If you find these annotations useful, please consider purchasing one of the books I wrote, or buying me a coffee (tea, most likely).

Chapter 50

p. 297
•epigraph: Nag Hammadi is an Egyptian city near which a collection of ancient gnostic texts were discovered in 1945. This epigraph comes from “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” See also p. 41n for biblical parallels.

•Composition 15, Parallax 17, Euclid X: The changing titles Riccardo gives to his paintings offer if not a history of avant-garde art in the latter half of the twentieth century, at least Eco’s satirical impression of it. These titles are similar to several by Piet Mondrian, which puts Riccardo several decades behind the times.

•squats: Unofficially or illegally occupied buildings. Associated with the left on p. 315.

•Ce n’est qu’un debut: Fr., This is only the beginning. A catchphrase of the (quasi-revolutionary) French protests of May, 1968. The next few titles will be politically engaged, left-coded, and at least quasi-revolutionary.

•Molotov: Both the long-lived and unrepentantly Stalinist Soviet politician—and the eponymous improvised weapon favored by street-fighting types.

•A Hundred Flowers: “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Chairman Mao said in 1956, signaling that differing viewpoints were now permissible and people could freely criticize the Party. Of course a year later the blooming flowers were culled.

p. 298
•In Praise of Ambiguity: Perh. a reference to Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)?

•A/Travers: A travers is Fr. for “through,” here leaning into a post-structuralist love of dividing words with slashes or parentheses.

•Ça: Fr., that.

•Denegation 15: Cf. Riccardo’s Composition 15, above.

•Megale Apophasis: The Great Declaration, a sacred text of the gnostic Simonians attributed to Simon Magus (Act 8: 9ff). From here on, Riccardo will be hermetic.

•quotations: Note that Riccardo is here postmodern in the specific way Eco lays out in Postscript to The Name of the Rose.

•pompiers: “Art pompier (literally ‘fireman art’) and style pompier are derisive late-19th century French terms for large ‘official’ academic art paintings of the time, especially historical or allegorical ones” (Wikipedia).

•Symbolists: Symbolism (in art as in literature) was mystical, dreamlike, decadent, and anti-realistic. Contemporary with but directly opposite to art pompier.

•Paradise of Doré: see p. 254n

•Beatrix: The Latin form of Beatrice, Dante’s muse.

•Mystica Rosa: Mary (see p. 203), but perh. here also the vast rose of divine love revealed in canto 30 of the Paradiso.

•Dante Gabriels 33: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a pre-Raphaelite (and proto-Symbolist) painter, is clearly being referred to here (although Dante Alighieri, from above, and Gabriel the angel also obtain). Is the 33 just another of Riccardo’s numbered series (Denegation 15 etc.) or is the number important? Each book of the Divine Comedy has 33 cantos.

•Fedeli d’Amore: See p. 146. Four of the listed paintings refer in some way to Dante.

•Atanor: Another term for an athanor, an alchemical furnace last referenced (as athanor) on p. 14.

•Homunculus 666: 666 is obv. the number of the Beast; for homunculus see p. 347 etc.

•Sophia: see p. 15

•Guernica: Picasso’s 1937 painting depicting the fascist bombing of the eponymous town in Spain. What creature, though?

•Mondrian: See p. 297n. The joke is that whatever Mondrian is, he is not a “realist of the old school.”

•sitar music: As was popular some time before the book takes place, ca. Sgt. Pepper’s (1967).

p. 299
•pavé: A Brazilian desert reminiscent of a tiramisu.

•circular movement: Always cycles.

•bees hunting for a hidden flower: Proust again. See p. 230.

•Simon: I.e. Simon Magus from p. 298n.

p. 300
•put a beard on him: Return of the beard as disguise theme. See p. 79n.

•Ennoia: see p. 41

•Demiurge: see p. 14n

p. 301
•prostitute: Returning to the epigraph.

•Helen of Tyre: Traditional companion of Simon Magus. Longfellow writes

He [sc. Simon Magus] says: “From this evil fame,
From this life of sorrow and shame,
I will lift thee and make thee mine;
Thou hast been Queen Candace,
And Helen of Troy, and shalt be
The Intelligence Divine!”

•“bonfires along the highway for truck drivers”: This is just curious. I don’t understand.

•Guillaume Postel: Sixteenth-century French polymath and kabbalist. Cf. Vivian Postel du Mas (another real person, doubtless unrelated and four-hundred years later but sharing a name) on p. 315.

•a letter carrier: We await silent Tristero’s empire.

•Superman: Another comics reference. And Superman handily picks up the Jewish reference from the previous line…

p. 302
•“I love you”: And yet, as Byron writes (Don Juan VI): “And I love Wisdom [i.e. Sophia] more than she loves me.” See also p. 343, epigraph.

p. 303
•Allumeuse: Fr., a tease or a flirt.

•beyond good and evil: An obvious Nietzsche reference.

•perpetrate all sins: As some heretical sects, such as the Historioni in Borges’s “The Theologians” (1949), were said to attempt.

•“I am the saint and the prostitute”: An even more explicit reference to the epigraph.

p. 304
•cock-a-doodle-doo: Either an evocation of madness or a reference to cuckoldry—both the homophonous pun and the fact that a cuckold (at least in the German tradition) was called, and imagined as, a “rooster rider” (Hahnreiter).

Chapter 51

p. 305
•epigraph: The title translates as: Theatre of Various and Diverse Worldly Minds. Garzoni wrote (although perh. not in the quoted book; I’ve never read it) against and in refutation of Agrippa, the guy who provided the epigraph to the whole of FP (q.v.).

•Deutsches Museum: “The world’s largest museum of science and technology” (Wikipedia).

p. 306

•Marlowe of culture: Once again I proffer the question: Philip or Kit?

•bowels of the earth: Always subterranean.

•cellars: More subterraneanity. Surely a suggestion of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

•crèches: A crèche is on the one hand nativity scenes (suggesting a subterranean display, which might indeed call for (“ox and lamb”) stuffed animals; it is on the other hand a daycare center, which would, perforce, require another kind of stuffed animal. Perhaps giving children taxidermied specimens to play with sounds outre, but we’re already underground.

•“in the light of the sun or the moon”: I have not really been keeping track well, but I do think something could be done with the various kinds of light in FP: solar, lunar, crepuscular.

•“I’m suspicious of everything underground”: Well there you have it.

•sewers of Paris: see pp. 8 & 350

p. 307
•mouth of the underworld: Avernus, Roman entrance to Hades, was famous for emitting such fumes that birds flying overhead fell dead.

•journey to the center of the earth: Obv. subterranean, but even more obv. a Jules Verne reference, so see below.

•Master of the World: Master of the World, like Journey to the Center of the Earth, is the title of a Jules Verne novel.

•Saint-Yves d’Alveydre: see p. 309, right below

p. 309
•epigraph: As will be revealed shortly, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was a French writer who visited Agarttha (see p. 4) in the hollow earth. “He wrote about this secret location in his Mission de l’Inde en Europe [India’s Mission in Europe] published in 1886. Worried he had revealed too much and apparently under the influence of his oriental contacts, he destroyed all but two copies of this book. One of which was owned by Gérard Encausse alias Papus [see p. 209], who edited and published it in 1910” (Wikipedia).

•Fabre d’Olivet: Antoine Fabre d’Olivet was a (French) revolutionary and also another hermeticist—but I want to pause on him here in light of Mission de l’Inde en Europe, because Fabre d’Olivet was born in Ganges (the French commune, not the Indian river, but still).

•humble clerk: I underlined these words and wrote next to them “Manutius” but I no longer remember what I meant. Can anyone help me here?

•Ministry of the Interior: Get it? Like Agarttha?

p. 310
•mésalliance: I.e. she married beneath her station.

•enharmonic spectrum…diatonic: Agliè has borrowed terms from (esp. ancient Greek) musicology: enharmonic and diatonic are two kinds of scales—the enharmonic scale has smaller intervals between notes than the more familiar diatonic scale. Somewhat oddly, the third kind of scale, chromatic, is the most directly related to the spectrum of visible light—but it goes unremarked upon here. Too exoteric, I guess.

•solar spectrum: But yeah, what I was saying on p. 306 about the different kinds of light…

•cyclic currents: Aways cyclic!

•interpolar and intertropical fluids: On p. 257 I made fun of the word fluids, but I guess it’s all here. Note that you can’t spell interpolar without Interpol.

Chapter 53

p. 312
•epigraph: J. M. Hoene-Wronski is the Józef Wroński from p. 258.

•wispy beard: Beard as disguise.

p. 313
•Eschenbach: Author of Parzival; see p. 141. I don’t remember this detail about going to India, but it’s been a long time since I read the poem.

p. 314
•a short circuit in the brain: De Angelis’s makes connections like Abulafia, and his description cannot help employing a computer metaphor.

p. 315
•“everything is connected”: I.e. tout se tient. See pp. 179, 289, & esp. 618.

•philosopheme: “A philosophcal formulation or principle: proposition” (MW).

•squats: see p. 297

•Action Française: Long lived far-right nationalist French group.

•Vivian Postel du Mas: Note the repeated Postel from p. 301.

•Jeanne Canudo: More commonly known as Valentine de Saint-Point, French Futurist.

•Fabian: The Fabian Society, a peaceful British socialist organization dedicated to amending society gradually, and not through revolution (a Fabian strategy, so-called). H.G. Wells & G.B. Shaw were not only members but kind of just emblematic of the vibe.

•Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes: Obv. this is the International Review of Secret Societies, an early C20 French journal, “rabidly anti-Semitic, biased, hateful and credulous to a degree that is hard to believe” (IAPSOP).

•La Sapinière: A.k.a. Sodalitium Pianum. Pope Pius X’s secret goon squad (1907–1914). Pope (avant la lettre) John XXIII was a member.

•cénacle: Fr., inner circle. More discussion on p. 360n.

p. 316
•”So it seems also to me, O Socrates”: Echoing Plato’s Socratic dialogues, passim.

• “I don’t know what Martinist means”: It really is confusing! See p279n.

•Front Populaire: A big-tent alliance of left-wing French groups, banded together against fascism.

•La Cagoule: Violent French right-wing group. We are scarcely out of conventional exoteric history here.

•Du Mas: I.e. Vivian Postel du Mas from the previous page, but note that the capitalization has changed. (Also Eco often cites the other guy named Dumas (3 Musketeers etc.…)

•Synarchie, panorama de 25 années d’activité occulte: Synarchy, an Overview of 25 Years of occult Activity.

p. 317
•Pétainist: Marshal Philippe Pétain was head of the Vichy French (i.e. collaborationist) government.

•Le 14e complot du 13 mai: The 14th Plot of May 13th.

•“As the man said”: The man, in this situation, is H.L. Mencken.

•“if, on a train, I find a bomb”: see p. 556

p. 318
•Tres: Its origin, in De Angelis’s obiter dicta. Tres is o.c. Spanish for 3, and homophonous with “trace”; a word that leaves but a trace?

Chapter 54

p. 320
•epigraph: For the record, Edgar is acting mad when he says this.

•“a gentleman of the old school”: So to speak.

•Turin: see p. 260n

•“a whole world to be discovered”: Cf. p. 202: “…it had hardly been worth crossing the Atlantic to discover a new world.”

p. 321

•glissons, à la guerre comme à la guerre: Fr., Let’s move on. In war you take it as it goes. Not the last time Garamond will say this (see p. 348).

Chapter 55

p. 323
•epigraph: For Fludd, see pp. 197, etc. For theaters, see pp. 282 etc.

•Adelino Canepa: see pp. 292ff.

•both visible and concealed: An unusual detail to spot at a glance. But o.c. thematic.

p. 324
•Georgic: As in relating to the Virgilian Georgics; rural/agricultural.

•wily Turk: A stock phrase, and perhaps a reference (“the first move”) to the Mechanical Turk, a (fraudulent) C18–19 chess-playing robot.

•Salesian: A Catholic “religious congregation”; perhaps not strictly a fraternal organization (like the Masons) but the next best thing.

p. 325
•the dream: see pp. 60–61

•bombardon: A bass tuba.

•“the partisans…occupied the town”: This statement seems to contradict one later in the same paragraph that “The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town.” My assumption (from the broader context) is that the partisans occupied the fields of the plain, and the quoted passage is simply an error.

•Franchi brigade: The Organizzazione Franchi; monarchist, liberal, anti-communist, and o.c. anti-fascist.

p. 326
•“what a memory!”: A strange thing, I think, to say to the narrator. A few documents aside, Casaubon’s memory is all the reader has. And perhaps Casaubon has learned a few of Agliè’s theater of memory tricks (p. 283).

•Black Brigade: Fascist paramilitary organization.

p. 327
•red or black: A Stendhal reference.

•“A corpse was a corpse…”: And now a Gertrude Stein reference.

•Combray: A village, the setting of (part of) Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; the first part of the first volume of which is titled “Combray,” and it ends with the famous madeleine episode.

•John Wayne: Note how the cowboy theme is undercut on the next page. Should probably be viewed as a reference to Jacobean drama, as Wayne’s signature director, John Ford, shares a name with the old (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore) dramatist. Or is that too much?

p. 328
•Hellzapoppin: An absurdist 1941 comedy film (and earlier stage musical, although clearly the film is meant here).

Chapter 56

p. 329
•epigraph: This appears to continue directly from the epigraph to Chapter 9 (p. 59).

•Spiritalia of Heron: Here’s Hero of Alexandria from p. 14 again, the book his Spiritalia seu Pneumatica (the title just means Pneumatics or Pneumatics, the two linked synonyms just representing Latin and (Latinized) Greek). Here’s a sixteenth-century engraving from the book, this one from an Italian translation (Spiritali di Herone Alessandrino).

•Tycho Brahe: Just an old Danish astronomer; just a joke. Tycho’s most famous feature is his missing nose, and here Casaubon “knows not” the correct name of Belbo’s teacher. Cf., though, “what a memory!” from p. 326. Is Casaubon just having us on?

•Domenico Savio: Student of Bosco’s (below); died Æ14 in 1857 and later canonized.

•Don Bosco: John Bosco, C19 priest and teacher; also canonized.

•embouchure: Honestly, embouchure—the positioning of the mouth when playing an instrument—does not usually refer to a callus.

•“not to puff out your cheeks”: Louis Armstrong (from two sentences earlier) is o.c. famous for doing just this (though not as much as Dizzy Gillespie, or perh., as Eco says, cartoon characters).

p. 330
•Ornette Coleman: Free-jazz saxophonist, and—there’s a lot to hate about saxophones, but this seems a strange place to draw the line.

p. 331
•“I believe all sin, love, glory are this…”: Eco’s (and Belbo’s) most beautiful passage.

•“perpetuation of the vile species”: Cf. Borges, “Tlön”: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they both multiply the numbers of men” (and see p. 13n).

•warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious: A litany of biblical (and extra-biblical) trumpet associations, leaning most perh. on Joshua 6:5b (“and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat”) and the various verses on “the last trump” (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:52).

•Oscar Levant…Gene Kelly: Oscar Levant was frequently Gene Kelly’s pianist, although not on Broadway. Perh. a reference to the scene in Kelly’s American in Paris in which Levant imagines himself playing “Concerto in F” on Broadway?

•Salgari: Emilio Salgari, turn-of-the-century writer of pulpy adventure stories. See p. 357.

•“Sitting Bull eats General Custer’s heart”: Not actually a historical fact, although one of Sitting Bull’s allies (Rain-in-the-Face) did threaten to eat Custer’s brother’s heart. Apparently he did not get to.

•“they stole comic books”: Infamy!!!!

p. 332
•I quite clearly wrote “rtvadlk” at the top of this page. Any ideas on what I meant?

•“my little listeners”: Even when Belbo is speaking he cannot help but slip into kitsch.

•They Had to See Paris: A 1929 talkie comedy film. I don’t know if they’re putting on a dramatization of it or just showing an old movie?

•“Good Start”: I wish I had a better grip on whether this is a performance or just an intro to a film.

p. 333
•imagining absurd machines: Perh. a suggestion that the invented Plot is, in fact, not original?

• “only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented”: Cf. (perh. not for the last time) Eco’s own Open Work: “…everything in the world is already implied by everything else, from the beginning of time, in the same way that it now appears that every discovery has already been made by the Chinese.”

•as the poet says: The poet is Baudelaire, the poem “Hymne à la Beauté / Hymn to Beauty.” English translations tend to make the mayfly a moth, but in the original it’s “l’éphémère” (with a pun on mayfly / ephemera, a pun available in Italian as well. Google translate gives the poem as:

The dazzled mayfly flies toward you, candle,
Crackles, flares up, and says: Let us bless this flame!

Chapter 57

p. 335
•epigraph: This is the third epigraph from The Chemical Wedding (and will not be the last); it is the only one not about a trumpet. A virgin dressed in blue always suggests the Virgin Mary.

•”Like Darién, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries”: Darien would be from whence Balboa “star’d at the Pacific.” Keats, who famously misidentified Balboa as Cortez, calls the observer “silent upon a peak in Darien,” so by “verbalizing” the sight, Diotallevi ruins the moment.

p. 336
•third gear: Presumably not a metaphor; presumably just because they’re going uphill.

•Mercedes: On p. 284, Agliè says that the Oedipus Aegyptiacus “costs less than a Mercedes.” To me, Mercedes will always suggest the Count of Monte Cristo’s ex-girlfriend, but perh. that is not relevant here.

•Eleusinian: Spelled “Eleusian” on p. 275.

•fumes: Always fumes and odors.

•“dream that you are dreaming”: Cf. Poe: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.”

p. 337
•Salomon de Caus: Architect and engineer, he will appear again on pp. 401 & (subterraneanly) 460 (as well as pp. 338 & 350). I can find no evidence that he was himself a Rosicrucian, but certainly people (both inside and outside FP) have later attributed Rosicrucian motives to him. Note that he is sometimes called Caus, reminiscent, perh. of Casaubon.

•the great Rosicrucian century: C17.

•rocaille: “Rocaille was a French style of elaborate design that appeared in furniture and interior decoration during the early reign of Louis XV. A reaction against the heaviness and formality of the Louis XIV style, it featured an abundance of curves, counter-curves, undulations, and elements modeled on nature” (Wikipedia). Note that rocaille comes around a century after de Caus’s death.

•Atalanta Fugiens: Source of the epigraph of Chapter 4, p. 28 (q.v.).

•coral: Coral horns, the good luck charms, appear on pp. 163 & 177. If Maier had written seashells instead of coral, this would have anticipated Lia’s Chapter 63 speech (see pp. 201 & 362ff).

•“we can no longer read it”: Much like (for much of history) “the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians” (mentioned immediately above).

p. 338
•some small structures: These descriptions recall the edifices described in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), although I haven’t been able to find any actual correspondences.

•Picinelli: Filippo Picinelli, C16 Italian author of Il Mondo simbolico, an encyclopedia of emblems, or as we might say (Eco the semiotician) signs. The book takes images and describes, with attestations, their various symbolic importances. IMs was translated into Latin as Mundus Symbollicus.

•Alciati: Nickname of Andrea Alciato, C16 Italian humanist and author of the Emblemata, a completely different kind of emblem book. Alciati’s is a book of epigrammatic Latin poetry, and was later reprinted with emblematic illustrations accompanying each poem. Alciati dies only three years before the appearance of Il Mondo simbolico.

•sublunar: see p. 3n

•ruling the universe: Just as the earth is ruled from its center (Agarttha) so the universe is ruled from its center (Earth—at least Ptolemaically).

•“naiad…embracing a bull with the scaly tail”: Perh. the image actually depicts Europa and Zeus, his bull-form given a fishy tail in, e.g., this mosaic.

•“some great biblical fish”: Jonah 1:17a: “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”

p. 339
•Nequaquam vacui: Usu. rendereed (e.g. on p. 193, q.v.) nequaquam vacuum. Is Agilè confusing the common phrase nequaquam vacuum with the common phrase horror vacui (horror of a vacuum)? Or is this a legitimate use of the genitive case?

•post hoc ergo ante hoc: Here made manifest is a concept we have encountered time and time again. An important concept for Eco—see his Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1990).

•facies hermetica: see p. 267

•“What counts, remember, is to possess a secret”: Agliè’s mantra.

p. 340
•Quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, et quod semper: The so-called Vincentian canon, a threefold test of canonical Catholic belief, formulated C5 by St. Vincent of Lérins. One must believe what has been believed (as the Latin says) “everywhere, by everyone, and always.” Here the canon is being used somewhat contrary to its intended use (of establishing dogma).

•“a girl wrapped in a blue garment spangled with golden stars. In her hand she held a trumpet”: Note the connection to various previous quotations from Andreae on pp. 329 & 335.

•wings…eye: Wings with eyes are a feature of esp. Byzantine angels.

•“more things in heaven and earth”: Garamond is quoting his own imprint, Project Hemes, ellipsis and all; see p. 265.

•CONDOLEO ET CONGRATULATOR: Lat., condolences and congratulations. Another reference to The Chemical Wedding. In a passage somewhat anticipating Kafka’s “Before the Law” (1915), the narrator spies a gate with “two columns on one of which stood a pleasant figure with this inscription, Congratulor. The other having its countenance veiled was sad, and beneath was written, Condoleo.” Jung famously cites this passage in his Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955).

•“through the curtain”: Should I have made a bigger deal of this before? Perceiving things despite the barrier of a curtain suggests a host of allusions, including the rending of the temple curtain (Matthew 27:51 etc.) and the exposure of the Wizard of Oz.

p. 341
•bilocation: Pythagoras (q.v.) is perh. the most famous (and first? practitioner of this technique.

•yogis: Yoga practitioner. The gravity of the term yogi has been somewhat subverted by more modern allusions.

•vegetable essences: Cf. the “ vegetable lethargy” of the soulless homunculi (p. 346).

•telluric form: Although telluric forces run through FP almost from the beginning (pp. 11ff), this is the first time it is linked to teleportation.

•musée Grévin: Parisian wax museum. An Anglophone writer would have used Madame Tussauds.

•tenda de umbanda: see p. 176

•Lenci felt: “Lenci dolls are wool felt dolls that feature heat-pressed wool faces with painted features. They typically have intricately made wool and organdy clothing, adorned with elaborate felt flowers, hats, and/or accoutrements. They are at the top end of the luxury goods market. Today they are considered highly prized collectibles” (Wikipedia).

•Gabrieli: Giovanni Gabrieli, renaissance Italian composer.

•Black Madonna: See p. 145 in general, but perh. esp. La Morenata, the Virgin of Montserrat, a sacred Catalonian statue.

p. 342
•Hamlet: Hamlet, o.c., has been quoted as recently as p. 340.

•Madame Bovary: For the reality of Emma Bovary, recall Flaubert’s quip, “Madame Bovary, c’es moi,” and Woody Allen’s 1977 short story “The Kugelmass Episode” (pdf).

•epiphanies: Lit. appearances or manifestations.

•Golden Calf: Aaron’s heretical idol in the desert (Exodus 32:4).

Chapter 58

p. 343
•epigraph: Trithemius last appeared on p. 133–34. His text describes allegorically Belbo’s relationship with Lorenza.

•“that had first struck me as cheap”: High and low, art and kitsch, are again confused (as, e.g., in FP’s dabbling in genre conventions).

•subaqueous: For once not subterranean!

•“the floor reflected the ceiling”: As above, so below, as Hermes Trismegistus (see p. 14) would say.

•Indian incense: More vapors!

•“two reptiles…a single circle”: For reptiles biting their tails see p. 195. In alchemy, the canonical chemical wedding is the marriage of sulfur (red) and mercury (usu. white but due to its associations with water also possibly blue)—so here that conjunction of opposites is represented visually (as was the custom in alchemical texts). Cf. the dueling dragons in the Prophecies of Merlin (Prophetiæ Merlini) by Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1135), in which the dragons were colored a more conventional red and white—but there the gloss on their meaning, from Merlin, is historical and not alchemical.

p. 344
•Rebis: “The Rebis…is variably identified as either or both the end product of the alchemical magnum opus (or great work) or/and the initial state of matter. It is heavily associated with the principle of hermaphroditism, or the combination of the male and female sexes into one being” (Wikipedia).

•Work of the White: The four phases of alchemy’s Great Work are (in order) black, white, yellow, and red. This one’s a purifying phase.

•White Copper, Immaculate Lamb, etc.: This list appears to come primarily if not entirely from the works of Antoine-Joseph Pernety (e.g. the 1898 translation An Alchemical Treatise on the Great Art).

•nuptial banquet: What follows is an approximation of the fourth day of the Chemical Wedding. The parts that recall the Grail quest—elderly king, banquet, warrior—are all in the CW original.

p. 345
•pendulum: !!!

•“Lorenza was gone”: Thus she disappoints all, as promised on p. 341.

•carbuncle: Borges, in his Book of Imaginary Beings (1957/1967), describes the carbuncle as a legendary beast with a glowing gem in its forehead. Also a term for a gem, of course, but this one illuminates.

•alembics: see p. 279n

p. 346
•fumes: Again!

•a bird: Clearly a type of the phoenix (radiant/ashes).

•golden trumpets: I’m just saying.

•insufflate: To blow something into something else—usu. a medicinal powder into a patient.

•Mysterium Magnum: Lat., great mystery, o.c. “Paracelsus and other alchemists employed the term ‘Mysterium Magnum\’ to denote primordial undifferentiated matter” (Wikipedia).

•a Thing: The ding an sich, the thing in itself—Kant’s term for reality as it really is, as opposed to how it is perceived. What the Great Work is groping for, at least for some.

Chapter 59

p. 347
•epigraph: Despite the many references to his work and thought, this is actually only the second appearance of Paracelsus in FP (after p. 133). The quotation is really too on point.

•measurements: Cf. the kiosk on p. 288, but more appositely Simon Studion on p. 196.

p. 348
•Cartesian imps: AKA Cartesian divers, a science-fair experiment or novelty device that bobs up and down in a bottle of water, apparently of a will but actually due to principles of buoyancy.

•automata: FP’s fear of automata starts way back on p. 11; see also p. 283n (“claim a miracle”).

• à la guerre comme à la guerre: Another stock phrase of Garamond’s; see p. 321.

•agogô: See p. 164 and esp. 212–13

•philter: see p. 231

Chapter 60

p. 349
•epigraph: Artephius “a writer to whom a number of alchemical texts are ascribed. Although the roots of the texts are unclear and the identity of their author obscure, at least some of them are Arabic in origin” (Wikipedia). Note that the presence of a labyrinth is always a Borges reference.

•“like the bell of a trumpet”: Hmmm.

•Ear of Dionysius: A cave with special acoustics through which the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse would eavesdrop on prisoners kept therein. The famous whispering gallery in Grand Central Station, NYC, is another example of such a place.

•“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else”: The following lament comes sometimes word for word from Antoine-Joseph Pernety, op. cit., where it is ascribed to the fifteenth-century English alchemist George Ripley.

•soul of Saturn: Another name for the the Prima Materia—i.e., the prime material, the philosopher’s stone, perh. the Rebis.

•aes ustum: Lat., burnt copper (or bronze). An old term for copper oxide.

•saffron of Mars: Iron oxide.

•aqua vitae: Lat., water of life. Alcohol.

•sperm of the stars: Various ancient legends ascribe power (usu. ill) to matter emitted from the stars, but I don’t know what in particular Eco, Balsamo, Pernety, or Ripley is referring to here.

•chelidon: Martin Rulandus’s Lexicon of Alchemy (1619) defines chelidonia as gold and chelidonius as any one of several kinds of precious stones with magical properties, often found inside swallows or tortoises. Take your pick what is used here.

•placentas: !!!

• “even…”: “What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.” R.H. Blyth wrote (Zen and Zen Classics vol. 4 (1966)): “Zen is this row of dots,” but perh. we are just better off not knowing what comes after placentas. Ripley himself trails off before this part of the list (“and an infinity of other things”).

•Balsamo: Giuseppe Balsamo, the real name of Cagliostro (q.v.). Now, the question is: Are we supposed to recognize this as a character, one of the Diabolicals? Another alias for St. Germain? Or is it a one-off joke?

p. 350
•Heidelberg…Caus: see p. 337

•Malraux: Novelist Andre Malraux, as Minister of Cultural Affairs, cleaned off the filthy façades of Parisian buildings.

•sewers: Both the subterranean theme and Salon’s particular bugaboo; see p. 308.

•Cloaca Maxima: Lat., greatest sewer. Rome’s ancient sewer.

•Colbert: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, First Minister of State under Louis XIV. Perh. significantly, since we’ve been talking about architecture, his sewer project began in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, which disaster allowed the rebuilding of London along new lines (Wren, etc.).

•Man in the Iron Mask: Both a real prisoner under the reign of Louis XIV (about whom much speculation) and the title of a Dumas novel (in which the masked prisoner is the king’s twin brother).

p. 351
•Ça alors: Fr., Well I’ll be.

•tapis franc: Fr., “a low or unsavoury tavern or cabaret; sot-hole, grog-shop, pothouse” (Wiktionary).

•pègre: Fr., “underworld, mob (part of society that is engaged in crime or vice)” (Wiktionary).

•Légendes: Fr., legends, obv.

p. 352
•rocaille: See p. 337, but isn’t the grammar weird here?

•phonurgic: Relating to the science of acoustics.

•Nibelungs: see p. 72

p.353
•epigraph: Arcanum Hermeticae Philosophiae Opus = Arcane Work of Hermetic Philosophy. Three heads of water, earth, and air, leave only the traditional dragon element of fire. References to the Golden Fleece abound in FP, but usu. concerning the Oder of the Golden Fleece: see pp. 144, 197, 354, 382, 401, etc.

•“those characters in Greek myth”: E.g.g: Actaeon, Tiresias, to some extent Semele (not “the wrath of the gods” but natural consequences there). Cf. Orpheus.

•“tinfoil or some metal leaf, gold and silver”: Again what is low is confused with what is high. Since this is tin and gold, the confusion points not only to Hermes Trismegistus (as above, so below) but to alchemy (transmuting base metals to gold). Note that tinfoil is what paranoids use to make their hats.

•“set in motion by the flames”: As in an eolopile—see p. 14.

•“precious stones—or bits of glass”: High and low again.

p. 354
•Renaissance portrait: This portrait of Prince Eugene of Savoy has the medallion around his neck, not his waist, but was the best I could find.

•stilettos or paper knives: Again the linking of opposites.

•Pink Panther: The cartoon character, of course, who walks to a mellow Henry Mancini jazz score.

p. 355
•San Gennaro: St. Januarius, patron saint of Naples; his blood (stored in an ampoule) miraculously liquifies on holy occasions.

Chapter 62

p. 356
•epigraph: Les druides. Les sociétés initiatiques celtes contemporaines = The Druids: Contemporary Celtic Initiatory Societies.

•Little Red Riding Hood: Presumably that they are on their way to be eaten by a wolf? Note that Casaubon’s prodigious memory (p. 326) has (“I don’t recall it exactly”) failed him here.

•Mikil: This I can find nothing on.

p. 357
•“Certain places have more magic than others”: Elementary tellurism.

•”the three hallouines of Lisieux, Clonmacnoise, and Pino Torinese”: Hallouine of course suggests Halloween, but I can’t get past that. Pino Torinese is right next to Turin (p. 260n), though. (Clonmacnoise is a ruined Irish monastery.)

•dolmen: An ancient megalithic tomb; a flat stone roof balanced atop two or three pillars, creating a kind of chamber.

•“blew a trumpet”: Yes, yes.

•Aïda: The Verdi opera set in ancient Egypt: see p. 260n. This is the triumphal march.

•ramsing: Usu. ramsinga, a sigmoid copper Indian trumpet [!]. Belbo (characteristically) is invoking Salgari’s Mystery of the Black Jungle (1895): “Beneath the earth [!] the mysterious roar was heard for the third time, and from the trunk of the banyan tree rang out the clear, brassy note of the ramsinga.” In Salgari, the Thugs are being summoned.

•Thugs: Here, o.c., murderous Kali-worshippers.

•subterranean currents: A more overt discussion of what is often…underground.

p. 358
•sibyl: see p. 275n

•Dantean nose: Check out Dante’s nose:

•cicatrix: A scar. A word to rhyme with Picatrix, q.v.

p. 359
•“O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!”: I cannot translate this, but I want to say that the Italian original has “O pegnia (oh, e oh! intus) et eee uluma!!!”—why did Weaver drop the intus? Also: note those three bangs (!!!); Eco doesn’t use that trick again!

Chapter 63

p. 360
•epigraph: A surprisingly accessible (esp. to English speakers) source.

•Réaumur cylindrical stove: More commonly called a cupola furnace; invented or reinvented in the C18 by French entomologist (!?) René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur.

•Deutsches Museum: see p. 305

•astrological cénacles: A cénacle in an upstairs room, and in Christian parlance a prayer group. Presumably the astrological minded have similar gatherings? Easier to stargaze from an upstairs room. But see also p. 315n for perh. a simpler explanation.

•Newton: Famously Newton added extra colors (incl. spurious indigo) to the spectrum to ensure there were seven colors matching seven musical notes matching seven planets. And all the other relevant stuff about Newton.

•“I’m like Amparo; I don’t believe in it, yet I surrender to it”: This is stated perh. most explicitly on p. 617.

p. 361
•Celtic and Amerindian: Not the two I would have picked. Perh. the existence of fairy folk / wee folk over and around the realm of humanity?

•file of cross-references…thin as a rail: One would expect Eco to jokingly follow a mention of the file with an immediate reference, but he subverts our expectations by providing two absolute cliches (one verbal, one (the mothering Italian woman encouraging food consumption) situational that are too widespread to be a reference to anything.

•Coney Island, Moscow May Day, Jubilee Year: At least here Eco gives us what we want—analogies in defense of analogies. Coney Island is the iconic fairground, May Day (international workers’ day) is of course a party in Soviet Russia, and Jubilee in ancient Israel was every fiftieth year (Leviticus 25) when debts were forgiven, etc.

p. 362
•serene wisdom: Cunningly, Lia’s speech is a microcosm of FP and the Plan.

p. 363
•hippopotamus: “Another intriguing behavior of hippos is that they roar in the morning at sunrise and in the evening at sunset. The Egyptians possibly interpreted this behavior as a greeting and farewell to the sun. And the sun’s travel was seen as an eternal cycle of rebirth that the deceased hoped to join. Hippopotami were thus associated with life, regeneration, and rebirth” (Met).

•Sphinx: See p. 177. A reference, o.c., to Oedipus’s riddle specifically.

p. 364
•menhir: Prehistoric standing stone; a proto-obelisk. Freudian, o.c. (as is, usu. Oedipus, immediately above, right?).

p. 365
•pregnant: Thus Lia’s model of the universe bears fruit, so to speak.

•“we had entered Gevurah”: In fact, we had entered Gevurah on p. 217.

•Moses Cordovero: C16 kabbalist. “His encyclopedic works became a central stage in the development of Kabbalah” (Wikipedia).

Previous installments:

The spoiler-free (in intent) annotations continue. This section (of Foucault’s Pendulum) is really long, so I’m dividing it into two installments. You can find the previous four installments here. I hope you’re reading along!

p. 217
•Gevurah: The left arm of God (Hesed is the right). Strength, bravery, wrath, fire. A check or boundary holding back on the awful expansiveness of the divine. To get from Hesed to Gevurah, one travels west, again the opposite of Casaubon’s travels between books.

Chapter 34

p. 219
•epigraph: Here is the Picatrix (p. 165). The Latin reads (after the litany of demonic names): “Come quickly with your spirits.” This particular demonic litany (which recalls or does not the one on p. 132) also appears in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985).

•Breaking of the Vessels: In addition to being a core kabbalistic concept (explained in the next few paragraphs), this is also the title of a 1982 book of poetry criticism by Harold Bloom.

•reshimu: I’m not the person who’s going to be able to say somethng interesting and original about kabbalism, but can we perh. cf. the Rebis (p. 344 etc.)

•seashells: See coquillage marin, p. 201.

•Fu Manchu: The arch-villain of Sax Rohmer’s pulp fiction. Note that FP is always flirting with being pulp fiction and that Rohmer claimed to be a Rosicrucian.

p. 220
•Adam Quadmon: Usu. Adam Kadmon, “primordial man,” and anthropomorphism of divine light. Cf. William Blake’s Albion.

•events in Italy: These were the Years of Lead so-called, when radicals from both sides of the political spectrum engaged in terror campaigns.

•Amazonia: The Amazon rain forest, o.c., and perh. more specifically a Brazilian national park. This somewhat idiosynchratic term reappears on p. 274.

•Fortaleza: A coastal city in Brazil.

p. 221
•O homem que matou Moro: Port., “The man who killed Moro.” Aldo Moro, a center-left politician, was kidnapped and murdered by Communists in 1978.

•poster of Che: Che Guevara, Argentinian revolutionary, or rather his inescapable face, posterized ca. 1968 by artist Jim Fitzpatrick

•Nietzsche and Céline: Friedrich Nietzsche and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; both right-coded writers (although only Céline really fits the bill).

•transcendental meditation: Meditation technique of Maharishi “Sexy Sadie” Mahesh Yogi. Trendy among hippie and New Age types in the 1960s and 1970s.

•macrobiotic: Zen-based diet also trendy in the 1960s and 1970s.

•Lichtenstein: Roy Lichtenstein, artist known for copying and blowing up (uncredited) comics panels. Not that I’m bitter.

•machines with fluorescent screens: The pinball machines have been replaced with video games.

•Planet X: Canonical term for a hypothetical planet on beyond Neptune, or perhaps anywhere. Marvin the Martian and Daffy Duck, e.g., battle over Planet X.

