Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum is a 1988 novel by Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco.

Sourced

• Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.
  • Casaubon, Binah, Chapter 7

• Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas — both false — can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.
  • Casaubon, Binah, Chapter 7

• There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
  • Jacopo Belbo in his first philosophizing with Casaubon, Binah, Chapter 10

• The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
  • Binah, Chapter 10

• "I've seen your files, Pow," Lia said to me, "because I have to keep them in order. Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a look." And she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet nurse, solid and healthy — she so slim and supple — with a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority. "Pow, archetypes don't exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason, the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth , too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there's a little man, a date, a baobab."
  • Lia's explanation to Casaubon, Gevurah, Chapter 63

• "Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."
  • Tiferet, Chapter 83

• And Belbo, now invincible, said, "Ma gavte la nata."
  • A captive Belbo, responding to Aglie's command to speak about the Plan, Hod, Chapter 113
  • Translation: "Unplug yourself."

• I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph. But I am here, and They are looking for me, thinking I possess the revelation They sordidly desire. It isn't enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to interrogate.
  • Casaubon in hiding from Them, Malkhut, Chapter 120

• It hurts me to think I won't see Lia again, and the baby, the Thing, Giulio, my philosopher's stone. But stones survive on their own. Maybe even now he is experiencing his Opportunity. He's found a ball, an ant, a blade of grass, and in it he sees paradise and the abyss. He, too, will know it too late.
  • Malkhut, Chapter 120

Unsourced

• We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or rather They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion. But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist. Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map. We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep private frustration. What frustration? Belbo's first file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.

• The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him.

• You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justified birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was- full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.

• You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.

• Wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else ...

• They remind me of Tom and Jerry.
  • Jacopo Belbo describing the Templars at the siege of Ascalon

• People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle.
  • Lia in conversation with Casaubon.

• "It’s all clear. Now follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to Byzantium, when various movements of Manichaean 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.

• "The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they have dealings with the infernal powers, and in fact some texts call them Borborites, from borbors, 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 in a mortar, mix in some honey and pepper, and gobble it up."

"How revolting, honey and pepper!" Diotavelli said.

Opening Quotations

• Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom. - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim
  • Dedication

• When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around. (original in Hebrew)
  • Keter, Chapter 1

• He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet. -Michael Maier
  • Hokhmah, Chapter 4

• Do not expect too much of the end of the world. - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
  • Binah, Chapter 7

• If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns. - Thomas Burnet
  • Binah, Chapter 18

• Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers but disappoints all and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty into fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers ... . - Johannes Trithemius
  • Gevurah. Chapter 58

• A map is not the territory. - Alfred Korzybski
  • Tiferet, Chapter 83
• The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place? - Karl Popper
  • Yesod, Chapter 118