Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum: the Plan and the conspiracy fever
Templars, Rosicrucians and the mysterious Plan: Umberto Eco's 1988 novel as a satire of obsessive interpretation and vanity occult publishing.
In 1988, eight years after the success of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco published his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum. The title refers to the instrument with which the physicist Léon Foucault demonstrated the rotation of the Earth in 1851, now on display in the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris. It is there, on a June night, that the story opens and closes, built as an enormous game around the myths of occultism.
Three editors and a dangerous game
The protagonists are three Milanese editors: the narrator Casaubon, a scholar of the Templars, Jacopo Belbo and Diotallevi, a lover of Kabbalah. They work for the Garamond publishing house, which also owns a vanity imprint, Manuzio, where naive authors publish at their own expense books on mysteries, sects and secrets. Reading those manuscripts, the three decide for fun to invent a universal conspiracy capable of linking everything.
Thus the Plan is born. Starting from a supposed Templar message found in Provins, the editors weave together Templars, Rosicrucians, Jesuits, Freemasons, Kabbalah, the Grail and the telluric currents of the Earth, also using a computer program they call Abulafia, after the medieval Kabbalist. Every coincidence becomes a proof, every gap a clue to be filled.
When invention becomes reality
The game gets out of hand. Some characters who truly believe in secret societies learn of the Plan and become convinced that the three know the secret of power over the world. Their faith turns fiction into persecution: Belbo is captured and, during a nocturnal ceremony in the Paris museum, dies hanged from the wire of the pendulum.
Eco describes the language of modern occultism with precision and irony, knowing it well as a semiotician and collector of antiquarian books. The novel is divided into ten parts named after the sefirot of the Kabbalah, from Keter to Malkut, and every chapter opens with an epigraph taken from esoteric, philosophical or literary texts.
A satire of interpretation
Foucault's Pendulum is not a novel against esotericism as a historical tradition, but against a certain way of reading signs. Eco stages the suspicion that a secret design hides behind every event, and shows how this mentality can become dangerous. Two years later, in the essay The Limits of Interpretation, he would discuss the same problem in theoretical form.
In the final part Casaubon reflects on Belbo and on the meaning of their adventure. The most important discovery is not a secret to be guarded, but the realisation that the need to believe in a mystery can drive people to build one from nothing and defend it stubbornly, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Translated into dozens of languages, the novel has become a reference point for anyone studying conspiracy culture. It also preceded by many years the fashion for esoteric thrillers mixing Templars and the Grail. Compared with those books, however, Eco offers the reader a vast, genuine erudition and, at the same time, the tools to defend themselves against its seductions.