•frogs: Doubtless the 1981 console game Frogger.

•Red Brigades: The communist side of the conflict in the Years of Lead.

p. 222
•Space Invaders: 1978 console game. “I’d kill my mom for a chance to play.”

•”you can’t play pinball with a pistol stuck in your belt”: See immediately below, Belbo’s writing on hips; but with all the symbolic overtones.

•Tilt: The Plot is of course an attempt to massage history without becoming ludicrous…to tilt it, in other words, but without the attempt registering upon the machine (this effort fails).

•homeopathy: see p. 213

•against nature: À rebours, the Huysmans novel last referenced on p. 16.

•vis movendi: Force of motion. The term dates back at least to Kepler.

•“immemorial lengths of time”: Presumably “my most immemorial year” (E.A. Poe).

•ileum: This is a part of the small intestine; presumably Belbo meant ilium, the hip bone.

•Amazon: Note that this is only two pages after an appearance of the other meaning of Amazon.

p. 223
•“the machine as metaphor of the cosmic body”: The cosmic body is, o.c., already a metaphor. This whole passage is perh. too on-point.

•alien faces: Not literally, but also as in Space Invaders?

•Che: see p. 221

•“one drop every six months”: Even slower than the Pendulum (reimagined here as a water clock?).

•Chandos: see immediately below, p. 224

p. 224
•cyclical crises: Just underlining the word cyclical.

•Hofmannsthal: The Lord Chandos Letter is a 1902 work by Hofmannsthal in the form of a fictional letter by a fictional lord (addressed to Francis Bacon, q.v. on pp. 8, 10, etc.). The letter is about language and its limits; what this has to do with economics I do not know.

•French collaborationists: Céline, perh.; see p. 221.

•Albanian political texts: Albania would have been Communist at this time. From Céline to Communism is a polar shift.

•Anselm of Canterbury: Anselm (see p. 65) was born in the Italian city of Aosta, but was also Archbishop of Canterbury (installed four years after the Norman Conquest).

•Dixie cup: Casaubon presents a hard-boiled detective scenario (see pp. 12, 29, etc.) undercut by the cheap, tiny, cute, disposable Dixie cup.

•Avicenna: 11th-century Muslim polymath last mentioned on p. 89.

p. 225
•taxidermist’s: Taxidermists furnish one of the traditional accoutrements of sorcerers. Smollett speaks of the “apparatus of a magician, such as globes, telescopes, a magic-lanthorn, a skeleton, a dried monkey together with the skins of an alligator, otter, and snake [etc.]” (Peregrine Pickle (1751); emphasis added). Cf . The Quacks Academy (1678): “Any sexton will furnish your window with a skull, in hope of your custom; over which hang up the skeleton of a monkey, to proclaim your skill in anatomy.”

•A. Salon: Merely a punning name, but also traditionally a place to discuss philosophical matters (as on p. 64); more, in other words, than just a taxidermist’s.

•Marlowe: See p. 29, and always remember that Kit Marlowe (no relation) is the author of Dr. Faustus.

•Laplace, Kant: The Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis is a cosmogonal theory seating the origin of the solar system in a nebula; named for the two philosophers, Pierre Laplace and Immanuel Kant, who proposed it.

•Königsberg: Home of Kant, the “sage of Königsberg.” Seven bridges in Königsberg crossed the Prengel River.

•seven bridges: A prototopological mathematical problem, solved by Euler: Kant on his stroll cannot cross each bridge only once.

•Mannerism: 16^th-century art movement. Its link to the Idea is not so clear to me, but perhaps comes through the Neoplatonist critic Lomazzo?

•“no piece of information is superior to any other”: An important rubric for 1. the paranoid worldview (cf. Eco’s work on “paranoid readings”) and 2. the construction of the Plot.

Chapter 35

p. 226
•epigraph: This is the Mandelbaum translation of these lines:

Whoever asks my name, know that I’m Leah,
and I apply my lovely hands to fashion
a garland of the flowers I have gathered.

Note in Italian Leah is Lia, like the FP character.

p. 227
•Yeats: W. B. Yeats, the great Irish poet. This fact reappears on p. 425.

•Stella Matutina: Morning Star (i.e. Lucifer); a group that only comes in for censure in FP; see pp. 284 & 584.

•Sam Spade: see p. 12 etc.

•Maltese falcon: See p. 28, but also cf. the Knights of Malta.

p. 228
•“I quoted him”: Who is “him”? In context it would seem to be Sam Spade, but did Spade ever say that?

•bon pour vous: Fr., good for you.

Chapter 36

p. 229
•epigraph: Burton’s passage tells of a self-fulfilling prophesy, just as (all of) FP does.

•Vagnère: see p. 110

•epicurean: Only in the loose, modern sense of the word. Epicurus was quite abstemious in his habits.

p. 230
•diabolical Doktor Wagner: Playing up his association with Faust (see p. 107n).

•“Who, on that gray morning of”: This sentence fragment recalls (i.e. prefigures) the opening of Eco’s 2010 novel The Prague Cemetery: “A passerby on that gray morning…”. Of course, Belbo is always teasingly writing badly.

•satanic: Another Faustian echo.

•Charlus, Jupien: Two characters from Proust. In Sodom and Gomorrah, Charlus compares his seduction (?) of Jupien with a bee invading a flower.

•deontologically: Deontology asserts that ethics are based on duty or rules. Are I crazy in seeing a pun off de…ntology (the study of teeth) and “bites” in the next line?

•Quatre-vingt-treize: Ninety-three, Victor Hugo’s final novel.

p. 231
•philter: A love potion, which naturally ties into the ongoing alchemical theme. Love philters will appear again on p. 348.

•“I had just given up drinking”: see p. 65

•“call him three times”: Like Candyman / Bloody Mary / Hastur / etc.

p. 232
•Cecilia/sax player: see p. 330

•La psychanalyse…ça ne colle pas: Fr., Psychoanalysis? What it comes down to is, between men and women…my dear friends…it just doesn’t work.

•“the viscount started, as if bitten by an asp”: Belbo’s prose is getting purpler.

p. 233
•Mackie Messer: A.k.a. Mack the Knife

•“you were at home, and with the Other”: Is he addressing Lorenza?

p. 235
•epigraph: Hagigah is a book from the Mishnah, which is itself part of the Talmud. Hagigah primarily deals with glossing Genesis.

•Conservatoire des Artes et Métiers: The place the book starts; see p. 7.

•“Is this all?”: Cf. Peggy Lee.

p. 236
•null pole: Cf. p. 327.

•Carmagnole: French Revolutionary song.

•Vendée: Counterrevolutionary region, or even pseudo-state, existing in opposition to the then-current French Revolution. Presumably the path from Carmagnole to Vendée is just 1960s radicalism dulling its radical edge (Belbo’s explicit charge a few paragraphs down and cf. p. 224).

•equinox or a solstice: The vernal equinox begins spring, which ends at the summer solstice.

•“rite of…spring”: Hidden in the text is Stravinsky’s controversial 1913 ballet.

•killed in Hungary: Presumably in the 1956 uprising (crushed by Soviet tanks).

•fanzines: Fanzines, being explicitly amateur (and implicitly anti-corporate), homegrown affairs, seema bad example for Belbo to use here. Perhaps he means fan magazines (Photoplay etc.)?

•Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: Treated here as two items but o.c. the title of a 1974 bestselling novel.

p. 237
•Bolivian militia: Presumably a reference to the death of Che Guevara at the hands of Bolivian Rangers.

•“Every point of the universe is a fixed point”: Cf. “no piece of information is superior to any other” on p. 225.

•special places: An explicit refutation (“nobody would believe that”) of telluric current theories.

p. 238
•scrofula: A royal touch traditionally heals scrofula, which is known therefore as “the king’s evil.” Antimonarchist wags assert that scrofula is the only disease whose name is a redundancy.

Chapter 38

p. 239
•epigraph: Although treated as a quote, this is merely a list.

•The Poetic Athanor: An athanor is an alchemical (!) oven.

•The Italic Parnassus: Parnassus is the mountain upon which the Muses live. Italic must mean Italian but I like to imagine it just means an really emphasized Parnassus. You know, like Parnassus!!

•Manutius: see p. 149

•The Flower Unplucked: A reference to Frost’s “Asking for Roses”: “A flower unplucked is but left to the falling.”

•Terra Incognita: Unknown land.

p. 240
•“nonfiction, I believe”: Very dry, very funny.

•New Atlantis: Another reference to the Bacon book (pp. 8 & 200).

•Königsberg Revisited: Kant again (v. p. 225); he wrote Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). “Phenomenal noumenon” is an oxymoron.

•pelican: In medieval legend, a mother pelican pierces her own breast to feed her young with her blood.

•D’Annunzian motto: This phrase is associated with the Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio.

•Grazia: Italian for “grace”; it is also the name of an Italian women’s magazine. Note that for all her blandness, Grazia wears a designer scarf and suit.

•Palazzo Venezia: Mussolini’s headquarters (as implied in the previous sentence). IIRC, this is a setting in Eco’s last novel (Numero Zero).

•globe: Putting the monde in Garamond?

p. 241
•Magdeburg hemispheres: A popular apparatus for scientific demonstrations back in the day; named for the original 1654 experiment in performed in Magdeburg, Germany (by the mayor).

•Madame Curie: Needless to say, Garamond’s account is not strictly accurate.

•hydrocarbon: “Petroleum, natural gas, and coal” (Wikipedia), and also o.c. a kind of compound in orgo.

•golconda: A city in India but presumably Garamond (and Eco) is thinking of the 1953 painting by Magritte.

•phlogiston: A hypothetical and obsolete substance that makes flammable items burn. No longer a recognized scientific possibility.

p. 242
•de Ambrosiis: His only appearance, IIRC.

•Svevo: Italo Svevo, author of the (much-lauded) Zeno’s Conscience (1923).

•incipit: First few lines.

•cela dit: Fr., that said.

p. 243
•Balzac, Proust, Joyce: Am I wrong in detecting more Proust and Joyce than Balzac in Eco?

Chapter 39

p. 245
•epigraph: Well, just see p. 239; Memphis-Misraim and Scottish are two different Masonic rites. “Shepherd King of the Hutz” is perh. more commonly rendered “Pastor-King of the Hutz.” Note the “Orphic”: named for Orpheus, his Ancient Mysteries.

•“the fear that They will find me”: Note the capital They.

•Floriana: I had assumed Eco had in mind the Thorgal character, but in retrospect I don’t think she appears until 1992 (but post hoc ergo ante hoc). Perhaps, given all the Maltese Falcon references, it matters that Floriana is a city in Malta?

•Cosmoranto: Cosmos + Esperanto.

•UNESCO: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

•“except Ivy Compton-Burnett”: Huge dis to Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Francis Hodgson Burnett.

•Nerval: Gérard de Nerval, pen name of Gérard Labrunie, nineteenth-century Romantic writer.

p. 247
•Lampedusa: Extremely famous Italian writer.

p. 249
•Paris is well worth a mass: Supposedly spoken by Henry of Navarre, who converted to Catholicism to become king of France (1593).

p. 250
•ça va sans dire: Fr., It goes without saying.

•Corriere della Sera: Large Italian newspaper.

Chapter 40

p. 251
•epigraph: The quotation continues: “The valiant never taste of death but once.” Proverbial.

•ideal observation point: Belbo’s ongoing refusal to do, but only to observe. Also cf. Casaubon’s earlier/later location in the periscope.

•“She kisses me as if she were playing pinball”: I.e. while moving her hips. See p. 222.

p. 252
•Hölderlin: German Romantic poet. What he has to do with the visual arts I do not know.

•the man with the scar: Belbo’s life takes on the form of bad melodrama.

•masked avenger: Traditional term for a superhero. Note that Superman does not wear a mask.

Chapter 41

p. 254
•epigraph: Daath, oft. Da’at, is the invisible non-sefira “skipped over” on p. 159. To be clear, Daath appears as a labeled circle on the tree of life, but it does not count as a sefira…rather it is the place where all ten sefirot are united (although not all sefirot literally intersect or “touch” Daath).

•Doré: Gustave Doré, French engraver who illustrated, among other books, Dante’s Divine Comedy. I once attended a lecture in which a critic complained…that while Doré’s illustrations for the Inferno were inspired, his illustrations for the Paradiso amounted to (and I quote) “fat Beatrice on a cloud.” Apparently Garamond disagrees.

•ça va sans dire: A favorite phrase of Garamond’s. See p. 250.

•UNICEF: The United Nations Children’s Fund (it stands for United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund). Garamond always brings up the UN (see p. 245)! Does he see the Red Cross and UNICEF as cultural institutions? Prob. he just means that his is not a charity.

p. 255
•d’Artagnan: One of the Three Musketeers (sc. the Fourth).

•Mandrake: …the Magician. Comic strip superhero. He shares a thin mustache with d’Artagnan.

•Philosophia Moysaica: 1638 text by Robert Fludd (see p. 197 etc.).

•unguentum armarium: This is in fact, a good part of the plot of Eco’s next novel, The Island of the Day Before.

•Volta and Marconi: Alessandro Volta and Guglielmo Marconi, inventors of the battery and the radio respectively.

•quai Saint-Michel: Just a place in Paris on the Seine. Here’s one by Matisse titled Studio, quai Saint-Michel (1916).

p. 256
•split hairs: Once again, see tetrapyloctomy, p. 74

•Rosa rosarum: Lat., Rose of roses. I am not clear on what his means in context.

•“…like revolutionaries, eh? Those days are past.”: see p. 236.

•couchette: Sleeping berth in a train.

•tapir: The comparison is made on p. 202.

•De Amicis: Another one-off name, much like the similar de Ambrosiis on p. 242.

p. 257
•decans: see p. 283

•book of Azoth: Azoth is the alchemical universal solvent, or perh. just another name for mercury. Paracelsus had the word engraved on his sword. A book titled Azoth is quite explicitly the subject of the 1619 volume below, but perhaps it can refer to or be inspired by the 1613 publication Azoth, sive Aureliae occultae philosophorum by Basilius Valentinus?

•“expert in magiam, in necromantiam, etc.”: This look like weird or bad Latin; one expects in magia, in necromantia, etc., as the way it stands (magiam, necromantiam) it would mean “an expert into magic, into necromancy” and so on…obvious nonsense. BUT as it turns out, the “in” is plain English, and necromantiam, etc., is the way Staurophorus lists the sections of the book of Azoth (with slight differences: e.g. Staurophorus writes magicam, not magiam). All b/c Eco refuses to italicize other languages!

•Staurophorus: Rhodophilus Staurophorus, pseudonymous author of Raptus Philosophicus, subtitled (in German): That Is, Philosophical Revelations Set Forth Quite Simply and Plainly, and Humbly Inscribed to the High and Renowned Fraternity K.C. The book does indeed describe how the author was (among many marvels) given a book titled Azoth.

•psychurgy: “Mental operation or activity” (OED).

•arithmology: “A treatise on numbers, or statement bearing upon them” (OED).

•auras: Paranormal (and originally Theosophical) energy fields detectable as emenating from the human body.

•fluids: Fluids? Fluids?

•psychometry: “Divination of facts concerning an object or its owner through contact with or proximity to the object” (MW).

•the five hyperphysical senses: Are these the five sense extended in some way beyond the physical, or are they five all-new senses?

•physiognomics: The study of discovering character by examining appearance.

p. 258
•spagyrics: Paracelsian method “to improve the efficacy of existing medicines by separating them into their primordial elements…and then again recombining them” (Wikipedia).

•evocatory magic: Spells from the invocation/evocation school. (Ha ha.)

•theurgy: The magical technique of compelling powerful (usu. benign) beings to serve. Contrasts with goety (see p. 271) or goetia. Presumably “voluntary theurgy” (below) is the same but without the compulsion?

•gymnosophy: see p. 25

•Memphis hieroglyphics: Ancient Memphis has its literal hieroglyphics, of course, but also see the epigraph, p. 245.

•onomancy: Divination by names.

•prophetic furies: As the wrath of the OT prophets, or of Luther.

•somnambulism: see the epigraph, p. 170

•mercurial chemistry: A vanilla chemistry term, but please remember that mercury is Azoth, and in alchemy is both a symbol of transformation and one of the “tria prima” (essentially, three elements) of Paracelsus.

•Wronski: Józef Wroński, nineteenth-century polymath whose thought influenced Éliphas Lévi.

•possessed nuns of Loudun: In 1634, some Ursuline nuns in Loudun, France, claimed demonic possession; the resulting witch trial burned a priest.

•the convulsives of Saint-Médard: “A group of 18th-century French religious pilgrims who exhibited convulsions and later constituted a religious sect and a political movement” (Wikipedia).

•elixir: see p. 14

•arsenic water: A nostrum for treating ulcers and cancers in various Pharmacopoeiae Chirurgicae, such as this one.

•Eurynomius: Eurynomos, a demon mentioned n Pausanias.

•agathodemons: Ancient Greek tutelary deities.

•Mithra: Presumably Mithras. Perhaps these carelessnessnes on Bramanti’s part (cf. Eurynomius above) are intentional on Eco’s (but see p. 265n).

•Morpheus: The son of Sleep in Ovid; he had no ancient mysteries.

•Samothrace: Site of an extra-mysterious ancient mystery dedicated to the Cabeiri or the Great Gods.

•Eleusis: Queen of the mysteries. “The words of Herakles when he was not /Allowed to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries: /’I was initiated a long time ago.’”

•Wood of Life: Lignum vitae, a hardwood tree; note that lingum is nearly lingam. The name evokes as well the Tree of Life.

•Key of Science: Couldn’t this be just anything? Maybe we should wonder what we’re getting out of Bramanti’s frenzied catalog. Did Eco just want to vomit out everything occulty he could think of? I mean, yes, and that is FP, but I mean in microcosm.

•Baphomet: see pp. 103-04

•mallet: Just as a phallic symbol?

•Ceres: Demeter, one of the foci of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

•Cteis: “The Cteis was a circular and concave pedestal, or receptacle, on which the Phallus, or column [obelisk] rested” (Pike, 1871).

•Patera: Roman libation bowl, often with a little navel (omphalos); apparently a yonic symbol.

•Cybele: Anatolian goddess imported to Rome in the form of a meteor.

•Astarte: Another name for Ashtoreth (p. 199).

Chapter 42

p. 260
•epigraph: Turba Philosophorum = Crowd of Philosophers. Early (tenth century?) alchemical book.

•cork: see p. 56

•gnostic novel: The Name of the Rose, written, indeed, by a famous critic (Eco o.c.) and set in an abbey recalling Turin’s Sacra di San Michele.

•gnoseology: The study of knowledge, but cf. E. A. Poe:

‘My son,’ said he, when we were seated, ‘what is the chief end of your existence?’
‘My father,’ I answered, ‘it is the study of Nosology.’
‘And what, Robert,’ he inquired, ‘is Nosology?’
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘it is the science of Noses.’

•geomancy: In retrospect, Bramanti could not have named geomancy, because that would have struck too close. To keep silent!

•maalox: Trade name for an antacid. Now we’re just being sily.

•mercurial Radames: Radames is a character from Aida; presumably Garamond is just coupling a hermetic sounding word and an Egyptian-sounding name.

•another book, by a famous journalist: I cannot find this book (assuming it is real). Turin is noted for its connections with the occult (“Italy’s capital of the occult”). Several sites mention it is part of two magical triangles, a white magic triangle with vertices at Turin, Prague, and Lyon, and a black magic triangle with vertices at Turin, London, and…San Francisco? What kind of monstrously acute angle is that?

•city of the automobile: In the same way that in the US Detroit is the Motor City.

p. 261
•satanic rites: Here Garamond has the bourgeois prejudices.

•six or seven years ago: Another indication of the changing times in Italy: the (violently) political book shops have become new age shops.

•Tupamaros: Uraguayan guerrilla group. Satisfying Garamond’s requirements, they were both Marxists and terrorists.

•Hermes: Garamond flubs again. (He is described two ¶¶ later as “missing the reference.”)

•The golden branch: Frazer’s golden bough (see p. 12). “The Golden Branch” is also how Andrew Lang (in The Red Fairy Book) translates Madame d’Aulnoy 1697 fairy tale “Le Rameau d’or.”

p. 262
•the lottery: Always a reference either to Shirley Jackson or Borges.

•rodent: Tapirs are not rodents, but Garamond is hardly a stickler for accuracy.

•Tabula Smaragdina: The Emerald Tablet so-called of Hermes Trismegistus. See pp. 283, 400, & 449.

•Isis Unveiled: The title of an 1877 Theosophical text by Madame Blavatsky. “The veil of Isis is a metaphor and allegorical artistic motif representing the inaccessibility of nature’s secrets” (Wikipedia).

•Tutankhamen: In the timeline of FP, we would be during or shortly after King Tut’s relics’ tour of West Germany. At least in the US, such a tour sparked Tutmania.

•the scarab of the pyramids: Garamond seems to have just linked the first two (or perh. the 2^nd and 3^rd) Egyptian-sounding things he could think of.

•“Project Hermes…will strengthen the flow of ideas”: Hermes is o.c. the god of messengers and commerce.

Chapter 43

p. 264
•epigraph: Huysmans is (more cryptically) referenced on pp. 16 & 222.

•Hermeticist Dr. Moebius: Clearly a reference to comics artist Jean Giraud, author of Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage, but more hermetic in French).

•dépliant: Fr., leaflet.

•Pentacle of Solomon: Solomon with a five-pointed star is not without precedent in occult writing, but Solomon’s seal is usually six-pointed. Perh. another solecism of Garamond’s?

p. 265
•Asian swastikas: Both the Nazi and the Hindu swastika “spins” clockwise. The idea that Nazis flipped the Swastika (to make it evil) is an old urban legend.

•“There are more things in heaven and earth”: From Hamlet. “...than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

•“evil genius of the Raja of Assam”: I assume more an evocation of pulpy writing than any specific reference.

•Editions Henry Veyrier: Éditions Henri Veyrier was a French publishing house and, apparently, book store (of used and rare books?).

•Jesuits: Certainly a focus for the conspiracy-minded, Cf. Pynchon’s Sino-Jesuit conspiracy in Mason & Dixon.

•Opus Dei: Another Catholic organization. Prob. more famous now than it was upon FP’s publication, thanks to Dan Brown. Mel Gibson is not a member.

•Carbonari: Nineteenth-century Italian revolutionary societies. Why are they in a contemporary directory? Prob. the only place they have been linked to Rosicurcians, etc., is in chapter VII of Immortal Lycanthropes.

•Rotary: The least secret of secret societies, a service nonprofit. At times, various anti-Masonic types (incl. The Catholic Church) have lumped Rotary International under the rubric of fraternal organizations. See p. 388.

•that French anthropologist: Claude Lévi-Strauss. Garamond misses the Levi (see p. 161) reference.

•a detective story: A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel. The irony is o.c. that the Mormons are the easiest to determine and assert the existence of of any group on this list.

•Church of Mithra: Again, prob. Mithras. Perh. this is another of Garamond’s misreadings, but prob. a translation artifact, as Italian sources use the form Mithra.

p. 266
•Vril: An energy source in the 1871 novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The concept of vril was embraced by Theosophists, but rumors of Vril-based organizations in Nazi Germany, although widespread, are poorly sourced.

•“Do all those really exist?”: Well, the Mormons do. I’ll admit that after failing to establish the extranovelistic bonafides of several groups I gave up.

•Tupamaro: see p. 261

•Picatrix: see p. 165

•gods of the underworld: Back to the subterranean theme.

•ectoplasm: Occult substance; some spirits drape themselves in ectoplasm to take a physical form.

p. 267
•homunculus: see p. 347

•Faust…Helen of Troy: What Faust did with Helen of Troy can be called “making a homunculus” only in the world of euphemism.

•secreted: Contains the word secret = occult.

•joss sticks: Incense sticks, from the Portuguese deus, God. Note the olfactory appeal.

•“faces exactly like professional sorcerers”: see physiognomics, p. 257

•beard: see p. 79

•facies hermetica: Lat., hermetic face. The first appearance of what becomes an in-joke among the trio.

p. 268
•sticks of incense: More olfactory.

•ivory hand: The hamsa hand so-called.

•legion: Apt for Diabolicals: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9).

Chapter 44

p. 269
•epigraph: The Enochian text is translated by Dee, something like: “I rayng ouer you, sayeth the God of Iustice, in powre exalted above the firmaments of wrath: in whose hands the Sonne is as a sword and the Mone as a throwgh thrusting fire.” (I say “something like” because I don’t know where the Enochian ends. Note that Crowley (who appears below) had a notebook titled Ol Sonf Vorsg (similar to Ol Sonuf Vaorsag above); also that he was kicked out of the Order of the Golden Dawn (whence this rite comes) quite literally—kicked down the stairs by Yeats.

•OTO: Before Crowley assumed control, the OTO had been an offshoot of Masonry, something like the Shriners.

•Aleister Crowley: The wickedest man in the world so-called.

•Liber AL vel legis: The Book of AL [i.e. El = God] or of the Law. The idiosyncratically capitalized AL has several additional occult significances (o.c.).

p. 270
•crossing my fingers: To ward off evil.

•Hoor-paar-Kraat: I.e. Harpocrates, Hellenistic god of secrets, and also Horus. Ra-Hoor-Khuit is another form of Horus, at least in Thelemic (i.e. Crowleyan) ritual.

•Liturgy of the Sword: Perh. a parody of the Liturgy of the Word?

•Mahapralaya: The cyclical (!) apocalyptic dissolution of the entire Hindu cosmos.

•Third Eye of the Kundalini: For the third (pineal) eye and Kundalini (together!) see p. 104.

•congressus cum daemone: Lat., conference with a demon. Crowley uses this phrase as part of the subtitle of his summoning ritual Liber Samekh.

p. 271
•goety: Black (or “low”) magic; contrasts with theurgy (p. 258).

•Bas-Aumgn: Spirits (?) invoked in the Liber Samekh. “Ye that are Gods, going forth, uttering AUMGN.”

•Sa-Ba-Ft: Another Liber Samekh spirit (?). “Nuith! Hadith! Ra-Hoor-Khuit! Hail, Great Wild Beast!”

•out of the ordinary: A good euphemism.

Chapter 45

p. 272
•epigraph: Terra senza tempo = Timeless Land. Peter Kolosimo is one of the first “ancient astronaut” writers.

•Mu: Hypothetical lost continent in the works of several early C20 writers but esp. James Churchward, who situated it in the Pacific.

•Chichén Itzá: Large, ruined Mayan city.

•spit and image: The older form of the phrase spitting image; presumably Belbo is honoring the obsolescent.

•“he find serpent worship…common origin”: Cf. Lessing, Laocoön (1766): “For there must certainly be a reason why the adulterous phantasy was never anything but a serpent.”

•“Except, of course, the Chosen People”: Diotallevi has forgotten Nehushtan, the bronze serpent, erected by Moses in the desert. Hezekiah “brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it” (2 Kings 18:4).

•Kaly-yuga: Usu. Kali Yuga, the fourth, final, and worst age of the Hindu cyclic calendar.You are here. It lasts 432K years, and has a ways to go.

•the decline of the West: The title of Spengler’s magisterial volume. This is the second time (see p. 210) Spengler has been accused of Nazism.

•gnomes, undines, salamanders…sylphs: For Paracelsus, creatures representing the four elements, respectively earth, water, fire, and air.

p. 273
•Nibelungs: See p. 72. In rejecting books for being too Nazi-adjacent, perh. one should not immediately invoke Wagner.

•Little People: It will be challenging performa reading of Irish mythology that separates the fairies from the little people.

•Columbus’s real aim: This is not quite the thesis of Michael Bradley’s The Columbus Conspiracy (1992)…but it’s not so far off.

•Hebrew letters…dream books: Why do dream books ahev Hebrew letters in them?

•Lourdes: French pilgrimage destinations, site of several miraculous appearances of Mary in 1858.

•Saint-Germain: He reappears, still dropping names: Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette.

•“the atom, a Jewish lie”: Atomic theory goes back to the pre-Socratics, but perh. that’s not what is meant.

•Fortian sciences: Usu. Fortean. Fort’s reputation has only grown since his death, and most fans seem to have the same half-skeptical, half-satirical view of facts that Fort did.

p. 274
•“spacecraft in prehistoric times”: See, that’s the kind of thing Peter Kolosimo would write about!

•thirtieth parallel: Actually it is at 29.9792458°, which is the speed of light (in a vacuum (!)) in m/second. But cf. p. 15: “the secret of the pyramids is revealed if you don’t calculate in meters but in ancient cubits.”

•“What does Quetzalcoatl have to do with Amazonia”: Casaubon has, o.c., been to Amazonia, and speaks of what he knows. Quetzalcoatl is the Mexican plumed serpent god.

•Aztlán: I’m sure this connection is made by everyone, but I’ll give one example: Species with Amnesia: Our Forgotten History by Robert Sepehr.

•yod: First letter in the Tetragrammaton.

p. 275
•“The Egyptians knew electricity”: Thus answering the question raised on p. 272.

•“I saw that in a movie”: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

•Porsena: Etruscan king who warred with and later befriended) Rome.

•Szmrszlyn Khraznapahwshkij: One wonders how Casaubon (? unspecified) managed to pronounce this name on the fly.

•Sibylline books: Oracular books describing the fate of Rome. Most of them were burned by the Sibyl as a negotiating tactic while haggling over the price with the king of Rome.

•Lilith the Talmudic demon: Adam’s first wife, turned bad.

•hermaphroditic great mother: Several sources point to the Solomon Islands as having a belief in a hermaphroditic great mother. I assume this is coincidence, but…Solomon (!) Islands!

•Marx and Nietzsche…angelology: Marx and Nietzsche were both quite explicitly atheists.

•Kant and occultism: Always connections with Kant (see p. 225). At least one writer, Ayn Rand, did see Kant as an occultist, in the sense that he hypothesized a noumenal world.

•Eleusian mysteries: Usu. Eleusinian (see p. 258).

•Cagliostro: see p. 165

•atomic energy: If this is also a Jewish lie (see p. 273), its proximity to the golem, a Jewish monster with truth on its brow, is interesting.

•Sacred Heart: The heart of Jesus as a symbol of God’s infinite love. Recall back on p. 171 the “sweetish spray cans labeled ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus’” Casaubon purchases.

p. 276
•Iamblichus: Neoplatonist philosopher; wrote a biography on Pythagoras.

•lured to a flower: Return of the Charlus & Jupien reference (p. 230).

Chapter 46

p. 277
•epigraph: This ritual is “Liber LXX”, or “The Cross of a Frog.”

•redivivus: Reborn.

•agitated voices: The squabble will prove to be between representatives of two different Satanic sects, the Order of Satan and the Luciferine Church; a parody, perh., of the internecine squabbles among very similar branches of (homoousios v. homoiousios) more mainstream religions.

•seventeenth-century print: Perhaps the one below (Stefan Michel Spacher, 1616).

•Bramanti…devils: Like Camestres (p. 271), Bramante has out-of-the-ordinary means.

p. 278
•Pierre: Pierre is never called anything but by this name. It o.c. corresponds to Peter, the rock on which Jesus built his church, but prob. it is just a generic French name rendering Pierre semi-anonymous. A parody of a Frenchman?; certainly Pierre slips into French more than other characters.

•hosts: Communion wafers.

•bon: Fr., all right.

•Eclise Lucifrienne: Luciferian Church.

•tauroboliaste: Fr., taurobolist; a participant in an ancient Roman bull sacrifice (associated with Cybele or perh. Mithras).

•psychopompe: Fr., psychopomp; a guide to the underworld for the newly dead. Trad. Hermes.

•Grand Tenancier du Mal: The grand proprietor of evil.

•pyxes: Containers for the consecrated host.

•comment dit-on: Fr., how do you say it?

•chasubles: Catholic liturgical garments.

•Adonai: The God of the Bible. Pierre is expressing a Gnostic philosophy here.

•principe: Fr., principle.

•Luciferre: This seems to be just emphasizing how Pierre pronounces his dark lord’s name.

•Mais voyons: Fr., Oh, come now!

•envoûtement: Fr., enchantment.

•Dogma and the Ritual of High Magic: see the epigraph, p. 161

•Our Lord: Freudian slip for a Satanist.

•Du Sangreal Bookshop: The Sangreal is the Holy Grail.

p. 279
•chocs: Fr., shocks.

•bibelots: Knicknacks, tchotchkes.

•alembiques: (Usu. alambiques, but:) Fr., alembics (aka limbecks); alchemical distilling devices. “Her limbecks dried of poisons / And the knife at her neck” (Housman).

•plaster Baphomet: For Baphomet see (again) pp. 103–4. I am beyond delighted to learn that Pierre’s plaster Baphomet is a memento of my late father.

•ordures: Fr., filth.

•hein?: Fr., eh?

•cataplasms: Poultices.

•jury d’honneur: A jury called to determine questions of personal honor; specifically (tho’ not here) one to determine guilt in Vichy collaboration.

•Martinists of Lyon: Lyon is a French city just a couple of hours from the Italian border. For Martinists se p. 209n, although there are many kinds of Martinists and I lose track.

•enfantine: Fr., infantile.

•sorcelery: Apparently an anglicization of Fr. sorcellerie, sorcery.

•voyante: Fr., seer, clairvoyant.

•crached: Crache is Fr. for spit, so with the Eng. suffix we have “spat.”

•Huysmans: J.-K. Huysmans from p. 264, etc., again. Huysmans himself eventually converted to Catholicism and became a Benedictine oblate.

•ouaise: Fr., yeah.

•carnival of Venise: Why does this phrase anger Bramanti so? Is it just that the carnival (only recently (in ’79) revived when FP takes place) is a tourist trap, or kitsch, or in some sense false? Or is it Pierre’s affected way of misspelling Venice just to remind everyone that he’s French?

p. 280
•goety: See p. 271.

•parquet: Fr., floorboards.

•diablotine: Fr., little devil; used to refer to naughty children.

•Carmelite scapular: The brown scapular, so called; a pair of cloth amulets worn over the head as a devotion to Mary.

•contresign: Fr., counterspell.

•envoutement retourne, ah oui: Fr., The Hex had backfired, yes.

•mauvais moment: Fr., a bad time of it.

•“we all belong to the same spiritual knighthood”: Cf., again, Carlyle, quoted before in the notes to p. 177: “Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven’s captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong?”

•vulgar Freemasons: see Great Orient, p. 281.

•Boito’s Mefistofele: An 1868 Italian opera based on the Faust legend.

•“Ha…brocanterie”: Fr., Ha, well said. That’s just a load of junk.

•poltergeist: The rational explanation.

•astral conjuncture: Usu. conjunction. Two or more celestial bodies lining up.

p.281
•merchants of the Great Orient: The Grand Orient is the largest French Masonic organization. Presumably “merchants” is just a slur against the vanilla nature of Freemasonry (compared to true initiates).

•Bien entendu, le rituel, ah ça: Fr., of course, the ritual, oh that.

•“no longer the days of Crowley”: Presumably referring to the hostile conflicts in wh. Crowley (kicked down the stairs by Yeats) found himself. O.c., again and again in this section we are reminded that these are no longer the Years of Lead so-called.

Chapter 47

p. 282
•epigraph: Delminio’s book describes a Theater of Memory, a kind of reverse theater (the spectator stands in the center and beholds concepts arranged in the stands (cf. Agliè’s little study, p. 283). More information here.

•crepuscular: I prob. should have been keeping track of all the times the lighting is something liminal, like twilight or dusk, but I guess it’s too late now.

•double-mullioned window: Two adjacent windows with a mullion (vertical support) between.

•diamond panes: A reference to Borges’s “Death and the Compass.”

p. 283
•polychrome: Painted, as on p. 182.

•one of those renaissance fantasies: E.g. Delmino’s from the epigraph.

•sylloge: A collection or compendium.

•the palace of Mantua: The Palazzo D’Arco hosts the Sala dello Zodiaco by Falconetto (ca. 1520) featuring decans; there may be others in Mantua, as decans were a Renaissance staple.

•thirty-six decans: “Groups of stars (small constellations) used in ancient Egyptian astronomy to conveniently divide the 360 degree ecliptic into 36 parts of 10 degrees each, both for theurgical and heliacal chronometrical purposes” (Wikipedia).

•salamander: see p. 272n

•a taxidermist friend: A. Salon, presumably. See the note for p. 225.

•aeolipile of Hero: Also called Hero’s engine, and usually involving heating water, not air; a simple steam-powered device.

•claim a miracle: A commonplace among early Christian texts (as in (pseudo-?)Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies) is that pagans, esp. perh. Egyptians, used a series of cunning legerdemains to make spurious miracles.

•golden law: I’m neither sure what this law is, not why it should be a law of earth and fire, and not fire and water or fire and air (depending on the type of aeolipile). It is perh. important, given our earlier adventures in Brazil, that the Golden Law (Port., Lei Áurea) is the 1888 law abolishing slavery (in Brazil).

•cyclotrons: Particle accelerators. Lamestream physics.

•“I know better than the so-called learned”: See again Tom o’ Bedlam’s mad song, quoted in the notes to p. 185.

•As it is below, so it is above: An inverted version of the second line of the Tabula Smaragdina (see p. 262).

p. 284
•Oedipus Aegyptiacus: Only the third volume of this vast tome of Egyptiana deals with hieroglyphics.

•Horapollon: Author of the Hieroglyphica (ca. 490), an eafrly and mostly incorrect explanation of hieroglyphics. His book is widely quoted.

