Foucault's Pendulum

Next week, the season finale, Umberto Eco, the man who mapped the space after the binding breaks from the inside.

Foucault's Pendulum.

A computer named Abulafia generates meaning from combinatorics.

The plan becomes real.

This episode will be all about the Knight Templars.

I was reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and I kept wondering why this obsession with the Knights Templars within occultist communities.

So I'm I'm going to lay it all out for you.

I just did a massive research on that, on the history of the Knights Templars, what we actually know, what is a bit uncertain from a historical point of view, and how the Knights Templars started to become... embedded into the esoteric milieu so follow along the episode and grab a snack and a drink because this one is long but there's so much to say but before we dive deep into the topic I'd like to remind you that this project, Angela's Symposium, only exists thanks to your support.

Secrecy stops explaining a small gap and becomes the mechanism that generates the entire genealogy.

Another related reason is the mythology is that the mythology can become self-protecting.

Umberto Eco satirized this combinatorial logic in Foucault's pendulum.

One's resemblance can count as connection and documentary absence can count as concealment.

He died sort of of old age in 1975, and he was the ruler of Spain that entire time.

So it's a really interesting contrast because we are, you know, like in counterfactual history, right? There's all these novels about if Germany had won the war, what would have happened? But we actually almost have an example of an authoritarian regime in Europe that survived for almost 40 years.

And I think It has a huge impact on Spain and how Spanish people see the world and art.

And in the 1970s, he was starting to decline and losing his grip a little bit.

These days, if you know about the Templars, you probably know about them not from like a history or a horror genre angle, but from like a conspiracy or a cult angle.

Yeah.

I could not think of any like straight horror movies besides these, this one and its sequels that really drew on the Templars where you do find them like starting back in like the 1700s, different like societies and occult groups started like claiming lineage going back to the Templars like you had the Freemasons by the time you get like I don't know you're like Order of the Golden Dawns and Crowley and Blavatsky and stuff like that the Templars are ensconced in a lot of like occult Right occult traditions if you hear people talking about like the Illuminati the odds are very high that they're also gonna mention the Templars and so these days you will find Templars mentioned mostly in stuff that's in like pop culture that talks about like kind of centuries-old conspiracies so like Dan Brown novels and Yeah.

Do you have any guesses here, John? Do you know where in like around the year 1990 I would have first encountered the Templars in my reading? Oh, it would have been in an Indiana Jones movie? Oh, actually, no.

As compelling and effective as it is, there is little doubt that this narrative contributed to the myth surrounding the protocols and to their success.

Not only the scientific literature has accepted Du Chaillat's story, but also Umberto Eco in his novels Foucault's Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery, and American cartoonist Will Eisner took Du Chaillat's story as the basis for his graphic novel about the Protocols.

We see here the Russian secret agents in Paris as they, according to Dusheller, prepare the forgery of the protocols.

And this is how Eisner imagines Sergei Nilos, the image.