On Foucault's Pendulum
Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says 'No littering.'
Around the same time that I initially decided I loved Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum enough to write about it, I accidentally cut my forehead trying to shave the little bit of hair that sometimes grows between my eyebrows (lol embarrassing). For three days and nights it oozed blood onto my face, and now it's finally stopped. This is a sign of the awakening of the Ajna chakra, and I've come to realize that my third eye has opened. I see the connections now, everywhere. For example, this was also the time I came up with the initial idea for this blog: those I trust the most, an inner circle, sharing our experiences with each other and everyone else. Media can be a basic lens for examining the world, but it's the connections we make, both personal and universal, that give that examination colour, and allow the mysteries of the world to reflect back through our examination. I invented the blog so that I could write about Foucault's Pendulum and I decided to write about Foucault's Pendulum because I wanted something to put on the blog I just invented. Synchronicity.
Foucault's Pendulum
So what is Foucault's Pendulum about? The surface-level gist is that it's about three editors at a publishing house in Milan who are ordered by the owner to operate a self-publishing scam for authors of poorly-written books on the occult. Numerology, Druidic rituals, Satanism, Rosicrucianism, the Knights Templar, Kabbalah, everything. The book frequently goes into fascinating historical diversions about the origins of these topics and how they have been related to one another by people throughout history. Our three editors, Casaubon, initially a skeptic; Belbo, initially ambivalent; and Diotallevi, initially a believer, start playing a game together, inventing a grand Plan connecting all of these disparate topics to one another to create one gigantic conspiracy. And then it all turns out to be true.
So what is the Plan? Well, it all stems from the trials of the Knights Templar beginning in 1307, at which point conventional history says they were eradicated by burning at the stake. Unconventional history, however, says they continued to exist in hiding, and still exist in the shadows to this day. The Plan begins with six groups of templars fleeing to secret hiding places throughout the world (some even suggest places as far-flung as Tibet). In fleeing, they split their greatest Secret into six parts, such that nothing can be gleaned from a mere subset of the six; you need all of them to understand. The Plan is a plan for reconstructing the Secret. At 120-year intervals beginning in 1344, the templars from one hiding place would organize a secret meeting with the next, passing it along, and in this way reconstruct the Secret after 600 years, in 1944. However, in the narrative of the three editors, something goes wrong and the meeting between the second and third groups never happens. What they claim follows since then are attempts by the templars to fix their mistake, and attempts by individuals throughout history to usurp the plan and steal the Secret.
The book has been inspiring me to do my own research on some topics it mentions. The Corpus Hermeticum, for example, is a fascinating text attributed to a Greek-Egyptian syncretic legendary figure---not a real guy---named Hermes Trismegistus. In the Renaissance it was thought to be written before the appearances of Jesus or Plato, and in fact to have inspired both of them. It was then discovered, in 1614, that the Corpus Hermeticum in fact came after those figures, the discoverer being one Isaac Casaubon. Hey, I know that name! No coincidence either, the book is deliberately associating our skeptic main character with the archetypical occult skeptic of history.
Let's get right into it. Foucault's Pendulum has a deep understanding of human psychology beyond our ultimately superficial notions of reason, which we often just use post-facto to justify what we already knew on a deeper level. It knows that you'll start from the perspective of a skeptic: so does Casaubon. It knows all the ways a person can refute a conspiracy theory and puts them right on the page for you. But it also has amazingly creative ways to refute the refutations. Take the Corpus Hermeticum, as a convenient example. You think it couldn't have preceded the ideas of Jesus and Plato? You think it came after them? Well,
You must reason not according to the logic of time but according to the logic of Tradition. One time symbolizes all others, and the invisible Temple of the Rosicrucians therefore exists and has always existed, regardless of the current of history-your history. The time of the final revelation is not time by the clock. Its bonds are rooted in the time of 'subtle history,' where the befores and afters of science are of scant importance.
After all, what is time as we know it but an invention of markets to refine and perfect the flow of commodities? Is temporal logic truly inherent to the human experience, or is there something deeper that this logic is occluding? (The book knows there is.) If you were to talk to a pre-agricultural human being, would they understand time as a linear continuum the way we do, or would their experience be completely different, in ways we've lost? And further, once we pass the terminal crisis of capitalism and move on to socialism, and once the state withers away into communism, when history as we know it is a distant memory, will the people who live in that far-off world understand our rigid, precise, linear idea of time? We all know by now that the fact of relativity already makes our idea of time contingent on the astronomically small scale of the world, rather than a universal truth. Maybe it's even less universal than that. It's not even uncommon to see current-day communists argue for the immediate 'abolition of time', as a battle to be won in the current war against capitalism.
Of course, Foucault's Pendulum also knows about Marx.
Historical materialism? Oh, yes, I believe I've heard of it. An apocalyptic cult that came out of the Trier region. Am I right?
It read me like a book. Anyway, if the book doesn't make you believe, it at least makes it all too easy to suspend your disbelief. But what is the act of suspension of disbelief other than a way of allowing yourself to be slowly convinced, up until the point at which you realize you do believe, and that you should have believed all along? What a perfect state of mind to be on the precipice of as you follow the trio uncovering the deepest secrets in their world.