•museum of wonders: Kircher curated a wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, that became the Kircherian Museum; eventually dispersed (1916).

•Champollion: Jean-François Champollion, French philologist who translated hieroglyphics with the aid of the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Agliè’s reaction is quite characteristic of him.

•Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae: Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom, a Christian alchemical text, richly illustrated. Only two copies of the first edition (there are others) indeed exist; “This is the third” is a perfect joke.

•Burnetius: Latinization of Burnet; this book is quoted on p. 125, q.v.

•Traicté des Chiffres: Treatise on Ciphers. The Vigenere cipher so-called (misattributed) proved uncrackable for over 300 years.

•Kabbala denudata: Translated by Mathers as The Kabbalah Unveiled.

•McGregor Mathers: Founder of the Golden Dawn; his translations (esp. of the Key of Solomon) are inescapable.

•British esthetes: Yeats called out!; but there are others (Machen e.g.).

•Stella Matutina: see p. 227

•vice anglais: The English vice; masochism.

p. 285
•queste du Graal: The quest for the Grail of course, Fr., but the wording does not seem to correspond perfectly with any of the major Grail texts (La Queste del Saint Graal or La Quête du Saint Graal, e.g.g).

•narwhal’s horn: Tusk, o.c.; traditional fake unicorn horn.

•extremes meet: Alchemical union of opposites (but also modern horseshoe theory).

p. 286
•Pyramidion: The pointy capstone of a pyramid. Cheops’ pyramidion has been missing for millennia.

•Carnarvon: Lord Carnarvon sponsored the expedition that uncovered King Tut’s tomb. He died two months after the opening of the tomb.

•Herodotus: The ancient Greek historian described the history and construction of the pyramids, although there’s nothing really implausible (or hermetic) in his accounts.

•Piazzi Smyth: Charles Piazzi Smyth, British astronomer who also dabbled in pyramidometry. Inventor (discoverer?) of the “pyramid inch,” useful to future pyramidometrists. Note that just as with the Anselm of Canterbury / of Aosta controversy (p. 224), Eco, or Casaubon his narrator, or the author of the MS. under consideration, has dropped the Charles to give Smyth a more Italianate name. (Smyth was named for his godfather, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi; he was also born in Naples.)

•convert to…cubits: See p. 15.

•“Tell me how you—”: How does he do it, folks? The answer is directly below.

•reading, in those images: The explicit purpose, o.c., of a memory palace.

Chapter 48

p. 287
•epigraph: There’s Piazzi Smyth (from p. 286)! Note that regardless of whatever snark I’ve indulged in, Smyth credited himself, in editions published in his lifetime, either as C. Piazzi Smyth or just Piazzi Smyth.

•cinematheque: This is an extremely strange word choice.

•Yankee Doodle Dandy: Cagney, as George M. Cohan: “Oh, I am proud. In fact, I’m flabbergasted. First time in my life, I’m speechless.”

p. 288
•Quid est veritas: Lat., What is truth? The “friend” is Pontius Pilate (John 18:38). The Latin famously anagrams into an answer to the question: Est vir qui adest, or It is the man who is here (i.e. Jesus).

•Flinders Petrie reports: AFAICT, this is a calumny of Agliè’s (although Petrie’s measurements did contradict Smyth’s).

•measure that kiosk: This is a precursor to Lia’s bravura analysis on pp. 534ff.

•victory at Poitiers: When Charles Martel defeated an invading army from Caliphate Spain.

•Jean-Pierre Adam: An actual architect and archaeologist, but I cannot find his kiosk measurements, if true.

p. 289
•tout se tient: Fr.: “everything is connected,” as on p. 179

•Marconi: see p. 255

•Chaldean priests: Presumably not merely religious leaders of the Chaldeans but mystics in the tradition of the Chaldean Oracles, a pseudoneoplatonic poem. Proclus was wont to say that, given his druthers, he would destroy, as inimical to humanity, all books except Plato’s Timaeus and the Chaldean Oracles.

•Karnak: see p. 167

•Thebes: The Egyptian, not the Greek city (presumably).

•open sesame: The magic words from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. “Open, sez me,” says Popeye.

•telluric currents: Cue musical sting.

•Sophia: see p. 15

Chapter 49

p. 292
•epigraph: Traditio templi = tradition of the temple; Temple et contemplation = (o.c.) Temple and Contemplation. “This volume brings together five lectures which were originally delivered at different sessions of the famous Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzer#2;land [sic]” (publisher’s website).

•***: see p. 60

•Canepa: At last the reference on p. 43 is explained.

p. 294
•La Stampa: “One of Italy’s oldest and most prominent national newspapers” (Wikipedia).

•partisan: see p 58

•Badoglian: General Pietro Badoglia became PM of Italy after the fall of Fascism; a Badoglian would be anti-Fascist.

•Mongo: The planet (ruled by Ming the Merciless) on which Flash Gordon adventures.

•Flash Gordon: Another of Eco’s frequent references to comics.

•Carabinieri: Italian military police. I always confuse this with Carbonari, which made A Farewell to Arms hard to understand.

p. 296
•“bayonet attack on Saint Crispin’s Eve”: Surely a reference to the “band of brothers” monolog on St. Crispin’s Day in Henry V.

(49 is a good place to stop, for inveraritious reasons. More TK!)

Fund my annotating brain problem

by "buying me a coffee"

p. 159
•Hesed: Oft. Chesed. The sefira of love, making it suitable for Casaubon’s amorous detour in Brazil. To get from Binah to Hesed, one travels southeast (not quite right for an Italian’s trip to Brazil). In some diagrams of the Tree of Life, this requires passing through Da’at, but for cabbalistic reasons Da’at does not count. See p. 213 for a full, in-world discussion.

Chapter 23

p. 161
•epigraph: Dogme de la haute magie is one half of a two-volume work, usu. bundled together, as Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Dogma and Ritual of High Magic). Levi, one of the most important nineteenth-century occultists, famously listed the four principles of the magician: to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silence. Very much in keeping with FP.

•Spanish name: see p. 192

p. 162
•cangaceiros: “Cangaço was a phenomenon of Northeast Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This region of Brazil is known for its aridness and hard way of life, and in a form of “social banditry” against the government, many men and women decided to become nomadic bandits, roaming the hinterlands seeking money, food, and revenge” (Wikipedia).

•escolas de samba: The Desfile das Escolas de Samba is a dance parade, part of the Brazilian Carnival.

p. 163
•nostrils: An impressive feat, to have muscles in the nostrils, but ties in to the perfumadores, thuribles, etc., below.

•plot…of capitalism: Here the Plot (with a capital P, as Belbo would later frame it) gets mixed with that most potent of occult symbols…the invisible hand.

•Nordeste bishop: Hélder Câmara, a rightist who turned left. Nordeste is the northeast region of Brazil, whence Câmara hailed.

•Beautiful Lady: Mary, o.c.

•seven sorrows: The official seven sorrows of Mary are (the list comes from here): 1. the Prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:34–35); 2. the Flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13–21); 3. the Loss of Jesus for Three Days (Luke 2:41–50); 4. the Carrying of the Cross (John 19:17); 5. the Crucifixion of Jesus (John 19:18–30); 6. Jesus Taken Down from the Cross (John 19:39–40); and 7. Jesus Laid in the Tomb (John 19:39–42).

•Yemanjá: A Yoruba water goddess, associated (syncretized) with Mary in Afro-Brazilian tradition (candomblé). Afro-Brazilian religion generally and syncretization specifically will be the major focus of this book (i.e. Hesed).

•“that Italian philosopher”: Presumably a joking reference to comedian Peppino De Filippo, who wrote (and starred in) the 1952 movie Non è vero…ma ci credo (It Isn’t True…but I Believe It).

•coral horns: Good luck charms. They reappear on p. 177.

•Bahia: A coastal Brazilian state; a center of syncretic Afro-Brazilian rites. Speaking of syncreticism, let us note that Bahia is an anagram for Baháʼí, the most self-consciously syncretic of religions.

p. 164
•“everything might be mysteriously related to everything else”: Mmmm…could be.

•agogô: “A small gilded instrument like a triangle with bells,” as Casaubon defines it on p. 212.

•omnipotent architect of an evil dream: Good description of a demiurge

Chapter 24

p. 165
•epigraph: Fr. for “Save the frail Aischa from the vertigo of Nahash; save the plaintive Héva from the mirages of sensibility; and may the Cherubim guard me.” The book is titled How to Become a Fairy. Héva is Eve, Nahash is a (the?) serpent. Aischa is…Mohammed’s wife? I don’t understand this epigraph, although the author was a Rosicrucian, so at least he fits in.

•Cagliostro: Eighteenth-century con artist, occultist, rapscallion, and Freemason. His imprisonment (by the Inquisition) was, in fact, for the crime of Freemasonry.

•Picatrix: The title of a medieval Arabic magic grimoire.

p. 166
•“Walls were draped with banners etc.”: see note for p. 225, below.

•fake seventeenth-century fauteuil: A fauteuil is a (usu. wood) armchair. How can Belbo spot its falsity so easily?

•“banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham”: The most famous banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham would be when Robin Hood feasts him in the wilds of Sherwood Forest. Are the chairs that rustic?

•“Anyway, to go on with the story”: Belbo is always writing bad literature.

•Bing Crosby: Just the sleepy-eyed crooner, o.c., with perhaps special attention to his trademark hat; but note that Bing can serve as a negation of both 1. truth and 2. the Crusader states, thanks to the classic lyric: “If it ain’t Bing, it’s Frank” (“Gotta Be This or That” (1945)).

•infulas: An infula is a kind of headgear worn by both pagan and Christian clergy (although note that in Spanish, infulas, pl., refer to vain “airs”). Which poets are referred to I do not know. Virgil uses the word infulae a few times, but none seems relevant.

•“various angelic spirits with names ending in ‘el’”: In contrast with the “demoniacal litany” of p. 132? The el in Michael, Gabiel, Uriel, Raphael, etc., if of course a Hebrew word for God.

•Radio Moscow: The Soviet propaganda station (analogous in at least some ways to Voice of America). Disco to propaganda mark the two bounds of bad taste.

•thurible: Incense burner, the thing swung by a chain in a high church service.

p. 167
•Clavicula Salomonis: The Key of Solomon, a medieval grimoire.

•risked self-immolation: Some might say that trifling in magic risks, ultimately, immolation.

•Karnak: Ancient Egyptian temple complex.

•cubic stone of Yesod: In Parsifal Unveiled (1971), the cubic stone is a type of the philosopher’s stone as well as being a literal (?) stone in ancient Israel. The two pillars of the Temple rest upon it. The sefira Yesod means “foundation” (see p. 615). The cubic stone reappears on p. 579.

•Familiar 39: Evidently a familiar spirit, here possessing a host. Why #39 should be Cagliostro’s number I cannot say.

•Isis: An Egyptian deity (like Osiris) of course, but also, significantly, in Hellenistic/Roman times the center of a mystery cult (see Apuleius’ Golden Ass; see p. 184) and a potent symbol of the mystery at the heart of occultism (see Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled).

p. 168
•gold bugs: A reference to the Poe story “The Gold Bug,” in which the titular bug leads to treasure.

p. 169
•unheimlich: Uncanny; Eco (and perh. Belbo) doubtless has Freud’s essay of the same name in mind.

Chapter 25

p. 170
•epigraph: Le tombeau de Jacques de Molay = (unsurprisingly) The Tomb of Jacques de Molay. Martinism (see, e.g.g., Michelet, p. 119, Papus p. 208) is a Masonic-adjacent branch (or branches?) of Christian mysticism; it fits fine on this list. “Somnambulism” prob. refers to the theories of Franz Mesmer, “eclecticism” specifically in an occult context. The list is, nevertheless, indeed eclectic.

•“a castle, cave, or some damn place”: Typical of the vagueness surrounding Rosicrucians, but note the subterranean nature of the cave.

•post CXX annos patebo: Lat. for “After 120 years I will be open.” See p. 192.

p. 171
•“not only to catch up with fiction but actually to precede it”: Post hoc ergo ante hoc.

•perfumadores of Yemanjá: We encountered perfumadores (Portuguese for perfumers/atomizers) on p. 44, Yemanjá on p. 163.

•Como adivinhar o futuro na bola de cristal: How to Predict the Future in (with?) a Crystal Ball.

p. 172
•naturally: A euphemism, o.c., but also an adumbration of Casaubon’s Rebis (p. 446), his philosopher’s stone (p. 641).

•“the men of secular modernity”: FP’s basic paradox, baldly stated.

Chapter 26

p. 173
•epigraph: Classic post hoc ergo ante hoc. De l’esprit des choses = On the Spirit of Things; “De l’esprit des traditions en général” = “On the Spirit of Traditions in General.”

•Salvador: Capital city of Bahia.

•Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos: A longer (without being the longest: Cidade do São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos) name for Salvador, meaning Savior of the Bay of All the Saints.

•black Rome: Roma Negra is one of Salvador’s nicknames. “Often referred to as the Black Rome, Salvador has emerged as an essential pilgrimage site for individuals from the African Diaspora” says this site.

•Nosso Senhor do Bomfim: Usu. Bonfim. “Our Lord of the Good End.” A (famous) eighteenth-century church.

•horror vacui: Literally (here) just “busy,”or without negative space; but o.c. also a fear of nothingness, of lack of meaning. See p. 193.

•sacristies: A sacristy in the church is the priest’s prep room.

•ex-votos: Offerings made to fulfill a vow.

•jacaranda: A purple tropical flower; Eco always notes the scents of holy places.

•Saint George: Known for slaying a dragon, which has always (at least since Marduk v. Tiamat) been a story of order defeating chaos. Cf. Apollo v. Python in p185n.

•Oxossi: Another Yoruba divinity. See p. 187.

•“hidden behind decorated façades”: They are quite literally behind the veil. A good example of how FP is just theme all the way down.

•“like silver plates now blackened and worn”: Note that in this simile the façade is the blackening (good neo-Platonism).

•famuli: Google dictionary defines a famulus as “an assistant or servant, especially one working for a magician or scholar.” Perh. they are wrinkled and limping in their context as Igors, or even as (pariodies of humanity) homunculi? In the context of a church painter, it is perhaps significant that Famulus is also the name of an ancient Roman artist who influenced, inter alia, Raphael’s frescos in the Vatican.

p. 174
•“angels with Etruscan faces”: Belbo has an “Etruscan smile” on p. 55.

•“The ancient palaces…had become houses of ill-repute”: Like the fall (enkitschification) of hermeticism.

p. 175
•Isis cults: see p. 167

•Saint-Germain: His first appearance (!) (aside from a question on p. 22 that may answered in the affirmative (but don’t flip back and look if you’re avoiding spoilers).

•candomblé: The syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion alluded to several times above.

p. 176
•pai: Short for pai-de-santo (father of the saint); a candomblé priest.

•mãe-de-santo: Mother of the saint; a candomblé priestess.

•Uncle Tom’s Cabin: This bestseller needs no introduction, o.c., except to note how over a the last century the book became (most explicitly with the title character’s name, but present here as well) a touchstone for condescension.

•tenda de umbanda: A place of worship (lit.: tent) for umbanda—which is, as is explained a few paragraphs down, a newer syncretic religion related to candomblé but incorporating occult European elements.

•snuffbox: What is up with this box? It appears whenever Agliè brings it out whenever he shows up, as a nervous habit. Is this just a bit of Dickensian character-building on Eco’s part? Is the box significant? A shepherdess on it—it is part of the Et in Arcadia Ego tradition (see p. 79)? Is it just, as would be thematic for Agliè, an unsolved mystery?

•Southern Cross: A constellation visible from the Southern Hemisphere, o.c., but Templars take the cross (as crusaders) and fight under the cross (their banner).

p. 177
•souk: Bazaar.

•Capuchins: Reformed Franciscan friars. They are “stigmatized” because St. Francis received the stigmata—miraculous appearances of Christ’s wounds. Note that capuchin is also a species of monkey, a stigma of its own.

•coral horns: see p. 163.

•“sexual symbols of pre-Judaic religions”: Statues of Asherah, presumably, or possibly (in miniature?) Asherah poles—see Exodus 34:13, etc. Perhaps it is significant that Asherah (and Baal) were boosted by Ahab, eponymous for another noted truth-seeker who got more than he bargained for. Another possibility would be Ashtoreth (p. 199).

•sphinxes: The sphinx is the traditional keeper of the riddle.

•Bororo: A (traditionally) hunter-gatherer people of the Brazilian interior.

•a single Tradition: A cornerstone of Levy, Theosophy, etc. Cf. Carlyle: “Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven’s captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong?” (On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841)).

•“The wise man does not discriminate”: Chuang Tzu: “The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate among them.”

•Cardinal Lambertini: Later (starting 1740) Pope Benedict XIV.

Chapter 27

p.179
•epigraph: Charles Mackay (Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)) tells almost the same anecdote of Saint-Germain, but with Richard I instead of Pontius Pilate. Note that the Cardinal de Rohan in de Plancy’s text was, historically, the patsy in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (see p. 423).

•tout se tient: Fr.: “everything is connected.”

•“C’est un homme…”: Voltaire: “He is a man who never dies and knows everything.” FtG: “He is a joke/fake count.”

•Horace Walpole: In addition to everything else, Walpole wrote the first gothic novel, Castle of Otranto (1764).

•la Pompadour: Madame de Pompadour, official chief mistress of Louis XV, famed as a patroness of the arts.

•femme de chambre: Chambermaid. Amparo is “intolerant” of such a low-class source.

•Casanova: Most famous nowadays as an archlover, but really very much in the vein of Saint-Germain or Cagliostro—a living picaresque, an adventurer who dined out on supposed hermetic or alchemical knowledge.

p. 180

•Gog: “Gog is a 1931 satirical novel by the Italian writer Giovanni Papini” (Wikipedia). Gog is o.c. in biblical, Koranic, and medieval legend an inimical, eschatological force, either on his own (Ezekiel 38:2) or in conjunction with Magog (Revelation 20:8ff).

•Funes: The main character of a 1942 Borges (drink!) short story, “Funes el memorioso,” usu. translated “Funes the Memorious” about a man with absurdly perfect recall.

•1930: Wikipedia, above, says 1931, but the point stands—before Borges in 1942.

p. 181
•terreiro de candomblé: A temple for candomblé (see p. 175) worship.

•ialorixá: The mãe-de-santo (p. 176); the priestess. On p. 186 the two terms are used together.

•favelas: Slums, or unplanned shanty towns.

•fumigant: Always with the atomizers!

•corbeil: “A sculptured basket of flowers or fruit as an architectural decoration” (MW).

•ex-votos: see p. 173

•Ogã: A priest who does not enter into the ecstatic trance. Why this is capitalized I do not know.

•Jorge Amado: Most famous Brazilian novelist. During the events of FP, Amado would have been 1. already famous and 2. still alive.

•Iansã: Yoruba goddess, syncretized in candomblé with various saints, incl. and perh. esp. St. Barbara.

•macumba: see p. 13

•Kardecism: Nineteenth-century Christian-adjacent spiritualist movement started by Allan Kardec (spelled Alain Kardek on p. 204).

•comidas de santo: Saint’s meal; an offering of food to the orixás.

•Exu: Yoruba trickster god (see p. 44). “A shrine dedicated to Exu is located outside of the main terreiro of a Candomblé temple, usually near the entrance gate” (Wikipedia).

p. 182
•Mercury: Like Mercury, Exu is both messenger of the gods and trickster. Remember that Mercury = Hermes = hermeticism. See p. 185.

•polychrome: Painted.

•Indio: Indian.

•caboclo: Portuguese for a mixed race European/Indian, but used specifically in umbanda to refer to a type of “working entity.”

•preto velho: An “Old Black Spirit” (i.e. the spirit of an elderly Black person) in umbanda, usu. depicted with a pipe.

•orixás: Spirits in the religions of the Yoruba and their diaspora. See p. 187 for a fuller discussion.

•historical materialism: Marx and Engel’s theory centering economics as a force in history. Marxism is suitably apocalyptic because it posits a turbulent period (revolution) followed by a worker’s paradise.

•Trier: German city and birthplace of Karl Marx.

•No pasarán: Lit. “they shall not pass” but here an anti-fascist (and therefore in the logic of the Spanish Civil War pro-Marxist) slogan.

p. 183
•Persia, Egypt, and pre-Judaic Palestine: This list seems to indicate the specific mystery cults of Mithras, Isis, and…who? Moloch? Christ would seem the obvious example to round out the mystery triad, but he hardly seems best described as pre-Judaic.

•“Africa preserved…to the Greeks”: As discussed in Plato’s Timaeus, presumably.

Chapter 28

p. 184
•epigraph: The Corpus Hermeticus (usu. (e.g. on p. 206) Corpus Hermeticum) is a Renaissance collection of ancient (?) occult literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (see p. 14); this quote evidently comes from an text preserved by Stobaeus, a Greek writer from late antiquity. For decans, see p. 283. Note that the circle is “the form of the Whole” as has been prefigured many times (the motion of the pendulum etc.).

•“What treasures of knowledge?”: Note that the chapter begins with no characters named, no people at all and merely speech. No character will be named until p. 186. I think people who don’t like FP would point to this kind of thing.

•Apuleius: Author of the Isisistic protonovel known as The Golden Ass—see p. 167.

•Neoplatonism: The antimaterialist philosophy of, inter al., Julian the Apostate. John 1:1 is overtly Neoplatonic.

•gnosis: Lit. just knowledge, although one cannot use the word without thinking of Gnosticism.

•“precisely because their language was impenetrable”: A very Agliè sentiment.

•Druids: Cf. “the wisdom of the ancient Celts” (p. 133).

•mages: Presumably here specifically Zoroastrian magi.

•gymnosophists: see p. 25

•age of the Antonines: AD 138–92 in Rome, ending with the disastrous reign of Commodus.

p. 185
•Hermes: What was implicit on p. 182 made explicit.

•Pelourinho: A neighborhood in Salvador, “a cultural hub for the Afro-Brazilian community” (Wikipedia).

•Saint Cyprian of Antioch: Magician, saint, and martyr, “a prototype of the Faust story” (Wikipedia). His highly romantic story involves his magic arts failing against Christian piety, whereupon he converts to the stronger force, eventually becoming a bishop before his martyrdom.

•buried: Subterranean again, if only metaphorically.

•Delphi: Site of the most famous oracle of ancient Greece, sacred to Apollo.

•Apollo: Apollo is of course the god of light and reason, and therefore by implication the Enlightenment. The opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian (ecstatic, like a candomblé, and also an explicitly mystery teaching) is central both to the last few centuries of Western discourse as well as FP. Cf. the mad song of Tom o’Bedlam:

I know more than Apollo, for oft while he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars in the wounded welkin weeping.

Apollo, as the sun, can never see the stars.

•dramaturgy of the serpent: The oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia, after Python, the enormous snake slain by Apollo there. The term dramaturgy seems to indicate that Agliè sees something false about the whole enterprise.

•Mithra: Zoroastrian force of goodness and light (cf. Apollo), conflated here with Mithras, the central figure of the poorly understood but widespread and popular Roman mystery religion. “If Christianity had been stopped at its birth by some mortal illness, the world would have become Mithraic.”–Renan, Marcus Aurelius.

•hierophant: “A priest in ancient Greece; specifically: the chief priest of the Eleusinian mysteries (MW); also, the fifth card in the Tarot deck.

•Prince of the World: Satan (John 14:30). Here Satan is summoned in the traditional home of the Greek gods; Medieval tradition would posit all ancient pagan gods as devils.

•Argos…Hera: Hera, queen of the gods, is the traditional patroness of Argos. In the Iliad book IV Hera lists Argos first among her three favorite cities.

•Phrygia: Ancient kingdom of Midas, a type of the alchemist insofar as he turns things to gold.

•hepatoscopic: By examining the liver of a sacrificial lamb.

•Memphis: Ancient capital of Egypt; note the “underground temples”!

p. 186
•’89: In 1889 Brazil overthrew and exiled its monarch, establishing a republic. In 1789 in France the Bastille fell. Hence the apostrophe.

•ci-devant: “Former”; but here clearly someone out of date—a “back number.”

p. 187
•virgins: Virgins plural? The black virgins (p. 145)?

•just-cooked foods: The comidas de santo from p. 181.

•“is Yemanjá Our Lady of Conception or not?”: Casaubon asks, almost piteously, whether one is permitted to play fast and loose with philosophical concepts. He apparently concludes the answer is yes.

•Xangõ: Considering Xangõ is mentioned for the first time, and only in passing, in the previous paragraph, and Jerome not at all, Casaubon must be coming to the event with some previous knowledge.

•Oxalá: The patron saint of Bahia. There are seven lines in umbanda, viz.: 1. Oxalá, 2. Ogum, 3. Oxóssi, 4. Xangô, 5. Águas (Waters), 6. Yori & Yorimá, and 7. Oriente (Orient).

•cabocla: The feminine form of caboclo, o.c. See p. 182.

•Orient: It is perhaps significant that the Knights of Pythias (a primarily US-based secret fraternal order) offers a degree: Ancient Order of Knights of the Orient.

•No pasarán: See p. 182.

p. 188
•corbeils: Established as the location of the saint’s meal on p. 181.

•multicolored: Cf. p. 182, polychrome.

•manioc: Aka cassava; a starchy root and staple food.

•coco: Port.: coconut.

•amendoim: Port.: peanut.

•gengibre: Port.: ginger.

•moqueca de siri-mole: Soft-shell crab stew.

•vatapá: “An Afro-Brazilian dish made from bread, shrimp, coconut milk, finely ground peanuts and palm oil mashed into a creamy paste. It is a typical food of Salvador, Bahia…[frequently] a ritual offering in Candomblé” (Wikipedia).

•efó: Perh. efo riro, a Yoruba vegetable soup.

•caruru: “A Brazilian food made from okra, onion, shrimp, palm oil and toasted nuts” (Wikipedia).

•farofa: Toasted cassava four.

•languid odor: Always smells with Eco!

•metempsychosis: Transmigration of the soul. The concept evokes Pythagoreanism (p. 139 etc).

Chapter 29

p. 189
•epigraph: Pia et ultimissima… = A pious and most final admonition about the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, to wit: Do they exist? What are they like? From whence did they get that name they adopted for themselves?

•“It was a mild evening”: Belbo and his bad literature again; the phrase is hackneyed. Perh. Belbo is also just quoting, as Robert Louis Stevenson used this exact phrase (“The Adventure of the Hansom Cab” (1878)) and it also appears in Hobomok by Lydia Maria Child (1824).

•“Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind”: Another quote, this one unambiguous—from Keats’s “I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill” (1816).

•Fama Fraternitatis: Report on the Brotherhood.

p. 190
•Cassel: Now Kassel.

•“all titles were like that in the seventeenth century”: Into the eighteenth: Robinson Crusoe’s full title (1719) was: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

•Lina Wertmuller: (Usu. Wertmüller); writer and director of Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974). The movie must be fairly recent in the timeline of FP.

•Ragguagli di Parnaso: News-sheet from Parnassus (1612), a satire on contemporary authors.

•Confessio fraternitatis Roseae Crucis, ad eruditos Europae: Confession of the Brotehrhod of the Rosy Cross to the enlightened of Europe.

•C.R.: This is, of course, Rosy Cross reversed.

•Christian Rosencreutz: An allegorical name straight our of Bunyan; the surname evokes the Rosy Cross, o.c.

•“an affectionate nickname”: Perh. because P.D. Sounds like “Petey” or someone like (childrens illustrator) P.D. Eastman? Irregardful, P.D., like G.G. M.P.I., is in the original document.

•Liber M: Presumably for Liber Mundi = The Book of the World.

•“center of all knowledge”: i.e., a fixed point; see pp. 5ff.

p. 191
•ant…grasshopper: A reference to the Aesop fable.

•mamaia: I can find no reference to this substance. The word is composed of two maternal roots: ma (or mama) and maia (Gk: μαῖα, good mother). See immediately below.

•“rosencreutzlische Mutti-ja-ja”: What is going on here? Rosy Cross–…like? -ish? Lische is Italian for “fish bones,” but…is that relevant? Mutti (“mommy”) reintroduces the mother theme of mamaia. “Mommy-yes-yes” is perh. just mamaia reinterpreted as mama-ja?

•“What was Luther then? Shit?”: Luther was of course the most fecal obsessed of…any theologian in history? Like Biz Markie, he got all his best ideas on the toilet.

p. 192
•Luther’s coat of arms: More commonly called the Luther rose.

•burning giraffe/limp watch: Surrealist images from the paintings of Salvador Dalí.

•post CXX annos patebo: see p. 170.

•opiate of the masses: Religion, according to Marx. Note that the term rosy cross sounds like someone accusing religion of being a little “red.”

•El pueblo unido jamás será vencido: The people united will never be defeated; this apears to be Spanish, not Portuguese—much like “ No pasarán” above and, like Amparo’s name (see p. 161).

•Pretoria: Perhaps it is a stretch, but if we’re still in a Marxist context, Pretoria is most famous in some circle as the subject of the song “Marching to Pretoria,” a hit in 1960 by pinks The Weavers.

p. 193
•seven sides: Unlike the octagon on p. 30.

•nequaquam vacuum: Lat: Not at all empty. In contrast, the most famous tomb in Christian history was, in fact, empty (John 20: 1–9, etc.). “Nequaquam vacuum” is just a small part of the inscription on Rosencreutz’s tomb, which reads in total: “Jesus mihi omnia, nequaquam vacuum, libertas evangelii, dei gloria intacta, legis jugum” or “Jesus is everything to me, not at all empty, the freedom of the gospel, the untouched (untried?) glory of God, the yoke (or summit?) of the law.”

•Donald Duck: And, still to remain Marxist, cf. the Chilean book How to Read Donald Duck by Mattelart and Dorfman (1971), a Marxist reading of Disney comics.

•horror: I.e. horror vacui; see p. 173.

•animula vagula blandula: A nearly untranslatable line from the dying words of Emperor Hadrian. “Darling rambling spiritling” is how I hesitantly translate it here.

•Book I: It looks like book one, o.c., but perh. a reference to / analog to Liber M (p. 190), with the I standing for infinite knowledge.

•macrocosm and microcosm: A callback to p. 190.

•manifesto: Still Marxist imagery—The Communist Manifesto (1848).

•soon to appear on this screen: Casaubon mimics the language of theater advertisements.

•Sub umbra alarum tuarum Iehova: Quoting the epigraph to chapter 12 (p. 72). Except unlike in chapter 12, here Iehova is spelled with a I—just like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)! Post hoc ergo ante hoc.

•“Send me ten dollars…”: Circularity…like the pendulum, etc.

p. 194
•Plekhanov: See? We never left the Marxism.

Chapter 30

p. 195
•epigraph: On the Spanish Monarchy. The Mirror of Solomon was a legendary crystal ball-like device.

•Cockaigne: A land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of luxury and ease…a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns showing their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheese)” (Wikipedia).

•Rudolph II: Holy Roman Emperor; prob. significantly he (like Elizabeth I) never married—alchemy is ultimately sterile (cf. p. 343).

•Comenius: More of a straight humanist and less of an occultist than most historical figures in this book (e.g. Dee!). He was offered but turned down the presidency of Harvard University.

•John Dee: His first appearance, but for more information see pp. 399ff.

•Monas Ierogliphica: Usu. Monas Hierogliphica. See p. 418 for an explanation / illustration (?).

•“To the end of time”: More of a Belbo line, shouldn’t it be?

•Michael Maier: Maier’s Atalanta is the epigraph to chapter 4 (p. 28).

•dragons biting their tails: Like ouroboros; or The Worm Ouroboros (1922), a book inspired by and frequently quoting Elizabethan literature (if not Dee himself).

•sphinxes: see p. 177

•Monopoly: capitalized like the Parker Brothers game; typical of Casaubon’s flippancy.

•Abracadabra: Casaubon seems to be just using the word as one might say presto or behold, but see also p. 28.

•“beneath (or, rather. above)…barometer”: In the most primitive of barometers, the weather glass so-called, rising water indicates falling air pressure.

p. 196
•Hortus Palatinus: Garden of the Palatinate, Frederick V’s beautiful and famous garden in Heidelberg.

•Palatine elector: Frederick V, ruler of the Palatinate, a (widely dispersed) state in the Holy Roman Empire.

•Mutter Courage: Mother Courage, a character in at least two works set during the Thirty Years’ War: Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668) and Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (1939). The name is not ironic, and she is indeed courageous, if a bit of a rogue in other ways.

•Prague, the magic city: Perhaps there is more to it, but certainly the golem + Kafka + Meyrink is sufficient magic for any city.

•White Mountain: Frederick V lost the Battle of the White Mountain (1620); part of the Thirty Years’ War.

•“Comenius’s house and library were burned, and his wife and son were killed”: Other sources indicate that his family died decades earlier, in an unrelated incident.

•Naometria: Gk. roots for “temple measurement.” The book is ~2000 pages long.

•Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae: Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom.

•Andreae: His first appearance, of many.

•“but he had written that in his youth”: Post hoc ergo ante hoc.

•Christianopolis: Gk. roots again: “Christian city.”

•pandemonium: A normal word, o.c., but also, in Milton, the capital city of Hell, and therefore the inverse of Christianopolis.

•lusus: Lat.: game, jest.

•ludibrium: Lat.: toy, mockery.

•Arcana arcanissima: The Secretest Secrets.

p. 197
•Fludd: Another first appearance of a recurring character.

•Apologia compendiaria…: A brief apology washing and cleansing, as though by a Fludd of truth, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, spattered with stains of suspicion and infamy. Fluctibus = flood = Fludd.

•“proof of their existence”: A very Agliè argument; Casaubon is making them now.

•Tractatus apologeticus…: Apologetic tract defensing the integrity of the society of the Rosy Cross.

•De Naturae Secretis: On the Secrets of Nature.

•Golden Fleece/Toison d’Or: see p. 144

•unimpeachable source: Col. Ardenti; p. 142.

•Barbara Cartland: Bestselling author of over 700 books, primarily period romances. She left 160 completed but unpublished MSS. at her death.

•Utriusque cosmi historia: Short for Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia = The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of both worlds, viz. the greater and the lesser. For short, The History of Both Worlds.

•Silentium post clamores: Silence after Shouts.

p. 198
•pseuds: Pseudointellectuals, a term popularized if not invented by Private Eye magazine in the 1960s.

•mamaia: It is back!

•Turris Babel: The Tower of Babel (see Gen. 11). The tower theme introduced on p. 41 returns.

•Ireneus Agnostus: Presumably a nom de plume. Ireneus evokes the early Christian bishop who wrote against the Gnostics (and other heresies), while Agnostus means not-knowing or not-Gnostic.

•Tintinnabulum Sophorum: The Bell of the Wise Ones.

•Spanischen Monarchy: The source of this chapter’s epigraph (p. 195). Cf. the ? in the epigraph’s attribution with Casaubon’s uncertainty here.

•“Like the Beatles. But only in Germany”: Of course, when the Beatles left Germany, that is when they really hit it big.

p. 199
•devil worship, alchemy, and heresy: An interesting trifecta.

•Ashtoreth: “For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians” (1 Kings 11:5a).

•Descartes: Cartesian dualism…cf. Neoplatonism & utriusque cosmi.

•Mersenne: French mathematician and polymath.

•“under this bed”: Bob Dylan: “Well, I got up in the morning, I looked under my bed. / I was looking every place for them gol-durned Reds” (“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” (1961), still a bootleg when FP came out).

p. 200
•Bacon’s New Atlantis: From whence the epigraph for chapter 2 (p. 10).

•“like God”: “God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.” –Stendhal.

•“Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère”: An adaptation of a line from Baudelaire’s foreword to The Flowers of Evil (1857): “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” translated here as “Hypocrite reader—my twin—my brother!” Casaubon would be modifying Baudelaire to speak to an “apocryphal reader.” BUT: The “toi” indicates that Casaubon is not quoting Baudelaire, but rather quoting Eliot quoting Baudelaire, because in The Waste Land (a significant text for FP for several reasons, incl. its grail themes), Eliot writes: “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” Casaubon has translated the English part of Eliot back to French.

•“make those trumpets stop”: Return of the trumpet theme.

•“The others say he’s drunk, or maybe it’s arteriosclerosis”: Cf. De Angelis’s description of the night porter: “Not only alcoholic, but arteriosclerotic, too” (p. 152).

•Feuerbach: Philosopher who sought materialistic explanations for religion. “His thought served as a critical bridge between the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and that of Karl Marx” (Wikipedia)—Amparo always comes back to Marx.

p. 201
•rosy-fingered dawn: Homer’s famous simile. An evocation of the rose, o.c.

•Yemanjá: A water goddess, remember. Here syncretized on the fly with Eos.

•ludibria: The feminie form of ludibrium (p. 196). Who has ears to hear, let him hear.

•Turris Babel: An obvious vulgarism.

•Arcana Arcanissima, the Golden Fleece: Still vulgarisms. Much later, Lia will make the argument more overtly (p. 362).

•“pâle et rose comme un coquillage marin”: A line from Mallarmé’s poem “Une Négresse” (1865); his description of “that alien mouth,” translated here as “pale, rosy as a shell.” The return of the rose.

Chapter 31

p. 202
•epigraph: Aperçu sur l’initiation is apparently Aperçus sur l’initiation, or Perspectives on Initiation, originally published in 1946. Guénon, a prolific writer on esoteriscism, died in 1951. “In his writings, Guénon proposes to hand down eastern metaphysics and traditions, these doctrines being defined by him as of ‘universal character,’ and adapt them to western readers ‘while keeping strictly faithful to their spirit’” (Wikipedia).

