Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us--and rightly--that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.  We consoled ourselves with the realization--unspoke, now, respecting the etiquette of irony--that we were parodying the logic of our Diabolicals.  But during the long intervals in which each of us collected evidence to produce at the plenary meetings, and with the clear conscience of those who accumulate material for a medley of burlesques, our brains grew accustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything with everything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit.  I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

As a teacher, I get to hear about the Illuminati a lot.  Teenagers gravitate toward the idea of an all-powerful cabal of sinister folks, perhaps because they rarely find that they are able to exert control over their own lives, and it's easier to think that someone, somewhere is in charge.  But the truth is it's probably not a teenager thing; after all, you only have to spend a few minutes on Twitter to find folks who believe that an anonymous official called Q is leaving a trail of crumbs to a massive conspiracy to perpetuate child abuse at the highest levels of government, and the counter-conspiracy working to take it down.  That, too, is probably a response to a lack of agency, to the need to believe someone is really in charge.

Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum is about that mindset, which has survived for thousands of years.  Eco places its origins in conspiracy theories surrounding the Knights Templar, a group of medieval crusaders who were forced to disband by a French king, and who some believe only disappeared underground.  The novel's protagonist, Casaubon, is an academic studying the Templars.  Eco's choice of name is pointed; like the Middlemarch reverend, this Casaubon is going to devote his life to a massive tome that connects all knowledge into a master theory.  With his associates Belbo and Diotallevi, who work at a vanity press, he composes a "Plan" which explains the links between the Templars and their later analogues: Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, Satanist, cabalists, Assassins, Mormons, Hitler.  They use the newfound power of computing to help them find unseen connections.  It's all in fun, for them, a way of mocking the kind of people who engage in such beliefs, and for whom nothing can ever be disproven because contradictory information is just a testament to how dangerous and hidden the knowledge really is.

The Plan says, in a nutshell, that the Templars knew of a secret power source related to the earth's magnetic field that could give those who wield it control over the entire earth.  They hid the information until it could be researched and harnessed properly, arranging over the course of nearly a thousand years to pass the knowledge to secret groups in several countries.  Somewhere along the way, the "handoff" was botched, leading to centuries of agitation and rivalry between neo-Templar groups.  But the actual nature of the Plan doesn't matter.  What does matter is that, while creating the Plan for laughs, the trio find themselves blurring the line between belief and disbelief, committing to the fantasy in ways they did not anticipate.  And then, when Belbo disappears, it seems that the Plan itself has come to life, or at least, those who genuinely believe in Templarite conspiracies have found them out and are hellbent on finding out what they know, even to the point of death.

All that drama happens in the last fifty pages of a 500-page book.  Most of the novel, although interspersed with convincing scenes of character history and drama (at one point, Casaubon moves to Brazil?) is devoted to the creation of the Plan, and even that doesn't really get named and explained until several hundred pages in.  What's impressive about the novel is that Eco doesn't make anything up that Casaubon doesn't also; the scraps of conspiracy theory and historical writings he uses to concoct the plan are all taken from historical sources.  The plot is secondary to Eco's attempt to create the conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories, one which bridges thousands of years and hundreds upon hundreds of sources.  And while it doesn't make for gripping reading, exactly, it's breathtaking, and it makes Dan Brown look like a child scribbling on a placemat maze.

Casaubon's search for the missing Belbo leads him to the Foucault Pendulum at a Paris museum, a giant pendulum which, by its rotations, proves the rotation of the earth.  The pendulum rotates because, unlike the moving earth, it is hung from a truly fixed point, as immovable and fundamental as the name of God searched for by cabalists.  But even this is a kind of cheat:

"You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet.  You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos, but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same.  And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others.  Wherever you put it, the Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it.  Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it."

"It promises the infinite," they go onto say, "but where to put the infinite is left to me."  What matters to Eco in Foucault's Pendulum is not the fixed point, but the need to fix a point at all, and the psychology that goes into choosing where to put it.