near Antioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics are fighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at the siege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philip-popolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehardouin tells us. Here's the connection with the Templars and the solution to our riddle. Legend has the Templars inspired by the Cathars, but it's really the other way around. The Templars, encountering the Paulician communities in the course of the Crusades, established mysterious relations with them, as they had before with the mystics and the Moslem heretics. Just follow the track of the Ordonation. It has to pass through the Balkans."
"Why?"
"Because, clearly, the sixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to the stone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslems venerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take off our shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don't know who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group of surviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connected with the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalem from Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, and there the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see how straightforward and economical the Plan becomes?"
"I must say I'm persuaded," Belbo said. "But where in the Balkans were the Popelicans waiting?"
"If you ask me, the natural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils, but the Templars of Provins couldn't have known that a few years later Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and remain under their dominion for five centuries."
"Which would suggest that the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany and Bulgaria. When was that to take place?"
"In 1824," Diotallevi said.
"Why's that?"
Diotallevi quickly sketched the following diagram:
PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCE GERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM
1344 1464 1584 1704 1824 1944
"In 1344 the first grand masters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribed places. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grand masters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixth master of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In 1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master. The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with the Paulicians fails, it must fail in 1824."
"Let's assume it fails," I said. "But I don't understand why such shrewd men, when they had four-sixths of the message in their hands, weren't able to reconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fell through, they didn't get in touch with the next group."
"Casaubon," Belbo said, "do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If they wanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years, they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knows where to find the master of the following group, but not where to find the others, and none of the later groups know where to find the masters of the preceding groups. If the Germans lose the Bulgarians, they'll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and the Jerusalemites won't know where anyone else is. As for reconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends on how the message has been divided. Certainly not in logical sequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message is incomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can't make any use of it."
"Just think," Diotallevi said. "If the Bulgarian meeting didn't take place, Europe today is the theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not finding one another, while each group knows that one small piece of information might be enough to make it master of the world. What's the name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe a Plot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battle to reconstruct a lost message. We don't see them, but, invisible, they act all around us."
The same idea then occurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and we quickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discovered that at least two expressions in th
e Provins message—the reference to thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and the hundred-and-twenty-year deadline—also appeared in the debate on the Rosicrucians.
"After all, they were Germans," I said. "I'll read the Rosicrucian manifestoes."
"But you said the manifestoes were fake," Belbo said.
"So? What we're putting together is fake."
"True," he said. "I was forgetting that."
69
Elles deviennent le Diable: débiles, timorées, vaillantes à des heures ex-ceptionnelles, sanglantes sans cesse, lacrymantes, caressantes, avec des bras qui ignorent les lois ... Fi! Fi! Elles ne valent rien, elles sont faites d'un côté, d'un os courbe, d'une dissimulation rentrée.... Elles baisent le serpent....
—Jules Bois, Le satanisme et la magie, Paris, Chailley, 1895, p. 12
He was forgetting that, yes. The following file, brief and dazed, surely belongs to this period.
FILENAME: Ennoia
You arrived at the house suddenly with your grass. I didn't want any, I won't allow any vegetable substance to interfere with the functioning of my brain (I'm lying, I smoke tobacco, drink distillations of grain). The few times, in the early sixties, when somebody forced me to share in the circulation of a joint, with that cheap slimy paper impregnated with saliva, and the last drag using a pin, I wanted to laugh.
But yesterday it was you offering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way of offering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the way nobody's danced for years, and—the shame of it—while Mahler's Fourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creature were yeasting, with the sweet and wrinkled face of an old nanny goat, a serpent rising from the depths of my loins, and I worshiped you as a very old and universal aunt. Probably I went on holding my body close to yours, but I felt also that you were in flight, ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked doors, moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly, Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.