At one point in Foucault's Pendulum the three editors try writing a computer program to string together sentences for their game, in order to automatically generate connections to be referenced in the Plan. After all, permutations and combinations of words and letters have had spiritual meanings since the true name of G-d was hidden by anagram in the Torah. They took quotations from occult texts and mixed them in with ordinary sentences. Their result was fascinating to me:
What follows is not true
Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate
The sage Omus founded the Rosy Cross in Egypt
There are cabalists in Provence
Who was married at the feast of Cana?
Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancee
It logically follows that
If
The Druids venerated black virgins
Then
Simon Magus identifies Sophia as a prostitute of Tyre
Who was married at the feast of Cana?
The Merovingians proclaim themselves kings by divine right
The Templars have something to do with everything
I was struck reading this how similar it is to a typical Q drop.
Even more interesting, what follows in the book is a process of interpretation of the computer output markedly reminiscent to the 'baking' that QAnon followers constantly engage in to try to interpret the words of their dubious prophet. Impressive prescience for a book first published in 1988, when computers were barely culturally relevant.
The Occult in Video Games
There are obvious references to the occult in lots of games, especially in Japanese games, and games directly inspired by Japanese games. The most obvious is the character of Sephiroth in Final Fantasy 7, named after the Sefirot of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. Another famous character is Paimon in Genshin Impact, whose namesake is a spirit named in the Lesser Key of Solomon, whose "knowledge includes all arts and secret Things".
I want to talk a bit about Trails, a cult classic (or should I say, occult classic) series of JRPGs by Japanese developer Nihon Falcom. Incidentally, this series is a big inspiration to the team behind Genshin Impact and its relatives. I've been working through the Trails series at a slow and steady pace for a few years now, and at the time of writing I'm nearly finished Trails of Cold Steel III, confusingly the eighth game in the series. Whenever I get to the credits in one of these games I'm always shocked to be reminded how small of a development team made such a huge, fascinating experience. The programming teams, for example, usually consist of just one or two people, despite the games almost always being hundred-plus-hour monoliths. I would definitely recommend the series, but only if you're okay with an extreme slow-burn experience that takes a pretty big commitment to get through. Unlike Final Fantasy, the Trails games are all directly connected and form one massive story. It's the dream Tetsuya Takahashi had for the greater Xenogears story, actually achieved. Probably no coincidence that the art style of the first game, Trails in the Sky, has such a similar graphical style to Xenogears: the characters are 2D sprites in 3D environments, and you can turn the camera around those environments with the shoulder buttons.
The Trails series is set in a fictional world, on the continent of Zemuria, a name probably picked to evoke the fictional continent of Lemuria, proposed in occult circles to be the true origin of humanity. Zemuria is separated into several small countries which we can skip over here, as well as two larger ones. The first is Erebonia, which is supposed to evoke 1800s Germany, to the point that its chancellor, Giliath Osborne, is so direct a stand-in for Bismarck that he takes his old title of Blood and Iron Chancellor. The second of the larger countries is Calvard, which is similarly supposed to evoke 1800s France. The games spend a great deal of time discussing the evolving political relationship between Erebonia and Calvard. The series is deeply interested in politics in general. The overarching story of the games is, broadly, about efforts from across Zemuria to counter a secret society called Ouroboros, whose shadowy Grandmaster evokes the old grand masters of the Knights Templar.
Some observations:
- The prominent Ouroboros member Campanella is possibly named after Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), a heterodox theologian who spent decades in prison for heresy. Interestingly, his arrest followed an attempt to "establish a society based on the community of goods and wives" (there's that hilarious theme of nationalizing wives again).
- The Pantagruel, an exceptionally large airship, takes its name from The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a series of 16th-century French novels about a father-son pair of giants, which were considered heretical at the time of their publication.
- In much the same way that Foucault's Pendulum discusses the usurpation of the Plan by John Dee, One of Ouroboros' grand operations, the Phantasmal Blaze Plan, is usurped by Giliath Osborne.
- The games Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure focus on a cult which uses alchemy to make a drug called gnosis---evoking gnosticism---that can turn humans into demons. The drug is made of pleroma grass, which is named after the gnostic concept of pleroma, associated with spiritual completeness. The main character in Zero and Azure, Lloyd Bannings, rescues a little girl named KeA from the cult, whose name is possibly a shortening of the opposite gnostic concept of kenoma, associated with spiritual emptiness.
Xylitol
It's 1890. German chemist Emil Fischer has just taken a pile of beech chips and extracted a new compound, xylitol, from them. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol---it's sweet. In 1902 he wins the Nobel prize for this and other achievements, mostly related to the study of sugars. In the 1940s commercial interest develops in the use of artificial sweeteners, and xylitol starts being mass-produced. Finland runs low on sugar as a result of World War II, but the Finns realize they can make xylitol: the country is about 75% forest, and much of that is beech. Research on xylitol finds that it's an amazing sugar substitute, bordering on miraculous. It tastes similar to ordinary sugar, it's safe for diabetics, and it's even found to kill oral bacteria. But outside of Finland it never catches on.
Some say the reason xylitol doesn't take over the world is that it's just slightly more expensive to produce than Aspartame. Others will point out that the price of aspartame, a deadly carcinogen, perhaps even the anti-xylitol, is deliberately suppressed. Why? Consider its chemical structure, which evokes the major feature of the sigil of Valefor, Duke of Hell:
Is it any coincidence that Valefor is known to lead his familiars into acts of theft?
Well, yes, it is.
Sam Yusim,
Montreal.