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Summary
Summary
International bestselling and award-winning author Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is "an intellectual adventure story, as sensational, thrilling, and packed with arcana as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Count of Monte Cristo" (The Washington Post Book World).Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled -- a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault's Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth.Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment. "An encyclopedic detective story...An intellectual triumph"--Anthony Burgess"Endlessly diverting . . . Even more intricate and absorbing than his international bestseller The Name of the Rose."--Time
Author Notes
Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, Italy on January 5, 1932. He received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954. His first book, Il Problema Estetico in San Tommaso, was an extension of his doctoral thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas and was published in 1956. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1980 and won the Premio Strega and the Premio Anghiar awards in 1981. In 1986, it was adapted into a movie starring Sean Connery. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Prague Cemetery, and Numero Zero. He also wrote children's books and more than 20 nonfiction books including Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. He taught philosophy and then semiotics at the University of Bologna. He also wrote weekly columns on popular culture and politics for L'Espresso. He died from cancer on February 19, 2016 at the age of 84.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
If a copy (often unread) of The Name of the Rose on the coffee table was a badge of intellectual superiority in 1983, Eco's second novel--also an intellectual blockbuster--should prove more accessible. This complex psychological thriller chronicles the development of a literary joke that plunges its perpetrators into deadly peril. The narrator, Casaubon, an expert on the medieval Knights Templars, and two editors working in a branch of a vanity press publishing house in Milan, are told about a purported coded message revealing a secret plan set in motion by the Knights Templars centuries ago when the society was forced underground. As a lark, the three decide to invent a history of the occult tying a variety of phenomena to the mysterious machinations of the Order. Feeding their inspirations into a computer, they become obsessed with their story, dreaming up links between the Templars and just about every occult manifestation throughout history, and predicting that culmination of the Templars' scheme to take over the world is close at hand. The plan becomes real to them--and eventually to the mysterious They, who want the information the trio has ``discovered.'' Dense, packed with meaning, often startlingly provocative, the novel is a mixture of metaphysical meditation, detective story, computer handbook, introduction to physics and philosophy, historical survey, mathematical puzzle, compendium of religious and cultural mythology, guide to the Torah (Hebrew, rather than Latin contributes to the puzzle here, but is restricted mainly to chapter headings), reference manual to the occult, the hermetic mysteries, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons-- ad infinitum . The narrative eventually becomes heavy with the accumulated weight of data and supposition, and overwrought with implication, and its climax may leave readers underwhelmed. Until that point, however, this is an intriguing cerebral exercise in which Eco slyly suggests that intellectual arrogance can come to no good end. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
A post-Derrida plunge into the labyrinth of the intellectual mind (Eco's and his characters') produces a conspiracy theory so all-embracing that it seduces with its power.
Kirkus Review
A first-rate, highbrow mystery packed with wit, satire, and erudition. As he did in The Name of the Rose (1986), Eco begins here with a teasingly slow windup followed by a narrative that kicks into high gear about one-fifth of the way in. From the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiens, the museum of technology in Paris, Casaubon narrates the tale of how a literary gag got out of hand, leading to violence, murder, mayhem. Casaubon has written a thesis on the medieval Templars--a martial order of monks founded initially to protect Crusaders en route to Jerusalem, and eventually disbanded by Pope Clement. Templar legends--in varying degrees of silliness--have been cropping up ever since: the movement went underground; it was buried within the Rosicrucians; it all connects with Atlantis, Stonehenge, the pyramids, etc. Casaubon meets up with Belbo, an underpaid scholarly editor amused at the heaps of New Age submissions crossing his desk--much of it, inevitably, touching upon a secret history of the Templars. Belbo's boss--a wizened operator of literary scams--wants to cash in on some New Age trade and suggests that Casaubon and Belbo throw together a history of the occult. Joined by Diotallevi, an authority on cabalistic word permutation, and with the help of a word processor, the team undertakes construction of a bogus study of the occult, a random sorting of hermetic writings: ""The challenge isn't to find occult links between Debussy and the Templars. The problem is to find occult links between, for example, the cabal and the spark plugs of a car."" The result is a book uncovering the Plan, an underground movement operated by the Masters of the World. Too busy chortling over their PC, Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi don't consider that even an outrageous theory can tread on dangerous ground--until Belbo disappears and Casaubon begins a serious search for the Masters. A rich, comic work moving between points of erudition and parody, captured here with a smooth translation from William Weaver. