Foucault’s Pendulum, novel by Umberto Eco. Photo: amazon.com Twenty years ago, still in school, with great interest—though not understanding much—on the recommendation of a teacher I read The Name of the Rose. At that time it seemed to me that the main problem in the novel was the opposition of dogma and heresy—the first slows down historical development, and the second moves it forward. In Foucault’s Pendulum, which, it must be admitted, is very hard to read because of the author’s hyperintellectual setup, everything is the opposite: heresies turn out to be the primary cause of superstitions that poison human life and consciousness. Despite the fact that Eco is an atheist, closer to the end of the novel his hero (and along with him, it seems, the writer himself) asks the question: Why not simply believe in Divine Revelation instead of constantly striving for occult knowledge? Foucault’s Pendulum is a real compendium of false teachings: here are the Templars, and Rosicrucians, and Kabbalah, and various kinds of hermeticism, occultism, alchemy; there is even a place for Kundalini yoga and Islamic mysticism of the Shiite kind.
The problem with so-called “secret knowledge,” according to Eco, is that people begin to believe in it and with their obsessed, blind faith give it life.
However, as Elena Kostyukovich (the translator of the novel into Russian) brilliantly noted in the preface to the Russian version, in the finale there arises a feeling that the author turns on the light in a dark room, where before that he frightened the reader with ghosts of various concepts. The problem with so-called “secret knowledge,” according to Eco, is that people begin to believe in it and with their obsessed, blind faith give it life. The striving of the proud mind to know that which is supposedly hidden from others—the temptation of gnosis, self-deification without God—throws the curious person straight into the clutches of demons. Eco demonstratively, step by step, shows how occultism destroys the human psyche, bringing its unfortunate adepts to conspiracy theories, persecution mania, and paranoia. The three heroes of Foucault’s Pendulum, at first somewhat skeptical toward “secret knowledge,” gradually begin to believe in it, along the way inventing a mad “theory of everything,” which destroys them.
Often researchers of Eco’s work draw parallels between Foucault’s Pendulum and his essay “Eternal Fascism”—and indeed, through the efforts of occultist-traditionalists like René Guénon and Julius Evola, both German Nazism and Italian fascism reveal their mystical underpinnings. Fascism, in Eco’s thought, is something cavernous, chthonic; it is the cult of so-called “spiritual Tradition,” in which, however, there is not a trace of the Abrahamic religions; it is a horrific brew of paganism, hermeticism, occultism, and various kinds of non-religious mysticism. It is important that the heroes of the novel first meet after 1968. Eco essentially demonstrates that the youth counterculture, which quite recently deified Marx and materialism, will soon fall into the swamp of the densest mysticism. We do not take into account the “old left”—they were and remain atheists and materialists, but the “new left,” after the failure of the social revolution, quickly begin to practice some kind of transcendental meditation or something like that, open bookstores of occult literature, and so on.
Umberto Eco, scholar, philosopher, writer Umberto Eco wrote his novel in the nineteen-eighties, when all sorts of “New Age” currents almost completely subordinated Western culture to themselves; religious ecumenism, cultural syncretism, eclectic rapprochement of the wildest and most contradictory mystical teachings became the underside of the postmodernist condition. And Eco understood this. The subversion of the metaphysical foundations of Western culture, carried out by post-structuralism, produced the opposite effect—deprived of spiritual foundations, which Christianity had given them for long millennia, people rushed to study “secret knowledge” in order to find ontological ground under their feet. However, no matter how difficult it sometimes is to read Foucault’s Pendulum precisely because of the abundance of schizophrenic concepts, in the finale Eco acts like a skilled magician exposing his craft. That which the heroes tried to make the trusting reader believe in does not actually exist.