•statuettes of Cheops, Nefertiti, the Sphinx: Nefertiti and the Sphinx (pp. 177 etc.) are iconic, but Cheops…while statues of him do exist, perh. here it is his pyramid.

•Bramanti: His name evokes the brahmins—i.e., the gymnosophists (pp. 25 etc.)

•Tantric: Tantra is specifically an esoteric yogic tradition, but the word tantric is broadly understood (among English speakers) to refer to mustical sex. For that matter, for all the talk of ass-kissing, Kundalini actually has a complex spiritual meaning I am not qualified to unravel. It’s not all asses!

•tapir: The tapir is native both to South America and to India, befitting a man in Brazil with a Brahmanic name.

•Ahmose I: Mid sixteenth-century BC pharaoh. Note how his name evokes Moses (Moses being, o.c., an Egyptian name).

•twenty-five thousand years before the founding of Thebes: So ca. 28200 BC?

p. 203
•Great White Fraternity: A term from Theosophy.

•antediluvian wisdom: This is the plot to the Timaeus.

•Karnak: see p. 167

•Akhenaton: The notorious (?) pharaoh who invented his own heretical monotheistic religion. His wife was Nefrititi.

•Hermes Trismegistus: See p. 14. Significantly, Hermes Trismegistus is associated with the Egyptian god Thoth.

•Princeton gnosis: A reference to the book Princeton Gnosis (1974) by philosopher Raymond Ruer.

•Solomon: Remember that it is from Solomon’s Temple the Templars get their name and the Freemasons their origin story.

•Solon: The lawgiver of Athens. Surely the connection of his name to Solomon’s cannot be mere coincidence…

•Plotinus: The greatest of the Neoplatonists (p. 184).

•the Essenes: A Jewish sect of the time of Christ. Esp. at the time FP was written, the Essenes were being proposed at the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

•the Therapeutae: Another, unrelated, Jewish sect from around the same time.

•Joseph of Arimethea: See p. 141. Still playing coy about just where in Europe Joseph brought the Grail.

•Alcuin: Scholar of the court of Charlemagne. His role in the eighth century could be seen as analogous to the role of someone like Ficino in the fifteenth, preserving and disseminating classical knowledge.

•King Dagobert: The temporal chronology is here violated unambiguously, as Dagobert lived a century before Alcuin. As a Merovingian, he would be (according to the mad texts of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln) a direct descendent of Christ.

•Saint Thomas: Presumably Aquinas; but why not Thomas à Becket?

•Bacon…Shakespeare: Redundant?

•Spinoza: Dutch-Jewish philosopher. “Many authors have discussed similarities between Spinoza’s philosophy and Eastern philosophical traditions” (Wikipedia).

•Jakob Böhme: Lutheran philosopher in the mystical/hermetic tradition.

•Debussy: French composer; died in Paris near the end of the First World War in an unrelated incident.

•Einstein: One of the four horsemen of Modernism; see Impossible Histories p. 94.

•Nero: Although nowadays merely a watchword for cruelty (Adventure Comics #314 (1963) calls him one of the three most evil men in history), a classical Jewish tradition existed viewing Nero as almost a messianic figure.

•Cambronne: Napoleonic general best known for his one word response to a demand for surrender: “Merde!”

•Geronimo, Pancho Villa: Both indigenous New World guerrilla leaders.

•Buster Keaton: “The Great Stone Face”; silent move comedian.

•“As for the influence of the original Rosy Cross on Christianity…it was no accident that Jesus had died on a cross”: Post hoc ergo ante hoc.

•“In cantos XXIV and XXV of the ‘Paradiso’ one finds the triple kiss of Prince Rosicrux”: I could not find this at all. The pelican’s there, though!

•“the three theological virtues of Masonic chapters”: Considering the three virtues come from 1 Corinthians 13:13…post hoc ergo ante hoc, once again.

•Rosa Mystica: An epithet of Mary.

•Kieswetter: Karl Kieswetter (†1895), who claimed to be descended from the last head of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.

•Theatrum Chemicum: Chemical Theater; cf. Chemical Wedding.

p. 204
•William Tell: Eco does a good job at keeping certain characters’ theories crazier and less coherent than others’.

•mistletoe: Most famously as the source of the death of Baldr in Norse myth; a significant point and plant in The Golden Bough.

•Aryan mythology: Here, presumably, Aryan = Teutonic, but see below.

•“the Aryans came from India, where the Rosicrucians took refuge after leaving Germany”: It would be an interesting exercise to construct this timeline (without saying p.h.e.a.h.).

•Max Heindel: American occultist and theosophist.

•Alain Kardek: Usu. Allan Kardec; see p. 181.

•Aum Banda: Aum is another spelling of the sacred syllable om; bandha is a yogic technique involving locking energy into the body. Make of that what you will.

•siakra: Siakra looks like an alternate transliteration of chakra.

•frontal plexus: A region above the eyes (third eye?); the term only seems to appear in new-age medicine discussions of chakras.

•paid provocateurs: A surprisingly evergreen accusation.

•atheistic materialism: E.g. Marxism? In the next paragraph Amparo is off to a “political meeting.”

Chapter 32

p. 206
•epigraph: Tertullian, a church father, is here preaching against the Valentinian gnostics (hence the title of his book). A translation: “The Valentinians desire nothing more than to conceal what they preach—if, however, those who conceal can be said to preach at all. If in good faith you ask them for information, they say with a stiff expression and a raised eyebrow, ‘It is deep.’ If you subtly test them, they affirm your common faith with forked-tongued ambiguities. If you show a little of your understanding, they deny whatever they discern. They possess an artifice by which they persuade before they teach everything.”

•batida: Traditional Brazilian cocktail.

•Carmen Miranda: The Brazilian singer with fruit on the head; Brazil as a mainstream / cosmopolitan / exoteric place—Miranda, after all, appeared in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

•Corpus Hermeticum: Source for the epigraph to chapter 28 (p. 184).

•“a harmless man”: see p. 593

•Pico della Mirandola: Source for the epigraph to chapter 101 (p. 516). Key humanist thinker, and also father of Christian kabbalism.

•Ficino: Marsilio Ficino; another humanist, important for translating ancient Greek texts.

p. 207
•Cassandra: The most salient point about Cassandra is that no one believed her.

•Parmenides: see p. 75

•Kardec: Note the different spelling from p. 204. Bramanti always gets things wrong; Agliè actually knows a thing or two.

Chapter 33

p. 209
•epigraph: Papus was a pseudonym of Gerard Encausse, a turn-of-the-century occultist and the father of neo-Martinism. Martines de Pasqually, o.t.o.h., is an eighteenth-century kabbalist and one-half (his student Louis Claude Saint-Martin is the other) of the reason od-school Martinists are called Martinists.

•tenda: Short of tenda de umbanda; see p. 176.

•gira: “A dance to celebrate the orixás” (Wikipedia), presumably derived from the Portuguese word for “spin.”

•alopecia areata: Patchy baldness.

•egun: Short for egungun, the collective dead of Yoruba religion.

•Pompa Gira: Usu. (e.g. p. 214) Pomba Gira; Exu’s consort. Note the gira.

•pretos velhos and caboclos: see p. 182

•Rei Congo: Brazilian folk hero who smuggled gold (from the mine in which he worked) in his hair, purchasing his son’s and his own freedom.

•Pai Agostinho: I.e. Father Augustine.

p. 210
•“the world of the earth”: The telluric theme

•Spengler: Early twentieth-century philosopher of history. In The Decline of the West (1918–22) he declared Western culture to be Faustian (see p. 546). Although he was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer, Nazis latched onto aspects of his thought (inspiring Amparo’s remarks, below).

•barracão: Port.: shed.

•Blud and Boden: Usu. translated as Blood and Soil. Nazi slogan

•“You eat your God for dinner”: The eucharist, o.c. Amparo is reacting against the usual canard that South America is full of cannibals.

•“It’s the Catholics”: Is Casaubon not (nominally) Catholic? Perh. Casaubon is a Huguenot name?

•“strangle the last priest…”: Adapted from Diderot: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

•marzipan: “In some countries, it is shaped into small figures of animals as a traditional treat for New Year’s Day or Christmas” (Wikipedia).

•Pantagruelian: i.e. Gargantuan. In Rabelais, Pantagruel is the giant son of Gargantua. Rabelais, who seems like the kind of guy Eco would like, also appears on p. 56.

•Cosmas and Damian: Brothers and early Christian martyrs; the patron saints of physicians.

•“a virgin pierced with swords”: The swords are the seven sorrows of Mary (p. 163).

•redeemer of Corcovado: The big statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro.

p. 211
•pai-de-santo: see p. 176

•Dubonnet: A spiced apéritif.

•elixir: The word is important in alchemy, but of course here it just has its regular meaning.

•Fountain of Youth: Traditionally located far north of Brazil, but perh. important as a traditional goal of Conquistadors—closely related to the theme of colonialism is Brazil.

•atabaques: Tall Afro-Brazilian drums. “Considered sacred in Candomblé and Umbanda” (Wikipedia).

•“Seu Tranca Ruas é Mojuba! etc.”: Seu Tranca Ruas, Sete Encruzilhadas, etc. are all umbada entities. “É Mojuba” is a greeting of respect. An English speaker might say: “Hail, Seu Tranca Ruas!”

•thurible: See p. 166. Here Eco specifies a “heavy odor.”

•Oxalá: see p. 187

•Nossa Senhora: Our Lady; Mary.

•Saturday night fevers: A reference to the Travolta disco movie (1977). Perh. contemporaneous with the events of FP?

p. 212
•well-tempered clavichords: A reference to Bach’s piece The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722). A clavichord is a type of clavier.

•hum hum hum: Cf. om / aum; or possibly latihan, ritual humming in the spiritual movement known as Subud.

•adventure stories: Once again FP overtly flirts both with bad prose and with the pulp tradition.

• agogô: Finally explained; from p. 164.

p. 213
•homeopathic: A method of alternative medicine, centuries old but embraced by New Age practitioners. “Like cures like.”

•Hesed: For the first time Casaubon seems to be aware of what book he is in.

p. 214
•“O seu manto…”: “Her mantle is of velvet, entirely embroidered in gold; her fork is of silver, and vast is her treasure... Pomba Gira of Souls, come and have a drink.”

•blond Achaeans: Achaeans=ancient Greeks (in Homer, e.g); presumably Agliè is using the term as less classically minded (like Bramanti) might use Aryan.

p. 215
•Copacabana: A beach neighborhood in Rio, but o.c. also the name of the most famous of new York nightclubs (“an all-night bar”).

•litmus paper: Paper that changes color in response to the pH level of a liquid it is dipped in.

p. 216
•Petrópolis: A city in Brazil named after Pedro II (exiled 1889).

p. 47
•Binah: “Understanding.” To get to this sefira from Hokhmah, one travels due “west.”

Chapter 7

p. 49
•epigraph: Lec is a near-contemporary Polish poet and aphorist (“An empty envelope that is sealed contains a secret” –Unkempt Thoughts). The book quoted appears to be posthumous.

•Académie de Saint-Cyr: Presumably a school of the old regime; Louis XVI was o.c. Beheaded in 1793.

•comic strips: The first reference in FP to comics. There will be many.

p. 50
•“I never threw paving stones…did unto them”: A conflation of two injunctions of Jesus: John 8:7 (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone) & Matthew 7:12 (do unto others as you would have them do unto you). Repeated, more or less, on p. 108.

p. 51
•Carpocrates: Second-century gnostic. Borges refers to him in “The Theologian” and “Three Versions of Judas.”

•Aleister Crowley: The influential occultist and Thelemite.

•impotentia coeundi: Sexual impotence. The topic keeps coming up…excuse me, I mean it gets mentioned an awful lot.

•Krupskaya: Lenin’s wife.

•weave baskets: The canonical occupation of loons. “…and basket weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes.” –Napoleon XIV, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!” (1966).

•I am that I am: Exodus 3:14: God’s statement to Moses. Cf. Popeye.

p. 52
•“draw up timetables”: Supporters of Mussolini paradigmatically assert that he made the trains run on time.

•Stalin: A strange conceit: Stalin attended the Tbilisi (i.e. Tiflis) Theological Seminary until his expulsion in 1899. The Bolshevik party was technically founded in 1912, although maybe you could argue for 1903. Anyway, Stalin must be looking at various nineteenth-century Marxist agitators and…prophesying? It’s also difficulyt to imagine Stalin capable of remorse.

Chapter 8

p.54
•epigraph: This is appears to be one of numerous fragmentary Manichean texts found on the German Turfan Expedition (1902–14).

•Ophiucho: Presumably (Italian name for the?) constellation Ophiuchus—significantly, one depicting Asclepius holding a serpent.

•Rick’s Café: From Casablanca (1942). Rick is the third Humphrey Bogart role (after Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe) referenced so far.

p. 55
•Copernican revolution in modern philosophy: Kant certainly claimed to have completed the Copernican revolution. The connection with 1. cycles and 2. astronomy is intentional. Note that “Copernican revolution” is itself a double meaning.

•Etruscan smile: A serene smile, as depicted on Etruscan funerary art.

p. 56
•the human condition: Sure, it’s just an everyday phrase, but surely Eco also had in mind one or all of: a 1933 Malraux novel, a series of paintings by Rene Magritte, a 1858 book by Hannah Arendt, and a film trilogy by Masaki Kobayashi (1959–61)

•Rabelaisian Sorbonne: The writings of Francois Rabelais are marked by erudition, obscenity, humor, and exaggeration. A Rabelaisian school (Sorbonne) would be similarly exaggerated.

p. 57
•A bevy of fair women: Quoting Milton (Paradise Lost, book XI) (and perh. a reference to Tennyson’s poem “A Dream of Fair Women” (1842)).

•“toutes les femmes…”: A quote from Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), translated here as

All the women that I’ve met arrange themselves on the horizon
With piteous handwringings and the sad looks of semaphores in the rain.

Note that quotation is not creation. (Exception.) See also p. 607.

•“…sous la pluie”: The sheer number of untranslated passages in FP points to the many transnational, pan-European societies therein. Note that Eco does not bother italicizing other languages, in contravention of convention.

•Lena: If Belbo is meant to evoke a hyena, Lena must as well, Lena the Hyena being a character from the comic strip Li’l Abner.

•Ophelia: From Hamlet, o.c., but the role suggests Dante’s Beatrice (who is found, contrarily, not in the abyss).

p. 58
•in Hell: Again, unlike Beatrice.

•partisans: Anti-fascists.

•rushing to her rescue: FP is always in a flirtation with being a lowbrow adventure novel, and nowhere more than in the mind of Belbo.

Chapter 9

p. 59
•epigraph: This is the first appearance of Andreae, although he, and the idea of a chemical wedding (Chymische Hochzeit) will appear time and again in the book.

•trumpet: Among all the evocations of a trumpet, we should add W.A.S.T.E.

•Finis Austriae: Lit. “the end of Austria,” the 1938 Anschluss.

•Earl of Rochester: John Wilmot. Often obscene Restoration poet who died (like Alexander the Great, Cú Chulainn, and Jesus) Æ 33. Graham Greene wrote a biography of him, long unpublished/uppressed.

•Object of Desire: A quotation of Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

p. 60
•“Never…what you think it is”: Cf. all the works of Rene Girard.

•***: The location of Belbo’s home is always obscured thus. It is therefore both an evocation of pulpy fiction and quite literally the final secret of the novel (see pp. 620–21).

Chapter 10

p. 62
•epigraph: Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi = The Magical World of Heroes. Vis numerorum would be “the power of numbers” (possibly “strength in numbers”?); vinum “wine.”

•Shklovski: Presumably Viktor Shklovsky, a formalist who wrote on the concept of defamiliarization—note that pronouns are, earlier in this paragraph described with the words “formal” and “familiar.”

•“We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us”: Presumably because Vladimir Mayakovsky was a revolutionary, and Dr. Zhivago a reactionary?

p. 63
•suicide attempt: If “we were all Mayakovskis” (p. 62), it is perh. significant that Mayakovsky died by suicide.

p. 64
•“he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him”: It is impossible (although post hoc ergo ante hoc) for this to be a reference to A Fish Called Wanda (1988): [John Cleese:] “…saying to someone ‘Are you married?’ and hearing ‘My wife left me this morning’…”

•Verdurin salon…chez Guermantes: Two opportunities for conversation in Proust.

•Joachim Murat: Napoleonic commander and sometime King of Naples. The dialogue runs:

“You are Black?”
“Yes, general.”
“Bravo, bravo. Keep going.”

p. 65
•Piraeus: Athens’ port.

•paralogism: Fallacy.

•Anselm: Casaubon knows him well; see p. 224.

•ontological argument: A more thorough summary here. Note that the saint is not the only one who will confuse “existence in thought with existence in reality.”

•Gaunilon: Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, a contemporary of Anselm’s who claimed that Anselm’s argument could be used to prove anything; again, he will not be the only one to notice this.

p. 66
•“save me and thee”: “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer” said Robert Owen.

•Gödel’s theorem: Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Presumably referring to the problem of a moron proving people are morons (a system proving itself).

•Epimenides: Epimenides is a Cretan, but Belbo is a cretin.

•Titus: 1:12

•universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars: Aristotelean logic.

p. 67
•“everything proves everything else”: Apparently the hallmark of a lunatic, but o.c. also the way everyone in the books thinks.

•Number 1: Does it matter that Eco’s final novel was titled Numero Zero? An off-by-one error?

Chapter 11

p. 68
•epigraph: Cioran is the most pessimistic of pessimistic philosophers. “Mauvais demiurge” (i.e. bad demiurge) is practically redundant.

•mask: Masks are also always Borges references.

•Seven Seas Jim: A suitably pulpy (or dime-novelly) name for Belbo’s imagination. Presumably his name owes the Jim to Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900).

•Catullus, the poetae novi: The Latin Catullus was one of the “new poets” in Rome, rejecting traditional forms to emulate (decadent?) Hellenistic models.

p. 69
•“hardened clay…Moses”: Moses was famously opposed to graving images.

•William S.: William S. Burroughs, o.c.…no, just kidding, it’s Shakespeare.

•Verona: Romeo and Juliet; “this piece” is o.c. Hamlet.

p.70
•“A novel about God incognito”: The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton (1908)?

•Titanic…South Seas: Belbo’s travestying of history; the Titanic was o.c. in the North Atlantic.

•pua blossoms: More of Belbo’s mischief: Pua is Hawaiian, and presumably not Papuan.

•“they call all white men Jim”: Lord Jim again.

•Kurtz: From Heart of Darkness, also by Conrad (1899). Quoted in Eliot’s “Hollow Men.”

p.71
•Manila…Malta: Note that this route is completely absurd and roundabout (although AFAICT it does not trace out a Tree of Life; I tried plotting it out).

•“meed of glory”: Rawlinson begins his classic nineteenth-century translation of Herodotus with the explanation that the history was written to prevent deeds from losing their “due meed of glory.”

Chapter 12

p. 72
•epigraph: “Under the shadow of your wings, Jehovah.” On p. 193, Eco calls this phrase “a formula of conclusion. Over and out”—a curious place to quote it, here ~10% of the way through the book.

•industrial archeology: Sounds like an exhibit at the Saint-Martin-des-Champs.

•Nibelung: A reference to the medieval German epic Nibelungenlied and Wagner’s operas inspired by it; or, prob., later medieval texts, in which the Nibelungs are dwarves—see p. 352.

•“leaving out the vowels”: Like Hebrew.

•justitia aequatrix: Equalizing (equitable?) justice, a phrase from Vico’s De Universi Juris Uno Principio et Fine Uno (1720).

p. 73
•The Advancement of Learning: Francis Bacon’s 1605 treatise. If Gudrun would more judiciously lose the right MSS., learning would be advanced.

p. 74
•vade mecum: A (portable) handbook. In English, the most famous appearance of the phrase is in the 1739 jokebook Joe Miller’s Jests, subtitled The Wit’s Vade Mecum.

•Aztec equitation: The Aztecs o.c. had no horses.

•Easter Island painting: Easter Island excels, o.c., in statuary.

•Montessori grading: Montessori schools do not grade.

p. 75
•Parmenidean Dynamics: Parmenides taught that reality is unchanging (contra Heraclitus, below).

•Heracleitean Statics: Heraclitus proclaimed that everything flows.

•Spartan Sybaritics: To live Spartanly is to eschew luxury, the opposite of a sybaritic.

•Tautological Dialectics: A tautology is true by necessity, a dialectic examines contradictions.

•Boolean Eristics: Boolean requires a binary; Eris thrives on chaos. Note that this interpretation requires an unorthodox understanding of Eristics, as filtered through the Principia Discordia.

•“if the public gets wind of this…”: N.B.!

p. 76
•rabbits: One letter off from rabbis.

p. 77
•Marquis de Carabas: A fictional title created by Puss in Boots (in the fairy tale incl. in, again, Perrault); PiB claimed his master, a poor boy, was the Marquis to gain him a fortune.

p. 78
•“I belong to a lost generation”: Hemingway’s epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1925) is Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.”

Chapter 13

p. 79
•epigraph: Chronique a la suite du roman de Favel (usu. Fauvel) is, as best as I can tell, Eco’s term for what is usually called the Chronique metrique, a poetic appendix to the Roman de Fauvel, a fourteenth-century satirical tale. Fauvel is a horse, and the term “currying favor” originally appeared as “currying Fauvel,” changing when people stopped reading the Roman de Fauvel and forgot who Fauvel was. None of that has much to do with the epigraph at hand, which autotranslates as:

The brothers, the Masters of the Temple—
Who were filled to overflowing
With gold, silver, and riches,
And who lived with such nobility—
Where are they? What has become of them?

•Et in Arcadia ego: Lat. for “Even in Arcadia I [i.e. death] am there.” The phrase is significant in occult books (like Holy Blood, Holy Grail) as an alleged clue to the bloodline of Christ.

•bearded…beards: Beards appear frequently in FP esp. as a disguise. “Beards have always been masks,” and masks have always been Borges references.

•Italo Balbo: A literal fascist, a supporter and confederate of Mussolini.

p. 80
•Fiat lux: see p. 26

•“Epistle follows”: Follows much later, insofar as we have moved from Genesis 1:3 to the penultimate section of the New Testament (the epistles).

•“To begin with…”: A v. brief overview of the First Crusade. Godfrey of Bouillon was the first ruler of Frankish (i.e. Crusader) Jerusalem, although he significantly refused the title of king.

p. 81
•mal d’Afrique: A nostalgia for Africa experienced by those who have visited.

•Lawrences of Arabia: T.E. Lawrence, famous, even before the movie came out, for his exploits in the desert in WWI, his writings sympathetic to Islam, and dressing in Arab robes.

•St. Bernard: Bernard of Clairvaux.

•Madonna’s right hand man: Bernard in fact is Dante’s final guide (replacing Beatrice) into the highest heaven.

p. 82
•Klossowski’s Baphomet: A 1965 “transgressive piece of experimental fiction” (Wikipedia), translated into English only a year before FP was.

p. 83
•Theban legion: The Sacred Band, a fourth-century BC elite force made up entirely of homosexual couples.

•“moorish maids with amber bellies and velvet eyes”: Honestly this sounds like it should be from Baudelaire, but I can’t find a matching line. Perhaps it’s just the pulpy overwriting Eco likes to flirt with.

•Macarius: Macarius lived as a hermit in the desert (of Egypt). It was indeed Simeon who lived atop a pillar (stylus) as a stylite. See Buñuel’s 1965 film Simon of the Desert.

p. 84

•Shulammite: The Shulamite woman is a (the?) woman from the Song of Solomon (6:13). Sexy!

•“Take me, but spare my life”: Another scene that owes more to pulp fiction than anything else.

•compline: Bedtime prayer.

•“From prohibitions…”: Similar to the exception that proves the rule.

p. 85
•“Thou hast said it, Caiaphas”: In Matthew 26:64, the Jewish high priest Caiaphas asks Jesus if he is the Son of God, and Jesus answers (echoing his affirmative response to Judas in 26:25) “Thou hast said.”

•“treacherous sycophant”: More pulpy prose.

•God’s bodkins…’swounds: Usu. odds bodkins and zounds. Archaic oaths.

•“turns purple”: Perh. a suggestion of the purple prose used in this scene.

p. 86
•Argentine comrades: Borges, obv. ( persecuted by Peron). Notice that the prison petition comes just as we are discussing imprisoned Templars.

•Tacuaras: They were indeed (neo-)fascists! Casaubon guessed right!

p. 87
•Green Beret: see p109.

•Dolores: Etymologically “sorrows,” o.c.

p. 88
•oriflamme: “a pointed, blood-red banner flown from a gilded lance, was the sacred battle standard of the King of France and a symbol of divine intervention on the battlefield from God and Saint Denis in the Middle Ages” (Wikipedia).

•Tom and Jerry: The MGM cartoon cat and mouse duo. Their violence is pointedly without consequence.

p. 89
•Ariosto: Author of the verse romance Orlando Furioso (1516–32): magic-filled, fantastic adventures of knights.

•Joinville: Joinville, in contrast, wrote a nonfiction history of a Crusade (and St./King Louis, o.c.), collected in the Penguin Classics edition Chronicles of the Crusades.

•Melisande and Baudouin: Rulers of Frankish Jerusalem.

•Barbarossa: Frederik Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, is, like Richard the Lion-Heart, a figure of the Third Crusade. His death is the subject of Eco’s novel Baudolino (2000).

•definitive fall of Jerusalem: Frederick II (HRE) had negotiated the (bloodless) possession of Jerusalem a couple decades earlier, but after 1244 it would remain in Muslim hands until the twentieth century.

•“Poor Templars”: Templars took a vow of poverty. Templars were rich. See also p. 93.

p. 90
•evil genius: see p. 96

p. 93
•“my poor Templars”: A repetition of the phrase. See p. 89.

•seraphically: Angelically.

p. 94
•Spirochaeta pallida: Eco’s avoision of italics extends (not only to foreign words and phrases but also) to scientific binomials.

•cur, quomodo, quando?: Lat.: why, how, when. Part of a list of questions from Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, but note: Not only are these three only an excerpt of Aquinas’s list, they do not match Belbo’s “Who, what, when, and why.”

Chapter 14

p. 95
•epigraph: Straightforward Templar testimony.

•“a harmless enigma made terrible…” : Please underline this passage.

p. 96
•pomp: Oddly enough, the word pomp appears twice on this page.

•pieds noirs: French colonists in Algeria.

•musketeers: One of many references in FP to Alexandre “Three Musketeers” Dumas.

•Old Man of the Mountain: First, but far from final, appearance of Hasan as-Sabbah.

•evil geniuses: Second appearance of the phrase in a half-dozen pages. See p. 90.

p. 97
•incident at Anagni: This is known as the Outrage of Anagni

•moved the papal seat: This is known as the Babylonian Captivity, although only later would Avignon generate the dreaded antipopes.

•commandery: “The smallest administrative division of the European landed properties of a military order. It was also the name of the house where the knights of the commandery lived” (Wikipedia).

p. 98
•in posteriori parte spine dorsi: Lat.: on the back part of the base of the spine, “in other words, on the behind.”

•in humane dignitatis opprobrium: Lat.: in an affront to human dignity.

p. 99
•pas de deux: A two-person ballet.

•Noffo Dei: A real historical figure, but note that his name is Italian/Latin for “nope of God.” Talk about a (see p. 42) sacred no!

p. 102
•“Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!”: Cf. the Illuminatus! Trilogy.

•Orwell or Koestler: Both writers on (George Orwell: 1984 (1949); Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon (1940)) nightmarishly totalitarian states. Significantly, considering the politics of Casaubon and his peers, they are writers against communism.

•Cultural Revolution: Maoist purge/ crackdown on dissent. There sure were are a lot of “what’s his names” in the Cultural Revolution.

•historia magistra vitae: Lat.: History is the teacher of life.

•“repeated, in a circle”: Like a pendulum, etc.

•John Ford: Hollywood director esp. of Westerns; but also, perh. significantly, the name of a post-Jacobean playwright. As Belbo would say, “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (ca. 1629?).

•“Martian historian”: cf. Martian Poetry.

p. 103
•Catharism: Dualistic medieval French heresy; suppressed by the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29). Famed for devotion to…nonprocreative sex.

•“istud caput vester deus est, et vester Mahumet”: Lat.: That head is your god and your Mahomet.

•“Moslems didn’t worship imaged in Mahomet”: Except medieval Christian writers accused them of doing so; e.g.g.: In the thirteenth-century German romance Ortnit Muslims worship two idols, one of Mohammed and one of Apollo; in The Song of Roland it’s three idols: Mohammed, Apollo, and Tervagent; round it out with something from Guillaume d’Orange.

•“always with a beard”: Beards again.

•a gray cat: Proverbial: At night all cats are gray.

p. 104
•pineal gland: It may start with Descartes, but the pineal gland is also very much a 1960s New Age obsession.

•Manel Tekel Phares: Daniel 5: 25. Usu. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Note that phares is unique to the Vulgate, and manel is o.o.o.

•Pape Satan…: A Mysterious cry from Dante’s Inferno, uttered by Plutus.

•le vièrge le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui: From Mallarmé; translated here as “The virgin, the lively and the beautiful today…”

p. 105
•Greek fire: A mysterious secret weapon of the Byzantines, a kind of napalm jetted from a flame-thrower tube.

•“like our generals”: IDK what they think of Italian generalship in Italy, but outside of Italy, they do not have a good reputation. As a college leftist, Casaubon may hold them in contempt regardless of nationalism.

Chapter 15

p. 106
•Joinville: see p. 89

p. 107
•Wagner: The great nineteenth century (antisemitic!) composer, o.c., but perh. more importantly the traditional name of Faust’s assistant.

•“a woman I had often seen”: Sandra, presumably; see p. 232.

•Crede firmiter et pecca fortiter: From Martin Luther. Roughly: “Sin greatly, but even more strongly believe.”

•metallic sky: A precursor to Casaubon’s metallurgy work.

•Dufy: Raoul Dufy, Fauvist painter.

•Guillaume Dufay: Or Du Fay, fifteenth-century Flemish composer.

•Flemish miniature: A renaissance MS. ilustration, such as that done the Master of May of Burgundy so-called.

•androgynous: Another of many references to androgyny. See p. 6.

•Aleksandr Nevski: The Tsar who defeated the Teutonic Knights, as is spelled out explicitly on p. 387.

p. 108
•ball bearings: Apparently a weapon of the time; see p. 50.

•first stone: As on p. 50, but more explicitly, an invocation of John 8:7.

•trumpet blasts: Trumpets again.

•seraphic: On p. 93, Diotavelli is seraphic; now it’s Belbo’s turn.

p. 109
•“disemboweled, then turned”: Creation in a disgusting way, like a demiurge.

•May ’68: Student uprising in Italy; “in May 1968 all universities, except Bocconi, were occupied” (Wikipedia).

p. 110
•spectator: see p. 23; perh. also a reference to Addison & Steele’s newspaper.

•born too late: see p. 49

•Jack the Ripper: Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976) brings Freemasonry into the Ripper murders. Alan Moore took the theme even further in From Hell (1989–98), too late for influencing FP (although post hoc ergo ante hoc), including a tour through London that seems straight out of FP chapter 115.

•Vagnère: A fact that is stressed more than once (see p. 229). Recall the old joke: “What is the question to which the answer is ‘9W’?” “Do you spell your name with a V, Mr. Wagner?”

Chapter 16

p. 112
•epigraph: More straightforward Templarism.

p. 113
•Sanhedrin: The supreme court of ancient Israel, convening in the Temple.

p. 114
•Struwwelpeter: Shock-headed Peter, the German children’s book (1845), endlessly translated and endlessly parodied.

•Martinetti: His name recalls F.T. Marinetti, the Italian Futurist (and proto-Fascist).

•Kundalini: see p. 104 et passim

•A Man called Horse: A 1950 Dorothy M. Johnson short story (or a 1970 Western of the same name) about a Bostonian who “goes native.”

•Langobard: Or Lombard, a Germanic tribe that conquered Italy in the Dark Ages.

p. 115
•Decima Mas: “Italian for 10th Torpedo-Armed Motorboat Flotilla” (Wikipedia). Note that they are also know by the Christmasy abbreviation Xª MAS.

•Santa Maria Ausiliatrice: Mary Help of Christians.

•day of glory: Days of Glory is a 1944 Gregory Peck war picture, although it has nothing to do with Italy. Note the reference to Molay!

p. 116
•So long, Mama: A reference to the WWII song “Goodbye Mama (I’m off to Yokohama).” This is the song Tom Lehrer parodied with “So long, Mom, I’m off to drop the Bomb…” (1965).

•send the word: A reference to the WWI song “Over There.”

•September 8: When Italy announced its surrender to Allied forces, 1943.

•grappa: An Italian brandy.

•Yalta: Where Churchill, FDR, and Stalin met to confer.

p. 117
•impotent: A surprising number of references to impotence in this book. See p. 51.

•“Bad literature brings no redemption”: Bad literature is of course what FP parodies, celebrates, and flirts with.

•zeugma: See p. 25. Somehow Belbo now does not recognize the word.

•fall of the Alamo: 1836.

p. 118
•“It had surely been chance.”: I guess we should all underline this, too.

Chapter 17

p. 119
•epigraph: Michelet was a poet and occultist in the Ordre Martiniste. Perh. significantly, another man named Michelet, Jules, coined the term “Renaissance.”

•Adolph Menjou: Hollywood actor in (inter al.) The Front Page (1931) and Paths of Glory (1957).

p. 120
•Garibaldi: Garibaldi died in 1882.

•“lost everything save honor”: A popular quotation of Francis I after losing the Battle of Pavia (1525).

•Foreign Legion: A subject typical of the sort of dime novel FP wants to be.

•Massu: Jacques Massu, French General. In 1958 he led the (unsuccessful) Algiers Putsch.

•two Tripolis: In Libya and Lebanon. Note that two Tripolis (triple-Es) makes six Es; I’m not sure what to do with that fact.

•the Magreb: Western North Africa.

p. 121
•“better than any American thriller”: FP’s ideal, again.

p. 122
•Gaulthier Walther: Apparently a fiction of Eco’s. The name means Walter Walter.

•order of Montesa: Named for their stronghold, the castle of Montesa, in Costera, Spain.

•hay wain: See Hamlet’s Mill, passim.

p. 123
•Nostradamus: The famed enigmatic prophet who published quatrains predicting the future (the centuries) in 1555. The lines are translated here as:

Beneath the food of ruminating animals,
led by them to the belly of the fodder city:
Soldiers hidden, their arms making a noise,

The fourth line of the quatrain, not supplied here, is: Tried not far from the city of Antibes. Antibes is not near any Templar trials I could find. Also, the Templars were dissolved over 200 years before Nostradamus wrote ( =not much of a prophecy).

•Comte de Beaujeu: Guichard de Beaujeu. Does the exoteric tradition even recognize this guy’s historicity?

p. 124
•Mao: “…the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it.” On Guerrilla Warfare (1937).

•pigtailed communists: The perfect place for a pejorative reference to pigs is after two paragraphs describing alliances with Jewish sects.

Chapter 18

p. 125
•epigraph: Telluris Theoria Sacra = Sacred Theory of the Earth, a work of theological geography including a hollow earth.

•“meet underground”: Always subterranean.

p. 126
•ogival: see p. 6

•speleologists: Cave scientists.

•hieratic: Priestly.

•bougres et manichéens: Bogomils and Manicheans, two dualistic sects. Bougres is the source of the word “bugger” because Cathars.

•Grange-aux-Dîmes: Tourable today.

p. 127
•dragoons: Mounted infantry. I would like to point out that this story is a story about dungeons and dragoons.

p. 129
•Raynouard’s Monuments historiques relatifs à la condamnation des chevaliers du Temple: Historical Monuments Relating to the Condemnation of the Knights Templar. No longer “a great rarity,” thanks to the miracle or modernity.

p. 131
•split hairs: See tetrapyloctomy, p. 74

Chapter 19

p.132
•epigraph: The Emergence of the Knightly Degrees in Freemasonry around the Middle of the eighteenth Century. Is this Beaujeu the exoteric Guillaume de Beaujeu (last Grand Master in the Holy Land) or the esoteric Guichard de Beaujeu (p. 123)? The presence of Aumont (see p. 77) suggests the latter.

•“selling sesame seeds in Samarkand”: Is this just here for the alliteration? Like “books in Braille”? At least Braille is in some sense a secret way of writing.

•Franz Josef Land: Russian archipelago, far north, near the Pole.

•“Counterfactual conditions are always true”: I had originally made this same point in Impossible Histories (a book you will like and should buy), but it got cut. I mention it in my annotations of IH, p. 7.

•Kuabris…Rocarbis: Although it appears Eco invented these name, some have had a curious afterlife in the Dr. Who novel The Menagerie by Martin Day (1995):—the Knights of Kuabris are an anti-science group, Defrabax a wizard, Cosmae his apprentice, who is in love with Kaquaan. The titular menagerie is the Menagerie of Ukkazaal, and is it populated with Taculbain, Mecrim, Dugraq, Rocarbis…there may be more.

p. 133
•Trithemius: His first appearance, but far from his last.

•Steganographia: Indeed, as implied, this book, apparently a book of magic, is actually an encrypted book on cryptology. A rare case of secret knowledge objectively hidden inside an esoteric text.

•Pamersiel Oshurmy Delmuson Thafloyn: The “traditional conjuration” of Pamersiel. See Gary St. M. Nottingham, Ars Theurgia Goetia (Avalonea, 2015) kindle edition.