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate heresy among the monks in an Italian abbey; a series of bizarre murders overshadows the mission. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The book became a hit despite some obscure passages and allusions. This deftly abridged version, ably performed by Theodore Bikel, retains the genius of the original but is far more accessible. Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel, is a bit irritating. The plot consists of three Milan editors who concoct a series on the occult for an unscrupulous publishing house that Eco ridicules mercilessly. The work details medieval phenomena including the Knights Templar, an ancient order with a scheme to dominate the world. Unfortunately, few listeners will make sense of this failed thriller. The Island of the Day Before is an ingenious tale that begins with a shipwreck in 1643. Roberta della Griva survives and boards another ship only to find himself trapped. Flashbacks give us Renaissance battles, the French court, spies, intriguing love affairs, and the attempt to solve the problem of longitude. It's a world of metaphors and paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar. Tim Curry, who also narrates Foucault's Pendulum, provides a spirited narration. Ultimately, libraries should avoid Foucault's Pendulum, but educated patrons will form an eager audience for both The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before.James Dudley, Copiague, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 HEBREW HANDWRITING ART That was when I saw the Pendulum. The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty. I knew--but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing--that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by p, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginning of p, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself. I also knew that a magnetic device centered in the floor beneath issued its command to a cylinder hidden in the heart of the sphere, thus assuring continual motion. This device, far from interfering with the law of the Pendulum, in fact permitted its manifestation, for in a vacuum any object hanging from a weightless and unstretchable wire free of air resistance and friction will oscillate for eternity. The copper sphere gave off pale, shifting glints as it was struck by the last rays of the sun that came through the great stained-glass windows. Were its tip to graze, as it had in the past, a layer of damp sand spread on the floor of the choir, each swing would make a light furrow, and the furrows, changing direction imperceptibly, would widen to form a breach, a groove with radial symmetry--like the outline of a mandala or pentaculum, a star, a mystic rose. No, more a tale recorded on an expanse of desert, in tracks left by countless caravans of nomads, a story of slow, millennial migrations, like those of the people of Atlantis when they left the continent of Mu and roamed, stubbornly, compactly, from Tasmania to Greenland, from Capricorn to Cancer, from Prince Edward Island to the Svalbards. The tip retraced, narrated anew in compressed time what they had done between one ice age and another, and perhaps were doing still, those couriers of the Masters. Perhaps the tip grazed Agarttha, the center of the world, as it journeyed from Samoa to Novaya Zemlya. And I sensed that a single pattern united Avalon, beyond the north wind, to the southern desert where lies the enigma of Ayers Rock. At that moment of four in the afternoon of June 23, the Pendulum was slowing at one end of its swing, then falling back lazily toward the center, regaining speed along the way, slashing confidently through the hidden parallelogram of forces that were its destiny. Had I remained there despite the passage of the hours, to stare at that bird's head, that spear's tip, that obverse helmet, as it traced its diagonals in the void, grazing the opposing points of its astigmatic circumference, I would have fallen victim to an illusion: that the Pendulum's plane of oscillation had gone full circle, had returned to its starting point in thirty-two hours, describing an ellipse that rotated around its center at a speed proportional to the sine of its latitude. What would its rotation have been had it hung instead from the dome of Solomon's Temple? Perhaps the Knights had tried it there, too. Perhaps the solution, the final meaning, would have been no different. Perhaps the abbey church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the