Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

Whyelse would he have unleashed a persecution that discredited thefair flower of French chivalry? The Temple realized that the kingsuspected and that he would attempt its destruction. Directresistance was futile; the plan required time: either the treasure(or whatever it was) had to be found, or it had to be exploitedslowly. And the Temple's secret directorate, whose existenceeveryone now recognizes..."

"Everyone?"

"Of course. It'sinconceivable that such a powerful order could have survived solong without having a secret directorate."

"Your reasoning isflawless," Belbo said, giving me a sidelong glance.

The colonel went on."The grand master belonged to the secret directorate, but he musthave served only as its cover, to deceive outsiders. In LaChevalerie et les aspects secrets de I'histoire, Gaulthier Walthersays that the Templar plan for world conquest was to be finallyrealized only in the year 2000. The Temple decided to gounderground, and that meant that it had to look as if the orderwere dead. They sacrificed themselves, that's what they did! Thegrand master included. Some let themselves be killed; they wereprobably chosen by lot. Others submitted, blending into thecivilian landscape. What became of the minor officials, the laybrothers, the carpenters, the glaziers? That was how the Freemasonswere bom, later spreading throughout the world, as everyone knows.But hi England things happened differently. The king resisted thepope's pressure and pensioned the Templars off. They lived outtheir days meekly, in the order's great houses. Meekly¡Xdo youbelieve that? I don't. In Spain the order changed its name to theorder of Montesa. Gentlemen, these were men who could bring a kingto heel; they held so many of his promissory notes that they couldhave bankrupted him in a week. The king of Portugal, for instance,came to terms. Let us handle it like this, dear friends, he said:don't call yourselves Knights of the Temple anymore; change thename to Knights of Christ, and I'll be happy. In Germany there werevery few trials. The abolition of the order was purely formal, andin any case there was a brother order, the Teutonic Knights, who atthe time were not merely a state within the state: they were thestate, having acquired a territory as big as those countries nowunder the Russian heel, and they kept expanding until the end ofthe fifteenth century, when the Mongols arrived. But that's anotherstory, because the Mongols are at our gates even now. But I mustn'tdigress."

"Yes, let us notdigress," Belbo said.

"Well then. As everyoneknows, two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, and amonth before it was carried out, a hay wain drawn by oxen left theprecincts of the Temple for an unknown destination. Nostradamushimself alludes to it in one of his Centuries..." He looked throughhis manuscript for the quotation:

Souz la pastured'animaux ruminant

par eux conduits auventre herbipolique

soldats caches, lesarmes bruit menant....

"The hay wain is alegend," I said. "And I would hardly

consider Nostradamus anauthority in matters of historical fact."

"People older than you,Signer Casaubon, have had faith in many of Nostradamus'sprophecies. Not that I am so ingenuous as to take the story of thehay wain literally. It's a symbol¡Xa symbol of the obvious,established fact that Jacques de Molay, anticipating his arrest,turned over command of the order, as well as its secretinstructions, to a nephew, Comte de Beaujeu, who became the head ofthe now clandestine Temple."

"Are there documentsthat bear this out?"

"Official history," thecolonel said with a bitter smile, "is written by the victors.According to official history, men like me don't exist. No, behindthe story of the hay wain lies something else. The Temple's secretnucleus moved to a quiet spot, and from there they began to extendtheir underground network. This obvious fact was my starting point.For years¡Xeven before the war¡XI kept asking myself where thesebrothers in heroism might have gone. When I retired to privatelife, I finally decided to look for a trail. Since the flight ofthe hay wain had occurred in France, France was where I should findthe original gathering of the secret nucleus. But where inFrance?"

He had a sense oftheater. Belbo and I were all ears. We could find nothing better tosay than "Well, where?"

"I'll tell you. Wherewould the Templars have hidden? Where did Hugues de Payns comefrom? Champagne, nearTroyes. And at the time the Templars werefounded, Champagne was ruled by Hugues de Champagne, who joinedthem in Jerusalem just a few years later. When he came back home,he apparently got in touch with the abbot of Citeaux and helped himinitiate the study and translation of certain Hebrew texts in hismonastery. Think about it: the White Benedictines¡XSaint Bernard'sBenedictines¡Xalso invited the rabbis of upper Burgundy to come toCiteaux, to study whatever texts Hugues had found in Palestine.Hugues even gave Saint Bernard's monks a forest at Bar-sur-Aube,where Clairvaux was later built. And what did Saint Bernarddo?"

"He became the championof the Templars," I said.

"But why? Did you knowhe made the Templars even more powerful than the Benedictines? Thathe prohibited the Benedictines from receiving gifts of lands andhouses, and had them give lands and houses to the Templars instead?Have you ever seen the Foret d'Orient near Troyes? It's immense,one com-mandery after the other. And in the meantime, you know, theknights in Palestine weren't fighting. They were settled in theTemple, making friends with the Moslems instead of killing them.They communicated with Moslem mystics. In other words, SaintBernard, with the economic support of the counts of Champagne,built an order in the Holy Land that was in contact with Arab andJewish secret sects. An unknown directorate ran the Crusades in aneffort to keep the order going, and not the other way around. Andit set up a network of power that was outside royal jurisdiction. Iam a man of action, not a man of science. Instead of spinning emptyconjectures, I did what all the long-winded scholars have neverdone: I went to the place the Templars came from, the place thathad been their base for two centuries, their home, where they couldlive like fish in water..."

"Chairman Mao says thatrevolutionaries must live among the people like fish in water," Isaid.

"Good for your chairman.But the Templars were preparing a revolution far greater than therevolution of your pigtailed communists."

"They don't wearpigtails anymore."

"No? Well, so much theworse for