•Agrippa: Source for the epigraph of the whole book. See p.…i, or something. He appears again on p. 521.

•Paracelsus: His work on homunculi becomes important later; see p.347.

•“a hundred years after”: Post hoc ergo ante hoc. See p. 339.

•Sodalitas Celtica: A late 15th-century academic (?) group; it looks like The Celtic Society, but it may just be The Society of Celtes, after Conrad Celtes, its founder. Doubtless it’s both.

p. 137
•kadosch knight: Usu. kadosh. “The term “Kadosh” is derived from the Hebrew word קדוש, which means holy or consecrated” (Wikipedia). Let me quote, because I find it charming, Kenning’s Masonic Cyclopaedia and Handbook of Masonic Archaeology, History, and Biography:

According to Bazot, the Kadosch was a Templar grade which professed to have originated in the Thebaid, among the hermits, οἱ θεραπευταί , Knights of Palestine and the East. Alexander, Patriarch of Alexandria, was one of the early members of this order. In the 7th century they made their vows to Simon, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and in the 11th they founded the Order of the Temple. Such is the legend as Bazot gives it but he adds, “Au commencement du quatorzième Siècle, l’ordre fut aboli, mais il s’est sécrètement perpetué jusqu’à nos jours.” [At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Order was abolished, but it has secretly perpetuated itself to this day.] If so all we can say is:— ’
Tis true, ’tis pity,
Pity ’tis, ’tis true.

p. 139
•“sum of the odd…two to eight”: This is an oddly roundabout way to sum all numbers, one through eight.

Chapter 20

p. 141
•epigraph: Il mistero del Graal = The Mystery of the Grail. It is perh. important to note that Evola was a fascist (and, later, a neo-fascist).

•Joseph of Arimathea: The man who, in the Bible, buries Jesus. In Medieval legend, he brings the Grail…usu. to England, not, as here, France.

•Parzival: A lengthy German Arthurian romance of the thirteenth century, an adaptation and expansion of Chrétien de Troyes’s unfinished Perceval, describing the quest for the Holy Grail.

•lapis exillis: Wolfram, who originated the term, actually called it lapsit exillis. (Lapsit = it fell?) No one knows what this means. See Parzival IX.469 (trans. Mustard & Passage (Vintage, 1961) p. 251).

p. 142
•Peter upon this rock: Matthew 16:18.

•Amfortas: The Fisher King in Wagner’s Parsifal; his name is Anfortas in Wolfram. His wound, tied to the wounded Waste Land (cf. Eliot) in wh. he lives, should be healed by the conclusion of the Grail quest.

p.143
•Obersturmunddrang: Casaubon changes Obersturmbannführer (a military rank: over (senior) storm (assault) leader) to over-storm-and-stress, referencing the proto-Romantic German artistic school Sturm und Drang. Note that Sturm und Drang is already over the top!

•Luciferian: Light bringing (as well as Satanic. o.c.).

•Le tombeau de Jacques Malay ou le secret des conspirateurs a ceux qui veulent tout savoir: The Tomb of Jacques Malay, or The Secret of the Conspirators: To Those Who Wish to Know Everything.

•Avalon: The list of sacred places from p. 4 comes creeping in.

•Garden of the Herperides: Western (sunset) land where golden apples grow; Hercules claimed them as one of his labors.

•Ultima Thule: The furthest north island to Classical geographers; see also p. 510.

•Clochis: Unlike Avalon, Thule, and the Hesperides, Colchis is to the east (on the shores of the Euxine, usu.).

p. 144
•Order of the Golden Fleece: Two branches of this order still exist, made up almost entirely of royalty and heads of state. Lame.

•Monsalvat: Wagner’s term; Montsalvat in Wolfram, the Mount of Salvation. Interesting that Ardentis sees this, at least, a mere (?) myth.

•hermetic allegory: What isn’t a hermetic allegory?

•Trinity is an Aryan concept anyway: Many Indo-European peoples have a triple god (Odin/Thor/Tyr). Probably not what he meant.

•Agarttha: See p. 4 again.

p. 145
•Kali Yuga: “The fourth, shortest, and worst of the four yugas (world ages)” (Wikipedia). It actually started a little over 5000 years ago.

•black virgins of the Celts: Black virgins usu. refers to statues of Mary made of dark wood, esp. prevalent in France, but some accounts suggest that the statues predate (by centuries) Christianity.

•Fulcanelli: “Fulcanelli (fl. 1920s) was the name used by a French alchemist and esoteric writer, whose identity is still debated” (Wikipedia).

•prime matter: The starting point for the alchemical great work. Note that the first stage of the great work is the black stage.

•Mahomet, abother great Druid initiate: Citation needed.

•Black Stone of Mecca: Of course the Black Stone (it is well documented) long predates Mahomet, just as the black virgins predate Christ. Post hoc ergo ante hoc.

p. 146
•the sacred animals of Odinism: Should probably be raven, wolf, and eagle, no?

•rock of Erik at Avalon: Well, this is a riddle. There is an Arthurian knight named Erec, but he has little to do with Avalon (except that his father is named Lac → Lake → Lady of the Lake?).

•dolce stil nuovo: “Sweet new style”; a term coined by Dante for a school of late medieval poets who write about divine love. Dante himself is an example.

•Fedeli d’Amore: The Faithful of Love; another Italian poetic school “practicing an erotic spirituality” (from here). Dante may have joined them.

•dis donc: Fr. for…well, the whole point is it’s largely untranslatable.

•bumbling creator: Demiurge again.

p. 147
•rune: I was unable to generate this rune.

•constellation of the virgin: Virgo.

•Spica: The brightest star in Virgo.

•“to encourage reactions”: Reactions are exactly what Belbo will get himself.

p. 148
•labyrinth: Borges. Drink!

•Les Cahiers du Mystère: The Notebooks of Mystery. Presumably Eco’s invention, perh. by analogy with Cahiers du Cinéma (but why then the definite article?).

p. 149
•Manutius: Named for the fifteenth/sisteenth century printer Aldus Pius Manutius. “Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts” (Wikipedia).

•Campari: A bitter liqueur.

•Zohar: Thirteenth-century Kabbalistic book, including commentarie son the Torah.

•Lekh Lekha: The section of the Torah including Genesis 12:1–17:27.

Chapter 21

p. 150
•epigraph: see p. 141.

•“fascinated even by a tree frog”: There is a frog in the rebus on p. 30.

•Kant: see p. 55.

p. 151
•De Angelis: His name is Latin for “concerning angels.”

•“The Magi arrive and ask…”: The Magi are o.c. famed for their refusal to rat out the location of the Christ child (Matthew 2:12).

p. 152
•27: see pp. 35–36: “any real permutation of the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters.”

Chapter 23

p. 154
•epigraph: Wolfram again, just as on p. 150.

p. 155
•treasure of Dongo: The millions in gold and jewelry that Mussolini had on him when he was captured fleeing Italy (on the shores of Lake Como). The treasure later disappeared, probably making its way into the coffers of Italy’s Communist Party.

•Annunziata: Just a policeman, just an Italian surname, but also the Italian name for the Annunciation. Annunziata fails to announce anything.

Go to Part 1: Keter

p. 19
•Hokhmah: “Wisdom”: the second of the sefirot. In case it matters, one travles from Keter to Hokhmah by going southeast (so to speak). It is “associated with analytical thinking and stability” (Wikipedia).

Chapter 3

p. 21
•epigraph: A kabbalistic text. As best as I can figure, a translation would go: “It is for this purpose that the mild angels often invented figures, characters, forms and words, and proposed things both unknown and wondrous to us mortals, things that signified nothing when approached as one usually employs language, but which can lead us, if we wonder greatly at our reason, into first an investigation and then a both veneration and love of all that is intelligible.”

•Abulafia: Thirteenth-century kabbalist.

•Casaubon: Our narrator, named for the character in Middlemarch who is writing a book, The Key to All Mythologies, and for the Renaissance Swiss philologist. Both connections are mentioned on p. 63

p. 22
•St. John’s Eve: June 23. John the Baptist is the patron saint of the Templars. See also p. 136.

•the word: On the one hand just short for password, but also a key concept. In the beginning was the word (as it says on p. 24).

•Comte de Saint-Germain: C18 alchemist; purportedly immortal. More on him will come.

•Assassins: Both the medieval secret society and the omnipresent danger, throughout the book, of just plain assassins.

p. 23
•creature: Meaning creation, o.c., but here given a life of its own, like a golem.

•Abu: If this references something more than a shortened form of Abulafia, I don’t get it.

•O what a beautiful morning: The first of several opening lines of various texts quoted and jumbled together. This is the beginning of the musical Oklahoma!

•at the end of November: In his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Eco himself writes: “Is it possible to say ‘It was a beautiful morning at the end of November’ without feeling like Snoopy?” (op. cit. p. 19). Unlike the others in this sentence, this quote is not an opening line.

•in the beginning was the word: First verse of the Gospel of John.

•sing to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles: Opening of the Iliad.

•now is the winter of our discontent: Opening of Richard III.

•Rhett Butler…Moscow: The hero, heroine, and setting of Gone with the Wind are turned into those of War and Peace. Low art → high; as below, so above.

•war and peace: This is, as stated above, the Tolstoy novel being referenced, but as it is here l.c., perh. it simply indicates that the two novels have scenes at war and scenes at peace?

•platonic insomnia: Joyce, Finnegans Wake: “that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.” The next sentence in FP underlines the connection.

p. 25
•palaces with grand staircases: Features of a memory palace so-called: a mnemonic technique that involves remembering things by placing them in an imaginary house.

•enormous sorites: A sorites is a chain of syllogisms. All mentions of sorities go back to the sorites paradox: A heap (sorites) of a thousand brains of sand is a heap; remove one, and you still have a heap; at no point (reduced one grain at a time) does the heap change to a not heap, ending in a heap of one grain.

•apothegms: Aphorisms or anecdotes. The title of a book by Francis Bacon (a writer cited quite often, an appearing, in FP.)

•hypallages: The first of several figures of speech paraded out. In a hypallage, an adjective modifies grammatically it does not semantically. E.g. “I spent a restless night”: the insomniac, not the night, is restless.

•zeugmas: Two objects are yoked to one verb. E.g. I left in a huff and a taxi.

•hysteron proteron: Two events listed in countersynchonous order. E.g. “Then came the thunder and the lightning”(MW). [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hysteron%20proteron]

•apophantic logoi: An apophantic logos is (in Aristotle) a statement that reveals (asserts?) truth of falsehood.

•hierarchic stoichea: Usually spelled stoicheia; presumably refers to hierarchies of pagan gods.

•processions of equinoxes and parallaxes: A play off precessions of equinoxes, the astronomical phenomenon by which the earth’s axis moves in a 26,000 year cycle (too slow for Foucault’s pendulum to detect!); here the procession matches the “dances of hysteron proteron” above.

•herbaria: The plural of herbarium, a collection of dried plants.

•gymnosophists: “Naked philosophers,” specifically those encountered (by Alexander the Great) in India.

•O Raimundo, O Camillo: Presumably Raimundus Lullus (AKA Ramon Llull), who constructed a memory wheel and and Giulio Camillo, who built (?) a theater of memory. Note that Raimundo Camilo was a twentieth-century Brazilian (!) outsider artist.

•Proust…“in search of a lost time”: French novelist who famously had his mempry jogged while tasting a madeleine in In Search of Lost Time.

•labile: “Subject to change.”

•Hop-o’-My-Thumb: Fairy tale figure who leaves a trail of breadcrumbs, which (much as in Hansel & Gretel) get eaten. Hop-o’-My-Thumb appears in Perrault’s book Stories from Times Past (!).

•misplace time refound: The opposite of finding lost time, Proust’s goal.

p. 26
•“disintegrating alien spacecraft”: Pinball machines, these must be; but don’t they sound like specifically Asteroids and perh. Space Invaders? Can’t be, though.

•“Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days…”: “Fiat lux” is Latin for “Let there by light,” God’s command (by a word!) at creation. The Big Bang, then, is a secular creation.

•numerus Clausius: A play off numerus clausus, or closed number, a quota system for university students. Here the limitation is not a university rule but a law of thermodynamics, the Clausius–Clapeyron equation (named for German physicist Rudolf Clausius).

•“emerge from nothingness”: Famously God created the world ex nihilo—from nothinhg.

•Yellow Submarine: A reference to the Beatles movie and song, but notice that Casaubon was last left looking through a periscope.

•“a Cheshire-cat black hole”: In Alice in Wonderland the Cheshire cat “vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.”

•Torquemada: First Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.

Chapter 4

p. 28
•epigraph: Atalanta Fugiens is an alchemical book, its title translating as Atalanta (the swift Greek mythological huntress) Fleeing. For the Rose Garden see p. 4.

•falcon: Sam Spade, from p. 12, reappears, this time with his Macguffin, the Maltese falcon.

•cadabra: The second half of abracadabra, the most famous of magic words for nearly two millennia now.

p. 29
•”two thousand years”: Probably not a reference to cadabra, above, but perhaps a reference to the (rounded-off) length of an astrological age—the Age of Pisces transferring into the Age of Aquarius, e.g. The change is astrological ages is due to the precession of the equinox mentioned on p. 25.

•castle in the Carpathians: From the novel (of that name) by Jules Verne. (Dracula’s castle is of course also in the Carpathians, but the connection seems more tenuous.)

•notarikon, gematra, temurah: Three methods of kabbalistically manipulating words. Notarikon (first appearing on p. 15) involves treating words as acronyms; gematra: assigning numerical values to letters and seeking words that add up to the same value; temurah: rearranging or replacing letters in a word.

•Sefer Yesirah: A proto-kabbalistic Jewish mystical book. It is old, attributed at times to Abraham or even Adam.

•Philip Marlowe: Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective (as opposed to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade).

p. 30
•the rebus: Can anyone solve this?

•octagonal: Borges’s Library of Babel, and Eco’s library in The Name of the Rose, are both hexagonal, so this one is a step up; the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is octagonal.

p. 31
•Tetragrammaton: In addition to its literal meaning, one should remember the Borges story “Death and the Compass.”

Chapter 5

p. 32
•the epigraph: Abulafia appears “in the flesh” so to speak. Note that he turns the name of God “like a wheel.”

p. 33
•“apparent sincerity”: see p. 55.

•“possible permutations”: This is temurah, of course, but it is also Borges’s “Library of Babel.”

•Abulafia: “In the flesh” again, but this time diagetically.

p. 34
•golem: The rabbinical protector of Prague, his act of creation either miraculous or blasphemous. Eco is doubtless also aware of Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 Modernist novel of the same name.

•“neat little program”: This is the plot to “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke (1953).

p. 36
•Isaiah 9:2: In the KJV, at least, this actually happens in Isaiah 9:3.

p. 37
•Metacyclosynchrotron: This appears to be a humorously expanded name playing off a kind of particle accelerator (synchrocyclotron).

p. 40
•Hiram’s Evil Assassins: In Masonic tradition, Hiram’s evil assassins were Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum—their antics are reenacted in Masonic ritual. In 1988 (when FP was published), “Imelda” would evoke recently exiled Filipina first lady Imelda Marcos, but what she has to do with Masons I don’t know.

p. 41
•Synarchy: The secret rulers of the world. The opposite of anarchy.

•Homonculi: see p. 14.

•the Tower: Most overtly, a Tarot card, but more TK.

•Ennoia: The Sophia, the great Mother. Simon Magus imagined her trapped in human form, incarnated as various women (e.g. Helen of Troy) through history.

•“I am the first and the last”: Used in a more divine context in, e.g.g., Isaiah 44:6 and Revelation 22:13.

•Sophia: see p. 15

•Hokhmah: We are, o.c., in section Hokhmah.

Chapter 6

p. 42
•epigraph: There’s Borges. Drink! Note the appearance of the word eco. A translation from here:

Judá permutated the alphabet through complex variations
and in the end
pronounced the name that is the Key
the Door, the Echo, the Guest, and the Palace…

•the password: This trick is reminiscent of the requirement “speak, friend, and enter” in Fellowship of the Ring (the password: friend (in Elvish). Also note that by stating the truth (no) the answer becomes a lie. This is similar to the paradox of the Cretan mentioned below, p. 66.

•NO: In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the lion (Judá León in the epigraph is Judah the Lion) speaks a sacred no.

p. 43
•printing: A relic of 1988: printing out all one’s files.

•one hundred and twenty: “Five Stones make one hundred and twenty Houses” (p. 35).

•“someone told me…that I was mad”: On p. 614.

•Adelino Canepa: see p. 292

p. 44
•atabaques: Drums providing that Afro-Brazilian beat.

•Exu: Afro-Brazilian trickster god. EXU is also an instruction to “execute” on some older computers—and execute is itself a word with two meaning.

•macumba: see p. 13

•perfumadores: Portuguese for perfumers/atomizers. Such fumes pervade the book.

•pontos: Presumably short for pontos cantados: “Ponto cantado is a musical genre practiced in Afro-Brazilian religions and cultural events” (Wikipedia, auto translated).

p. 45
•amor fati: Love of fate. Nietzsche uses this term in The Gay Science for the act of willing or affirming whatever has happened.

•Garamond: A font family and the sixteenth century printmaker (Claude Garamond) who created it. Wikipedia mentions, perhaps relevantly, that in the past “any good sixteenth-century French font” got attributed to Garamond and only more recently have people come to understand that he was just one engraver among many—the one who got the credit.

•Pilade’s: Just a bar, named for its proprietor, but Pilade suggests both Pylades, the Greek mythological figure known for his loyalty in friendship, and Pilate, the Biblical figure known for asking “what is truth?”—and, as a barkeep should, for washing his hands.

I started rereading Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum after many years—it was a real favorite of mine when I was in college—and when I looked I could find no satisfactory set of annotations for it online. It’s a book that could be served by some annotating, so (says I) I thought I’d try my hand at it.

If you’re not currently reading Foucault’s Pendulum (hereafter FP)—sorry! I’ll post these all under the “annotations” section, which you can unsubscribe from selectively. I hope this string of annotations posts (one per section of FP) will serve as a useful guide for future readers—I also hope said readers will come to this blog, be persuaded to stay, and eventually buy copies of my books so that I can in turn purchase food to survive long enough to annotate another chapter. It’s the circle of life!

Also, maybe you should read FP! It’s great!

These annotations are pretty much spoiler-free—by necessity, because I’m writing them as I read (although I’m willing to flip ahead if I remember something important). They’re keyed to the pages of the 1989 HBJ hardcover. Overinterpretation (a very Eco word) is of course not just encouraged but also thematic.

If you have no idea what the kabbalah, the (related) Tree of Life, the Templars, or (related) the Rosicrucians are, you probably should read a brief essay about each before you pick up FP.

Corrections and additions welcome (really!). I guess if you find a big storehouse of great annotations…don’t tell me?

Preliminary material

•that diagram: This is the Tree of Life, a key concept in kabbalism. The ten circle are the ten sefirot, or emanations of the divine; each section of FP is named for one of the sefirot.

•Epigraph #1: Agrippa was a sixteenth-century German occultist. His words are clearly addressed to us, the readers of FP.

•Epigraph #1: Raymond Smullyan, American mathematician, was still alive when FP was published. In his book 5000 BC, he attributes this quote to his friend, computer scientist (!) Saul Gorn.

p. 1
•Keter: “Crown,” the topmost point on the Tree of Life (above). “In Western esotericism, Keter is linked to the initial point of divine emanation” (Wikipedia).

Chapter 1

p. 3
•the epigraph: A blogger offers this translation of the Hebrew text: “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”—and an attribution (not in the Hebrew, apparently): “Gruberger, Philip S. (ed.) The Kabbalah: A Study of the Ten Luminous Emanations from Rabbi Isaac Luria with the Commentaries Sufficient for the Beginner. Vol. II, Jerusalem: Research Center of Kabbalah, 1973. p. 7.” The pendulum, like the heavens it reveals, travels in a wheel, of course.

•Pendulum: The entire driving metaphor for this opening chapter revolves (!) around the experiment by which a pendulum can demonstrate the rotation of the earth. I’m hardly going to be the guy to explain the physics of why the earth rotates under a swinging pendulum, forcing the pendulum to move in a circle, but you can watch a simple video here.

•π: Of course a book about both the triumph and failure of rationality would start with π. The discovery and exploitation of π is an achievement in both theoretical and applied mathematics; on the other hand, π is by necessity irrational (ha!).

•sublunar: (In the traditional Pythagorean system) anything below the orbit of the moon (sublunar; i.e. Earth) is subject to decay, while anything beyond is immortal. Yeats says “the circle of the moon…pitches common things about.”

•singularity, duality, triadic, quadratic, “the unnumbered perfection of the circle”: A sequence counting 1, 2, 3, 4, infinity (a circle being a polygon of infinite sides). Some points Eco was probably not thinking of: Infinity is the fifth in this sequence and, on a Mac, option-5 is ∞. The rabbits in Watership Down count 1, 2, 3, 4, many. George Gamow named his popular science book One, Two, Three…Infinity (eliding in that ellipsis, inter alia, the 4).

p. 4
•mystic rose: Eco’s previous novel was The Name of the Rose. “The rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left,” Eco writes in Postscript to The Name of the Rose (HBJ, 1983. p. 3).

•Agarttha: A mythical, mystical kingdom sometimes located inside the hollow earth. Important in Theosophy. The first of many references to subterranean locations in this opening.

•Novaya Zemlya: On the one hand simply a far north Russian island; but Eco was certainly thinking of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which the (doubly) fictional country of Zembla is named for the real island.

•Avalon: The mythical island to which a dying King Arthur was carried (and on which Lancelot was raised).

•Ayers Rock: Sacred sandstone formation in the center of Australia

•Solomon’s Temple: Home of the Knights Templar (q.v. passim) and ancient trad. founding place of the Freemasons, in addition to being a real place sacred to Judaism.

•Saint-Martin-des-Champs: A medieval priory rededicated during the French Revolution to be a secular temple of technology and now a museum. This is in fact the currents setting of the story.

•“only at the Pole”: A pendulum makes a full rotation in the “natural” duration of twenty-four hours only at the Pole. Significant thematically.

p. 5
•“pivot, bolt, or hook”: Newton hypothesized Absolute Space, which “remains always similar and immovable,” in his Principia (quoting the Gutenberg translation, p77).

•Foucault: This is French physicist Leon Foucault, of course, who created the pendulum in question, but it is also always no matter what anyone may say Michel Foucault, the twentieth-century theorist.

•Panthéon: Here an eighteenth-century building in Paris but named for the ancient (synarchical!) Roman temple to all the pagan gods.

•sixty-seven: 66.6 (i.e. 666, the number of the Beast (p. 31) rounded up. Also (o.c.) this.

p. 6
•Ein-Sof: A kabbalistic term for God, more or less in his purest form (formlessness?).

•Belbo: Just a Piedmontese name (and a river in Piedmont), but perhaps it is significant that belbus is Latin for “hyena,” making belbo a faux-italianization of the word; the old lore of the hyena is that it can change its sex, as alchemical matter can change from masculine to feminine. I should mention that belbo is not actually the Italian word for “hyena,” though. I’m just spitballing.

•ogive: Wiktionary gives the first two definitions: 1. “(statistics) The curve of a cumulative distribution function.” 2. “(architecture) A Gothic pointed arch, or a rib of a Gothic vault.” The perfect blend of art and science! Eco uses the word twice in two pages. Note (?) the homonymy with Oh, jive!

•static hypocrisy: Only two pages later, Eco will issue a much less metaphorical accusation of hypocrisy (p 8).

p. 7
•Jurassic: New-fangled inventions are here and throughout coupled with and confused with prehistoric (antediluvian) life forms.

•archons: Malevolent agents of the Demiurge in Gnosticism—roughly, demons—but also prob. selected for the way the name suggests several prehistoric genera, such as archeopterix (lampshaded here), archelon (one of the “great metal tortoises” mentioned on this page?), etc.

•Bréguet: Louis Charles Bréguet, French aviation pioneer. His 1911 biplane hangs in Saint-Martin-des-Champs, as Wikipedia conveniently avers. Alluded to again on p. 10.

•Blériot: Louis Blériot, French aviation pioneer.

•Esnault: Robert Esnault-Pelterie, French aeronauticist.

•Dufaux: Brothers Armand and Henri Dufaux, Swiss inventors who built an early helicopter in 1905.

•Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers: A series of STEMmy French schools. The organization also “hosts” (Wikipedia) the museum we are currently in.

•priory: Literally a monastery (and indeed the museum in which this chapter is set was once a priory) but also an evocation of the Priory of Sion, a (purported) successor to the Templars.

•ogive: see p. 6

•chthonian: “Associated with the underworld,” one of many underground words and images in this chapter and the next. See telluric, cicadas below)

•Statue of Liberty: Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s name for this statue is Liberty Enlightening the World (La Liberté éclairant le monde). Enlightenment is o.c. what the characters in FP seek.

•another world: The Americas as a New World, as distant as Agarttha.

•Pascal: Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher. His turn from rationality to religion is echoed in the plot of FP.

p. 8
•Baals: Idols to which babies are sacrificed, specifically here in a fire. Presumably a misinterpretation of boilers or furnaces.

•Nuremberg maidens: iron maidens; torture devices (with the extra significance of the word Nuremberg for moderns, after the Nuremberg Trials, doubtless intended). There is a low-budget 1963 Italian horror film titled The Virgin of Nuremberg; when I was a teenager I persuaded my friends to watch it, and this suggestion was so unpopular that I was subsequently banned from choosing the movie (it was not my first offense).

•cher maître: “Dear master” or “dear teacher”

•hypocritically: see p. 6.

•Bacon…New Atlantis: In this C17 utopian proto-novel, the “House of Salomon” is an edifice “dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.” Honestly, I don’t think Bacon was being satirical or hypocritical here.

•network of Paris sewers: Doubtless inspired by Hugo’s Les Misérables. Another subterranean reference.

p. 9
•epiphany: Although the literal meaning fits, Eco is doubtless also thinking of James Joyce here.

Chapter 2

p. 10
•epigraph: This is the work by Bacon referenced on p. 8.

•flying over the Channel: Specifically Louis Blériot (see p. 7), who did just this is 1909.

p. 11
•pictures at an exhibition: A sly nod to the 1874 piano suite by Mussorgsky of the same name.

•éclairant le monde: Fr. for “enlightening the world”; part of the “true” name of the Statue of Liberty.

•Gramme: The Belgian scientist Zénobe Gramme. Note that the “great stone statue” is massive, and a gramme is a unit of mass.

•Lusitania: The passenger ship sunk by Germans in WWI. But also the ancient name for Portugal, a country most strongly associated with the Knights Templar. Perhaps it is significant that Winsor “Little Nemo”McKay animated a 1918 propaganda cartoon about the sinking of the Lusitania.

•telluric: “Of the earth.” The first appearance of a word that will be significant later in the book.

•cicadas: An insect that emerges from the earth in a prototypical resurrection motif. Another subterranean reference (and a foreshadowing of Casaubon’s enwombing in the periscope).

p. 12
•doubter: Doubting Thomas is both the apostle who doubted and the apostle whose gospel, excluded from the Bible, is a source of esoteric wisdom.

•Watt’s engine: A steam engine. Romantics (here called Ossianic after the Romantic love of Ossian’s poems, Neo-Gothic for analogous reasons) may dislike the Industrial Revolutions

•Empedocles: In order to give the appearance that he had ascended bodily to heaven, leaving behind no corpse, this ancient Greek philosopher leapt into a volcano (the ruse failed; the volcano spat out one of his shoes, which was noted). Empedocles had his secrets: “Shelter these teachings in thine own mute breast,” he wrote.

•Frazer: James George Frazer’s massive anthropological work The Golden Bough focused around Roman murder-based rites in Nemi. The Golden Bough is a source of both much twentieth-century occult study and much twentieth-century Modernist literature (especially Eliot’s The Waste Land)—irresistible for Eco.

•Sam Spade: The hero of The Maltese Falcon (book and movie). He does not, in fact, kill a woman in the end of either, although it’s a noir thing to do. See also p. 28.

•robot: see p. 15.

p. 13
•Lavoisier: Antoine Lavoisier, French chemist.

•macumba: Brazilian black magic. On our narrator’s mind!

•mirrors: Whenever Eco mentions mirrors, you can be sure it is a Jorge Luis Borges reference. “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men,” Borges writes most famously (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), although these mirrors in the Saint-Martin-des-Champs, you will note, explicitly sometimes do not.

•Alhazen: Ibn al-Haytham, medieval Muslim scientist and the “father of modern optics.”

•left-handedness: Borges, from his poem “Mirrors”:

Everything happens and nothing is recorded
In these rooms of the looking glass,
Where, magicked into rabbis, we
Now read the books from right to left.

•copper mask: Masks are also always Borges references. Eco might as well set this scene in a labyrinth!

p. 14
•eolopile: The primitive steam engine known as Hero’s (or (Heron’s) engine, theorized here to be used as a mechanical device to ape the actions of a god to fool worshipers in ancient Egypt. Hippolytus (in his Refutation of All Heresies) claimed that pagan temples were full of such spurious miracles. The thematic significance need not be commented upon.

•“reeking bastards of the Demiurge”: In Gnostic cosmology, the Demiurge is the (bad) creator of the (bad) physical world.

•Balnaeum Mariae: Mary’s bath; the alchemical device better known as a bain-marie , used to heat things indirectly.

•hydrargyrum: The element mercury (Hg). Mercury is of course the same as Hermes, below.

•mysterium conjunctionis: “Carl Jung suggested the term mysterium coniunctionis (Latin: ‘mystery of the conjunction’) as a designation for mystical paradoxes” (Britannica).

•Elixir: All these alchemical procedures, above, are in the interest of creating the Elixir—which will grant immortality or enlightenment or riches.

•“from athanor to athanor, from alembic to alembic”: These are just alchemical vessels, but the passage from one to another suggests an echo of the line from Henry V Part 2: “not Amurath an Amurath succeeds.”

•a gnome-size homunculus: A homunculus is (in this context) an artificial man, usu. imagined as tiny.

•acajou: Mahogany.

•Holy Shroud of Basilides: C2 Gnostic theologian; here he is conflated with Jesus (who had a shroud, the Shroud of Turin. Borges wrote an essay “A Vindication of Basilides the False.”

•Hermes Trismegistus: Thrice-great Hermes. At once a Hellenized name for the Egyptian god Thoth and a pseudo-historical author of the ur-texts of mysticism, the Corpus Hermeticum. Here he is also conflated with Jesus (whose foreskin, the one part of him left behind after he ascended to heaven, is the relic known as the Holy Prepuce.

•Elfs of Avalon: The second appearance of Avalon (see p. 4), here associated (as it often is) with the realm of faerie (elfs).

p. 15
•Agliè: There are so many names from history introduced in this chapter that it may not be obvious that Agliè is merely a name of a character in the book.

•notarikon: The kabbalistic practice of interpreting words as acronyms. (Would not gematra (se p. 29) be more apposite?)

•robot: Calling back to p. 12.

•androgynous vases: Presumably the vases are tall and thin (phallic) while also, by necessity, being vases, yonic.

•Lalique: René Lalique, nineteenth-century French glass blower, or the company he founded.

•poteries: Fr. for pottery.

•majolica: “From the mid-15th century onwards, maiolica was a type of pottery reaching Italy from Spain” (Wikipedia).

•faience: Tin-glazed painted pottery.

•Yaldabaoth: A name for the Demiurge (the bad creator) in some Gnostic traditions.

•Archon: see p. 7

•Sophia: Lit. wisdom, but also used as a (quasi-)deity, a feminine aspect of God. Also a lady’s name, wh. may be significant.

p. 16
•Plerome: The Fullness, a Gnostic term for God (the good guy). Usually it is rendered Pleroma, the word plerome being relegated to botany, and meaning “the central core of primary meristem of a plant or plant part that…gives rise to the stele” (MW). The combination of scientific and occult, as well as concepts like central part and producing something new, are key here.

•Ogdoades: This is a plural noun, but it here receives a singular verb. It probably refers to Gnostic heavens, but it could also be the eight Egyptian gods.

•a rebours: “backwards,” but also the title of J.K. Huysmans’s decadent novel about an esthete.

•hanged man: Among other things, a tarot card. “It expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe” says A.E. “tarot guy” Waite.

•Verne: Jules Verne, French proto-science-fiction writer.

Man is is love and loves what vanishes.
What more is there to say?

What more is there to say? I don’t really have a lot of annotations for this postlude. I’m glad it’s in there; I think it’s fun; it may persuade you not to attempt to construct a time machine, or if you do construct a time machine, only to use it to visit the future.

p. 387
•epigraph: Perhaps having beggared my powers of imagination, I opted here for the merely obvious:

Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire.
§Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859).

•Nietzsche died in the nuthatch: Soberer eyes requested I change nuthatch to something less offensive, but apparently alternative I came up with more offensive, and eventually they gave up.

•Monte Cooke: His essay is really good! If you’re traveling back in time (he persuaded me) either you already succeeded or you already failed, and if you already succeeded someone may well have noticed and recorded it. So never try to go back in time to a situation where people would definitely have noticed and recorded it (e.g. right next to a Beatle at the rooftop convert); choose instead going to place where people may not notice (a Cretaceous swamp) or may notice but not record (e.g. a meeting of pre-Columbian Iroquois) or, best of all (as the book says) a place where a mysterious strange was both noticed and recorded. If you ever find in a nineteenth-century diary, say, an entry that reads “and then a strangely garbed fellow identifying himself as [your name] appeared from nowhere, claiming he had traveled from the future” you should probably go for it.

What is we kissed while preordering?

p. 389
•Lannes/von Tornë: I found these two fellows and their two fates in two different books I read years apart, and the delight I made in connecting them was the whole reason I shoehorned these unnecessary facts into an already overburdened chapter.

pp. 391ff
•notes: This bibliographic technique is my own, vaguely based on others I have seen but deprioritizing readability in favor of saving space.

Initially I had wanted to plug entries as something like: NY: HBJ, 1970; but copy editors insisted, perhaps psychotically, that it would have to be: New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. I’m lucky they only wrote out New York and not New York City! I know all those New Yorks would kill me, and honestly does it help anyone to be reminded where Macmillan resides? so I cut the city out altogether.

People, people, I had no fight for every page in this book, and too many notes would mean more cuts in the chapters proper. (I suggested, in vain, cutting the opening Notes to the Reader to save space.)

p. 403
•c.g.s.: This is cum grano salis: With a grain of salt. At first I had sprinkled g.g.s. here and there, and when an editor suggested no one would know what i meant, I blithely laughed. Surely the reader can just google up c.g.s.!

Then I tried googling c.g.s.

I mean, it’s there. You’ll get it eventually. But perhaps it’s not the easiest thing to google. So I converted most c.g.s.s to cum granis salis and left I think only this one. I figure if you’re reading the notes straight through, front to back, like a murder mystery, you’ll be able to figure this one out.

pp. 405ff
•And that’s it for annotations. I hope they were informative. I hope people of the future, when they scratch their heads over some inexplicable blunder in Impossible Histories, will find these notes and dig up a half-baked explanation.

I have another book coming out in a month—perhaps I will annotate that one, too? In any event, the garlands of quotations will continue, perhaps until doomsday. They will be my legacy.

p. 368
•Global Thermonuclear War: Obviously this is a nod to the movie War Games, because we cannot escape from ourselves.

•epigraph: The epigraph was to be:

Sex can be compared to atomic energy. It is a powerful force. Used wisely, it can warm our lives and enrich a meaningful relationship. Used carelessly or wantonly, it can cause an emotional explosion that may blow up our chances for happiness. Most of us believe that sexual as wall as atomic energy should be used for constructive purposes.
§The Seventeen Guide to Knowing Yourself (1967).

The book is by Daniel Sugarman and Rolaine Hochstein, but I was just going to leave them out. It’s a great quote, but I will sacrifice two writers at the alter of keeping an epigraph’s citation attractively short.

p. 369
•a veil of absolute secrecy:

This veil was at the time itself is unprecedented! You’ll notice that before nuclear weapons, governments didn’t have a lot of secret technologies. It wasn’t until 1911 that the US even had a law against “the disclosure of national defense secrets” and then these secrets were mainly things like the deployment of forces, or layouts of military installations. Even when a government did have a secret weapon, such as 1918’s top-secret British M-Device—an exploding shell that delivered poison gas (diphenylaminechloroarsine)—that secrecy scarcely covered an entire field of science. The British used poison gas to kill rabbits, M-Device or no. Poison gas wasn’t secret! But the Bomb was.

Nuclear science in its infancy (i.e. pre-War) had been a model of international cooperation: Lise Meitner, an Austrian working in Sweden, and Otto Frisch, an Austrian working in Denmark, crunched out a theoretical framework to explain the experiments of Otto Hahn (German), whose own work built upon the recent discoveries of Enrico Fermi (Italian), Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie (French), and James Chadwick (British). Only the conquests of Nazi Germany put an end to the scientists’ cosmopolitan spirit. (Incidentally, everyone in this paragraph except the two Austrians would go on to win Nobel prizes.) Fermi, Frisch, and Chadwick would later work in America developing the atomic bomb, but by that point there would be no openness. By that point the British, the Germans, the Soviets, the Japanese, and the Americans would all have rival and mostly independent nuclear programs (the exceptions to complete independence would be a sometimes grudging cooperation between the British, the Americans, and the Canadians (as per Wolfe, above), and a propensity of the Soviets’ to spy on everyone). The potential for fission to create an atomic weapon was therefore developed behind closed doors. No civilian organizations were even able to discuss whether development was a good idea. No plebiscite could be taken on early nuclear policy because no one knew enough to vote on. This widespread ignorance applied to the very governments that were developing atomic weapons: One reason the US pushed so hard to develop the A-bomb was a fear that the Germans might be on the cusp of developing it first; no one in American knew that the underfunded German program was nowhere near a breakthrough, Hitler having put all his money on a different secret weapon (the V-2 rocket).