true Temple. In any case, the experiment would work perfectly only at the Pole, the one place where the Pendulum, on the earth's extended axis, would complete its cycle in twenty-four hours. But this deviation from the Law, which the Law took into account, this violation of the rule did not make the marvel any less marvelous. I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving. So it was not so much the earth to which I addressed my gaze but the heavens, where the mystery of absolute immobility was celebrated. The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved--earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion--one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part in that supreme experience. I, too, moved with the all, but I could see the One, the Rock, the Guarantee, the luminous mist that is not body, that has no shape, weight, quantity, or quality, that does not see or hear, that cannot be sensed, that is in no place, in no time, and is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, number, order, or measure. Neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth. I was roused by a listless exchange between a boy who wore glasses and a girl who unfortunately did not. "It's Foucault's Pendulum," he was saying. "First tried out in a cellar in 1851, then shown at the Observatoire, and later under the dome of the Panthéon with a wire sixty-seven meters long and a sphere weighing twenty-eight kilos. Since 1855 it's been here, in a smaller version, hanging from that hole in the middle of the rib." "What does it do? Just hang there?" "It proves the rotation of the earth. Since the point of suspension doesn't move . . ." "Why doesn't it move?" "Well, because a point . . . the central point, I mean, the one right in the middle of all the points you see . . . it's a geometric point; you can't see it because it has no dimension, and if something has no dimension, it can't move, not right or left, not up or down. So it doesn't rotate with the earth. You understand? It can't even rotate around itself. There is no 'itself.'" "But the earth turns." "The earth turns, but the point doesn't. That's how it is. Just take my word for it." "I guess it's the Pendulum's business." Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off--he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter--their first and last encounter--with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude? I watched with reverence and fear. In that instant I was convinced that Jacopo Belbo was right. What he told me about the Pendulum I had attributed to esthetic raving, to the shapeless cancer taking gradual shape in his soul, transforming the game into reality without his realizing it. But if he was right about the Pendulum, perhaps all the rest was true as well: the Plan, the Universal Plot. And in that case I had been right to come here, on the eve of the summer solstice. Jacopo Belbo was not crazy; he had simply, through his game, hit upon the truth. But the fact is that it doesn't take long for the experience of the Numinous to unhinge the mind. I tried then to shift my gaze. I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all and nothing, at once cause and effect. But I realized that to neglect the Pendulum that hung from the vault while admiring the vault itself was like becoming drunk at the stream instead of drinking at the source. The choir of Saint-Martin-des-Champs existed only so that, by virtue of the Law, the Pendulum could exist; and the Pendulum existed so that the choir could exist. You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple. Still unable to take my eyes from the key of the vault, I retreated, step by step, for I had learned the path by heart in the few minutes I had been there. Great metal tortoises filed past me on either side, imposing enough to signal their presence at the corner of my eyes. I fell back along the nave toward the front entrance, and again those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks: the planes of Bréguet, Blériot, Esnault, and the helicopter of Dufaux. A signed first edition of this book has been privately printed by The Franklin Library. Copyright (c) 1988 Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani Sonzogno Etas S.p.A., Milano. English translation copyright (c) 1989 by Harcourt, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/ contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. Excerpted from Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Keter | |
1. When the light of the infinite | p. 3 |
2. Wee haue divers curious Clocks | p. 8 |
Hokhmah | |
3. In hanc utilitatem clementes angeli | p. 19 |
4. He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden | p. 24 |
5. And begin by combining this name | p. 27 |
6. Juda Leon se dio a permutaciones | p. 37 |
Binah | |
7. Do not expect too much of the end of the world | p. 43 |
8. Having come from the light and from the gods | p. 46 |
9. In his right hand he held a golden trumpet | p. 51 |
10. And finally nothing is cabalistically inferred | p. 53 |
11. His sterility was infinite | p. 58 |
12. Sub umbra alarum tuarum | p. 62 |
13. Li frere, li mestre du Temple | p. 67 |
14. He, if asked, would also confess to killing Our Lord | p. 81 |