In the author’s thought, conspiracy theories are the last metanarratives, the end of which postmodernism proclaimed; however, their multiplicity and eclecticism are the reason that man cannot live without the meaning of life; having lost faith in one, he seeks the support of life in other places. Yes, what is presented in the novel is parascience, and for such highbrow scholars as Eco, science is sufficient to expose his “double.” However, even the atheist and postmodernist Eco understands that the dominance of spiritual syncretism is to a large extent the fault of the antimetaphysical intentions of postmodernism. Thus, on the ashes of destroyed Christianity, fascism reappears as an alternative to postmodernism, as a call to return to Tradition. Eco shows what this “Tradition” is and how it destroys the human personality.
After Foucault’s Pendulum, it became clear to me why Christianity forbids reading occult literature: It is too great a temptation for the proud mind.
Foucault’s Pendulum is a great book, necessary for raising the degree of self-criticism among intellectuals, who usually imagine themselves smarter and higher than everyone. “Superstitions bring misfortunes”—so reads one of the epigraphs to the novel. In Eco’s thought, there is no main, final structure that explains everything. There is only a play of independent meanings, “signifiers without signified” (one of Eco’s scholarly works is called The Absent Structure). However, if for the “left” and atheists this is a consolation, for all the rest it is a challenge. And these “obsessed” (or “possessed,” in the novel they are called both ways) begin to seek truth in various spiritual filth. After Foucault’s Pendulum, it became clear to me why Christianity forbids reading occult literature: It is too great a temptation for the mind—a proud, uncontrollable mind striving for self-deification, revelation without God. Christianity warns that occultism in all its modifications (from medieval hermeticists and alchemists to Blavatsky and Evola) is spiritual filth that opens man’s reason to communion with eternal dark minds—demons.
Man’s immersion in occult books is not some mental adventure, as the heroes of the novel think, but a gradual immersion in psychic disorder (the long experience of many unfortunate people staying in various sects clearly demonstrates the psychic disorders of various adepts of “secret teachings”). Foucault’s Pendulum came out in time—in 1988, when in the USSR all sorts of psychics and magicians were operating at full speed; the same was true before the 1917 revolution, in the era of the Silver Age. When spiritual filth accumulates in such quantity, the social collapse of this or that culture is inevitable. Eco writes a book that was destined to become prophetic—quite soon readers all over the world would go crazy over The Da Vinci Code, and the crafty Arturo Pérez-Reverte would quickly produce intellectual detectives in the spirit of Eco, only without the philosophical underpinnings (thus his famous The Club Dumas would become a lightweight version of Foucault’s Pendulum).
Various kinds of occultism indulge the pride of the mind, leading man into communion with the abysses of hell.
Reading Eco’s second novel, sometimes you think that your head will explode; there is so much information, and it’s presented in a paranoid tone. However, the author, with the entire course of the narrative and the heroes’ reasonings, proves that any esotericism destroys man’s mind and personality, forcing him to believe in his own exceptionalism and chosenness, and therefore destroys his psyche. Christianity is democratic, exoteric; it hides nothing, helping man to know himself through communion with God, while various kinds of occultism indulge the pride of the mind, leading man into communion with the abysses of hell. It is enough to look at the windows in any newspaper kiosk, and we will see all sorts of magazines like, “Secrets of History,” “Divinations,” “Interpretations of Dreams,” and other rubbish. Multiply this by whole shelves with esotericism in bookstores—and we get a catastrophic picture.
I would like to be mistaken, but sometimes it seems that the majority of people do not need either science or religion; they want to feel that they are “not like everyone else,” they need something that flatters their mind and abilities for acquiring knowledge. Not all of them, but intellectuals, first of all, must necessarily read Foucault’s Pendulum in order to come to their senses a little, to sober up from esoteric narcotism. In the years when postmodernist culture has undermined the millennial metaphysical foundations of human existence and the temptation is so great to find an occult alternative for them, often multiplied by orientalist ravings, it is time to return to God, to His Revelation in Christ, and to become a partaker of His existence through grace, forever rejecting demonic gnosis; to cleanse oneself from spiritual filth that poisons the soul and body of unfortunate mankind in the post-secular, irrational epoch. Even though it was written by an atheist scholar, Eco’s book can help in this.