Please preorder my next book

p. 370
•two billion dollars: “And back then that was a lot of money.”

•Notorious, which started preproduction in 1944: But was the MacGuffin uranium in preproduction? According to Ken Mogg, the MacGuffin ”had started as a secret Nazi army being formed in Brazil, became ‘chemicals and mechanisms’ for building a ‘new German weapon’” and only later settled on uranium. Is it possible the uranium angle was added late in the game? [Ken Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock Story (Titan, 2008) p. 98.]

p. 371
•Only two people: In 1965, postmodern novelist Donald Barthelme published a story about one crewman trying to persuade the other crewman to turn his key (read it here); but that’s only a story, and Barthelme, as a postmodernist, is not to be trusted.

p. 375
•an incentive to overstate the power of atomic weapons: This postwar cartoon is indicative of the perception that the two Bombs had absolutely leveled Japan.

p. 377
•any nuclear explosion in warfare: Just because they have not exploded does not mean nuclear weapons have not been used. The book’s next paragraph deals with deterrence, but examples could be multiplied (or maybe they could not; hard to tell with deterrence).

Eisenhower always credited the threat of a nuclear strike—he didn’t actually come out and threaten it, as back then presidents were diplomatic and subtle, but the threat existed nevertheless—with ending the Korean War. Was Ike right? It’s also possible that Mao was not actually that eager to keep throwing his soldiers into Korea, but felt pressured into continuing because of pressure from the Soviet Union, his ally. Once Stalin died, and the pressure lifted, Mao quickly negotiated a peace.

A few years later, in 1955 and 1958, China and Taiwan (and therefore China and the US) clashed over possession of two small islands, Quemoy & Mastsu; once again, the implicit threat of the American Bomb kept the conflict from escalating beyond saber-rattling, and China gave in. By 1964, China had the Bomb, too, and nuclear threats became more dangerous. Nevertheless, despite decades of tensions, Taiwan and China have not gone to war.

How often has this happened? Did NATO back down in its objections to the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia because the Russians chose to bring out nuclear-tipped Iskander missiles? Actually, Iskander missiles can hold both nuclear or conventional warheads, so there may not have been any nuclear missiles on the front lines; but there might have been. None ever launched, though. NATO refused to intervene, and the Russians still occupy parts of Georgia. It may have been nothing, but it may have been the nukes.

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can preorder, but it's a soft launch

p. 378
•Cuban Missile Crisis: The CMC had such an outsized impact on American culture…This is a line from Ralph Pape’s 1979 play, Say Goodnight, Gracie:

When he looked into the camera and told the nation that there were missiles in Cuba, he was incredibly sexy, I thought.

And surely this is part of it…not just the threat of nuclear annihilation, but the coupling of that threat with the Kennedy Mystique (TM). Here, in toto, is Lorine Niedecker’s 1967 poem “J. F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs”:

To stand up—

black marked tulip
not snapped by the storm

‘I’ve been duped by the experts’

—and walk
the South Lawn

[Pape, Say Goodnight, Gracie (Doubleday, 1979) p. 28; Niedecker, From This Condensery (Jargon Society / Inland Book Co., 1985) p177.]

p. 379
•epigraph: And here we would have had:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

God’s plan made a hopeful beginning
But man spoiled his chances by sinning.
      We trust that the story
      Will end in God’s glory;
But, at present, the other side’s winning.
§Oliver Wendell Holmes, attr.

p. 380
•Brian Martin: Is Brian Martin a good source? Maybe he has a reputation as a wacko, especially now, when writing about COVID vaccinations make it easy to be a wacko. I finished this chapter before the pandemic, in a lull between when Martin was famous for being controversial/wrong about AIDS and when Martin was famous for being controversial/wrong about COVID. I didn’t know much about him when I read his estimate. Perhaps I would have looked for a different source if I’d gone back and checked him out again later.

But perhaps not. Martin writes soberly about the things he’s being controversial about. I like gadflies, even gadflies I disagree with. Martin pretty consistently says that he has no strong opinions about vaccines and is merely interested in their social science aspect, and it’s not like vaccine orthodoxy and heterodoxy is not a fertile field for a social scientist. I mean, Martin could hardly be more one-sided than Ron Rosenbaum.

Maybe if I’d been soberer I would have cited this guy instead.

•a freak rainstorm: As Alan Moore once wrote, “It’s like old naval battles. So much depends on a quirk of the wind.” [Watchmen #3 (Nov. 1986)]

p. 381
•the assumption this chapter started with: This assumption is so prevalent in nuclear discourse…I’ll limit myself to just one example, when Martin Amis in 1986 said Ronald Reagan “like his opposite number…is the keeper of the planet, of all life, of the past and of the future.” [Amis, The Moronic Inferno (Penguin, 1986) p. 96.]

p. 382
•a nuclear war that does not escalate: Sometime in the ‘90s I read an interview with Eve Ensler in which she said she literally could not imagine a limited nuclear war. If anyone can find the source of that interview, please let me know; I want to make fun of it.

p. 349
•epigraph:

…the People, who tho’ generally they are uncapable of making a Syllogism or forming an Argument, yet they can pronounce a word.
§Lord Halifax, Character of a Trimmer (1688).

•Oswald Mosley: One of these things in not like the others…

p. 350
•color photography: Arguably the two most famous photos from the Vietnam war (a young napalmed Phan Thi Kim Phuc running (Nick Ut, 1972) and the street execution of Nguyen Van Lem (Eddie Adams, 1968)) are in black and white, and I can only assume that they are in part famous because the distance b&w film gives us from the events makes them comfortable enough to be famous photos.

Before you snort at the word “comfortable,” please recall that the Monkees used footage of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem as part of a joke in their movie Head. It’s a good joke, and it makes a decent satirical point, but it’s still a snuff film, and would it have been included in Head if it were in color?

•One theory on the fall of the British Empire: I got this from Brian Lapping’s End of Empire (St. Martin’s, 1990), but I’ve long since donated the book to Housing Works, and it seemed wasteful to purchase a new copy just to confirm a reference, so I left it vague.

p. 351
•Southern Ocean: A fourth edition in 2002 was supposed to reinstate the existence of a Southern Ocean, but it never go approved. Allegedly a decades-long feud between South Korea and Japan over the correct name of the Sea of Japan…excuse me, the East Sea…has derailed things indefinitely, to the extent that the IHO is considering replacing all names with code numbers so boring that no one will want to fight about them. Is this true?

Consider preordering Sorcerers

•the power of words: Here’s another example. What are the racial demographics of the US? African-Americans make up about 13% of the population; but “African-American” in this context means someone who self-identifies as African-American, which generally entails having 28–100% African heritage. If you’re 72% white, you’re black. Now, the average African-American is 24% European. We’re dealing in rough averages here, but it’s still pretty clear how loose these definitions are. If we, as a country, decided that people who were three-quarters black were white—the way we now believe people who are three quarters white are black—almost half of African-Americans would disappear. They wouldn’t go anywhere but they’d disappear as African-Americans. Halle Berry would no longer be the first black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar; she’d just be, ho hum, another white actress who won the Best Actress Oscar; Barak Obama, the 44th white president. [Katarzyna Bryc et al., “The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans Across the United States”; AJHG, Vol. 96, Issue 1, Jan. 2015.]

p. 361

•epigraph:

Ngu Minh Khanh’s face hardened as he glared at Van An and said, “All right! That’s fine! Perhaps you want to savor the full range of our American techniques of punishment! Splendid! Take him away and turn the heat on!” Two side-kicks came in and dragged Van An away.
The enemy used many different forms of torture on Van An but they could get nothing out of him.
§Li Biyang, “Letters from the South” (1965).

This is a Maoist propaganda comic, which I got from the excellent collection (edited in part by Umberto Eco (?!)) The People’s Comic Book (Anchor, 1973).

p. 364
•the ’60s youth movement: I’m sorry for picking on Boomers this much. I blame Oedipus.

•Monkees had started out silly but: This is of course the movie Head mentioned above.

Libraries have my books!

p. 365
•Everyone assumed that World War II was serious: Spike Jones’s 1944 “Leave the Dishes in the Sink” is a good example of an utterly frivolous and silly song that effortlessly becomes something serious when you realize that the reason for the jubilation is the return of a son from the war. If the song had been released in 1972, it would have had a tedious explanation attached, making sure everyone listening apprehended the gravity of the situation.

In 1945 Syd “Danny and the Dinosaur” Hoff released an entire collection of cartoons about returning vets, and the entire book is funny and serious and charming, without ever stopping to explain why the funny and charming parts are serious. The weisenheimer dedication of the book reads: “The author is bitterly ungrateful to World War II for the ideas in this book.”

Meanwhile (in contrast) a Vietnam-era book of army poetry contains, as part of a ponderous six-page introduction, observations such as: “War has its scatology, even its hilarity at times. This young poet enjoys his joke as much as any man. But the manifestation of the ultimate obscenity…is beyond either tears or laughter…”

[Hoff, Mom, I’m Home (Doubleday, Doran, 1945) p. v; Michael Casey, Obscenities (Yale UP, 1972) p. xi.]

p. 366
•Phil Ochs literally couldn’t have recorded a hit to save his life: Quite literally, sadly. “Fifty Phil Ochs fans can’t be wrong.”

p. 342
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:

Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?
Thou hast shooted dead great Hamilton.
You got behind a bunch of thistle
And shot him dead with a big hoss-pistol.
§anon., trad.

I didn’t always cite my epigraphs thoroughly, but this one is from Remini, op. cit., p. 41, and I tell you this because everyone has a different version. Joseph J. Ellis (e.g.) has “O Burr, O Burr, what hast thous done etc.” What can you do? It’s anon. and trad.

[Ellis, Founding Brothers (Vintage, 2002) p. 27.]

•1828 campaign song: You can hear Oscar Brand sing it below:

•the devil, as is his wont, obeyed the letter: This is the bonest mot in the whole book.

p. 343
•“the little lady who made this big war”: Variants abound for this quote as well. I’m not even keeping track any more. Take your pick.

•Agnes Repplier: Repplier is all but forgotten now, but she was justly famous in her day, and a bald summary (such as the one I provided) does not do justice to her reasoning or her irony.

Consider preordering Sorcerers

p. 344
•“Uncle Tom’s Crabbin”: This cartoon features a motif familiar in animated shorts: One character just wants to get some sleep, but can’t because troublemakers keep making noise all night. In this case, the character who just wants some sleep is Simon Legree! which as you can imagine creates a strangely dissonant text.

•Olive Oyl: This was a full nine years before Popeye appeared in the strip, of course. At the time Olive was somewhat ambiguously (are they only playing a part at this point?) dating Ham Gravy.

The strip itself (below) will raise more questions than it answers. Olive, you will notice, is in blackface, but “little Eva’s brother” would (in the context of the novel, if he existed) be white. A solid gag, though.

•Minister’s Wooing: I have no where else to mention the fact that our friend Alcibiades gets name-dropped in the book, here:

When brought face to face with the great truths of the invisible world, they stand related to the higher wisdom much like the gorgeous, gay Alcibiades to the divine Socrates…they gaze, imperfectly comprehending, and at the call of ambition or riches turn away sorrowing.

•altogether better-written book: The Calvinist idea that people should birth children who almost certainly, statistically at least, will end up damned is particularly well presented:

She wondered that the sun could shine so brightly, that flowers could flaunt such dazzling colours, that sweet airs could breathe, and little children play, and youth love and hope, and a thousand intoxicating influences combine to cheat the victims from the thought that their next step might be into an abyss of horrors without end.

or

The mother clasped her babe to her bosom, and looked with shuddering to the awful coming trial of free agency, with its terrible responsibilities and risks, and, as she thought of the infinite chances against her beloved, almost wished it might die in infancy.

p. 345
•assassinate Burr’s character: ♫ “Don't let them know what you’re against or what you’re for etc. etc.” ♫

p. 346
•Henry Ward Beecher: The great man may be largely forgotten today, but Beecher has a kind of immortality, as his portrait features in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.”

Libraries have my books!

•other limericks, less suitable for polite company: Should I quote one??…nah, you can follow the citations in the endnotes, right? Keep this stack family friendly.

•tried for heresy: As mentioned in the notes to chapter seventeen, W. Robertson Smith was tried for Presbyterian heresy—tried in 1876, cleared 1880. When did that stop happening?

p. 348
•Your favorite CD is ruined: One editor told me to cut this chapter because (he claimed, if not in these exact words) Hamilton fans were rabid humorless sociopaths who would never be able to handle imagining a timeline in which they could not watch their darling. Obv. I ignored his advice, but I guess I’m saying: If you’re a rabid humorless sociopathic Hamilton fan, have pity on me!

• The epigraph here:

Aaron Burr, that old apostate,
Thought our country had bad joss,
Sought to form his own good-joss state,
But, alas, it was a loss.
§anon., trad.

[Quoted in Van der Geer op. cit. p. 3108.]

p. 320
•Mecca: I wanted to title the book Elephants in Mecca and Nineteen Other Things That Didn’t Happen, but this, along with other proposed titles, got nixed.

•epigraph: The epigraph for this chapter was to be:

It’s considered more pious and reverent to believe in, than to know the truth about, the deeds of the gods.
§Tacitus, Germania (AD 98).

Consider preordering Sorcerers

•everybody invading everybody: This chapter originally opened with a long and discursive build-up before it reached this part. For posterity, I reproduce the build-up below:

Everyone invades everyone.

History is more than just people invading or conquering each other, but it’s not so much more than people invading or conquering each other. Especially in the wild days before 1928, invasion was just business as usual; you invaded if you could invade; if you could, you conquered as well.

Herodotus, the first historian, chose as his theme the conflicts between Europe and Asia; the early chapters of his book try to pinpoint the origin of the conflict in a series of offenses, mostly involving kidnapping women. His early examples are all stories we recognize now as mythological: Jason sailing to Colchis (on the Asian side of the Black Sea) to steal Medea (and incidentally the Golden Fleece); the Trojan prince Paris seducing Helen away from Sparta (which of course brings the Greeks to war against Troy, in Asia Minor).

The actual origin Herodotus cites—the very first offense, which caused so much strife between Europe and Asia—involves Phoenicians kidnapping Io from Argos and bringing her to Egypt, which sounds plausible enough. But readers of Bulfinch’s Mythology will remember Io as the woman a besotted Zeus changed into a heifer, whereupon Hera sent a gadfly to torment her, pursuing her all the way to Egypt. Herodotus says his version comes from Persian sources, which admittedly tend to have less Zeus in them than Greek sources.

The point is that Herodotus’ origins are not real origins; in part because they’re not real, but in part because they’re not original. Long before the Argonauts or the Trojan War, long before Io, invaders from somewhere on the border of Europe and Asia moved both east and west, pushing into both continents. Almost all the languages of Europe, and many in Asia, such as Farsi (in Iran), Urdu (in Pakistan), and Hindi (in India—it’s pretty much the same language as Urdu) are descended from the language of these invaders. This was the origin that Heroditus missed, but there’s no reason to believe it’s really an origin. It’s just before Io.

This is one of the lessons of history—like the third lesson of history, maybe: Whenever you hear the word “original,” there’s always something before it. Fodor’s travel guide for Alaska mentions that Denali is the “original name” for Mt. McKinley; but Denali is nothing of the sort. Mt. McKinley was originally named thousands of years ago; whatever people named it either left Alaska for warmer climes or died out by now. Almost certainly whatever language it was named in is either extinct or transformed beyond recognition. Far from being original, Denali may well be second-newest name for the mountain, after McKinley—it’s hard to make an actual chronological list because the name Denali wasn’t written down until after the name McKinley, and there have been several other competing names in native American language (as well as several other competing names in Indo-European languages). The only thing that’s certain is that none of these names are “original.” The original name is lost in the mists of time.

Whenever someone invades someplace, they’re invading someplace that had been invaded many times before. Everyone points a finger and says “they started it,” but the pointers pointing had started something in turn, long ago. The Normans conquered England, and they conquered it from the Saxons; the Saxons had conquered it from the Roman remnant, who had conquered it from the Celts who had conquered it from the people who had put up Stonehenge—not even their name survives. Who knows whom they conquered it from? “It’s conquests all the way down.”

Even if we agree that people eventually become the “rightful inhabitants” of a country, and that there’s no need to look further back in time—no one’s seriously suggesting that Anglo-Saxons should be kicked out of England, Romans or no Romans—conquest is often a complicated matter. Whether you like it or not, when you conquer, you can end up conquering conquerors. When the Mongols conquered northern China, they didn’t snatch it from it from actual Chinese people; they snatched it from the Jurchin, a Tungusic people (perhaps related to the Turks) who had themselves conquered the Chinese, and set themselves up as overlords, a hundred years earlier. When the British incorporated Hong Kong into their empire, they didn’t conquer it from the Chinese either; they conquered it from the Manchu, descendants of the Jurchin, who had reconquered China in the seventeenth century.

Everyone also agrees it’s wrong to conquer countries for no reason; but remember: Everyone wants to conquer countries. So people have become good at coming up with reasons: a causus belli. Alexander the Great didn’t just march off and conquer Persia on a whim. Persia held many Greek colonies in Asia Minor in its thrall; it had invaded Greece twice in the century and a half before Alexander’s birth; and it had spend the intervening years meddling in Greek politics, imprisoning an Athenian garrison during the Samian War [a conflict between the Greek city of Athens and the Greek island of Samos] and playing both sides off against each other in the Peloponnesian War.

Nearly every war starts with someone making up a reason for it, so coming with examples is too easy to be much fun. These reasons are not always persuasive: Even if Alexander had some justification for marching against Persia, he had mush less for continuing to push into India, or for annexing Egypt: Egypt had been an unwilling part of the Persian emperor when Alexander arrived, and the naive Egyptians actually welcomed him, assuming he was there to free them from the Persian yoke. Alexander was more than happy to free Egypt from the Persian yoke, but he set them under the Macedonian yoke, which they remained under for three centuries; even after the Macedonians were overthrown (by the Romans), Egypt was not free, but rather found itself passed from one empire to another, ruled by a series of foreign conquerers. A native Egyptian would not rule Egypt again until 1953—that’s almost 2300 straight years of foreign rule! Although it has happened (in 1868, Great Britain invaded Ethiopia to rescue some missionary hostages; they occupied the capital, grabbed the hostages and returned home, leaving behind a dead emperor (suicide) and general anarchy, which is admittedly suboptimal) conquerers rarely just hand conquered lands back to the people they conquered them from.

Napoleon, everyone’s idea of a self-aggrandizing glory-hound who invaded countries for no reason, actually had a pretty good justification for his wars: The countries he was invading had been at war with France for years…

(…of course, the reason they were at war with France was because France had declared war on them; of course, the reason France had declared war on them was because they were harboring and in fact funding French emigrees who were planning to invade revolutionary France; because France had been taken over by fanatics who had overthrown the rightful government and (eventually) murdered the rightful king; because the king was a tyrannical jackass; it probably keeps going. Wordsworth’s summary: “Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defense / For one of conquest”—is still probably a just one.)

ii. It’s been noted that if you had the chance to escape from jail in America in the nineteenth century, you probably should do it; if you have the chance to escape from jail in America today, you probably shouldn’t. Escaped convicts used to be able to cross state lines, assume a new identity, and start life anew, with a clean record; now you just get caught almost immediately, and you’re worse off than when you started.

Similarly, in the nineteenth century, if you had the chance to conquer another country, you probably should. You probably shouldn’t, because it would be wrong, but also you probably should because you can plunder and exploit the populace an use the land and natural resources for whatever you want. It’s win/win! Except for the conquered people, who lose.

That was the nineteenth century. The prospects for invading another country are less sanguine now; this is probably due to a much-maligned treaty, the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was, at the time, the largest multinational treaty ever. In 1928, 54 nations agreed that war would henceforth be illegal. The number quickly swelled to 62 nations (up to 63 in 1971). And everything was peace, peace, peace forever.

As even the most desultory acquaintance with the history of the world after 1928 will tell you, the pact was, in one sense, an utter failure. After a little more than a decade, 61 of the 62 signatories were at war with each other, and you have probably noticed that war has hardly disappeared from the globe. But this is, really, an unfair complaint, because laws never eliminate crimes. Technically, laws create crimes, because there is no crime if there is no law, but I mean that laws never eliminate the acts they criminalize. We have all the right laws in place, but there are still burglars and assassins in America. But a good law makes it difficult for burglars and assassins to ply their trade. You can think of legal punishments as a tax. If the fine imposed for smuggling is less than the tariff for importing, you have a broken system; everyone will smuggle. The tax on crime needs to be high enough that a career in crime is unattractive.

This is what the Kellogg-Briand Pact proposed. It proposed a tax on conquest. And this is where it succeeded. It’s not that people don’t invade or conquer places any more; it’s just that when they do, the rest of the world declares this conquest illegitimate. Before 1928, if one country could think of a baseline plausible justification, it could seize what territory it wanted —and if it succeeded, everyone nodded their heads and said, “Hard cheese” (except Thomas Paine; back in 1791, he had declared conquest an illegitimate method of establishing sovereignty; but no one listened to Thomas Paine). When Japan invaded China in 1931; when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935; when Germany invaded everyone starting in 1939; no one said, “Hard cheese.” I mean, I guess the Axis said, “Hard cheese,” but the rest of the world said, “Quit it”; first in a whiny, ineffective way, but later with rather persuasive force.

In their book The Internationalists, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro try to prove statistically that conquest has been on the decline since 1928. Running the numbers from 1819 and 1928, they found that during that time you could expect the country you lived in to lose territory to conquest, on average, once in your lifetime; the odds have dropped so that now you can expect it twice a millennium. The average amount of land conquered during this period per year was over 100,000 square miles; currently, the average amount per year is a little over 5000 square miles.

Most pronounced had been the change in what Hathaway and Shapiro call “sticky conquests”—conquests that stick around and get legitimized as permanent incorporations of territory. Comparing pre–1928 conquests to post–1928 conquests shows a 86% drop in sticky square miles conquered; if you look at the world after World War II, the drop increases to 94%.

You can pick apart and argue with individual cases they show—China’s absorption of Tibet doesn’t “count” as a sticky conquest to Hathaway & Shapiro for reasons that strike me as sophistic —but it’s hard to argue with a 94% drop. Something’s going on here. We may be in an era of increased civil wars and increased undeclared wars and increased stateless entities at war and increased wars against abstract concepts (see p. xx); but we are in an era of decreasing conquest, which counts for something.

But this is a recent development. For all of history before 1928, it was nonstop conquest: an average of 100,000 square miles per year. Everyone invaded everyone.

Europe has invaded Asia (Alexander the Great, 330 BC; Russian expansion, 1600–1945) and Asia has invaded Europe (invasion of the Huns, ca. 370; the Ottoman conquests, ca. 1389); Asia has invaded Africa (Persian conquest of Egypt, 525 BC; Ottoman conquest of Egypt, 1517) and Africa has invaded Asia (Egyptian conquest of Syria, ca. 1550 BC; ditto 271 BC); Europe has invaded Africa (Roman conquests, starting in 146 BC; Italian conquest of Ethiopia, 1936) and Africa has invaded Europe (Moorish conquest of Spain, 711; Fatimid Egypt’s conquest of Sicily, ca. 965); Europeans invaded the Americas (1492 etc.) and America then invaded Europe (Normandy, 1944); obviously, America has also invaded Asia (Japan, 1945), Africa (Liberia, 1847), the Philippines (1898), Hawaii (1898), etc.

Everyone invades everyone. India invaded Malaysia and Indonesia (Chola Empire, 1025) and Malaysians and Indonesians invaded Madagascar (which may have been uninhabited, ca. 200). Sub-Saharan Africa has invaded northern Africa (XXV-dynasty Egypt, 760 BC) and Sub-Saharan Africa has invaded southern Africa (Bantu expansion, ca. 300), but only once in all of history has Sub-Saharan Africa left its continent and invaded somewhere else. It may have happened many times in prehistory—Sub-Saharan Africa is where people are from, after all—but it only happened once in history. Ethiopia invaded Yemen.

And then start the stuff on Axum (as section iii).

p. 320
•Only once in all of history: Was it really only once? Although the historical record is spotty, third-century Axumite emperors also claimed to have conquered (and then lost, presumably) a colony in Yemen.

There’s a long history of people simply pretending to rule areas they could not possibly have sovereignty over. Until 1800, the King of England also called himself King of France, based on medieval claims to the title. There was, of course, another King of France on the throne, sometimes bald and sometimes not, the whole time.

Until the nineteenth century, books often asserted the existence of vast inland Iroquois Empire, stretching to the Mississippi. Although the Iroquois Confederacy did control a lot of land, a hegemony stretching that far west is pure myth, but a myth that was perpetuated for an interesting reason. The Iroquois may have originally claimed possession of the western lands as the same kind of fantasy that made Queen Elizabeth call herself Queen of France; but the British chose to believe them, and chose to spread the claim, to help their own territorial ambitions. The only European power to have a presence in the Mississippi region was France; the British had no leg to stand on when they claimed to be the rightful rulers of inland America…unless the Iroquois were the rightful rulers; because the Iroquois were subject to the British. By the transitive property of rulership, the Iroquois’s empire became part of the British’s.

Axum certainly claimed to be the de jure rulers of Arabia Felix at times when we know it definitely had no presence there. It also claimed sovereignty over the Blemmyes—a mythical headless people with eyes on their nipples; which could not possibly be true—but probably when they said Blemmyes, they meant not the mythical creatures but non-mythical people known now as the Beja, which is less ridiculous.

Regardless of whether Axum ruled Yemen in the third century, it certainly did in the sixth. Briefly, Axum ruled Yemen.

Libraries have my books!

•first Christian state: Christianity spread far in its early years—there were Christian populations in China during the Tang Dynasty, and in Mongolia as late as the time of Genghis Khan and his successors—but the Church of Rome only had a dim understanding of these far-flung branches. They doubtless inspired the legend of Prester John, who ruled a Christian utopia somewhere in Asia. In 1165 a letter from Prester John to the Byzantine Emperor circulated; the letter was forged, as letters from mythical figures tend to be, but it caused a sensation. As the age of exploration dawned, Europeans sought Prester John’s kingdom around the globe; finally settling on Ethiopia—the largest Christian kingdom outside of Europe—as the most likely location. Sixteenth century Dutch maps labeled Ethiopia as Prester John’s kingdom, which may have raised the awkward question: How could John still be reigning after four hundred years? The eventual consensus was that Prester John was a title, not a person; Portuguese travelers to Ethiopia found that the Ethiopians had never heard of such a thing.

p. 322
•Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon: Solomon had the floor of his throne room polished like glass, so when the Queen arrived she assumed it was full of water, and lifted her skirts. In this way Solomon managed to catch a glimpse of her legs (to ascertain if they were, as slander had it, hairy, or hoofed).

•as late as 1789: Of course, by 1789 Johnson had been dead for five years. His translation actually came out in 1735. My error.

Johnson’s most famous book on Abyssinia is his 1759 novel The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which correctly locates Abyssinia south of Egypt, while inventing most other facts about its people and customs.

Theodore Dalrymple once wrote that Rasselas is better than Voltaire’s Candide, which…well, I think that’s a bonkers assessment, but take it as a recommendation.

p. 323
•heretics by the standards of the European church due to semantic differences: Monophysites were enheresied in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. Few Protestants or Catholics nowadays could state categorically that they are dyophysites, which they almost certainly are, or what the term even means. People were more hardcore about these things in the fifth century.

•elephant ivory: I was under the impression that India did not start importing elephant tusks from Africa until the nineteenth century, when the Indian elephants’ population had dwindled; but the fact checker had to burst my bubble with accursed facts, and apparently India started importing African ivory in the sixth century. So that’s one on me.

p. 324
•they had converted to Judaism: The Himyarites are a footnote in Jewish history—they don’t even appear in Paul Johnson’s mammoth History of the Jews. Isaac Asimov, who surely liked to present himself as someone with exhaustive, encyclopedic knowledge of universal history, once claimed the the Maccabean kingdom was (pre-C20 Israel, and excluding “Old Testament” history) “the only time that Jews had the power” (i.e. temporal, political power). Of course, Asimov had forgotten Himyar! [Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov (Bantam, 1995) p. 22.]

•hardly going to become puppets to the Jews of the diaspora: Four hundred years later the Khazars, a Turkish people living north of the Caucusus, would make a similar decision, ignoring Christian and Muslim missionaries to become the final Jewish state until the founding of modern Israel. There’s a chance the Jewish Khazars are a myth, but, hey, for many years the Jewish Himyarites were shrugged off as a myth as well—until archaeological discoveries have proved they, at least, were real, or as real as any of us are.

p. 325
•Yusuf: You’ll notice that everyone in this story has an Old Testament name. Kaleb = Caleb; Abraha = Abraham; Yusuf = Joseph. This would not be the last time this would be true of a Middle Eastern conflict, and it could not have been the first—by definition, every conflict recorded in the Old Testament involves OT name vs. OT name. But it’s got to be a relatively early post-biblical example.

p. 327
•in danger of becoming, in a loose sense, “idols:” The English Puritans who smashed not only statues and stained glass windows but also crosses acted from similar motives. Umberto Eco tells the story (this may be fictional, but with Eco you never can tell) of a Franciscan friar who wiped his butt with a relic, the robe of St. John, and then rolled it in dung, simultaneously crying out that oops! he accidentally dropped the relic in the toilet, whoops! It doesn’t do to become too attached to relics! We could also cite the sporadic hundred-year reign of iconoclasts (“icon smashers”) in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Very different religious traditions have wrestled with similar issues. “If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him” is the famous Zen Buddhist injunction not to idolize the Buddha, but other Zen masters have used less violent but more vulgar language, comparing the Buddha to a “privy hole” (Linji) or a stick encrusted with dung (Yunmen).

The thirteenth-century Hindu holy man (and god incarnate) Gundam Raul destroyed the pots and decorations for the Navaratra festival, and he may have had a similar motivation; but Gundam Raul was always doing weird things that people around him thought were crazy. He slept in a dung heap. He jumped out of the bushes yelling boo to scare some cows. He cursed his buttocks when he farted. He once demanded oranges to eat when there were no oranges left in the village; his followers traveled far and bought oranges, but when they returned he decided he didn’t want them any more. Maybe there was a lesson in all this. Maybe he was trying to teach people a lesson.

[Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (HB, 1994) p. 478; Linji: trans. Burton Watson, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi (Columbia UP, 1999) p. 76; Yunmen: trans. Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier (North Point, 1990) p. 137; Gundam Raul: trans. Anne Feldhaus, The Deeds of God in Rddhipur (Oxford UP, 1984) passim.]

p. 328
•with the benefit of hindsight: Perhaps hindsight can help us understand why the Qarmatians failed, or where they went wrong. To put it another way: If the Black Rock was not an idol, why did people spend so much time flocking to see it?

The Black Rock was given to Abraham by the angel Gabriel, and, frankly, I’d like to see an object that was handled by Gabriel. I’ve paid good money to see Mark Twain’s writing desk, and a Gabriel/Abraham rock sounds a lot better. But this isn’t right. And to understand that we need to step back and look at how we look at myth.

By myth I don’t mean something false (Mythbusters; “Ten Myths about the Civil War”; The Myth of the Rational Voter). Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina (in 622) and subsequent triumphant return to Mecca (in 629) are foundational myths for Islam; they are also real and true historical events; as far as anything in the seventh century is certain, these events are certain. The martyrdom of Joseph Smith in 1844 is important in the mythology of the Church of Latter-Day Saints; you’d have to be a real tinfoil-hatted nut to assert that it never happened. For non-Mormons the meaning of the event is different, and they might call it “the murder” or “the assassination of Joseph Smith” rather than “the martyrdom.” But everyone agrees that Joseph Smith was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844. On the other hand, the myth where Zeus has his sinews removed by a monster and stuck in a jar has somewhat less historical certainty; we might want to call that a false myth. But plenty of myths are true.

There’s a natural tendency to assume that things run from myths downward. Why do Christians get baptized and break bread at communion? Because Jesus told his disciples to baptize “all nations” (Matthew 28:19) and to break bread “in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). It seems pretty straightforward.

But of course there was baptism long before Matthew 28; John the Baptist was baptizing people before Jesus even began his ministry; he baptized Jesus! And the bread broken in Luke 22 was part of a Passover supper—in other words, part of an older ritual, commemorating an even older myth—as is explicitly stated in Exodus 12:14ff. “And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever etc.”

Why did ancient Athenians, at the Feast of Pots (Chytroi), drink their wine alone and in silence? Euripides provides the answer in Iphigeneia in Tauris, when Orestes explains that they did it in his honor, when the Furies pursued him to Athens after he killed his mother blah blah. It’s a long explanation (lines 950ff.) and you should read it for yourself. But here’s the problem. Most of us probably agree that Orestes, like most of the characters from the Trojan War story, never existed. Agamemnon never sacrificed his daughter to Artemis; Clytemnestra never axed him ten years later; Orestes never slew her in revenge; certainly he never fled the whips of the Furies to Athens. What were the Athenians doing, basing their ritual on a myth that never even happened?

Way back in 1888, W. Robertson Smith came up with the solution: He posited that “in almost every case” the ritual is not derived from the myth: rather the myth is derived form the ritual. The myth is a story invented to explain why people are doing the thing they’re already doing.

To take one unambiguous example: Sailors are forbidden from whistling on steamships because, they are told, their whistling could be mistaken for leaking steam. Actually, though, whistling has been tabooed on ships since long before the age of steam. The older superstition was that a whistling sailor might “whistle up the wind”; when sails became obsolete and this fear stopped making sense, sailors had to construct a new reason for the old taboo. Note that both reasons are not only spurious but implausible: Whistling empirically fails to summon winds, and whistling also sounds nothing like a steam leak. First came the custom, and then came the explanation. First comes the ritual, and then comes the myth.

This is a sad state of affairs; many of us want myth to be primary because we want to imagine that culture is invented by storytellers, not by obsessive compulsives who somehow bullied everyone into performing a meaningless action. Maybe occasionally this is true; but “in almost every case” the stories are just desperate attempts to graft meaning onto silliness. (This is true, Smith insists, of beliefs as well; even our treasured moral values are presumably ad hoc explanations for arbitrary taboos and customs. Unsurprisingly, the Presbyterians charged him with heresy, which is the kind of thing that could still happen in the nineteenth century.)

What does this mean for the Qarmatians?

Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and in this way they follow in the footsteps of Muhammad; it is tempting to say (and many do!) that they travel to Mecca because Muhammad did (in 629, remember); but of course this pilgrim route had been old before Muhammad was even born. The custom of pilgrimage to Mecca didn’t arise because Muhammad did it; Muhammad made a pilgrimage to Mecca because the custom existed.

Similarly: Pre-Mulsim Arabs made a pilgrimage to Mecca. And the Qarmatians made the same blunder we all tend to; they assumed that the Arabs were traveling to Mecca because the sacred Black Stone as there. But actually, it is more likely that the Black Stone was sacred because so many people made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The ancient world was full of curious stones: A meteorite (brown, large enough to fill a wagon) fell at Aegospotami in ancient Greece, and people thought it was interesting; if Aegospotami had been a pilgrimage site, you can bet that the Brown Stone would have been not interesting but sacred. Someone call in the priests of Cybele!

Abraha thought pilgrims were traveling to Mecca because of the Kaaba, but the Kaaba is an unostentatious building. Demolishing the Kaaba would hardly keep anyone from Mecca, the way demolishing Walt Disney World would keep people away from Orlando. Pilgrims would still visit Mecca; someone would have rebuilt the Kaaba sooner or later and nothing would have been different at all.

[Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris (Oxford UP, 1973) p. 45; Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (Schocken, 1972) p. 18; whistling: Douglas Morgan, What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?: Unexpurgated Sea Chanties (Swordsmith, 2002) p. 23.]

p. 329
•the sky darkened with birds: Dungeons & Dragons (second edition)—in the Al Qadim setting, of course—calls these creatures elephant birds, because of their propensity for killing elephants. Difficult opponents, especially for a party who cannot fly.

p. 330
•In Plutarch, for example: Centuries later, Boccaccio, puzzled by the myth of the Etruscan god Tages (who was born autochthonously from the ground), came up at last with a satisfactory explanation. Doubtless people saw the man Tages emerge from a cave, and naturally they assumed he was being born! For this theory to work, Etruscans would have to be completely baffled by the concept of caves, but, sure, if it works for you, Boccaccio.

Lucian once wrote about a river near Byblos that every year turns red in memory of the dying god Adonis. Lucian notes that a man explained the whole thing to him rationally: the river passes through a region filled with red earth, and when the wind blows a certain way, red earth blown into the river dyes it red. Lucian though, reains skeptical: “Even assuming that he spoke the truth [says Lucian] yet there certainly seems to me something supernatural in the regular coincidence of the wind and the colouring of the river.”

Nevertheless, a footnote in my edition, appended to the red-soil theory, states tersely: “This is the correct explanation.”

[Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods vol. 1 (Harvard UP, 2011) p. 109; Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess (Faenum, 2013) pp. 43 & 41.]

p. 331
•You might as well believe that birds drop rocks: Inexplicably, Ziauddin Sardar, in his history of the region, has both smallpox and stone-dropping birds attack Abraha, one after the other. Covers all bases! [Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City (Bloomsbury, 2014) p. 28.]

p. 332
•epigraph: The epigraph here had originally been

“To speak the truth, and be skillful with bow and arrow”—so seemed it alike pleasing and hard to the people from whom cometh my name.
§Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883).

p. 336
•an army revolt over vacation time: Specifically, in Maurice decided not to recall the army of the Danube for the winter, as was the usual custom. They’d been fighting the Avars, one of the innumerable nomadic peoples who harried the borders of the Eastern Empire, up somewhere near modern Moldova; doubtless Maurice feared mischief if the army withdrew. The army would have none of this, though, and they rebelled against the emperor; Maurice soon found himself betrayed on all sides, and returned to a monastery. The army elevated the centurion Phocas, “a man of the lowest birth,” to the throne, and Phocas proceeded to go nuts. He dragged Maurice from the monastery and made the old emperor watch as, one by one, his sons were beheaded before him. Maurice was next. Maurice’s wife and daughters were sent, safe to a convent for a little while, but then Phocas suspected the nuns of plotting behind his back. They were tortured and killed. Next: everyone was tortured and killed. The Emperor killed his most competent general, Narses (not the same as the more famous General Narses from the sixth century, who was even more competent; but still a competent general from the standpoint of A.D. 602) after promising him safe conduct. Etc. Gibbon calls Phocas a “worthy rival of the Caligulas and Domitians of the first age of the empire.” Crazy, capricious imperial murder was back, as though it had never left.

The reign of Phocas was not very popular, needless to say. If Phocas had been popular, then his murders would have been downplayed; the fact that the first thing anyone (including me) says about him is that he murdered lots of people lets you know he was unpopular. The second thing everyone says about Phocas is that he was ugly—a hideous unibrowed scarfaced monstrosity of a man. “He was not,” John Julian Norwich notes laconically, “as pleasant as he looked.”

[“a man of the lowest birth:” Christian Huelsen, The Roman Forum: Its History and Its Monuments (Loescher, 1909) p. 96; Gibbon op. cit. vol. II p. 904; Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries (Knopf, 1988) p. 279.]

Should I mention again abt. buying I.H.?

•he invaded to avenge his father-in-law’s death: Maurice had been avenged already, and there was no reason for Khosrow to keep marching against his avenger; but there were six hundred years’ worth of reasons to march against the Roman Empire. Khosrow would not be denied vengeance for something.

He took the relic of the True Cross from Jerusalem; he also took the Patriarch, in chains. His general Sain brought him suggestion for a peace treaty, and Khosrow had Sain flayed alive.

•Heraclius, slipped out of his besieged city: It happened like this. Things were looking grim for Byzantium. Nomadic Avars, encouraged by the Persians, ran rampant through the European provinces of the Empire. On the far western fringes of the Empire, in Spain, Visigoths eyed the little land on the coast that the Romans still possessed. Khosrow besieged and took Chalcedon, directly across the Bosporus from Constantinople—an area so close to the city that it is now a district of Istanbul, kind of like a Turkish Staten Island. The Emperor Heraclius was preparing to flee back to Carthage where he came from—so beset on all sides was the Empire that Carthage must have seemed the safest place to hide—when the Patriarch of Constantinople guilted him into swearing an oath that he would stay in his capital city, live or die. Probably he thought he was going to die.

The Emperor Heraclius did leave his capital, it turns out, but he did so to conquer. While keeping the victorious Persians temporarily at bay with tribute payments, he secretly gathered his forces. The Byzantines had retained mastery of the sea, so Heraclius was able to sail his army to attack the Persians where he liked: first near the border of modern Syria and Turkey; next he headed across the Black Sea to Armenia, gathering a larger force there to press south into the heart of Persia.

•Soon the Persians were losing: Khosrow saw that his one hope was to conquer Constantinople, decapitating, as it were, his enemy before his own kingdom fell. With his allies, the Avars, Khosrow laid siege to a city that had never fallen to force of arms.

But Constantinople had a secret defense. That secret defense was simply how much worse at stuff people had become since the height of Roman power. These were the Dark Ages so-called, when Anglo-Saxons looked in wonder upon he ruined buildings Romans had left in Britain and called them enta geweorc—the work of giants. The great land walls of Constantinople were also the work of giants, or at least a work that still seemed marvelous a century and a half after they were built in 448. Over the span of a thousand years the land walls would only be breached once, by the innovation gunpowder and cannons; that once would spell the end of the Byzantine Empire.

But that once would not be in 626. In 626 the land walls held, and the besiegers eventually gave up—the nomadic Avars to go plunder elsewhere, presumably, and the Persians to see if they could keep Heraclius’ army from sacking their own capital. Ctesiphon was indeed spared Heraclius predations, but he had plundered so much of the rest of Persia that Khosrow’s credibility was shot. His renewed empire was crumbling around him. One of his sons had Emperor Khosrow killed, along with most of his other children, and assumed the imperial mantle. Peace followed, on the principle of status quo ante: All conquered Roman provinces returned to Byzantine hands; all combatants got safe passage home; the True Cross returned to Jerusalem.

[enta geweorc: Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English (Blackwell, 1997) p. 254.]

•utter disarray: The Byzantine Empire was also in shambles, of course. The imperial treasury was deeply in debt after Heraclius had borrowed so much to raise and maintain the victorious army. So much land had been razed and plundered. Heraclius had in turn plundered the proverbial wealth of Persia, but unfortunately his treasure barges sank in the Black Sea en route to Constantinople, enriching only Neptune.

But Persia was much worse off. Khosrow had exhausted and bankrupted his country in turn, and as the losing side Persia could expect to be the more exhausted and the more bankrupted. Even worse, plague swept war-torn Persia, killing as much as half the population in some places. Among the dead was the new emperor, who had reigned only six months; he left the Empire in the hands of his seven-year-old son, who was the grandson and only surviving descendent of the Emperor Maurice; he had been raised Christian. Heraclius was named regent.

Zoroastrianism had been the official religion of the Persian Empire for over a millennium. If ever the Persian people were going to accept a Christian ruler, it was not going to be the prepubescent son of a patricide; it was not going to be now, with the humiliation of defeat still stinging. Soon the young Christian Emperor Ardashir had been slain, and Persia was in the grips of Civil War yet again.

(Obvs. I just wanted to write about the war in more detail, and took advantage of alleged footnotes to do so. My apologies for the transparent deception.)

p. 337
•In 637, the Arabs took Jerusalem: There goes the one true cross again!

p. 306
•epigraph: The epigraph for this chapter would have been:

…through Behring Straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world.
§Melville, Moby Dick (1851).

•No one knows that Arkansas is “The Natural State”: I’d originally joked that Arkansas is the natural state because it is poor, nasty, and brutish, which, ha ha!, is a solid jape. But someone pointed out that such a jape could reasonably be construed as an insane prejudice against Arkansas, which is not one of my insane prejudices. Not wanting to alienate my readership, I cut it. (The hack on New Jersey is milder, and I can get away with it because I lived there for a decade.)

p. 307
•died (as was the custom) of scurvy: I’ve mentioned before how I initially wanted this book to be more “intratextual,” and you can see how I might include a reference here to all that scurvy talk on p. 281.

Consider preordering Sorcerers

p. 310
•the reason the Republic of Ireland claims Ulster or Argentina claims the Falkland Islands: Talk about alienating my readership! Hey, for that matter, why does Spain claim Gibraltar?

•Lincoln was shot by the handsomest man in America: And here’s where I’d put a “hyperlink” to p. 108. And a couple of pages after this, when Karl Marx, appears, I could have “linked” to p. 94, on which Marx’s nascent Lutheranism gets discussed. It would have been off-topic, but still boss! Maybe I should have talked them into setting the ebook version this way…

p. 311
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be

Let’s kiss.
§Nikita Krushchev to Richard Nixon, 1959.

(Context/my source (beware! pdf!).)

Just because things remind me of things, let me quote adventurer/diplomat Francis Younghusband, from a 1891 letter to his wife:

I was utterly flabbergasted at seeing the [Russian] Secretary go up and kiss the Consul three times on both cheeks and then see the Consul go up to Macartney and kiss him likewise! He then advanced on me but as much as I like him I draw the line at kissing him, so I extended my hand well in front of me to keep him at a respectable distance while I wished him Happy Easter.

[Patrick French, op. cit., p. 89.]

Libraries have my books!

p. 313
•An international incident ensued: Kyle Ward’s History in the Making points out how the Carolina incident was once a major talking point in US history textbooks and is now all but forgotten. [Ward, History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years (The New Press, 2007) pp. 132ff.]

p. 317
•When Richard Nixon took Nikita Khrushchev: Khrushchev tends to come across as a toddler in these so-called “kitchen debates,” which is weird, because he’s talking with the often-petulant Nixon.

Nixon: Neither one [viz. US or USSR] should put the other in a position where he in effect faces an ultimatum.
Khrushchev: Who is giving an ultimatum?
Nixon: We will discuss that at another time.
Khrushchev: Since you raised the question, why not now when people are listening. We know something about politics too. Let your correspondents compare watches and see who is filibustering. What do you mean?
Nixon: I’ll be very direct. I’m talking about it on the international scene—
Khrushchev (breaking in): That sounds like a threat to us. We too are giant. You want to threaten us. We will answer threat with threat.

[Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon vol. 1: The Education of a Politician 1913–1962 (Simon & Schuster, 1987) pp. 524–25.]

•Cuba, some one hundred miles from US territory: The buoy at Key West reads “ninety miles to Cuba” but is actually located 110 miles away. The closest distance between Cuba and Florida, according to wikipedia, is 94 miles. JFK, when complaining and campaigning against Eisenhower’s failure to reconquer Cuba, used the Key West 90-mile estimate. [Ambrose, op. cit. p. 590.]

p. 318:
•no rallying point for the loyalists: Except, of course, for this plucky kid!

Consider preordering my next book?

p. 289
•epigraph

Except for graveyards and bathhouses, the whole earth is a mosque.
§Al-Tabirzi, A Niche for Lamps (C14).

p. 290
•the empire’s leadership does not have the best reputation: Here’s Emerson: “The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon.” [“Considerations by the Way” (1860).]

•a 1963 Superboy story:

•Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Elagabalus: Wilde presents them in the order: Tiberius, Caligula, Domitian, Nero, Elagabalus, which is achronological. But: The reference to Nero is somewhat ambiguous, and it may be that Domitian is being hailed as Nero Caesar for some reason. The punctuation in the modern edition I read—a semicolon, as is used to separate the other emperors—makes Nero look like part of the sequence, but some (not all!) older editions use a colon instead, making Nero part of the Domitian section. Cf. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (Bantam, 1983) p. 126 with The Writings of Oscar Wilde vol. IV (Gabriel Wells, 1925) p. 264.

p. 292
•so addicted to baths that it made them decadent and weak: Marcus Aurelius similarly condemned the decadence of the Syrian legions, who were “behaving with the morals of Daphne” and “bathing in hot water.” He sent a stern disciplinarian to get the bathing cut out, but like most Stoic strictures of M. Aurelius, this one didn’t stick. Now, this information comes from the Historia Augusta, a mostly spurious Roman history, so it may be false—but the point is that the author of the Historia Augusta, himself a Roman, believed it! [Anthony Birley, ed., Lives of the Later Caesars (Penguin, 1976) p. 153.]

•Hot baths have been shown to reduce sperm counts: Other theories for declining Roman population have been floated: Perhaps the Romans were becoming increasingly sterile from eating food cooked in lead pots. Perhaps Romans evolved to have few children because men competed to marry women with no siblings (ensuring they’d get the full inheritance). And then there is the claim that an increasing acceptance, or even faddishness, of homosexuality in the Empire led to a lower birthrate, especially among the upper classes.

I don’t find any of these theories as plausible as the bath theory. The claim that Rome was ever very open or tolerant of homosexuality (for example) is clearly overblown. It might be true if we compare Rome to, say, Victorian England, but it is certainly not true if we compare Rome to ancient Greece, or to a modern ideal. Strangely enough, one reason people assume homosexuality was so accepted and widespread in the Empire is that some ancient writers, such as Suetonius, wrote books claiming that many emperors were gay; however, Suetonius meant this claim primarily as an insult, and Suetonius’ insults need to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s unlikely that empresses became prostitutes as often as Suetonius claims they did; it’s also unlikely that emperors were gay as often as Suetonius claims they were. The whole reason Suetonius brought the emperors’ sexualities up in the first place is that he knew his readers would be scandalized (Suetonius was always looking to scandalize). Assuming that everyone Suetonius called gay was really gay is like assuming everyone a junior high school bully calls gay is really gay. In a society where homosexuality is really accepted, the term stops being an insult.

That being said, Hadrian was pretty gay; and Hadrian had no children. Ditto for Elagabolus (he may never have consummated his shocking marriage to the Vestal Virgin, referenced below). But this was unlikely to have been the norm among emperors.

•laws of this nature: Conversely, peoples on small islands, such as the Polynesians, tend to work it the other way, developing cultural institutions that encourage people not to breed, lest they overpopulate their home territory.

p. 294
How could that have happened?: There are, of course, a million other theories. I quote Gibbon’s “immoderate greatness” on IH p. 332. Here’s one I got from F.W. Walbank (author of The Awful Revolution: The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West):

So: Rome had an economy built on slaves, and eventually there weren’t enough slaves to go around. In the ancient world, slaves ended up on the slave market from two main sources: either they were kidnapped by pirates or they were taken captive in war. Well, Rome spent a lot of effort getting rid of pirates (remember, the entire Mediterranean was “a Roman lake” because they owned all of its shores) and the empire was so big that wars only took place far, far away from the city of Rome. For new slaves to get to Rome was quite a march! Add to this the growing humanitarian trend—spurred first by followers of the philosophy of Stoicism and later by Christians—of freeing one’s slaves, especially on their master’s death. The result was that Rome was short on slaves, and there was no one to throw pots or cut stones. There was no one to do work!

Meanwhile, the outer provinces—less civilized, less humane, and more often at war—still had access to slave labor. They also had access to semi-civilized serfs who were not too proud to do a slave’s labor for a pittance. So manufacture gradually moved further and further from Italy and the heart of the Empire. Eventually, Romans in Gaul and Britain, in North Africa and the Near East, realized they were generating most of the industry, and were in some sense more important to the Empire than the seat of government. This was a sure-fire way to destabilize the Empire.

I think Walbank has a clever idea, here; I’m sure it didn’t help things. You can find a dozen competing theories of decline, and they’re all probably true as far as they go, and none of them are enough to topple Rome on their own, or perhaps even in aggregate (except my theory, of course!).

p. 297
•Marcus Aurelius only made two big mistakes in his life: Robin Campbell once called Stoic philosopher Seneca “history’s most notable example of a man who failed to live up to his principles”; but surely the enormity of M. Aurelius’s mistakes get him an honorable mention?

I don’t mean to be too hard on these guys. Maybe it’s really hard being a Stoic! Maybe we should prefer people who reach for something impossible and fail than low-hanging-fruit pickers who succeed at their hedonistic nihilism (or whatever).

Saki wrote: “It is the golden rule of all religions that no one should really live up to their precepts; when a man observes the principles of his religion too exactly he is in immediate danger of founding a new sect.”

[Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Penguin, 1985) p. 14; The Novels and Plays of Saki (Viking, 1944) p. 249.]

•He also tried to rename…the months of the year: August was to be Commodus, while other months were renamed after Commodus’s nicknames, attributes, and obsessions: September → Hercules [C’s patron and ideal]; October → Invictus [i.e. undefeated]; November →Exsuperatorius [i.e. conquering]; December → Amazonius [“his own surname” because of his obsession with Amazons. [Birley p. 171 (c.g.s.!).]

p. 302
•for its wonderful location: The nearby city of Chalcedon was called the “city of the blind” because its founders would have had to have been blind to build a city somewhere other than this perfect peninsula.

Get my books from a library!

p. 303
•end of the humanity: Well, sure, that’s a typo for “end of humanity,” but more importantly: I’d remembered reading somewhere that Augustine had called the fall of Rome the end of the world; I went looking through the source of the quote in a Penguin edition of The City of God, and found this St. Jerome reference right in the introduction, so I decided to use it rather than flip through the following thousand pages looking for a needle in a haystack.

If anyone has the Augustine quote, though, please let me know!

p. 304

•epigraph:

There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire,
Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday—
All this rush’d with blood.—Shall he expire
And unavenged?—Arise, ye Goths and glut your ire!
§Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

•Augustus never figured out a way to make Roman reproduce: Other peoples have had quite the opposite inheritance problem: Often there are too many heirs, and each one wants to control the kingdom. The Ottomans, the empire that conquered the Byzantines, ending the millennium-and-a-half history of the Roman Empire, developed a technique for dealing with the problem of multiple potential heirs: When a new sultan took the throne, he immediately executed all his brothers, leaving no rival claimants to power. Shakespeare refers to this practice in Henry IV Part II (V.ii), when Prince Hal, about to become King Henry V, says:

Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear.
This is the English, not the Turkish court;
Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,
But Harry Harry.

Prince Hal means: “Don’t worry, my brothers. I’m not going to kill you.”

The Ottoman fratricide plan worked great—once or twice. Murad I (also known as Amurath, above) had his half-brother Ibrahim done in, and his son Bayezid I strangled his brother with a bowstring—to avoid spilling his royal blood—but by the third generation, Bayezid's sons knew the trick and refused to trust each other long enough to be murdered. Instead they fought each other in eleven years’ worth of war to decide the next sultan. Although from time to time a new sultan would get away with murdering his brothers—Mehmed II, who passed a law requiring political fratricide, drowned his half-brother, who was an infant and couldn't do anything about it—most Ottoman sultans saw their brothers flee immediately upon accession, heading for the hinterlands to try to drum up enough support for a revolt. After all, if Shakespeare knew about the custom, Ottoman princes would certainly have caught wind of it. They had to wonder where their uncles were.

(Later on, by the seventeenth century, the more modern and humane Ottoman sultan was sequestering all potential heirs, forbidding them any education or exposure to the outside world, so they could never build a power base for revolt. This had the unfortunate consequence of ensuring that the eventual legitimate heir to the empire was completely ignorant of the outside world when he assumed power. Cue the Ottoman decline.)

•The Romans could have adjusted their culture: Another possible adjustment: polygamy (like the Ottomans!). Roman custom forbade it, and although Roman Emperors frequently divorced, and broke other Roman marriage taboos—Elagabalus married a Vestal Virgin, one of the priestesses who tended the sacred fire of Rome, a serious breach of religious protocol that helped lead to his assassination a year later—none of them went so far as to be married to more than one wife at once.

p. 268
•epigraph: I’d wanted the epigraph here to be:

In Baffin’s Bay, where the whale-fish blows,
Is the fate of Franklin—no one knows.
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To learn that my husband still did live.
§“The Sailor’s Dream”; quoted in Joseph P. Faulkner, Eighteen Months on a Greenland Whaler (1878).

p. 269
•Hilariously, though: Is this (as some readers have thought) too heartless? Isn’t the entire story of Franklin’s expedition, as presented here as a thrilling adventure tale, heartless? Every time we present human suffering as art or narrative, aren’t we being cruel? All the men who died (and got eaten) didn’t think it was so thrilling.

Borges once complained about the desire to present suffering in a story to evoke pity; it is, after all, not society that is making fictional characters suffer, but the artist himself. He compares such sentimental fare to “a certain Russian film [that] illustrates the iniquity of war by showing the wretched death agony of an old nag cut down by bullets—fired, of course, by those who made the film.”

Art, though, is heartless, and we are all just grist for its mill. Sorry, Franklin!

[Borges, Evaristo Carriego (Dutton, 1984) p. 93.]

p. 271
•HMS Erebus: The second-tallest volcano in Antarctica, Mount Erebus, is named for this ship; it stands next to Mount Terror.

p. 272
•the first ship to sail south of the Antarctic Circle: I got into quite a fight (in the relative sense; it was all amicable) with sensitivity readers about this one. No one actually knows that Cook’s ship was the first to sail this far south (the argument goes) so giving priority to Cook as opposed to a Pacific Islander evinces a Western bias. This is fair enough, but it’s a standard that beggars all historical generalizations! Anything could have been done before the alleged “first time” it was done!

I mean: If I say that gunpowder was invented in China, should I add a footnote: “Unless it was invented somewhere else earlier by people who left no record”? How many weaselly modifiers and footnotes should we include?

I could find no evidence (human artifacts on some Antarctic island, e.g.) that anyone pre-Cook had traveled that far south. I could also find no evidence that anyone pre-Cook had no traveled that far south.

There are legends of Polynesians traveling south and finding remarkable things, but there are also legends of Irish saints traveling west and finding remarkable things, and St. Brendan landing in America is about as likely as Hui Te Rangiora landing in Antarctica.

But anything can happen, and if someone digs up some early artifacts (on the Balleny Islands, perhaps?), I’m happy to change my statement. I have no allegiance to Cook or particular interest in preserving a legacy for him. I just don’t want to make my prose uglier and wordier with just-in-case caveats.

Even if we learn that Cook was scooped on the Antarctic Circle, he almost certainly set a record for sailing south, and maybe I should have phrased it that way. Although Cook never sighted Antarctica, he made it to a latitude (71°10’ S) hundreds of miles south of the Antarctic coastline. A 1972 biography of Cook mentions adds: “It is worth noting in passing that, from that day to the present time two hundred years later, no ship ever again has penetrated as far south in that region.” This is no longer true (thank you again, global warming!) and the latest record is 78°44’.

[Alistair MacLean, Captain Cook (Doubleday, 1972) p. 131; “Italian Icebreaker Sets Record Reaching Furthest Point South,” The Maritime Executive 2/1/2023.]

•south of the Antarctic Circle there were no natives to kill him: For non-polar explorers, death by native marked one of the primary dangers they would face—Ferdinand Magellan: killed in the Philippines while circumnavigating the globe, 1521; Juan Ponce de Leon: killed fleeing Florida, 1521; Mungo Park, killed in what is now Nigeria plotting the course of the Niger river, 1806; Percy Fawcett, killed in Brazil seeking the Lost City of “Z,” 1925. We’ve already covered disease, and the other big killer of explorers—Robert Clive, 1774; Meriwether Lewis, 1809; John Speke, 1864; Kermit Roosevelt, 1943—is suicide.

Please buy this book!

p. 273
•Everyone already knew where the South Pole was: Umberto Eco points out the complicating factor that the Pole that can be seen is not the real Pole; but perhaps this only applies to mystics. [Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (Ballantine, 1989) p. 327.]

•Arctic explorer George Melville: Melville suffered his own Arctic disaster in 1879 while seeking to sail to the North Pole. Unlike most of the rest of his crew, he survived.

p. 275
•twenty-six men and one hapless stowaway: You’ll notice that this is basically the plot of Edgar Allen Poe’s only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).

p. 277
•pygmies live here, at most four feet tall: Presumably, these are Santa’s elves. Just spitballing here.

•maelstroms do exist: An authoritative first-person account can be found here.

p. 279
•the word didn’t even exist until 1912: How marvelous the discovery of vitamins must have seemed in the early days in hinted at by A.P. Herbert in the pages of Punch:

     Vitamin “A”
     Keeps the rickets away
And succours the meagre and nervy;
     “B”’s what you lack
     If the stomach is slack,
And “C” is the foe of the scurvy;
     So when a man dines
     Let him murmur these lines,
Or sure he will live to deplore it—
     Just ask yourself “What
     Disease have I got,
And which is the vitamin for it?”

“D” had been discovered by by the time this was printed, and it had been determined that it (not A) prevented rickets—but presumably the details had not filtered down to the poets. [Herbert, Ballads for Broadbrows (Doubleday, Doran, 1931) p. 22.]

p. 281
•how little people understood the disease: As late as 1916, Danish sailors—not explorers, just normal sailors who happened to be wintering in Greenland—suffered from scurvy as they wintered. [Peter Freuchen, Arctic Adventures op.cit. p. 317.]

p. 282
•epigraph: The epigraph for part two should have been:

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.
§Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1823).

p. 285
•The Gorilla Hunters: I thought I remembered reading in this book the (inaccurate) claim that the comparative lack of what Victorians would call “civilization” in West Africa was due to the predations of gorillas, constantly destroying all human advancements, tearing down megaliths, etc. as they do—but when I went back to the book to find this passage, I could not. If anyone who’s read Ballantyne could tell me if I imagined it, or if the claim is really in there, I’d be very grateful.

p. 286
•All of your favorite superheroes: This claim was more true when I first outlined the chapter than it is now, as in the intervening years the Marvel cinematic universe has riveted more recent heroes such as Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight to the public consciousness.

•Dean Sage: Imagine how many times Sage dined out on this story, the story of his desperate encounter face to face with a man-eating panda. Sage died in 1963. Considering that there were pandas in the London zoo starting in 1938, even this 1946 comic seems implausibly late to pull off the ruse.

Anyway, there’s no chance you’re not getting cherce panels from the comic (below).

p. 287
•no one was certain it was an amphibian at first: I guess they suspected it in 1878, and in the next four years or so they nail it down. Compare volumes 17 and 20 of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge. (Vol. 17 p. 182 & vol. 20 p. 452.)

•tyrannosaur: Everyone remembers this fight as Kong vs. a T. rex, but at least in the 1933 movie the dinosaur is clearly something else. The 1933 novelization merely calls the creature a “meat-eater” while describing it in some ways that sound tyrranosauric (“of its forelegs it had almost none; only frail clawlike members good for nothing save to lift food to its mouth”) and in some ways not (“long slender neck”). Perhaps it evolved into a different species in the millions of years its ancestors dwelt on Skull Island? [Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong (Grosset & Dunlop, 1976) p. 118.]

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p.240
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:

Lord Jesus kyng of glorye
Suche grace and vyctorye
Thou sente to Kyng Rychard,
That neuer was found coward!
§Richard Coer de Lyon (C14).

p. 243
•The death of Thomas à Becket: This is the plot of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

•Death to the Greeks: The name of the tower was Mategriffon, and I had originally included it, but then chickened out, because how could Mategriffon mean “death to the Greeks?” But it turns out that that’s mate, as in checkmate, plus griffon, a debasement of the word “Greek” perhaps influenced by the griffons in Byzantine iconography.

•between Turk and Arab: Remember that the First Crusade had started as an attempt to conquer Turkish Jerusalem. By the time the Crusaders got to the Holy City, the Turks had been driven out, and Arabs ruled the place. This was (from the Crusaders’ POV) still unacceptable, and hardly stopped the sack of the city.

p. 244
•He was so generous: This generosity became proverbial, and let me just quote Gotthold Lessing’s 1779 drama, Nathan the Wise here:

Nathan: His House is large
Dervish: And larger than thou thinkest
For every beggar is a member of it.
N: Yet Saladin so hates the beggar tribe—
D: That root and branch he means to blot them out,
Though in the attempt himself become a beggar.

[Lessing, Laocoön; Nathan the Wise; Minna von Barnhelm (Dutton, 1970) p. 124.]

p. 245
•killed everyone they saw: “God will know his own” or “let God sort it out” are the traditional explanations for the Crusaders’ killing Christian and infidel indiscriminately; probably apocryphal.

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p. 246
•He left England in the trust of his brother John: This is the traditional (I mean modern traditional, not traditional traditional; it’s from the nineteenth century) Robin Hood setup. Disney’s Robin Hood presents the situation in song:

While bonny good King Richard leads the great Crusade he’s on
We all have to slave away for this good for nothing John!

The song appears to be based on a bawdy nineteenth-century piece of filth, “The Bastard King of England,” attributed to Kipling and sometimes presented as the reason Kipling was never knighted. It’s that offensive!

•legend would maintain he was only sleeping: Fiction one-ups legend here: see Umberto Eco’s Baudolino (2000).

p. 247
•Tyre has always been notoriously hard to besiege: In the thirteenth-century German romance Ortnit, titular hero Ortnit loses 9,000 knights taking Tyre—and he had magical golden dwarf-made armor than cannot be broken, and, as an ally, the Russian bogatyr Ilya Muromets, strongest man in the world. [J.W. Thomas, trans., Ortnit and Wolfdietrich: Two Medieval Romances (Camden House, 1986) p. 24.]

•Conrad fired a crossbow at the old man: The story of Conrad’s intransigence echos a more famous anecdote about Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, who in 1296 led the defense of Tarifa; Guzmán’s son was held hostage outside the city walls, and besiegers threatened to slit his throat, so an accomodating Guzmán tossed a knife over the battlements.

Guzmán and his knife are a common subject in Spanish literature, but an Anglophone audience is perhaps most likely to encounter him as a hasty allusion in Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo. That’s where I learned about him, at least. [Rinconete and Cortadillo (Four Seas, 1917) p. 93.]

p. 250
•a cameo in Scott’s Ivanhoe: King Richard cameos is so many texts, including a large number of Robin Hood ones

and let us add only the fraudulent work of teenage genius con artist Thomas Chatterton (whom you will recall from IH p. 237), which presents Richard in battle thus:

The foemen fal arounde; the cross reles hye;         waves high
Steyned ynne goere, the harte of warre ys seen;
Kynge Rycharde, throrough everych trope dothe flie,
And beereth meynte of Turkes onto the greene;          bears many Turks
Bie hymm the floure of Asies menn ys sleene;          the flower of Asia’s men
The waylynge mone doth fade before hys sonne;          waning moon
Bie hym hys knyghtes bee formed to actions deene,          glorious actions
Doeynge syke marvels, strongers be aston.          astonished 

p. 255
•died gloriously in combat: Richard was the next to last English king to die in battle—Richard “my kingdom for a horse” III was, of course, the last.

p. 256
•epigraph:

We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it to the grave.
§Baburnama (1530).

p. 260
•Turks avoided shedding noble blood: When the Mongols executed the Caliph al-Muta’sim in Baghdad, for example, they rolled him up in a carpet and rode horses over it; it would have been a sign of great disrespect to stab him

p. 263
•France to join with the Turkish infidels: I can’t find the reference here, surrounded as I am by my back issues, but Dave Sim once wrote that the goal of every French-speaking people is to hurt their allies.

p. 264
•by most metrics the Balkans do not do well: Our idea of the Balkans as a backwards, savage part of Europe, marked out by cruelty and lawlessness, may be partially a question of perception and not reality. The most influential book, at least for English speakers, in shaping our ideas of the Balkans is Dracula, and needless to say most of Dracula is not true.

On the other hand, the character of Dracula is loosely based on a real Romanian ruler, Vlad the Impaler. Many countries have had cruel rulers who inflicted cruel punishments, but Vlad must have gone above and beyond to have been so thoroughly associated with one form of execution. James VI of Scotland ordered a lot of witches burned, but he's not known to history as James the Witch Burner (instead, oddly enough, he's known to history as James I of England). Impaling was a signature Ottoman punishment that never really caught on in Western Europe, and it seemed particularly brutal to the West—although it may not be objectively worse than the rack or other punishments. Whether Vlad the Impaler was objectively worse than other, non-Balkan bad rulers is perhaps subject to debate.

p. 265
•Until very recently: This book was in preproduction long enough that I had to add this qualifying phrase.

•a non-Greek philosopher, and most likely you’ll be naming a German or an Austrian: When Monty Python set up a soccer game between philosophers, it was, of course, the Germans against the Greeks.

On the other hand, their philosophy song, “The Bruces’ Song,” does include, Hume, Mill, Hobbes, and Descartes.

•few or none of them has garnered any international attention: This is a ridiculously unfair statement I probably put in just to give editors something to flag, and then forgot about. IH in fact cites two Rumanian writers (Eliade and Cioran) who are internationally famous as well as excellent.

p. 227
•epigraph: The epigraph was to be:

I think ill of the world, (continued Byron,) but I do not, as some cynics assert, believe it to be composed of knaves and fools. No, I consider that it is, for the most part, peopled by those who have not talents sufficient to be the first, and yet have one degree too much to be the second.
§Marguerite Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron (1834).

•You can probably look at the moon: From The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (ca. 1000):

‘Why so silent?’ said Her Majesty. ‘Say something. It is sad when you do not speak.’
‘I am gazing into the autumn moon,’ I replied.
‘Ah, yes,’ she remarked. ‘That is just what you should have said.’

[The Pillow Book (Columbia UP, 1991) p125]

•Nothing is valued unless it is rare: A counterpoint, from Sei Shonagon again: “Do people tire of the cherry trees because they blossom every spring?” [Ib. p. 64.]

p. 228
•technical mastery: I apologize for all the quotes but who can resist?

Parrhasius…entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his work by the birds, haughtily demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen. Upon finding his mistake, with a great degree of ingenuous candour he admitted that he had been surpassed, for that whereas he himself had only deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.

[Pliny, Natural History XXV.36.]

Three other good stories of artistic skill can be found here.

•the proof was in the pudding: A friend of mine always corrects this proverb to be: The proof of the pudding is in the eating; but I am unconvinced.

p. 229
•Audacity was the calling card of Modernism: Reducing Modernism to audacity is probably thoroughly irresponsible, but perhaps an example will make me look like less of a jerk.

Take, as our example, Max Ernst’s 1934 surreal novel Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness). This book is (in case you didn’t know) a proto-graphic novel composed of wordless collages cobbled together from nineteenth-century engravings. Any given page (each page is one full page illustration) is fine but conventional. I mean it is conventional for a surreal picture. It is (to invert Dr. Frank N. Furter’s phrase) conventionally unconventional. A man with a lion head tickling the feet of a woman bound to a bed; a woman in Victorian garb and a dragon giving a back rub to a somersaulting gentleman; 1934 was brimming with this stuff.

But this is not an art book! It is a novel! It says so right on the title page there that this is a roman. And as a novel, the work is groundbreaking! Suddenly the small similarities from picture to picture of the kind you might find in any artist’s work are not merely small similarities—they are a plot! These are characters doing things. As the book becomes more and more abstract towards the end, this is merely the story, the same way that Dante’s experiences become more abstract as he moves further through the Divine Comedy.

All it took to transform a conventional humdrum collection of collages into a major work of art was the audacity to assert its novelhood.

•Moderninsm: Modernism is of course much bigger than art; Modernism was at heart a totalizing system that sought to control all aspects of our lives; it has died out almost everywhere except in our educational system.

I’ll only be gesturing towards one of the manifold aspects of Modernism if I point out that when Orwell claims that socialists, to make the world less “untidy,” seek “to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard,” he is picking on not socialism (which of course he favors) but on Modernism (which he certainly doesn’t). The clearest example of this Modernist will-to-tidiness can be found, I think, in H.G. Wells’s utopian novel The World Set Free, in which humanity at long last has the wherewithal to “nail down Easter.” The idea that four or five clerics are inconvenienced every twenty years or so in calculating Easter is too much for Wells’s brave new world! “In these matters, as in so many matters [Wells is explicitly referring to Easter as well as other calendar ‘improvements’] , the new civilisation came as a simplification of ancient complications.”

If you’ve ever passed a housing complex where every building and every entrance looks identical, and have assumed that it was built this way to save money, remind yourself that the initial impetus was to make H.G. Wells (or people with similar brain problems) happy.

[Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (HB, n.d.) p. 179; Wells, The World Set Free (Dutton, 1914) p. 238; cf., o.c., James C. Scott, Seeing like a State (Yale UP, 1998).]

•the lambasting Modernists received was unprecedented: Before they hated Modernists, they hated proto-Modernists (so I guess all my claim of “unprecedented” was just me talking out of my hat). Édouard Manet’s 1963 Olympia, for example, had people in a tizzy. Georges Bataille, in his monograph Manet, collected some of the responses of the time, and they’re worth reading because they don’t even resemble art criticism so much as an attempt to be mean.

Such a picture might “stir up a revolt,” protested one Jean Ravenel in L'Epoque. And Jules Claretie in L'Artiste: “What on earth is this yellow-bellied odalisque, this wretched model picked up God knows where and pawned off as representing Olympia?” Ernest Chesneau, a critic who later stood up for Manet, wrote in Le Constitutionnel: “He manages to provoke a good deal of shameless snickering, which causes crowds to gather in front of this ludicrous creature he calls Olympia.” The daughter of Théophile Gautier wrote in L'Entr’acte: “The exhibition has its clown. Among all the artists is one who turns somersaults and sticks out his tongue.” “Never has there been a spectacle to equal it or anything quite so cynical as this Olympia, a kind of female gorilla,” exclaimed Amédée Cantaloube in Le Grand Journal. In Le Petit Journal Edmond About tried to sum things up: “Peace to Monsieur Manet! Public ridicule has done justice to his pictures.” The deepest shudder of all ran through Paul de Saint-Victor, a senior critic whose opinions carried weight: “The crowd gathers round Monsieur Manet’s highly spiced Olympia as it would round a body at the morgue. Art that has sunk so low is not worthy of our censure. ‘Speak not of them, only gaze and pass on,’ says Virgil to Dante as they make their way across one of the circles of hell.”

[Bataille, Manet (Skira, 1955) p. 61.]

•See any issue of the New Yorker: The cartoons referenced (one of which, I guess, certainly did not appear in the New Yorker) appear below. I apologize for the bad scans; these books have tight bindings!

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•etc.: Okay, just one more!

p. 231
•Lyrical Ballads: Despite being one of the seminal poetry volumes in the English canon, is Lyrical Ballads actually any good? If you’re interested in my review, the answer is sort of.