15. I will go and fetch you help from the Comte D'Anjou | p. 90 |
16. He had been in the order only nine months | p. 95 |
17. And thus did the knights of the Temple vanish | p. 100 |
18. A mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns | p. 105 |
19. The order has never ceased to exist, not for a moment | p. 111 |
20. Invisible center, the sovereign who must reawaken | p. 119 |
21. The Graal ... is a weight so heavy | p. 126 |
22. The knights wanted to face no further questions | p. 130 |
Hesed | |
23. The analogy of opposites | p. 137 |
24. Sauvez la faible Aischa | p. 140 |
25. These mysterious initiates | p. 144 |
26. All the traditions of the earth | p. 147 |
27. One day, saying that he had known Pontius Pilate | p. 151 |
28. There is a body that enfolds the whole of the world | p. 155 |
29. Simply because they change and hide their names | p. 159 |
30. And the famous confraternity of the Rosy Cross | p. 164 |
31. The majority were in reality only Rosicrucians | p. 169 |
32. Valentiniani per ambiguitates bilingues | p. 172 |
33. The visions are white, blue, white, pale red | p. 175 |
Gevurah | |
34. Beydelus, Demeyes, Adulex | p. 185 |
35. I' mi son Lia | p. 191 |
36. Yet one caution let me give | p. 193 |
37. Whoever reflects on four things | p. 199 |
38. Prince of Babylon, Knight of the Black Cross | p. 202 |
39. Doctor of the Planispheres, Hermetic Philosopher | p. 207 |
40. Cowards die many times before their deaths | p. 212 |
41. Daath is situated at the point where the abyss | p. 214 |
42. We are all in agreement, whatever we say | p. 218 |
43. People who meet on the street | p. 221 |
44. Invoke the forces | p. 225 |
45. And from this springs the extraordinary question | p. 227 |
46. You will approach the frog several times | p. 232 |
47. The sense alert and the memory clear | p. 235 |
48. The volume of the Great Pyramid in cubic inches | p. 240 |
49. A spiritual knighthood of initiates | p. 244 |
50. For I am the first and the last | p. 248 |
51. When therefore a Great Cabalist | p. 255 |
52. A colossal chessboard that extends beneath the earth | p. 258 |
53. Unable to control destinies on earth openly | p. 260 |
54. The prince of darkness | p. 267 |
55. I call a theatre | p. 269 |
56. He began playing his shining trumpet | p. 274 |
57. On every third tree a lantern | p. 279 |
58. Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute | p. 285 |
59. And if such monsters are generated | p. 289 |
60. Poor idiot! | p. 290 |
61. The Golden Fleece is guarded | p. 293 |
62. We consider societies druidic if | p. 296 |
63. What does the fish remind you of? | p. 299 |
Tiferet | |
64. To dream of living in an unknown city | p. 307 |
65. The frame was twenty foot square | p. 310 |
66. If our hypothesis is correct | p. 313 |
67. Da Rosa, nada digamos agora | p. 317 |
68. Let your garments be white | p. 321 |
69. Elles deviennent le Diable | p. 326 |
70. Let us remember the secret references | p. 327 |
71. We do not even know with certainty | p. 331 |
72. Nos inuisibles pretendus | p. 334 |
73. Another curious case | p. 337 |
74. Though his will be good | p. 346 |
75. The initiates are at the edge of that path | p. 350 |
76. Dilletantism | p. 355 |
77. This herb is called Devilbane | p. 362 |
78. Surely this monstrous hybrid | p. 365 |
79. He opened his coffer | p. 368 |
80. When White arrives | p. 370 |
81. They could explode the whole surface of our planet | p. 371 |
82. The earth is a magnetic body | p. 374 |
83. A map is not the territory | p. 378 |
84. Following the plans of Verulam | p. 381 |
85. Phileas Fogg. A name that is also a signature | p. 383 |
86. It was to them that Eiffel turned | p. 384 |
87. It is a remarkable coincidence | p. 386 |
88. Templarism is Jesuitism | p. 388 |
89. In the bosom of the deepest darkness | p. 392 |
90. All the outrages attributed to the Templars | p. 394 |
91. How well you have unmasked those infernal sects | p. 396 |
92. With all the power and terror of Satan | p. 397 |
93. Whereas we stay in the wings | p. 399 |
94. En avoit-il le moindre soupcon? | p. 400 |
95. Namely the Jewish Cabalists | p. 401 |
96. A cover is always necessary | p. 404 |
97. I am that I am | p. 407 |
98. Its racist gnosis, its rites and initiations | p. 417 |
99. Guenonism plus armored divisions | p. 419 |
100. I declare the earth is hollow | p. 421 |
101. Qui operatur in Cabala | p. 424 |
102. A very thick and high wall | p. 425 |
103. Your secret name shall have 36 letters | p. 428 |
104. These texts are not addressed to common mortals | p. 431 |
105. Delirat lingua, labat mens | p. 433 |
106. List No. 5 | p. 436 |
Nezah | |
107. Dost thou see you black dog? | p. 449 |
108. Are there several Powers at work? | p. 454 |
109. Saint-Germain ... very polished and witty | p. 460 |
110. They mistook the movements and walked backward | p. 465 |
111. C'est une lecon par la suite | p. 469 |
Hod | |
112. Four our Ordinances and Rites | p. 475 |
113. Our cause is a secret | p. 480 |
114. The ideal pendulum | p. 495 |
115. If the eye could see the demons | p. 497 |
116. Je voudrais etre la tour | p. 501 |
117. Madness has an enormous pavilion | p. 504 |
Yesod | |
118. The conspiracy theory of society | p. 511 |
119. The garland of the trumpet was set afire | p. 518 |
Malkhut | |
120. They hold for certain that they are in the light | p. 531 |