It does have “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” one of the all-time best poems; but it also has a lot of other poems as well. Certainly Wordsworth would become a great poet eventually, but was he a great poet in 1798? I mean, think of your favorite Wordsworth piece—the Lucy poems, the sonnets, The Prelude—well, you’re probably not going to find it in here. Instead, you’ll find a lot of broad melodrama, as weepy peasants whine out their sub-Les Mis sob stories. A little of this goes a long way. “Oh, look! Another poor person whose children are dying!”

“Goody Blake and Harry Gill” (while hardly not a melodrama about the sufferings of the poor lol) is fun, but still slight. “Anecdote for Fathers” is cute enough, but even slighter (and not helped by the portentous subtitle). “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned” are fine, but so on-point. In fact, “fine” is a word I would use to describe most of the poems. Even when they’re ludicrously bathotic, they’re competent. But for Wordsworth, all you’re really left with is “Tintern Abbey,” which is not a lot.

Coleridge has a handful of poems beyond “Marinere.” Two are excerpts from his play Osorio, which are at times inexplicable on their own, and must have been especially inexplicable upon publication, with no critical apparatus. On the other hand “The Nightingale,” one of the better poems in the book, also has its inexplicable (“A most gentle maid” etc.) flights and interpolations, so maybe I shouldn’t blame Osorio. Maybe Coleridge poems (and this is certainly true even of his best ones) always have a kernel of mystery in them that baffles all reason, or at least all reasonable attempts to explain why certain passages were selected for inclusion. So: “Marinere,” “Tintern Abby,” maybe “The Nightingale,” a couple of jokey fun poems, and the rest no more than “fine.” That’s the wellspring of the English Romantic movement?

What can you do? I don’t make this stuff up.

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p. 232
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:

He always accuses me of trying to look “cool”…I was like, “Everybody tries to look cool, I just happen to be successful…”
§Daniel Clowes, Eightball #17 (1996).

•one of those works that “starts something”: This chapter is really a chapter about the faddishness of literature, and so I wanted to digress here to talk about something I find interesting but which I couldn’t fit into the book, viz. the faddishness of novels’ titles.

Before the twentieth century novels used to have predictable, utilitarian titles, generally either the name of the setting (Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Washington Square) or the main character (Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Allan Quatermain), sometimes preceded by “the adventures/history of” (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; Smollett’s 1769 twofer The History and Adventures of an Atom). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is all three at once! The Scarlet Letter is indeed about a scarlet letter; The Red Badge of Courage is, with a certain degree of irony, about a red badge of courage. If you pick up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, you’re not liable to complain you didn’t know what you were getting into.

Moby Dick; or, The Whale is just the name of a character, albeit one with no speaking lines; in case that wasn’t clear enough, the subtitle spells it out.

Jane Austen, who could name books after places (Northanger Abbey) or people (Emma), hit upon one of the more fanciful naming schemes of the nineteenth century with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Although later, more lowbrow writers would copy this pattern, and Horatio Alger alone cranked out Fame and Fortune, Slow and Sure, Do and Dare, Strive and Succeed, Try and Trust, etc. (also Rough and Ready, although that is just the protagonist’s name; don’t blame me, his name is literally Rough and Ready*), Austen’s abstractions were the exception. For every Great Expectations there are a dozen like Ivanhoe, The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Typee (Typee is part of French Polynesia, where Melville had been marooned).

Earlier novels have the complicating factor of titles that are really long. The book we know and love as Robinson Crusoe was released as The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner…and then the title goes on for fifty plus more words, summarizing the plot of the book, and even spoiling the ending. This is nothing if not literal.

Then something changed after the first quarter of the twentieth century. Look at some of the key titles from America’s heavy hitters of the time, the Nobel Prize laureates Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck:

The Sound and the Fury (1929) (that’s from Macbeth), Absalom! Absalom! (1936) (from 2 Samuel 19:4), The Sun Also Rises (1926) (from Ecclesiastes 1:5), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) (from John Donne), Of Mice and Men (1937) (from Robert Burns), The Grapes of Wrath (1939) (from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe), East of Eden (1952) (from Genesis 4:16). They’re all quotes! “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” And so on.

F. Scott “no Nobel” Fitzgerald does it too: Tender Is the Night (1933) is from Keats, This Side of Paradise (1920) from the comparatively obscure Rupert Brooke. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929) is from Milton. Over in England, Waugh’s Handful of Dust (1934) is from T.S. Eliot.

None of these books predate the 1920s. Before that, it’s hard to find “quote titles.” Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) takes its name from John Bunyan, but it’s more of a reference than a quote; Vanity Fair, after all, is a place. There’s Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which comes from Gray’s “Elegy,” and then pretty much nothing until 1918, when Theodore Dreiser wrote an obscure, unproduced play titled The Hand of the Potter—a quote from FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. After which comes the deluge.

You still see quote titles on occasion (though even Infinite Jest now qualifies as an old book), but the fad has passed.

*Footnote on Rough and Ready:

“What's your name, my lad?”
“Rough and Ready, sir.”
“What name did you say?” asked the clergyman, thinking he had not heard aright.
“Rough and Ready, sir.”
“That's a singular name.”
“My right name is Rufus; but that's what the boys call me.”

And yet, by my estimation, no human in the entire book actually addresses Rufus by the name Rough and Ready. The conceit that they might, though, is sufficient to make the book unendurable.

[Alger, Rough and Ready (John Winston, 1897) p. 11.]

•you’ll find all four: I wrote this list, clearly facetiously, without actually checking if it was true, but was gratified to learn, when I double checked at the eleventh hour before publication, that Lyrical Ballads does in fact conbtain:

1. the triumph of the imagination:

Therefore am I still
A lover of … all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive…

(“Tintern Abbey”).

2. the splendors of nature: “Sweet is the lore which nature brings” (“The Tables Turned”).

3. wouldn’t it be interesting to be a shepherd?

When I was young, a single man,
And after youthful follies ran,
Though little given to care and thought,
Yet, so it was, a ewe I bought;
And other sheep from her I raised,
As healthy sheep as you might see,
And then I married, and was rich
As I could wish to be…

(“The Last of the Flock”).

4. vengeful ghosts: “Marinere,” of course!

Naturally, you’ll find other examples at your own leisure.

[Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford, 1998) pp. 115, 105, & 77.]

•“in the air,” as they say: By they I mean most particularly Vincent “the Bug” Bugliosi, the D.A. most famous for prosecuting Charles Manson, but who is relevant here for blaming (in his 1996 book on the topic) the O.J. Simpson verdict on the fact that the inevitability of O.J.’s acquittal was “in the air,” and the jury had to know about it. The Bug’s argument is more interesting than this bald summary makes it sound. [Bugliosi, Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (Norton, 2008) pp. 31ff.]

•end with the hero in peril: In fact, Ariosto’s sequel to Orlando, the unfinished, posthumously published Cinque Canti, ends with most plotlines unresolved, with, for example, the knights Ruggiero and Astolfo trapped in the belly of a whale and no escape in sight. Of course, these perpetual cliffhangers are due not to Ariosto’s innovations, but just due to the fact that he died before he could finish it; but such are the accidents that make up literature.

p. 233
•if we limit things to poetry: The mid-eighteenth century was a golden age of English prose fiction, of course, and everyone should find something to enjoy in the run between Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Stern’s Sentimental Journey (1768). What happens after that is what I would call a fallow period for the novel, as sentimental and grotesque themes take over (with exceptions, such as Austen) until the 1840s or so (a controversial statement, which I would rather defend at length at another time).

p. 236
•among those most influenced by the French tradition: A more scholarly explication of the relationship between French culture and Pol Pot’s atrocities can be found (in song form) here.

p. 237
•pseudo-medievalist literary forger Chatterton: Chatterton, like many frauds and fakes (I’m looking at you, Ern Malley) was an excellent poet, but his teenage medievalism that fooled England is at times so transparently not anachronistic that…look, he used blank verse, a sixteenth century invention, in allegedly fifteenth-century poems, which is only one hundred years off, and which might conceivably fool people if the fact that blank verse is a sixteenth century invention were not one of the most widely-known facts in the history of versification.

•(Wordsworth): Originally I had written:

…Chatterton, dead by his own hand at age seventeen, who “with the food of pride sustained his soul / In solitude” (Wordsworth) when “black despair…was thrown / Over the earth in which he moved alone” (Shelley).

I got the quotes from Charles Wilcox’s 167-page introduction to the volume of Chatterton that I read, and I only learned later that, despite what Wilcox did not state but I thought implied, these lines do not refer to Chatterton at all. They are mostly correctly quoted, and are indeed from Wordsworth and Shelley, but at best they’re “inspired by” Chatterton in the same way Jon Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory album was “inspired by” the film Young Guns II. Fortunately, a little poking found that both Wordsworth and Shelley did indeed each write other lines about Chatterton, and they’re in the final text.

[Thomas Chatterton, The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, with Notices of His Life, History of the Rowley Controversy, a Selection of His Letters, and Notes Critical and Explanatory Vol. 1 (W.P. Grant, 1842) p. cxxxviiii.]

p. 238
• “lost cause”: “I replied that only lost causes were of any interest to a gentleman.” –Borges, “The Shape of the Sword” (1944). [Borges, Collected Fictions (Viking, 1998) p. 139.]

•Norman Mailer produced “the list”: Also, Mailer said, Heidegger is hip and Sartre is square—not sure I understand that one. [Dinerstein op. cit. p. 229.]

•what is square: It’s worth noting that at one point, “square” had the specific meaning of someone who did not appreciate jazz. In High Society (1954), the tragedy is that “now the silly chick [Grace Kelly] is going to marry a square.”

As late as 1970, The Aristocats can inform us that “a square with that horn / Makes you wish you weren’t born / Every time he plays” (hear it here)—but the movie anachronistically takes place in 1910, so good luck figuring that out.

p. 210
•epigraph: The epigraph was to be:

Q.: Describe the hardships of the Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land.
A.: Many of them died of Salvation.
§Alexander Abingdon, Bigger and Better Boners (1952).

p. 211
•Druze: My original (or not original original, but early on) plan for this book was to make it a kind of print hypertext. After the word Druze here, for example, would be “(see p. 178)” printed in orange ink. And if you turned to p. 178 of I.H., a page with much more information about the Druze, you would find the first appearance of the word Druze printed in the same orange ink.

Similarly, the preceding paragraph—I mean the first full paragraph on p. 211—would have had the phrase “he ordered every dog in Egypt killed” printed in green, and way over on p. 274 there would be a passage with a “(see p. 211)” printed in the same green. The passage on p. 274 in the published book reads: “You can’t exactly let them go; dogs can’t live in Antarctica. Basically, you have to kill the dogs.” But in the hypertext version of the Ms. the passage read: “You can’t exactly let them go; dogs can’t live in Antarctica. Basically, you have to make like Hakim and kill the dogs (see p. 211). I cut the “make like Hakim” because I figured few readers would remember 86 pages later who Hakim was or what he killed—but I could put the reference in if the page “link” sent the curious reader to the explanation.

I think this is a good idea—I mean, putting “see p. so and so” is nothing new, but with the color-coding, you can flip to a page and your eye catches immediately the relevant passage. It also makes for a fun, colorful book—there would actually be several other colored passages in that paragraph mentioned above, and every page would have one or two. But editorial nixed the idea on the grounds that it was 1. too expensive to print and 2. crazy.

Maybe someday.

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•idol of stone: This seems to be a common medieval European belief about (or calumny against) Islam (perhaps due to confusion with the Black Stone of the Kaaba (see p. 326 of IH)). One of the chansons de geste about Guillaume d’Orange—I think it was Prise d’Orange—also features a Muslim idol, and in the thirteenth-century German romance Ortnit, Muslims worship two idols, one of Mohammed and one of Apollo. The irony of course is that this kind of idolatry is precisely what Islam has traditionally charged Christianity with (see p. 262 of IH). [J.W. Thomas, trans., Ortnit and Wolfdietrich: Two Medieval Romances (Camden House, 1986) p. 27.]

p. 216
•Marra: Harold Lamb spells it Maara or Ma’ara, but the fact-checker disagreed.

•ate human flesh: According to Amin Maalouf, older sources acknowledge the cannibalism here, but “in the twentieth century, however, these accounts have generally been concealed—perhaps in the interests of the West’s ‘civilizing mission’?” Maalouf’s book is designed to refute a version of the Crusades I found unrecognizable, which is hardly surprising, as it a French version. For example, I learned about the cannibalism from Harold Lamb’s bestselling and quite matter-of-fact 1930 history of the Crusades (“They stifled their hunger with some bodies of Moslems they found in a near-by swamp etc.”), and I’d imagine most Americans interested in the Crusades would have used the same source. I can’t fully blame the French, though, as Maalouf specifically cites Steven Runciman’s three-volume history as containing only “a single allusion” to the cannibalism. I’m not sure how many allusions a history should have, and I’ve hardly double checked an edition of Runciman, but I’d be surprised if Runciman was trying to spare the reputation of the Crusaders, a group he famously despised and held in contempt; Runciman’s sympathies were with the Byzantines and the Muslims. [Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (Schocken, 1984) p. 270; Lamb, Iron Men and Saints (Doubleday, Doran, 1930) p. 199.]

•Antioch: The city of Antioch was founded by Alexander the Great’s general Seleucus (see IH p. 50), Antiochus being the name of both Seleucus’s father and his son; a good reminder of what a long legacy Alexander’s conquests had.

p. 218
•epigraph:

Forget me, Lord, if I forget 
    Jerusalem for Babylon, 
If I forget the vision set 
    High as the head of Lebanon 
Is lifted over Syria yet, 
    If I forget and bow me down 
    To Brutish gods of Babylon. 
§Arthur Colton, Harps Hung Up in Babylon (1907).

p. 220
•encouraged European unity: Karen Armstrong, in her book Holy Wars, makes this the primary motive for the Crusades; but I found her book to be almost dishonest in its attempt to press this issue. I am (let me stress) not a supporter of the Crusades, which were a pretty stupid idea, but I was thinking of Armstrong’s weird views of medieval Europe when I wrote about the crusades being a response to current events.

To get an idea of what I mean by Armstrong’s weird views in Holy Wars, take this post-Crusade passage:

“A cool political look at the Ottoman regime would have shown Christians that it had grave internal flaws: for all its imposing military strength, there was no way it could have conquered the whole of Europe. But faced with the Islamic peril, Europeans were incapable of this kind of detachment. Their vision of Muslims as the absolute enemies of Christendom had had too long to sink in; it had become an essential part of the way they saw the world.”

I think this is weird. To assume that it is detachment that Europeans were missing, as opposed to data about the Ottoman Empire is weird. But especially weird is the idea that Europe should only be concerned about a threat that could conquer it in its entirety, as opposed to a threat that, I don’t know, successfully conquered its southeastern portions and held them for centuries.

What do you call a European opposed to being conquered? A hater, apparently.

[Armstrong, Holy Wars (Knopf Doubleday, 2001) p. 462.]

•Timothy Dwight: The book this quote comes from is an absolute hoot, a collection of off the cuff remarks and impromptu “decisions” concluding informal debates among the Yale seniors of the time, all made by President Dwight and recorded and later published by his son. Among Dwight’s other recorded opinions: Ethiopians only have dark skin because of sunburn; the prevalence of base ten number systems among various people is due not to their number of fingers but to the decimal teachings of Adam and Eve; and the easiest way “to estimate the happiness of societies” is to count their populations—the more people, the more happiness! [Dwight, op. cit. pp. 117–18, 126, & 146.]

p. 221
•obsessed with reconquering (or rereconquering) Jerusalem: This is the last passage of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (excluding only paratext):

Sir Bors, Sir Ector, Sir Blamor, and Sir Bleoberis, went into the Holy Land thereas Jesu Christ was quick and dead, and anon as they had stablished their lands. For the book saith, so Sir Launcelot commanded them for to do, or ever he passed out of this world. And these four knights did many battles upon the miscreants or Turks. And there they died upon a Good Friday for God’s sake.

On the other hand Robin Hood, so often linked to the Crusades in popular media, was never a Crusader in the old ballads, and first became on in 1849 in Joachim Stocqueler’s Maid Marian: The Forest Queen.

[Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur vol. II (Penguin, 1969) p. 531; Stephen Knight, “Robin Hood and the Crusades,” Florilegium vol. 23.1 (2006) p. 213.]

•sail across the Atlantic to reach Asia:

•there’s a lot we don’t know about this guy: Oliver Herford once wrote that, as far as caricatures go,

Columbus is an easy one
To draw, for when the picture’s done,
Where is the captious critic who
Can say the likeness is not true?

[Herford, Confessions of a Caricaturist (Scribner’s, 1917) p. 60.]

•definitely not trying to prove the earth was round: The myth that Columbus wanted to prove a round earth was probably started by Washington Irving, the first American to make his living as a writer.

Irving is more famous nowadays for his stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but when he lived in Madrid (where he later served as U.S. ambassador to Spain), he became interested in Spanish and Islamic history. The year 1492 marks not just the year of Columbus' voyage but also the year that Christian Spaniards conquered the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, the emirate of Granada; Spanish libraries in the early nineteenth century were still the best place in the western world to learn about Islam. Irving's researches led to a biography of Mohammed—the first sympathetic book about the Prophet in English—as well as books about early Islamic expansion, about the Muslim kingdoms of Spain and the fifteenth-century “crusade” to drive them out; but Irving's first and best-selling history book was his influential, multivolume biography of Columbus, which contains the flat-earth canard. Irving’s experience as a short-story writer may have driven him to invent the myth for dramatic purposes. Without the scenes of children and naysayers jeering an a dogged Columbus, this period of his life—where the mariner vainly seeks funding for years and years—is the least easy to make exciting, even for a writer as skilled as Irving.

Irving was also more of a practical joker than it is probably good for a historian to be—in 1809 he hoaxed New York City by starting a manhunt for the “missing person” Diedrich Knickerbocker, who turned out to be just one of Irving's pseudonyms. That fudging of the truth helped advertise his Diedrich Knickerbocker book; fudging the truth about Columbus may have made for an exciting read; but the lie stuck.

p. 222
•irrelevant to the rest of his book: …which was a biography of Angus MacAskill, the world’s tallest man.

p. 224
•Without Columbus the Americas would have still been discovered eventually: One of the stupider internet rituals is the annual festival of Pretending Columbus Didn’t Discover America.

The argument that Columbus didn’t discover anything, because people already lived here, is essentially an argument about a definition, and arguments about definitions are always silly, but this argument is even sillier than most. If you tell some friends you’ve discovered a great restaurant, or a comic book series to read, you in no way imply that you are the very first person ever to eat this food or read that comic. “Guys, I discovered this restaurant” means something like “I came across it on my own.” Columbus came across the New World on his own.

Etymologies are not always useful in determining meaning, but here the connection is obvious. Discover means to dis-cover, or uncover; to make known. Like many words, discover has more than one meaning, and, for example, in the 1950s Jonas Salk both discovered the polio vaccine and then discovered this fact to the world.

Obviously, several millennia ago, some people in Siberia found a way across the Bering Strait into North America; they probably disclosed this fact to others, prompting several waves of migration to the Americas. The knowledge was eventually forgotten. Thousands of years later, there was the Leif Erikson deal; he told other Vikings, and possibly a few other medieval scholars, but the knowledge died out with the Greenland colony, moldering in old forgotten books. It’s possible in 1492 that a few Icelandic scholars suspected the existence of North America, just as it’s possible some Eskimos at the time had traveled between the Old World and the New. But they were in no position to spread the word. If someone in a basement had discovered a polio vaccine in 1949 and then died without telling anyone, the event would be of no importance; it would not have changed the world. Jonas Salk changed the world, and so did Columbus.

In other words, however many times the Americas had been discovered in the past (and some historians or conspiracy theorists will make cases for a Polynesian discovery or a Chinese discovery), the New World was always in a position to be discovered again. Columbus discovered America for the final time. This was the discovery that stuck, the seal of the prophets. No one would ever be able to discover America after Columbus, because within a few years of his discovery, every mariner in Europe knew of its existence, and the word spread from there to the rest of the Old World.

To put it another way, every human being who has ever said Columbus discovered America has acknowledged that people were already living there. Either every human being who had ever said Columbus discovered America doesn’t know what words mean, or the word they’re using means something different from what you’re pretending it does.

I’m annoyed that I’m here refuting nonsense about Columbus; I don’t even like Columbus! I’d much rather be refuting nonsense about a historical figure I admire, such as Seleucus, Genghis Khan, or Roger Bacon. But then I guess I’ve been defending the Crusades passim, and I certainly don’t support them, either!

p. 185
•What if the DNC chairman lost his gavel?: I thought I was so clever when I came up with the Wallace what-if, but it turns out that everyone else had already thought of it before me. Even in a non-counterfactual (i.e. factual) not-an-alternate-history context, Conrad Black wrote—this is in a “straight” biography of FDR—“Of all the hypotheses of American history, a Wallace presidency following the death in office of FDR is one of the more chilling ones.” [Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (Public Affairs, 2003) p. 568.]

•epigraph:

What I love him in spite of
Is, a girl wants a fellow to go straight ahead like a locomotive and he is more like a loco-might-of.
Dear Miss Dix, I surely need your advice and solace,
It’s like I was in love with Henry Wallace.
•Ogden Nash, “The Strange Case of the Lovelorn Letter Writer” (1951).

This is the best epigraph! I can’t believe they (we?) cut it!

The poem this epigraphs comes from (as is probably clear from context) takes the form of a letter from a “lovelorn” woman to a Miss-Lonelyhearts–style columnist named Miss Dix.

Anyway, a better exemplum of Wallace’s reputation, at least by 1951, will never be found!

pp. 185–86
•If anyone sought to try that now, his party would shoot it down: Yet another bold statement that will perhaps come back and bite me on the bottom soon.

pp. 186–87
•in 1956 Adlai Stevenson expressed no preference: Somewhat similarly, in 1956 Eisenhower (running for his second term) refused to name his VP, insisting the decision lay with his current VP, Richard Nixon, who could decide to by VP again or not. Nixon refused to believe that Eisenhower was giving him a choice and spent weeks in agony, trying to decode what the president must have meant, looking for the secret meaning in Ike’s laissez faire attitude. Ultimately, of course, Nixon decided he would run again, and he was, indeed, VP for all eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency.

p. 187
•best remembered to history for whining that comic books were too scary: Kefauver is also remembered for wearing a coonskin cap. It’s a weird legacy, but I didn’t make it up.

•most of the Democrats probably admired him: An editor asked me how, if the Democrats were booing him, this could possibly be true, but…don’t you boo people you admire? I sure do.

p. 190
•Wallace found himself bounced from the ticket: FDR made him secretary of commerce.

p. 191
•epigraph:

If we had been shot down at that time, we would have avoided many difficulties.
•Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, Jan. 9, 1945; quoted in Inoguchi and Nakajima, The Divine Wind (1968).

This is also a really good epigraph!

•what to do with the atomic bomb: No less a light than Tim McVeigh griped to his lawyers how unfair it was that “no one had criticized Truman when he dropped the bomb on innocent women and children,” a statement that bears the remarkable distinction of being simultaneously fallacious and false. [Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (Simon & Schuster, 2023) p. 290.]

p. 192
•the only Japanese who were taken prisoner: This is more or less the plot of Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp.

p. 193
•If that wasn’t bad enough: And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Japanese also had a nuclear weapons program!

Although…honestly, there’s probably zero chance it could have amounted to anything before the war ground to a halt, as an embargoed Japan didn’t have enough resources to devote to making a bomb, even if it had had enough time, and even if it had both time and resources it didn’t have the ability to get a bomb they made to any Allied nation except maybe the tail end of Siberia even if they did make it. So I left this pipe dream out of the calculations.

p. 194
•unconditional surrender may have entered wartime policy by accident: That’s according to Takaki. On the other hand, according to (is this a real source??) The Nazi Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch, “records of the conference show that ‘unconditional surrender’ was discussed and agreed upon” beforehand. So I may have screwed that up by listening to Takaki; perhaps I was over-credulous because I liked his book Iron Cages when I read it, decades ago now, and once I like a book by someone I’ll fall for anything he says. [Meltzer & Mensch, The Nazi Conspiracy (Flatiron, 2013) p. 58.]

p. 195
•Hirohito was constantly being linked: In general, pop culture of the war often treated Axis powers as more of a monolithic entity than the were in real life. Carson Robison’s 1942 single “Plain Talk” predicted (in song) that if the US lost the war, its citizens would be “doing the goosestep” and “living on rice.” (Hear him here.) Although Japan’s army also goosestepped, it’s unlikely that Robison knew that, and he’s clearly just thinking of Germany and then Japan.

Among Robison other releases in the war, incidentally, were these two records:

“Mussolini’s Letter to Hitler” b/w “Hitler’s Reply to Mussolini” (1942)
“Hirohito’s Letter to Hitler b/w Hitler’s Last Letter to Hirohito” (1945).

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•to other Axis leaders in popular discourse: Here’s another one:

or:

The thin mustache suggests Hirohito to my eye, but it could be Tojo.

•one 1942 comic book: I somehow bungled the text on the poster, inadvertently translating it from Wolvertonese to English, as you can see:

•Arthur Szyk’s famous cover to Collier’s:

Here’s another from the same artist, but with Tojo, and not Hirohito:

Tojo often takes the place of Hirohito is wartime imagery, and at times the caricaturists are not too interested in making a good likeness (see Wolverton above), and good luck figuring it out sometimes.

Anyway, Arthur Szyk is amazing. I’ve never been able to find a copy of Szyk’s 1941 The New Order, probably the relevant collection here, but I learned a lot about his WWII-era art from Steven Luckert, The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), much easier to get your hands on.

p. 198
•agonistic behavior: In college I read a paper that asserted this very thing, with graphs, and covering behaviors in both Betta splendens and Felis catus, but when I went to find it, I got nowhere. I even contacted my old professor, who had tragically lost her old syllabi in some computer malfunction. So if anyone can find the paper I’m looking for here, please let me know. I just left this bald assertion unattributed.

p. 206
•duped into believing a Soviet slave labor camp was a pleasant village: The truth is the Russians positively excelled at passing fake villages off on the unwitting. The term for such places—Potemkin villages—comes from the perhaps apocryphal story that Grigory Potemkin had erected town facades along the Dneiper River in 1787, to make Catherine the Great think, as she passed by, that war-torn Crimea had been rebuilt. By the Soviet era, they’d made fooling foreigner into an art. At a time when Nazi Germany and fascist Italy permitted foreigners to roam about the country unaccompanied, the Soviet Union only let visitors see carefully stage-managed tableaus. The result was similar to if Americans tried passing off Epcot Center as Orlando, Florida, to European tourists—just a typical American city, folks!

•“Globaloney,” Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce called…:

p. 153
•epigraph:

Some men have a passion for horses, others for birds, others, again, for wild beasts; but I, from childhood, have been penetrated with a passionate longing to acquire books.
§Julian, letter to Ecdicius (AD 362).

•a dream to reverse the relentless march of history: William F. Buckley once vowed to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” which is halfway to the same thing. The problem is that stopping history is very hard to do; if you consider how much history has passed since Buckley made this pronouncement in 1955, you'd have to include Buckley in the list of those who failed.

It’s a long list of failures (Julian included), which is why we have idioms about cans and worms, or genies and bottles. But some people have managed to hold the movement of history off for a while: Japan's decision to discard firearms in a classic example. In most countries, the introduction of firearms led to a proliferation of their ownership and use; when ownership has dropped, it is because the state has mandated a monopoly on deadly force. Many developed countries have very few people who own or habitually use guns, but that's never true of the army, for example. So once Japan started using Portuguese flintlocks in the mid sixteenth century, it's no surprise that its soldiers began to adopt their use, that their engineer quickly worked at improving their design and manufacture. The Japanese army used flintlocks extensively in their invasion of Korea in the 1590s, for example. For a society with an elite that prided itself on swordsmanship, the gun acted as an “equalizer,” making peasants and bandits as dangerous as samurai: In the film Seven Samurai, every samurai who dies gets killed by a bullet. Swords were the past, guns were the future. And yet…when Commodore Matthew Perry landed in Japan two and a half centuries later, he found a country with very few firearms, even in the armed forces—and the firearms they had were archaic flintlocks, of the same old sixteenth-century design. In two hundred and fifty years, Japan had made no further improvements in a vital technology, and even lost almost all manufacture. They’d managed to get rid of almost every gun in the country.

Japan was a special case, though. Its geography allowed it to remain almost completely isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. Once the country was unified under the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603, there was literally no one to fight. The only use the Shogun could see for guns was rebellion…against him!…so he got rid of them. If France had tried to get rid of all its firearms in 1603, it would have simply been conquered by England or Spain. But Japan was able not only to halt history, but even to turn it back to an age when firearms were almost nonexistent.

Of course, at the end of the nineteenth century, Japan was fully armed again. By 1876 they'd begun maneuvering for the conquest of Korea, for real this time. By 1905 their armed forces beat Russia. By the 1940s they controlled East Asia. (Japan now once again has the lowest gun ownership in the developed world; but their police still have modern weaponry.) So history wasn't really stopped, but it was stalled for two hundred and fifty years, which is pretty good.

Change is often scary, and we have a tendency to label things as they are now, or were in the recent past, as right or natural. Some of the extravagant features of the nun's habit, such as the “wimple” that the Flying Nun wore, are just items of medieval dress that never got updated as secular fashions changed. Nuns eschewed the vagaries of worldly fashion, and the end result is that some of them wear clothing that was perfectly ordinary half a millennium ago—but is almost unprecedented today.

Keeping your wimple in place while the world moves through hairnets to pillbox hats is difficult enough, but nothing compared to the difficulty of forcing history to move backwards, Julian-style. That hasn’t stopped people from trying: “Fundamentalist” and “radical” sound like antonyms, but at heart they both point to a philosophy of returning to some original state, the “fundamentals” or the “root” (radix is Latin for root) of a movement. In the 1970s The Khmer Rouge tried to move Cambodia back to a pre-modern agricultural society before the introduction of currency (they even started their calendar over, beginning it at “year zero”); predictably, this led to widespread famine and a couple million deaths. People still try, though. Sometimes you gotta try.

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p. 154
•Julius Caesar is only the most famous of a host: Other ancient assassinees familiar from IH includes Philip II (Alexander the Great’s father), Seleucus I (Alexander the Great’s “successor”), Caligula, Nero, Domitian, etc.. Add the as-yet unmentioned: Polycrates (tyrant of Samos; 522 BC); Dion (tyrant of Syracuse, 354 BC); Tiberius Gracchus (Roman tribune, 133 BC); etc.; etc.

•coating one side of a knife with poison: The (never reliable) Historia Augusta suggests that Marcus Aurelius killed his co-emperor Verus in the same way, which honestly doesn’t sound like something Marcus Aurelius would do. [David Magie, trans., Historia Augusta vol. I (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1932) p. 171.]

p. 156
•Julian affected the long beard that marked a philosopher: “‘Come now, Epictetus, shave off your beard.’ If I’m a philosopher, I’ll reply: I won’t shave it off. ‘Then I’ll have you beheaded.’ If it pleases you to do so, have me beheaded.” [Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford UP, 2014) p. 9.]

(Tip of the hat to from whose post I stole this reference.)

p. 158
•Rome and Persia were pretty much always at war: In this case one bone of contention was that the Persian king Shapur II claimed “historical” dominion over all lands east of Macedonia. This would be the equivalent of modern-day Italy claiming the rights to London, England, by virtue of ancient Roman conquest.

p. 161
•Constantius abruptly caught a fever and keeled over dead: According to Ammianus, Constantius received an omen of his death when he spotted a headless corpse with feet pointing west. I’m not sure if such a sight is always an omen of death. Was it important that Constantius at the time was marching west? That he saw a headless corpse in a “suburb” of Antioch called Horsehead? [Ammianus op. cit. pp. 228–29.]

p. 162
•Rome had long espoused religious pluralism: One of Julian’s arguments against Christians was that although there are many acceptable gods to worship, the Christians worshiped none of them and were therefore atheists. Naturally, from Julian’s point of view Jews were therefore also atheists, a common slur against them (as we have seen). [Julian, “Against the Galilaeans.”]

p. 163
•rhetoric, philosophy, and grammar: These basic subjects were called the trivium, which gives us ultimately out word trivial (although oddly not the mostly unrelated trivia).

p. 164
•or, if you wish, miracles, prevented the work from progressing: Here’s Francis Wrangham, writing in 1795:

…The same Almighty WORD
Which summon’d into being and dissolv’d
The pond’rous Edifice, in pristine form,
At his appointed time shall reunite
It’s [sic] scatter’d parts: no feebler arm may raise
The ruin’d pile. This, erst the Roman Lord,
Rash Julian knew; with fruitless effort toil’d
The insolent Apostate, so to thwart
Jehovah’s plan: Him, hurl’d from central depths
By arm divine, the conglobated fire
Repell’d, as oft his daring hand essay’d
The impious work.

[Wranghham, The Restoration of the Jews (Archdeacon & Burges, 1795) pp. 9–10.]

p. 166:
•Procopius: Not the same Procopius as gets quoted on IH p. 331.

p. 168
•epigraph for the second section:

I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.
§W. Somerset Maugham, Sheppey (1933).

p. 170
•Moses was the humblest man: Usually I quote the King James version of the Bible, but this time I quoted…no real version? I mean, the quote isn’t made up, but I guess I amalgamated a couple and pretended I translated the whole thing from Hebrew myself?

Anyway, cf. the actions of everyone’s hero, Stalin, who inserted into his official biography the sentence: “Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”

All of this ribbing of Moses is probably unfair, though. The KJV I failed to quote used the word meek. Honestly, the passage could mean that Moses was shy (which he clearly was, at least in Exodus 4). One study bible suggests that Moses is in fact humbled by nonstop “affliction”; this suggestion has at least the merit of making sense in context (his siblings are roasting him), which the meek/shy/humble axis does not.

[Stalin: Paul Johnson, Modern Times (Harper Perennial, 1992) p. 454; KJV Apply the Word Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2016) p. 267.]

p. 172
•Eventually, Muslims held the majority in Egypt: When exactly Muslims took the majority is a question that is perhaps unanswerable and for which the estimates are all over the place. If anyone has a good source with good evidence, please let me know.

p. 173
•rarely ran smoothly for very long: Here’s another example, from long before Julian’s time: In northern India in the second-century BC, the emperor Pushyamitra persecuted Buddhists in his empire so assiduously that said Buddhists welcomed foreign invaders (in this case Greeks) who promised to stop their suffering.

(W.W. Tarn suggests the persecution may be a myth, but concedes that the “usual view among historians of India has been that, though the story is greatly exaggerated, it must have some basis in fact.”)

[Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India (Ares, 1985) p. 177.]

p. 180
•Copernicus…Ignatius of Loyola: Apparently I did not take seriously enough my claim on IH pp. 389ff. that none of the same people would have been born after a change in history (such as the longer reign of Emperor Julian).

p. 139
•epigraph:

…it is a question whether war and anarchy and confusion be not preferable to the deceptive peace and apparent prosperity of despotism, that, like the death-dealing vampire, soothes while it destroys.
§Mayne Reid, The Boy Hunters (1853).

p. 140
•a parody of the popular nineteenth-century German children’s book Shock-Headed Peter: A frequently parodied book, both in Germany and England. WWII saw the publication of Strewwelhitler, which is quite good (read it here in pdf). An excerpt:

Piecrust never could be brittler
Than the word of Adolf Hitler

Both Strewwelhitler and Swollen-Headed William is funnier if you’re familiar with the original.

[Robert & Philip Spence, Struwwelhitler: A Nazi Storybook by Doktor Schrecklichkeit (Daily Sketch, 1941) p. 3.]

•helpfully labeled “indemnity”:

p. 143
•They would give Hitler everything he wanted: Hilaire Belloc, who always knew what to say, summarized Chamberlain’s policy with this nice triptych:

Dear Czecho-Slovakia
I don’t think they’ll attack yer
But I’m not going to back yer.

[Quoted in William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill vol. II (Dell, 1989) p. 295.]

p. 144
•Having betrayed his allies to a madman: I had originally quoted here Wordsworth’s lines concerning the pusillanimity of England’s traditional rival in a crisis:

                                       France, ’tis strange,
Has brought forth no such souls as we had then

with the addendum that England in 1938 was no better. But that got cut.

[William Wordsworth, The Complete Poetical Works (Houghton Mifflin, 1904) pp. 287–88.]

•That wasn’t part of the deal!:

•two MPs literally vomited: Can this possibly be true? I got it from Manchester, but I haven’t had the nerve to check where he got it from.

p. 145
•They went around it: Everyone makes fun of the Maginot Line, and I’m no exception, but I guess I should mention that the Maginot Line did, in fact, do what it was supposed to so. It prevented the Germans from attacking anywhere along the Maginot Line. It forced them to attack in one particular place, a place at which, if the French had planned things better, they could have concentrated their forces. If Constantinople had impregnable walls for the part of its perimeter that faced land, and so Crusaders entered the city by sea…is that the land wall’ws fault? You might as well blame the Maginot Line for not preventing D-Day.

•epigraph: I’d originally planned to have two epigraphs for this section. I got greedy!

For I have never yet heard a story of anyone whose good fortune was complete who did not end up in complete ruin.
§Herodotus III.40 (440 BC).

&

They are tried in Nuremberg, I believe…
§Eric P. Kelly, The Trumpeter of Krakow (1928).

p. 152
•Harry S Truman: Purists traditionally insist on no period after the S, Truman’s middle name actually being S. Hyperpurists can counter that Truman himself often dotted the S. Between purity and hyperpurity who am I to decide?